WW1 British Contract M1911 in .455 Webley Self-Loading
Britain
•
9m 34s
On the eve of World War One, the Royal Horse Artillery and Royal Flying Corps had both adopted the Webley Self-Loading Pistol, chambered for a special .455 caliber semi-rimmed cartridge. With the needs of wartime, Webley deliveries of these pistols were too slow, and alternatives were sought. The obvious choice was the Colt 1911 pistol, already in service elsewhere with British troops. Colt had no trouble adapting the design to the .455 Webley semiauto cartridge, and between 1915 and 1919 some 13,000 of them were sold to Britain (plus more in .45 ACP). The .455 caliber guns are so marked on the slide, and all have W-prefix serial numbers to indicate their chambering. Purchases continued after the Royal Flying Corps was renamed the Royal Air Force in April 1918. While some were surplussed after the war, others would stay in service until World War Two.
Up Next in Britain
-
.38 ACP Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revo...
The rarest variation of the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver is the .38 ACP model. Only 341 of these were made by Webley, in an attempt to compete with the new semiautomatic pistols appearing on the market - most notably the Colt Model 1900 and Model 1902. The Colt was chambered for .38 ACP, a r...
-
British L66A1: A Pistol for Northern ...
In 1974, the British Royal Army Ordnance Corps purchased about 3,000 .22lr caliber Walther PP pistols to issue as Personal Defense Weapons to service members of the Ulster Defense Regiment. These were to be issued to servicemen (and women) who faced personal threats to their lives. the choice of ...
-
Charger-Loading Lee Enfields: The CLL...
In our continuing series on the development of the British Lee Enfield rifles, we are looking at the CLLE conversions today. In 1907 the British adopted a new universal short rifle (the SMLE) that used charger (aka stripper) clips. Previous models of the Lee in British service had to be loaded on...
