The MP40/I was an experimental modification of the MP-40 submachine gun developed by the Erma company (we think) in late 1942. It was presumably developed in response to complaints of Soviet fire superiority with SMGs because of their large drum magazines (and also the larger number of SMGs used ...

The MP40 is an iconic piece of World War 2 weaponry, and it's about time we took a closer look at its development...

Thanks to the Institute of Military Technology for allowing me to have access to these three examples so I can bring them to you! Check out the IMT at:

http://www.instmiltech...

The Mk18 Mod0 grenade launchers was developed by the Honeywell corporation in 1962, and was the first weapon in what would became a category of high volume grenade launchers used by the US military. The modern iterations are all self-loading, but this first example was fired by a manual crank han...

I ordered a copy of Damien Lewis' book on the exploits of British SOE in WWII expecting to find an overview of, well, what SOE had done during the war. That's not quite what this book is. Instead, Lewis has given us essentially a first-person view of SOE's work through the eyes of Danish commando...

The PM9 was an interesting an unique submachine gun designed by Louis Debuit for the French firm Merlin and Gerin (hence the MGD name – Merlin, Gerin, Debuit) in the late 1940s and early 50s. The design was intended to provide a very compact package, which it did with a very short action, folding...

France began experimenting with self-loading rifle designs in the late 1890s, although most of this work is mostly unknown today. The work was done by the State arsenals, and kept as military secrets, without patents being filed or commercial sales considered. All sorts of systems were developed ...

Hiram Maxim is obviously best known for the Maxim Machine Gun, but he and (most significantly) his assistant Louis Silverman also dabbled in handgun design. It appears that the work was primarily Silverman's, done with the tacit support of the Maxim company. A followup version was made with more ...

https://www.matrixarmory.com/

Matrix Armory is a new gun display system developed by Jeff High (a long-time Forgotten Weapons supporter, incidentally) who wanted something that would really do justice to guns that you want to display and appreciate. The other sorts of display/racking systems o...

The MAT-49 was developed by France after World War Two to satisfy the need for a more modern submachine gun to replace the MAS-38. The military had come around to standardizing on the 9x19mm cartridge for its pistols and subguns, and the 7.65mm MAS-38 was not feasible to convert. All three state ...

The Model 1901 and 1905 automatic pistols were the final development of the Mannlicher system. In this iteration they used internal magazines, a straight walled 7.65mm cartridge, and a delayed blowback system in which the slide had to overcome a spring-loaded wedge before it could open.

The Mo...

With the Model 1896 pistol, Ferdinand Mannlicher made an effort to improve the ballistics of his pistols and make them less awkward, by moving to a locked breech action and a bottlenecked higher velocity cartridge. The very first Model 1896 was a blowback, but this was almost immediately replaced...

The Mannlicher Model 1894 was one of the first successful semiauto pistol designs, and used a very unusual blow forward action. Instead of having a moving slide, the bullet would actually pull the barrel forward when fired, cycling the action. The Model 1894 used a double action trigger and had a...

Today we will look at the various different categories of machine guns - what makes them, why they exist, and what their place in military history is. Specifically...

Automatic Rifle: Shoulder or hip fired, limited magazine capacity, minimal sustained fire capacity. Examples: M1918 BAR, Chauch...

Following up on yesterday's discussion of the history and mechanics of the French Pistolet Automatique Modele 1950, today I am running it in a run-n-gun pistol match.

The gun worked well for me, not having any malfunctions, but did present a couple issues. One was hammer bite, and the other wa...

The PA MAC 1950 (Pistolet Automatique Modele 1950) was the result of a 1946 French effort to standardize on a single military pistol. By the end of WWII, the French military had accumulated a mess of different pistols of French, Spanish, American, and German origin; officially using the Luger, P3...

The Phillips & Rodgers M47 Medusa is a mechanically very interesting firearm; a revolver that can chamber basically any cartridge with a 9mm bullet diameter and an overall length no longer than a .357 Magnum. This is made possible because a revolver does not have the headspace requirements of a s...

I would like to propose that the M38 Carcano short rifle was, despite the poor reputation of the Carcano series of rifles, one of the best thought out bolt action weapons of World War 2. Why, you ask? Well, let's consider...

Only a few nations actually recognized the short ranges at which comb...

Phillip A. Luty was a Briton who took a hard philosophical line against gun control legislation in the UK in the 1990s. In response to more restrictive gun control laws, he set out to prove that all such laws were ultimately futile by showing that one could manufacture a functional firearm from h...

Before the Winter War, the standard light machine gun adopted by the Finnish military was the Lahti-Saloranta LS-26. This was a complex and finely built weapon, using a short recoil action and tilting bolt, chambered for the same 7.62x54mm rimmed cartridge as used by Finland's Mosin-Nagant infant...

Ott-Helmuth (Otto, after he emigrated to the US) von Lossnitzer was a remarkable firearms engineer. He served through World War One as a machine gunner, gaining extensive experience with a variety of different machine guns that were rebuilt in 8x57mm for German military use, and was called back i...

One of the the flamethrower design styles to come out of experimentation late in World War One was the toroid type, with a donut-shaped fuel tank and a central spherical pressure bottle. The British continued development on this type of weapon between the wars, and used it in World War Two. While...

Isaac Newton Lewis is best known for the Lewis light machine gun, but that was not his only foray into firearms design. He also patented two different types of handguns - one gas operated and this short recoil design. Very little information about this pistol is available, although it was apparen...

The Lebel was a truly groundbreaking development in military small arms, being the first rifle to use smokeless powder. This gave it - and in turn the French infantry - a massive advantage in range over everyone else in the world at the time. This advantage was short-lived, but the French did the...

Larry Vickers has published the newest book in the Vickers Guide series, and it looks at German small arms of World War II - the first of two volumes to do so.

https://www.vickersguide.com/ww2germany

I had a hand in the project writing a substantial chunk of the text, and so I met up with ...