“Modern” meaning rifles and sidearms that fired a round that could be reloaded reasonably rapidly. Not muzzleloaders and so on but weapons that use some form of cartridge; swing out the cylinder (or lever/bolt action rifle) and put six more in the revolver kind of guns. I’ve always been under the impression the Civil War was fought with Napoleonic style muzzleloaders but I don’t know why I have thought that.
Springfield Model 1873 was probably the last to not fit your standards, if you mean multiple rounds. Single shot, 10 rounds per minute. Next:
Springfield Model 1892-99, which is a US copy in .30-40 Krag of the Norwegian Krag-Jørgensen rifle. Also used by Denmark. 5 rounds, bolt action. Next:
Springfield 1903. 5 rounds, bolt action. Apparently there’s a 25 round type but it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Next:
M1 Garand. Semi-automatic, 8 shots. Also, M1 Carbine a little later, 15 or 30 shots, semi, but I believe meant to replace the role of pistols in some units. Next:
And so on, other semi/fully auto like M14, M16.
Handguns - revolvers before the 1911 for a long time, do 5/6 shot blackpowder revolvers not count?
Civil War muzzle loaders were quite different than Napoleonic muzzle loaders. The invention of the Minie Ball (which isn’t a ball at all) allowed the use of rifled barrels without getting the round stuck during reloading due to barrel fouling, dramatically improving their effective range, and the change from flintlock to percussion lock made them much more reliable and weatherproof. Another dramatic change (partially as a result of the musket’s greater range and partially just to changing tactics in general) was that the bayonet on the end of the musket went from being of primary use i the battlefield, accounting for roughly a third of all casualties, to becoming the seldom used and mostly last-ditch weapon that it remains to this day, accounting for less than 1 percent of casualties during the Civil War. So while they were both muzzle loading muskets, Civil War era muskets weren’t the same as Napoleonic muskets.
During the Civil War, breech loaders really proved their worth. A typical example was at the first day of Gettysburg when a small group of mostly cavalry held off a much larger group of Confederates because they had breech loaders, which raised the rate of fire from about 3 or 4 rounds per minute to about 10 rounds per minute. This made the Confederates think that they were fighting a much larger force than they actually were and delayed their advancement until other Union troops could reinforce the battle.
The Army was so impressed with breech loaders during the war that they completely switched to breech loaders right after the war. The first thing they did was come up with a conversion kit which allowed the Model 1861 muskets to be converted into breech loading rifles (the so-called Allin or trap-door Springfield rifles). They could convert a Model 1861 musket for about $5 when a new rifle built from scratch would cost about $20. Eventually they kept refining the design and soon they were producing new rifles from scratch, but from then on out it was all breech loaders of some sort. So basically the answer to your question is right after the Civil War, starting with the Springfield Model 1866.
Some breech loaders were used during the Civil War but the main infantry muskets remained muzzle loaders throughout. They did experiment with revolving rifles. With a revolver pistol, your hand is behind the cylinder. With a revolving rifle, one hand is in front of it, which means little bits of sprayed metal and powder that come out of the side of the barrel get embedded into your arm. That, combined with the black powder revolver’s nasty tendency to chain fire (fire off all cylinders at once), made people think that revolving rifles were a really bad idea. It’s bad enough when a revolving pistol chain fires. It’s much, much worse when you’ve got one hand in front of the cylinder and your arm right next to the cylinder when it chain fires.
Gah. Missed the edit window. That should say out the side of the cylinder (technically out through the small gap between the cylinder and the barrel).
The Henry rifle existed during the civil war, but were not provided by the army. They could fire 28 rounds a minute but soldiers had to buy them out of their own funds.
According to wikipedia, in 1864 only 290 were being made a month. So they weren’t popular enough to be common weapons.
As for which war after that repeating rifles became adopted for official service, I don’t know. Maybe the Spanish american war.
I know the OP asked about the American army, but I figured people might enjoy hearing a wider response.
Most of the world’s Great Powers adopted “modern” guns on a wide scale in the last quarter of the 19th Century, largely due to the development of smokeless powder in the early 1880s.
The French adopted the magazine-fed Lebel M1886 in 1886, while the the British (and by extension, the Empire) adopted a magazine fed bolt-action rifle (the Lee-Metford) in 1888.
In 1884 the Germans updated their single-shot Mauser Model 1871 rifles to incorporate a tube magazine and the Russians, meanwhile, adopted the Mosin Nagant M1891.
Japan adopted the Arisaka Type 30 in 1897 and interestingly, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) had acquired useful quantities of Winchester Model 1866 “Yellowboy” rifles which they used during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877/1878.
The “Civilised” countries of the world all appear to have had magazine-fed, cartridge-firing, repeating rifles as standard-issue by 1901, if that helps.
As for handguns: Cartridge-firing handguns appeared in the 1860s, but the Smith & Wesson Model 3 (1870) appears to be the first cartridge-firing handgun adopted for US service.
There are various British cartridge-firing handguns from around this period (The Royal Ulster Constabulary model was introduced in 1868 and the Beaumont-Adams was being produced or converted in a cartridge model about the same time) but by 1875 most of the cartridge-firing revolvers we all recognise from Westerns (the Colt Peacemaker etc, as well as cartridge conversions of the Remington New Model Army and Navy Colt etc) were all in existence.
Interesting data point: British revolvers were generally double action or double action only (I’m only aware of a tiny handful of British single-action revolvers) while most (but not all) US handguns appear to have been single-action models until at least the late 1880s.
Whenever this question comes up I always like to point out that, as counter-intuitive (or even downright crazy) as it sounds to us today, during the transition the ‘old guard’ military generals did NOT favor a quick, universal adoption of rapid fire weapons as it was thought it would simply allow for a much less disciplined infantryman and, consequently, a huge increase in wasted ammunition. Not so much the introduction of cartridge weapons, rather going from single-action to semi-automatic action. Mass adoption of *fully *automatic, one-man machine guns as standard issue essentially had to wait until after WWII.
Martini,
I see that the Beaumont-Adams was, according to Wiki, a muzzle-loading revolver. Does that mean that every chamber had to be reloading through the barrel or could the chambers be loaded directly?
Why did British revolvers tend to be DA or DAO but US revolvers SA?
Who switched to semi-auto pistols first and why?
Basically, the big rifle changes have been as follows (starting with smoothbore muskets):
Smoothbore flintlock musket (Napoleonic Wars style) --> Percussion cap musket : 1840s
Percussion cap musket --> Rifled musket/Minie Ball (Civil War std. rifle) --> 1850s
Rifled Musket --> Single-Shot cartridge rifle (Trapdoor Springfield): late 1860’s
Single Shot cartridge rifle --> Magazine fed, Bolt action smokeless powder(30-40 Krag) late 1880s-1890s.
Bolt action rifles --> self loading rifle (M1 Garand) : 1936
Self Loading rifle --> Assault rifle (M16): 1965-ish.
I’ve left out examples of incremental improvements within a category; for example, the M14 and M1 are not very different, and there were several models of single-shot rifles that were all broadly similar.
This is also for US forces; the time frames for say… the British Army would be different, with the move from bolt-action rifles to self-loading rifles taking place in the late 1940s/1950s, and the switch to assault rifles taking place even later, with the adoption of the SA80 in 1985.
It seems no one has remembered submachine guns here:
The Thompson .45 “Tommy Gun” was developed for clearing trenches in WWI, but entered production too late to be of any service in that war. Once the US had entered WWII, the standard M1928A model (I believe it was) was greatly simplified so it could be produced more cheaply. Those were the Tommy Guns the Rangers at Point du Hoc used in The Longest Day, and I think Tom Hanks carried one in Saving Pvt. Ryan. The differences in surface detail are obvious.
The M-3 .45 “Grease Gun” was developed during the war to replace the Thompson. Like the British Sten gun, it made extensive use of cheap metal stampings, IIRC.
If I’m not mistaken, both the Thompson and the M-3 remained in the US inventory until the early '60s, when preference started to be given to assault rifles rather than submachine guns or heavy automatic rifles like the M-14 and BAR.
The first Assault rifle was developed in WW2. It’s not that much different than an AK47 in form.
i don’t I have ever seen anyone else refer to an M1 as a bolt action rifle. Care to elaborate?
Any comment on its use in the Congo War, '66 and '67?
The Pedersen device deserves mentioning, it was a gadget that could easily slip into a M1903 and convert it to intermediate powered, semi-automatic operation from high powered bolt action. These were made just after World War I and destroyed in the early 1930s when focus shifted towards developing a semi-automatic service rifle that led to the M1. A couple of examples were officially saved and a couple more were pocketed by the people tasked with destroying them in a bonfire. It’s kind of the Inverted Jenny of martial arms collecting.
The M1 was originally chambered for ten .276 Pedersen rounds, and would have been a better weapon if they had left it that way but there were vast stocks of 30-06 they wanted used up. That’s why the odd capacity of eight rounds.
The “–>” arrow was intended to denote the change from one type to another.
So… with that in mind, it was
(from) bolt action rifles → (to) self-loading rifles (M1 Garand).
Aah. My bad.
The original design was a cap-and-ball revolver, loaded from the front of the cylinder (not the barrel - that was rifles). They were later converted en masse to fire cartridges, and from the late 1860s were produced “as-new” chambered for .450 Adams and other catridges.
The issue with cartridge revolvers in the US was a thing known as the Rollin White Patent, which was, basically, a patent on “bored-through” cylinders for metallic cartridges filed in 1855. Smith & Wesson acquired the rights for the design but it basically meant (in theory) no-one else in the US could make a cartridge-firing handgun until after the Civil War.
Cartridge-firing handguns had been around in Europe since the mid-late 1840s, but they were for (generally) puny pinfire and rimfire cartridges - but it also meant European gunmakers were free to develop cartridge-firing handguns without worrying about Patent issues and so forth.
The double action mechanism was invented by a British engineer, Frederick Beaumont in 1856, modifying an 1851 Robert Adams “Double Action Only” design. Beaumount took out patents in both Europe and the US and and signed an agreement with Robert Adams to produce double action Adams revolvers.
They were extraordinarily popular and put Colt’s London factory out of business (as well as double-action, the Beaumont-Adams had a solid frame and was also .54 calibre instead of the .36 of most contemporary Colt revolvers).
The first US-designed double-action revolver I’m aware of is the Colt Thunderer/Lightning, in 1877 - basically a double-action Colt Peacemaker. I’ve never worked out why double-action revolvers
That’s a tough one. The first commercially successful semi-automatic pistol was the Mauser C96 (1896) and they were privately purchased by many British officers, including Winston Churchill who used his at the battle of Omdurman (1898) and again during the Anglo-Boer War. They weren’t officially issued, though. Similarly I believe a number of German officers purchased C96s privately as well.
From what I’ve read, Switzerland was the first country to adopt a semi-auto as their standard service pistol, with the Ordonnanzpistole 00 (a Luger). The German navy adopted the 9mm Parabellum Luger in 1904 and the army followed in 1908, hence P 08 (Parabellum 08) as the designation for that gun Ze Germans are always carrying in Movies About The War.
The notable thing about the Colt M1911 was that it was a large calibre (Both the UK and US were fighting Colonial wars at the time and wanted the stopping power), while the various European self-loaders of the late 19th/early 20th centuries tended to be in “smaller” calibres (7.63mm, 9mm, etc).
As to why countries switched to semi-autos when they did? I don’t have a definitive, “official” answer, but semi-autos held more ammunition than revolvers, fired faster - and were easier to reload on horseback (remember, cavalry were still an important part of the military in those days), so it was really an obvious direction to be heading in.
I did not include them because they are I believe for more specialized purposes. As in, in one unit, the majority of guys would carry Garands etc.
I am pretty sure they are not an effective way to behead someone. Necromancy is another story.
Well, with their fingers on their triggers they were knee-deep in gore.