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In 1915, the French Darne company – best known for sporting shotguns – entered the military market with a contract to manufacture Lewis guns for the French Army. Apparently some of the folks at Darne thought they could do better than the Lewis, and the company developed its own machine gun design during the war. [...] For a while now I’ve been following the rabbit hole of machine gun use in the second half of the 19th century – the days of the manually-operated machine gun (Gatling, Gardner, Nordenfelt, etc) and the early days of the Maxim. The persistent question is, why didn’t anyone seem to recognize the military potential of [...] I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I opened up John Ellis’ The Social History of the Machine Gun – machine guns and social histories of anything don’t really tend to go together. Ellis has a fairly extensive list of books to his name, but the jacket describes him as a former member of [...] When Hiram Maxim began building his machine gun, the standard cartridges of the day were still large (.45 caliber or thereabouts) black powder rounds. Maxim’s early “World Standard” guns were designed around these rounds, and it was one of them that he took to an 1887 Swiss Army trial in Thun to compete against a [...] If I were Bill Mauldin I would have a very deadpan caption for this. US Marines somewhere in the Pacific with a captured Japanese Type 92 machine gun. Was this article worth 15 cents to you? For less than the cost of a newsstand gun magazine, you can become a Forgotten Weapons Premium Member and help support the site, as well as get some cool industry discounts and access to our Members-Only forum! Yes, I know the carbine is also called the Type 53, but this Type 53 is a machine gun, okay? (photo from Max Popenker) Unrelated to this photo…the Zhejiang Iron Works in China made everything from machine guns to grenades to field glasses – and called everything “Type 77″ in commemoration of the Marco [...] This really has to be the most awesome pedal-powered vehicle ever built: On the move… Set up and ready… In action! I don’t know the background on the tricycle, but the Maxim guns are very rare air-cooled lightweight models. Like this one: Lightweight Maxim in .303 caliber Ultimately they weren’t light [...] or Louis Stange’s Forgotten Machine Gun by Leszek Erenfeicht and Jan Skramoušský The museum at the Military Historical Institute of Prague in Czech Republic has got a great many unique and experimental firearms, both of indigenous and foreign origin. But even amongst these unique guns one can sometimes find a gem – such as [...] We’ve spent some time scouring through the Forgotten Weapons Archives, and found all the interesting machine gun manuals we have to put together on a single huge DVD. I’m very happy to announce that we have a company to print it (along with nice DVD case artwork and a printed label on the disc), and [...] |
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So Many Machine Guns!
Not too long ago, a pretty serious machine gun collector named Richard Wray passed away, and his estate is auctioning off his collection, which includes 80-odd transferable machine guns – nearly all of them very interesting historical pieces.
I won’t get into my personal thoughts on the merits of leaving one’s collection to the auction [...]