storm rifle 1

STORM RIFLE

Let’s talk a little about the history of the assault carbine, as I think such a misunderstanding over them persists despite my best efforts to kick the crap out of your brain over them ( this should be the job of Black Cat Dude, but he hasn’t posted since February, evidently selfishly deciding a real paying job and a satisfying personal life is far more important than writing for free on the Internet, the bastard ).  It all pretty much started with the Gatling gun.  There had been the introduction of the lever action prior, and that was important, but that was just another breech loader, albeit an important advancement with its self contained cartridge.  The Gatling was a machinegun in prototype.  Gatling himself was a pretty good tinkerer, and the breakthrough innovation was from an agricultural implement, but more than anything else, he was a salesman.  And he oversold the crap out of his gun.  Just as any elixir of unreported ingredients could theoretically cure everything from cancer to shingles, his gun could replace whole companies of men and cause world peace to break out.  The Russians were the first true believers, and wasted little time incorporating them into its units, but almost nobody else bought the promise or the hype.  The Brits did try them out a time or two, but while sometimes they worked to good effect, other times they jammed much too easily.  The Gatling was an idea ahead of its time, and while there was money to be made for its inventor, the utility was too limited.  The idea was sound, the ability to utilize it had not yet arrived.

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That happened when the Maxim gun arrived.  This was the first true machinegun, as it fired automatically from the energy of its own previous detonations.  The Gatling was a manual crank.  With the Maxim, machineguns came to rule the battlefield.  Not that anyone paid any attention for nearly two decades ( some military officers did try to noodle out tactics, but were ignored as much as aircrafts proponents would be later ).  Right after the turn of last century ( I think 1904, but I could be off a year or two ), Japan and Russia went to war.  The naval engagement got all the historical hype, but this was the first time massive machinegun deployment between two conventional armies was seen and the whole world soundly rejected what they saw.  The Japanese sent their infantry armed with bayoneted rifles against emplaced machineguns and got slaughtered.  Okay, our bad, say the officers, let’s try something a little different.  Not.  They just kept pushing wave after wave of bodies into the guns.  Eventually, after about 40,000 deaths, they won the battle.  But not because their tactics were sound.  It was because the Russians had been cut off and couldn’t be re-supplied.  In effect, the Japanese used bodies as pincushions until the enemies ammunition ran out.  But it wasn’t just a bunch of primitive Ornamentals failing to grasp White Folk military tactics.  All of the majors had military advisors on hand at the battle to observe and report.  And either none of them grasped the significance, or the few that did were ignored by their chain of command.  Ten years later, the Brits and French sent wave after wave of spearmen into massed German machinegun fire ( obviously, the Germans got the idea.  They were also the ones who figured out how to circumvent the limitations of trench warfare, without tanks.  But I get ahead of myself ).

Continued next article

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