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Thread: The History of the Rifle, pt. II

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    Pazu the Kitsune's Avatar Shopkeeper
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    Default The History of the Rifle, pt. II

    The History of the Rifle, pt. II - The U.S. Civil War and the move to breech loading


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    ^Picture of the breech section of a US model 1865 "First Allin" Springfield rifle. This conversion system was designed specifically for the Springfield model 1861 and 1863 rifled muskets, of which 1.5 million were produced during the course of the Civil War - a huge production number for any small arm type in the 19th century. While the inventor had envisioned this system being applied to all of them, only a small fraction were ever converted. Counting both the First Allin and the later Second Allin system of 1866, only around 30,000 were ever converted. For this reason these conversion systems are considered essentially a failure, and Erskine Allin's career in firearm manufacture was short lived. Many unconverted M1861s were sold to various Latin American nations. There they would see extremely limited service (and no actual combat use outside of Mexico), and would be replaced by the more popular Remington Rolling Block rifles and Winchesters in the early 1870s. When the US army adopted the Springfield M1873 as its standard service rifle for both infantry and cavalry, the Springfield M1861s saw the end of their days as a military weapon. Many were sold to civilians, and even today many Americans have M1861s gathering dust in their basements. The rarer M1865s and M1866s, wherever their use may have been outside of the United States, would also become rapidly obsolete in the face of newer, more effective weapons.

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    The US Civil War was a large scale, bloody conflict. It was and still is the most devastating war ever fought in North or South America. For the victorious Union, rifles were cemented as the future of small arms; any advantages that smoothbore weapons may have once held were now clearly long gone. The Union army, now once again the army of the United States, had suffered terrible losses, and now that this great calamity of a war was over it began a process of downsizing and recovery. The army learned a number of things about modern warfare, however, and these they would not forget despite the general downsizing they went through in the post-bellum era. One of these lessons was in the potential of breech loading rifles. Guns like the Hall rifle, the Sharps carbine, and especially the Spencer carbine showed time and time again that well trained troops armed with such weapons could turn the tide of a battle by laying down fire at a rate that other weapons could not compete with. There is a quote attributed to the Confederacy in which they describe early lever action repeating rifles like the Spencer carbine as 'Those damn yankee rifles that they could load on Sunday and shoot all week.' Even before the war was over, the North knew of the advantage of having a breech loading rifle as the standard infantry weapon. The military decided that the best way to go about achieving this aim was to create a 'conversion' system, which will be described in more detail later, for the existing 1.5 million Springfield M1861s and 1863s which it had produced. For the 19th century this was a huge number of weapons produced, and so adopting a conversion system to apply to these muzzle loading weapons was a logical decision. Eventually this system would be created by a man named Erskine S. Allin, and the first Springfield model 1865 rifles would appear shortly after the end of the war in 1865. These rifles were Springfield M1861 rifles that had been given Allin's breech loading conversion system, and the 1865s are thus often called the 'Springfield M1865 (First Allin)'. These were quite crude in many ways, however, and so a new model would appear in 1866, called the 'Second Allin'. Also in 1866, we see the creation of the first in a line of one of the most iconic weapons ever made - the Winchester rifles. The Winchester model 1866 was in many ways just a rebrand of an earlier rifle, however the Winchester company would make constant improvements to its weapons, and was also very good at marketing them, so their later models would see numerous original (and some would argue ingenious) designs, and the decades after the Civil War would see their company emerge as one of the most prominent arms manufacturers in the world. As these developments during and immediately after the Civil War were happening, other equally significant developments were happening on the other side of the Atlantic.


    Prussia was quickly becoming a serious threat in the eyes of its neighbors. Now led by the political genius Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian army was perhaps the most modern in Europe, thanks to a series of domestic military innovations. In the field of artillery, this emerged in the form of the Krupp cannons, which I will not give details on in this post but are still worth researching nonetheless. In the field of small arms, this took the form of the 'Dreyse Needle Gun'. Invented by Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse, these were some of the first breech loading rifles adopted by a European army. This rifle was also advanced in that it didn't use a hammer to ignite the cartridge, but rather an internal needle, hence why it is called the 'Dreyse Needle Gun'. By the time of the onset of the US Civil War in 1861, Prussia had largely adopted the Dreyse Needle Rifle as the standard small arm for all infantry in the Kingdom's military. The Second Schleswig War, fought in 1864, saw the defeat of the Danish military at the hands of an enemy who utilized a rifle that could fire at a rate that their own infantry could not even hope to compete with. It was not until the defeat of Austria and its German allies in 1866, however, that the other European militaries really began to take notice of this small arms innovation. The armies of Europe realized that breech loading rifles would be the future of small arms, and they naturally all sought to obtain them and replace the older muzzle loading 'rifled muskets' with these new, more effective weapons. Simply put, the most effective and economical way of doing this at that time was to create a conversion system that could convert the older muzzle loaded rifles into ones that could be loaded through a breech at the rear of the barrel. Although there are an astounding number of conversion systems, as indeed almost every nation in Europe at the time produced their own, they almost all have the same basic principle. The rear part of the barrel would be cut out and replaced with a breech mechanism. This breech could then be opened and a bullet encased in a metallic cartridge inserted into it. The breech would then be closed, and the hammer, which previously struck a percussion cap, now struck a surface which would press an internal needle into the rear of the cartridge, causing ignition and subsequently firing the bullet out of the rifle. Arguably the most successful of these conversion systems was the British 'Snider-Enfield', which was on the whole cleaner and simpler than most other conversions, and Snider rifles would end up being used by numerous militaries throughout the world, including far off nations such as Japan.
    Last edited by Pazu the Kitsune; July 10, 2017 at 09:53 PM.

    "If you can keep your head when all about you
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  2. #2

    Default Re: The History of the Rifle, pt. II

    Interesting, I never had much knowledge before about such conversion systems.

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