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sOne of my library booksale finds this summer was Arabs at War by Kenneth Pollack. This massive book is 583 pages of text and another 70 pages of notes. This is a Council on Foreign Relations book published by University of Nebraska in 2002. It covers the time period 1948-1991. The introductory chapter is “Understanding […]
A year ago, I wrote about C. J. Chivers’ The Gun. I just read another book about the AK-47 assault rifle. This one being Larry Kahaner’s AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War. This is the earlier book (2008), while Chivers’ book came out in 2011. AK-47 begins with the assault on Baghdad […]
A trip to the main library took me down to the military science section looking for new additions of Osprey Men-at-Arms booklets. Instead, C. J. Chivers’ The Gun caught my attention. This is a history of the AK-47 assault rifle. Chivers served as an officer in the United States Marine Corps. He is a writer […]
20th Century Small Arms: Alternate Histories, Counter Factuals, and Speculations
Sunday , 19, May 2019 War Leave a commentA reader of both the history of firearms, history, and science fiction generally leads to a collision of all three. I have discussed how many governments chose not to make changes in small arms. Light machine guns were seized upon with enthusiasm but not self-loading rifles. You start to think of “what ifs?” The Third […]
World War 2 had shown that small infantry units could do more with increased firepower. The German Sturmgewehr 44 pointed the direction to the future with select fire capability and a less powerful cartridge. The bolt action rifle still had some life in it. The first Arab-Israeli War fought in 1948 mainly with bolt action […]
World War 2 started on September 1, 1939 with the infantrymen of the initial belligerents using the same rifles used a generation before in World War 1. The biggest difference was the use of a new generation of light machine guns – Bren guns, MG-34s etc. The submachine gun did have an impact, and everyone […]
The interwar period of 1919 to 1939 in the realm of small arms has two distinct periods. The first half 1919-1929 was a time awash in WW 1 surplus. The Polish-Soviet War, the Freikorps action in the Baltic States were all fought with WW 1 weaponry. The British and French Empires were enlarged by territory […]
Last week, I mentioned a mistake in the novel Skylark Mission with the mention of Japanese automatic rifles in World War II. I thought I would discuss small arms of World War II with some emphasis on “automatic rifles.” I started writing and ended up with multi-part series. Modern firearms have their origin in the […]