It goes back further than that...
I inherited a weird old sabre bayonet last year, and other than it had "been found in a field in Saskatchewan" no one really knew anything about it. It took a bit of doing to figure out what it was - a bayonet for a Chassepot Rifle. Which I though was a pretty strange thing to end up in the dirt in Saskatchewan - a bayonet for a French rifle that was only in service for 8 years, from 1866-1874 (when it was converted into the Gras rifle, and the bayonet style changed). It was one of those things I couldn't let sit, so I spent a fair bit of time digging into the history of the Chassepot...
Anyway, bear with me a sec, because how it likely ended up in Canada says a lot about military expediency when it comes to captured weapons.
The Chassepot was a paper cartridge, breach loading rifle. In the Franco-Prussian war, it went up against the much better known paper cartridge rifle (due to its much longer service life) Dreyse needle gun. The thing is, the Dreyse was getting pretty long in the tooth by then (it went into service in 1841).
The Chassepot was an order of magnitude better rifle. It had an effective range of 1200meters to the Dreyse 600m, was more accurate, had a 35% higher velocity and a flatter trajectory. Tellingly, the vast majority of Prussian/German casualties during the war were from the Chassepot.
In the end, it didn't matter, because the Prussian/German army had better artillery and much more of it. But their troops quickly saw the benefit of the French rifle and grabbed them whenever they could. In fact, so many were captured after artillery duels (which the Prussians/Germans inevitably won), and the value of the weapon was so obvious, that the Prussian/German forces started collecting them, and issuing them to their own troops. German factories were even producing ammo for them. By the end of the war, over 200,000 of them had been captured and re-issued, entire regiments went into the field with their enemy's rifle in hand.
After the war, the era of the paper cartridge died, as everyone rapidly moved to brass cartridges (the more well known Gras is just a brass cartridge conversion of the paper cartridge Chassepot). The Prussians had no need for all the captured French rifles anymore, so they sold them. To British arms merchants who promptly flooded the colonies with them as a cheap big game rifle - which is undoubtedly how my bayonet found its way to a muddy field in southern Saskatchewan.
With specialized supply chains and manufacturing, and the specific training conducted for modern rifles, it's doubtful we'll ever see that kind of mass adoption of the enemy's rifle, but it can and does happen on smaller scales.
I inherited a weird old sabre bayonet last year, and other than it had "been found in a field in Saskatchewan" no one really knew anything about it. It took a bit of doing to figure out what it was - a bayonet for a Chassepot Rifle. Which I though was a pretty strange thing to end up in the dirt in Saskatchewan - a bayonet for a French rifle that was only in service for 8 years, from 1866-1874 (when it was converted into the Gras rifle, and the bayonet style changed). It was one of those things I couldn't let sit, so I spent a fair bit of time digging into the history of the Chassepot...
Anyway, bear with me a sec, because how it likely ended up in Canada says a lot about military expediency when it comes to captured weapons.
The Chassepot was a paper cartridge, breach loading rifle. In the Franco-Prussian war, it went up against the much better known paper cartridge rifle (due to its much longer service life) Dreyse needle gun. The thing is, the Dreyse was getting pretty long in the tooth by then (it went into service in 1841).
The Chassepot was an order of magnitude better rifle. It had an effective range of 1200meters to the Dreyse 600m, was more accurate, had a 35% higher velocity and a flatter trajectory. Tellingly, the vast majority of Prussian/German casualties during the war were from the Chassepot.
In the end, it didn't matter, because the Prussian/German army had better artillery and much more of it. But their troops quickly saw the benefit of the French rifle and grabbed them whenever they could. In fact, so many were captured after artillery duels (which the Prussians/Germans inevitably won), and the value of the weapon was so obvious, that the Prussian/German forces started collecting them, and issuing them to their own troops. German factories were even producing ammo for them. By the end of the war, over 200,000 of them had been captured and re-issued, entire regiments went into the field with their enemy's rifle in hand.
After the war, the era of the paper cartridge died, as everyone rapidly moved to brass cartridges (the more well known Gras is just a brass cartridge conversion of the paper cartridge Chassepot). The Prussians had no need for all the captured French rifles anymore, so they sold them. To British arms merchants who promptly flooded the colonies with them as a cheap big game rifle - which is undoubtedly how my bayonet found its way to a muddy field in southern Saskatchewan.
With specialized supply chains and manufacturing, and the specific training conducted for modern rifles, it's doubtful we'll ever see that kind of mass adoption of the enemy's rifle, but it can and does happen on smaller scales.
