The proper way to operate a Lee Enfield is to rotate the rifle when operating the bolt so that lifting your head out of the way is not required (to avoid getting the cocking piece in the teeth) and I imagine the K31 would work well the same way in a rapid if not slung in too tight with a prone sling.
Just a thought (rapid fire)
- Thread starter cyclone
- Start date
Exactly.
The last time I ran a milsurp rifle match I shot faster times with my No4 than a buddy with his Garand.
VooDooMan seems to think that DATAM's comment re: the SMLE in War One is something to laugh at.
Anyone doubting the statement should read some of the contemporary German accounts of facing the old BEF in the early stages of that War. I particularly recommend two books, one being "The Retreat From Mons", the other being "The Advance From Mons". The former is an account of the early fighting by a British officer who was right up at the sharp end. The latter book is also a first-person account, but by a German Captain who was only a few hundred yards away, on the other side of the Line. Very interesting to read the two accounts, side-by-side. Read them like that and you can see that there is confusion on a couple of occasions, but there is NO effort at propaganda. Both are entirely straightforward accounts of some very ugly fighting.
And it IS true. The statement, "The British had a machine-gun behind every bush" actually was used in a German regimental dispatch back to the higher headquarters.
British machine-guns actually numbered two per battalion.
"The machine-gun is a vastly over-rated weapon. Two per battalion is more than enough." So said Lord Kitchener, who was Minister of War at the time. Army poverty, in combination with Kitchener's policy, was what forced the British professional Army, the "Old Contemptibles", to become the finest single formation of riflemen ever to see combat. In that little Army, you weren't even regarded as a soldier until you had finished your first seven-year enlistment and re-upped. They didn't have enough machine-guns, but they did have ammunition.... so they trained every man to be his own machine-gun.... and it worked. One minute, 15 rounds, 200 yards, 100% hits.... and that was the minimum standard. Some of those guys were REALLY good.
I only ever had the opportunity to shoot with one man who was trained to those standards in the early stage of that War. We used my SMLE Mark I* * * and good 1944 DI-Z ammo. He shot my BUTT off at 125 yards.... and he did it absolutely cold, using MY rifle. Four days later, it was his 83rd birthday.
They were good.
Anyone doubting the statement should read some of the contemporary German accounts of facing the old BEF in the early stages of that War. I particularly recommend two books, one being "The Retreat From Mons", the other being "The Advance From Mons". The former is an account of the early fighting by a British officer who was right up at the sharp end. The latter book is also a first-person account, but by a German Captain who was only a few hundred yards away, on the other side of the Line. Very interesting to read the two accounts, side-by-side. Read them like that and you can see that there is confusion on a couple of occasions, but there is NO effort at propaganda. Both are entirely straightforward accounts of some very ugly fighting.
And it IS true. The statement, "The British had a machine-gun behind every bush" actually was used in a German regimental dispatch back to the higher headquarters.
British machine-guns actually numbered two per battalion.
"The machine-gun is a vastly over-rated weapon. Two per battalion is more than enough." So said Lord Kitchener, who was Minister of War at the time. Army poverty, in combination with Kitchener's policy, was what forced the British professional Army, the "Old Contemptibles", to become the finest single formation of riflemen ever to see combat. In that little Army, you weren't even regarded as a soldier until you had finished your first seven-year enlistment and re-upped. They didn't have enough machine-guns, but they did have ammunition.... so they trained every man to be his own machine-gun.... and it worked. One minute, 15 rounds, 200 yards, 100% hits.... and that was the minimum standard. Some of those guys were REALLY good.
I only ever had the opportunity to shoot with one man who was trained to those standards in the early stage of that War. We used my SMLE Mark I* * * and good 1944 DI-Z ammo. He shot my BUTT off at 125 yards.... and he did it absolutely cold, using MY rifle. Four days later, it was his 83rd birthday.
They were good.
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The sad thing is that, whenever an army equipped its soldiers with rapid-fire rifles in either WWI or WWII, they often short-changed the troops in terms of equipping them with machine-guns.....
.....it seems the British were of that mentality with the SMLE, as were the Americans when they equipped U.S. GI's with Garand self-loaders, but failed to provide sufficient automatic weapons to the troops.....
British Army actually adopted the automatic machine-gun before any other army.
They bought 100, to arm and police one-quarter of the world. When I visited the Pattern Room (1976) they had s/n 1 on one table and s/n 100 on the table next to it. You could stand with 1 on your left and 100 on your right and compare them. Number 1 was exactly as issued, right to being chambered for the .450 Gardner & Gatling cartridge, 100 had been reworked and reworked and reworked and was in the final configuration.
By the end of World War One, machine-guns averaged about 128 per battalion: the lesson had been learned.
It seems that some lessons have to be learned over and over and over again.
They bought 100, to arm and police one-quarter of the world. When I visited the Pattern Room (1976) they had s/n 1 on one table and s/n 100 on the table next to it. You could stand with 1 on your left and 100 on your right and compare them. Number 1 was exactly as issued, right to being chambered for the .450 Gardner & Gatling cartridge, 100 had been reworked and reworked and reworked and was in the final configuration.
By the end of World War One, machine-guns averaged about 128 per battalion: the lesson had been learned.
It seems that some lessons have to be learned over and over and over again.
rapid fire with the SMLE
The Lee Enfield, using polished chargers, 10 rounds in the magazine, prone, can fire an amazing number of rounds in one minute.
The average Infantryman was expected to fire 15 aimed rounds per minute, and most could do 20. I have personally fired 39 rounds in one minute from a Lee Enfield, and had 38 hits on a Figure 11 target at 100 yards. This was for a demonstration, timed by stopwatch, and recorded on video tape.
But then again, I had a great instructor. An old Sergeant-Major who had been an Instructor at the School of Musketry in Hythe, England.
There are records of such Instructors firing more than 50 rounds in a minute with a Lee Enfield. Also, bolt manipulation was practiced a lot within the British Regular Army.
This video actually proves nothing, except that you can waste a lot of ammo down the range. ONLY HITS COUNT.
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The Lee Enfield, using polished chargers, 10 rounds in the magazine, prone, can fire an amazing number of rounds in one minute.
The average Infantryman was expected to fire 15 aimed rounds per minute, and most could do 20. I have personally fired 39 rounds in one minute from a Lee Enfield, and had 38 hits on a Figure 11 target at 100 yards. This was for a demonstration, timed by stopwatch, and recorded on video tape.
But then again, I had a great instructor. An old Sergeant-Major who had been an Instructor at the School of Musketry in Hythe, England.
There are records of such Instructors firing more than 50 rounds in a minute with a Lee Enfield. Also, bolt manipulation was practiced a lot within the British Regular Army.
This video actually proves nothing, except that you can waste a lot of ammo down the range. ONLY HITS COUNT.
.
I was actually referring to how widely-issued machine-guns were...
Incidentally, that's about how many the BEF went to war with, in the early days of WWI.
By around June 1915, it was "upped" to about 1,000 - so they definitely started to catch on....
The German Army had about 5,000 Maxims in service at the war's start, for comparison.
That must have been quite a sight!...
They did eventually catch-on!
So sad but true....
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cyclone: believe me, that WAS a sight. Maxims are what I went to England to research in the first place. Took 5 months to get permission to visit the Pattern Room WITH a camera. Presented myself at the Factory gate and was escorted to the Pattern Room by a lovely chappie with a cocked Sterling AFTER he checked my letter. He waited until PR staff confirmed that I was really supposed to be there. Rather impressive; they knew more about me than I did.
Just got in the door when the fellow who met me asked, "Tell me, old chap, have you seen one of THESE?" and tossed me this ugly, sawed off little thing. I asked what it was and he asked what I thought it was, so I said that it looked like a miniature EM-2. "Top secret, you know," was how his reply started.... and we spent the next hour dissecting and playing with the X-70 4.85mm IW, s/n 04. The first photograph (left side only) had been released only the previous day. After stripping it down and playing with it, he asked if I had any suggestions. (ME????) I did have three and they put one into production on the later Test rifles, so I can honestly say that I own 1-1/2 lines of Small Arms of the World.
So then we played with Maxims: Number 1, Number 100, several later models, Russian, German, German '08/16 s/n 9: only one in existence. Spent hours just with Maxims, gave them a copy of the manual on the 08 that I wrote for the Shilo Museum. Saw LOTS of neat things. 400 Lee-Enfields on one gigantic rack, no two the same. AKM, just 8 months old, that came out of Northern Ireland. Sealed Pattern of my Snider Carbine. Parker-Hale and Sealed Pattern 1858, side by side. Utterly mind-boggling.
Next day, visited the IWM and ID'd 3 Maxims for them, including the very FIRST. IWM had the gun and no documentation, Science Museum had the documents (including a letter from Maxim) but couldn't find the gun: it was at the IWM. Sort of a no-brainer, but it felt good. Saw a Zepp Maxim from the Zepp that my grandmother and grandfather both saw shot down over London; they only met 8 years later.
What a rush! I'm STILL trying to figure out how to get that V-2 into my camera bag.
gyates93: the man who shot my buns off was Private John E. Snow, known as "Jack", Newfoundland Regiment. He joined in Town and served initially at Gallipoli, arrived in France just too late for the Big Push, but he was in on Gueudecourt, Sailly and others. He was "KIA" at Monchy-le-Preuex but really was only knocked out, woke up with a Gew98 in his face and a jackboot in his ribs. He was sent to Heilsburg in E. Prussia, then to a farm in what is now Poland, worked there for half a mark a day. A year after he started there, Red Cross found him and he got 13 months' Red Cross parcels all at once. He and two friends, an Irishman and a Scot, escaped and spent 5 months walking through the Russian Civil War. They came in sight of Smolensk before they turned around and headed back to Germany because it was safer in the hands of their enemies than it was with their friends. "Fritz kept us drunk all the way back to Heilsburg," he told me. When the War ended, he did a week in a hospital and was back on his feet for the March into Cologne. Amazing story and it all has been reported and documented.
I took a photo at the time we went shooting for the first time and put it on the front page of The Pilot, the rb newspaper out of Lewisporte. I was the editor at that time and tried to have a Great War story every November 11 issue and every July 1 issue. Jack's picture was in the paper in November, 1979 and I wrote up his Great War adventures in November, 1980. There are other articles about, and by, him in The Legionary and other publications. Really nice guy, too, very literate. He died in 1982 and I still miss him.
I will run away now and give you all some peace from my ramblings.
Just got in the door when the fellow who met me asked, "Tell me, old chap, have you seen one of THESE?" and tossed me this ugly, sawed off little thing. I asked what it was and he asked what I thought it was, so I said that it looked like a miniature EM-2. "Top secret, you know," was how his reply started.... and we spent the next hour dissecting and playing with the X-70 4.85mm IW, s/n 04. The first photograph (left side only) had been released only the previous day. After stripping it down and playing with it, he asked if I had any suggestions. (ME????) I did have three and they put one into production on the later Test rifles, so I can honestly say that I own 1-1/2 lines of Small Arms of the World.
So then we played with Maxims: Number 1, Number 100, several later models, Russian, German, German '08/16 s/n 9: only one in existence. Spent hours just with Maxims, gave them a copy of the manual on the 08 that I wrote for the Shilo Museum. Saw LOTS of neat things. 400 Lee-Enfields on one gigantic rack, no two the same. AKM, just 8 months old, that came out of Northern Ireland. Sealed Pattern of my Snider Carbine. Parker-Hale and Sealed Pattern 1858, side by side. Utterly mind-boggling.
Next day, visited the IWM and ID'd 3 Maxims for them, including the very FIRST. IWM had the gun and no documentation, Science Museum had the documents (including a letter from Maxim) but couldn't find the gun: it was at the IWM. Sort of a no-brainer, but it felt good. Saw a Zepp Maxim from the Zepp that my grandmother and grandfather both saw shot down over London; they only met 8 years later.
What a rush! I'm STILL trying to figure out how to get that V-2 into my camera bag.
gyates93: the man who shot my buns off was Private John E. Snow, known as "Jack", Newfoundland Regiment. He joined in Town and served initially at Gallipoli, arrived in France just too late for the Big Push, but he was in on Gueudecourt, Sailly and others. He was "KIA" at Monchy-le-Preuex but really was only knocked out, woke up with a Gew98 in his face and a jackboot in his ribs. He was sent to Heilsburg in E. Prussia, then to a farm in what is now Poland, worked there for half a mark a day. A year after he started there, Red Cross found him and he got 13 months' Red Cross parcels all at once. He and two friends, an Irishman and a Scot, escaped and spent 5 months walking through the Russian Civil War. They came in sight of Smolensk before they turned around and headed back to Germany because it was safer in the hands of their enemies than it was with their friends. "Fritz kept us drunk all the way back to Heilsburg," he told me. When the War ended, he did a week in a hospital and was back on his feet for the March into Cologne. Amazing story and it all has been reported and documented.
I took a photo at the time we went shooting for the first time and put it on the front page of The Pilot, the rb newspaper out of Lewisporte. I was the editor at that time and tried to have a Great War story every November 11 issue and every July 1 issue. Jack's picture was in the paper in November, 1979 and I wrote up his Great War adventures in November, 1980. There are other articles about, and by, him in The Legionary and other publications. Really nice guy, too, very literate. He died in 1982 and I still miss him.
I will run away now and give you all some peace from my ramblings.
For speed with a boltgun, the Norwegians really have it down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfY899uNOk0
These was some videos from their national Landsskytterstevnet shooting competition and those guys were even faster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfY899uNOk0
These was some videos from their national Landsskytterstevnet shooting competition and those guys were even faster.
