Was there ever a bad milsurp?
- Thread starter Alex_Zues
- Start date
Back aways, one of my school teachers in the late 50's early 60's had been sent out to Normandy as a replacement platoon commander - a 2nd Lt in a well-known British infantry regiment. He lasted all of two days before his unit, all on tracks, and with him in a Bren Gun carrier as the third vehicle, were suddenly mown to shreds by what turned out to be four or five MG-42 set up about 600m away on a slight rise. Out of the 27 men under his direct command, three survived, him being one of them. He recalled vividly lying on the ground. looking through the 'lacework' superstructure of his burning BGC, wondering how it had all happened so fast. He left his left arm and most of his left leg in Normandy, and his innocence - he had never actually seen a live German either.
The MG42, 'Hitler's Buzz-saw', was then, and still is, the finest and most innovative general purpose machine gun ever made.
tac
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Das is Efeiciant...No!?
To some people, "patriotism" has more to do with what was best than field performance.
The Ross did not perform well in the field, although under "clean"conditions like a sniper might encounter, and how they're used today, they excel. They were quickly pulled from the field and replaced with the SMLE, but of course there are those who will blame poor ammo (which the SMLE with its more appropriately "generous" tolerances for ammo and field dirt shot well), politics and the like, but then there are the field reports....
What a rifle does today in the pristine conditions of our modern matches, only speaks to what is possible today under pristine conditions.
The Ross did not perform well in the field, although under "clean"conditions like a sniper might encounter, and how they're used today, they excel. They were quickly pulled from the field and replaced with the SMLE, but of course there are those who will blame poor ammo (which the SMLE with its more appropriately "generous" tolerances for ammo and field dirt shot well), politics and the like, but then there are the field reports....
What a rifle does today in the pristine conditions of our modern matches, only speaks to what is possible today under pristine conditions.
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Actually the French Chauchat in 8mm Lebel wasn't that bad. Not awesome, but not that bad. The real problems came with the American .30-06 model.
I'd argue that the Nagant 1895, while reliable and fairly accurate, would be about the last handgun I'd ever want to take into combat. Also, the earliest Astra 1921s are notorious for cracking frames.
I'd argue that the Nagant 1895, while reliable and fairly accurate, would be about the last handgun I'd ever want to take into combat. Also, the earliest Astra 1921s are notorious for cracking frames.
I can think of a few:
Rifles:
-The Lebel M1886 was badly outclassed soon after its introduction due to its slow-loading tube magazine. The lack of a safety (a flaw common to other French military bolt actions) rules out carrying the rifle in a state of immediate readiness.
-US Krag-Jorgensen: No charger-loading either, but at least it could be topped up with single rounds without opening the action. The strength of the action was another major disadvantage. That the Americans picked these when the Mauser was in the same trial is mind-blowing.
Pistols:
-All things Nambu, especially the Type 94 with its exposed trigger bar.
-Glisenti M1910: Despite having a locked breech, it still couldn't handle standard 9x19mm ammunition.
Machine guns:
-Japanese Type 11
-Fiat-Revelli Models 1914 and 1935
-Breda Model 30
Rifles:
-The Lebel M1886 was badly outclassed soon after its introduction due to its slow-loading tube magazine. The lack of a safety (a flaw common to other French military bolt actions) rules out carrying the rifle in a state of immediate readiness.
-US Krag-Jorgensen: No charger-loading either, but at least it could be topped up with single rounds without opening the action. The strength of the action was another major disadvantage. That the Americans picked these when the Mauser was in the same trial is mind-blowing.
Pistols:
-All things Nambu, especially the Type 94 with its exposed trigger bar.
-Glisenti M1910: Despite having a locked breech, it still couldn't handle standard 9x19mm ammunition.
Machine guns:
-Japanese Type 11
-Fiat-Revelli Models 1914 and 1935
-Breda Model 30
There are different reasons why a given weapon could be "trash" and people are not examining the REASONS closely enough.
Want to see a real trash Moisin-Nagant? I'll loan you one of mine and some of this nice 8x56R ammo I have lying around. Basically, you are in the same situation as the guy who was issued a Ross along with ammo which had been previously CONDEMNED because it was so far out of spec that a Lee-Enfield could not digest it.
Ross Chambers were not made "tighter"; the reamer specs were provided by Enfield and the reamers were identical. The "flaw" was that the Ross action was so incredibly strong that the Chambers did not EXPAND on Proving the rifles to the extent that an LE chamber would expand. RESULT was the same, though: tight Chambers on the Rosses. This was NO problem if the Ammo was TO SPEC. Canadian Ammunition was not made to a "smaller" spec; it was made precisely to the existing Imperial spec.
Between the original Ross Mark II and the Mark II***** there are 82 design and specification changes. Nearly ALL of these are down to the SSAC - the Standing Small Arms Committee. Robert A. Heinlein once said that "A Committee is a life form with two or more legs and no brain!", and he was very nearly right. It is directly down to the experts at the SSAC that Ross is remembered as "the man who never made the same rifle twice".
The Mark III (THREE) Ross was another matter entirely; it was based on PATENTS dated 1910 but the first rifles were not built until at least 2 years later. First delivery of any number to the Canada Militia was in 1913. Rifles were being built slowly for the military (which already was well-armed) and much of plant production was going into Sporters. Troop trials with a large number of Rosses were scheduled for 1914, but European affairs intervened and the new rifle became THE combat arm WITHOUT a trial. Here again, the SSAC intervened, blocking the manufacture of a Mark III with a 26-inch barrel which already had been prototyped at the request of the Artillery. Demands for "instant production", clearly impossible without trained staff and materials at hand, followed and the factory bought materials when and as possible, hired hundreds of workers and trained them on the job..... only to have them learn what to do and then leave for better-paying jobs at the huge American plants which were tooling for P-14 production, for Berthier production, for Moisin-Nagant production. The Ross factory became a training-ground for Winchester and Remington workers and the Government of Canada refused flatly to declare the Ross plant to be a critical plant, which would have stabilised the work force. Some rifles left the factory with barrels reefed-on so tight that it actually crushed the Chamber entrance, making for a jamming rifle as soon as it was fired.
To be fair, NONE of this was the fault of the RIFLE. I have a rifle here which was to have taken part in the 1914 Trials but which ended up in Bermuda, France, Belgium, England and Chile before coming back to Canada. You will not find a slicker, more reliable rifle anywhere... and I very much doubt that you can show me many rifles 95 years newer which are more accurate. YES, it is long and heavy and you can't get into your dugout with you rifle slung: that was the MAIN complaint against the rifle in the actual Trenches. Yes, it could mud-up; so could a Mauser, a Lee-Enfield, ANY other rifle: THAT was the biggest problem of all. The solution was to clean your rifle. Yes, there was a problem with the Bolt; follow the Standing Orders and the Armourer looked after it for you.
The worst thing about the Ross was not that it was "not British"; the Brits would have accepted what the Ross did had it come from a Swiss or German rifle. The problem was that the Ross was COLONIAL and was a direct result of a mere COLONY becoming uppity when the Mother Country TOLD it that it would be allowed to have the cast-offs of Imperial Service..... but would NOT be allowed to have the most modern rifles. So THAT was pretty terrible..... and then the Ross had to compound that by smearing the latest British rifles practically OFF the ranges.... in the TOP Match in the British Empire. Looked bloody bad, what? BRITISH rifles being defeated on British ranges, what? Can't have that, old man, can't have that. Not bloody SPORTING!
So that takes care of the Ross for a while.
I hope.
In my own opinion, the worst design for a combat rifle MUST be the French 1907 and 1907/15 "dit coloniel" Berthier-system rifles. They were finely-fitted and beautifully-made from the best of materials by workmen who cared what they were doing, but they were a DISASTER of a design. Nevertheless, MILLIONS were made and they served for half a century and more, from the Western Front to Viet-Nam to the Rif War and, without doubt, there are still a few chugging along, should ammunition be available.
Think on this for a moment. Read it carefully first. You have a beautifully-made, long, elegant rifle. It uses a sighting system which the sales Anglaises discarded in 1890. You can see daylight around the Bolt. The bottom of the Magazine is OPEN at all times; the War is in heavy mud. It has NO safety mechanism of any kind. Ammunition is issued just before you need to use it, in 3-round clips. To carry the rifle with a round in it, you have to load 3 rounds, chamber and eject the first one, hold down the second and slip the Bolt forward. You now have a TWO-SHOT rifle. You are wearing a snazzy blue jacket and bright red pantaloons and shiny black leggings and a bright-blue kepi with gold trim. When the Sous-lieutenant blows his whistle the first time, you will attach the 17-1/2-inch spike bayonet and load the rifle. The second time the Sous-lieutenant blows his whistle, you will climb out of your Trench and advance, shoulder-to-shoulder, with the rifles at waist level, firing from the hip, toward the Boche. The machine-guns are 300 yards away and Fritz has had 2 years to sight them in.
A GENERATION of Frenchmen died in this manner. They should have lived.
A generation of French GENERALS and POLITICIANS should have been shot instead. They were the ones who sent better Men than themselves out to die with this ABORTION of a thing in their hands.
'Nuff said.
Want to see a real trash Moisin-Nagant? I'll loan you one of mine and some of this nice 8x56R ammo I have lying around. Basically, you are in the same situation as the guy who was issued a Ross along with ammo which had been previously CONDEMNED because it was so far out of spec that a Lee-Enfield could not digest it.
Ross Chambers were not made "tighter"; the reamer specs were provided by Enfield and the reamers were identical. The "flaw" was that the Ross action was so incredibly strong that the Chambers did not EXPAND on Proving the rifles to the extent that an LE chamber would expand. RESULT was the same, though: tight Chambers on the Rosses. This was NO problem if the Ammo was TO SPEC. Canadian Ammunition was not made to a "smaller" spec; it was made precisely to the existing Imperial spec.
Between the original Ross Mark II and the Mark II***** there are 82 design and specification changes. Nearly ALL of these are down to the SSAC - the Standing Small Arms Committee. Robert A. Heinlein once said that "A Committee is a life form with two or more legs and no brain!", and he was very nearly right. It is directly down to the experts at the SSAC that Ross is remembered as "the man who never made the same rifle twice".
The Mark III (THREE) Ross was another matter entirely; it was based on PATENTS dated 1910 but the first rifles were not built until at least 2 years later. First delivery of any number to the Canada Militia was in 1913. Rifles were being built slowly for the military (which already was well-armed) and much of plant production was going into Sporters. Troop trials with a large number of Rosses were scheduled for 1914, but European affairs intervened and the new rifle became THE combat arm WITHOUT a trial. Here again, the SSAC intervened, blocking the manufacture of a Mark III with a 26-inch barrel which already had been prototyped at the request of the Artillery. Demands for "instant production", clearly impossible without trained staff and materials at hand, followed and the factory bought materials when and as possible, hired hundreds of workers and trained them on the job..... only to have them learn what to do and then leave for better-paying jobs at the huge American plants which were tooling for P-14 production, for Berthier production, for Moisin-Nagant production. The Ross factory became a training-ground for Winchester and Remington workers and the Government of Canada refused flatly to declare the Ross plant to be a critical plant, which would have stabilised the work force. Some rifles left the factory with barrels reefed-on so tight that it actually crushed the Chamber entrance, making for a jamming rifle as soon as it was fired.
To be fair, NONE of this was the fault of the RIFLE. I have a rifle here which was to have taken part in the 1914 Trials but which ended up in Bermuda, France, Belgium, England and Chile before coming back to Canada. You will not find a slicker, more reliable rifle anywhere... and I very much doubt that you can show me many rifles 95 years newer which are more accurate. YES, it is long and heavy and you can't get into your dugout with you rifle slung: that was the MAIN complaint against the rifle in the actual Trenches. Yes, it could mud-up; so could a Mauser, a Lee-Enfield, ANY other rifle: THAT was the biggest problem of all. The solution was to clean your rifle. Yes, there was a problem with the Bolt; follow the Standing Orders and the Armourer looked after it for you.
The worst thing about the Ross was not that it was "not British"; the Brits would have accepted what the Ross did had it come from a Swiss or German rifle. The problem was that the Ross was COLONIAL and was a direct result of a mere COLONY becoming uppity when the Mother Country TOLD it that it would be allowed to have the cast-offs of Imperial Service..... but would NOT be allowed to have the most modern rifles. So THAT was pretty terrible..... and then the Ross had to compound that by smearing the latest British rifles practically OFF the ranges.... in the TOP Match in the British Empire. Looked bloody bad, what? BRITISH rifles being defeated on British ranges, what? Can't have that, old man, can't have that. Not bloody SPORTING!
So that takes care of the Ross for a while.
I hope.
In my own opinion, the worst design for a combat rifle MUST be the French 1907 and 1907/15 "dit coloniel" Berthier-system rifles. They were finely-fitted and beautifully-made from the best of materials by workmen who cared what they were doing, but they were a DISASTER of a design. Nevertheless, MILLIONS were made and they served for half a century and more, from the Western Front to Viet-Nam to the Rif War and, without doubt, there are still a few chugging along, should ammunition be available.
Think on this for a moment. Read it carefully first. You have a beautifully-made, long, elegant rifle. It uses a sighting system which the sales Anglaises discarded in 1890. You can see daylight around the Bolt. The bottom of the Magazine is OPEN at all times; the War is in heavy mud. It has NO safety mechanism of any kind. Ammunition is issued just before you need to use it, in 3-round clips. To carry the rifle with a round in it, you have to load 3 rounds, chamber and eject the first one, hold down the second and slip the Bolt forward. You now have a TWO-SHOT rifle. You are wearing a snazzy blue jacket and bright red pantaloons and shiny black leggings and a bright-blue kepi with gold trim. When the Sous-lieutenant blows his whistle the first time, you will attach the 17-1/2-inch spike bayonet and load the rifle. The second time the Sous-lieutenant blows his whistle, you will climb out of your Trench and advance, shoulder-to-shoulder, with the rifles at waist level, firing from the hip, toward the Boche. The machine-guns are 300 yards away and Fritz has had 2 years to sight them in.
A GENERATION of Frenchmen died in this manner. They should have lived.
A generation of French GENERALS and POLITICIANS should have been shot instead. They were the ones who sent better Men than themselves out to die with this ABORTION of a thing in their hands.
'Nuff said.
By the way, many Canadian regiments had NO trouble with the Ross Rifle.
"We had NO problems with the Ross Rifle, but we kept our rifles CLEAN, unlike some outfits that never cleaned their equipment." Capt. George Dibblee, DCM, A Company, 5th Battalion, Candian Mounted Rifles - Flers-Courcelette, Regina Trench, Cambrai and a hundred other bad places. He served 1914 through 1919, was an experienced Cowboy and a Guide for the NWMP before the War, enlisted as a Private and made it to Captain.
He knew what he was talking about.
That is from a personal interview.
"We had NO problems with the Ross Rifle, but we kept our rifles CLEAN, unlike some outfits that never cleaned their equipment." Capt. George Dibblee, DCM, A Company, 5th Battalion, Candian Mounted Rifles - Flers-Courcelette, Regina Trench, Cambrai and a hundred other bad places. He served 1914 through 1919, was an experienced Cowboy and a Guide for the NWMP before the War, enlisted as a Private and made it to Captain.
He knew what he was talking about.
That is from a personal interview.
"The Ross Rifle was...... unpopular.... due to its length and weight. You couldn't get into a dugout with your rifle slung." Capt. George Dibblee, DCM, 5CMR
To my way of thinking, a 26-inch-barrelled Ross with a 10-round Lee Magazine would have been absolutely the Cat's Meow.
Ross built a prototype 26-inch rifle, designed to fit British artillery-limber brackets. The SSAC put a definite stop to the project.
I think I might look for a couple more junkers, see if I can put one together the way it could have been......
..... should have been.........
To my way of thinking, a 26-inch-barrelled Ross with a 10-round Lee Magazine would have been absolutely the Cat's Meow.
Ross built a prototype 26-inch rifle, designed to fit British artillery-limber brackets. The SSAC put a definite stop to the project.
I think I might look for a couple more junkers, see if I can put one together the way it could have been......
..... should have been.........
- Location
- West coast of Vancouver Island
I know this has been posted many times, but.... it's a great photo.
Canadian Soldiers Turning in Their Mark 2 Ross Rifles, Kingston, Ontario, June 2, 1915
Canadian Soldiers Turning in Their Mark 2 Ross Rifles, Kingston, Ontario, June 2, 1915
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- Location
- Tucson, Arizona
For what it's worth.
the Ross made a fine sniper rifle but not in the trenches. I have two and would have had a third, but I ran out of money, All three were different
Assemble the bolt wrong and it would come out of the rifle a lot faster than it went in . They fixed that by installing a pin in the bolt so some squaddie couldn't disassemble it
Fact. Canadian troops were quick to scarf up any SMLE's they could get from battlefield pickups only to be told to turn them in because they didn't have bayonets. (later rectified)
Crap ammo? sorry, the smle digested all that so-called crap ammo without a problem. Only the air service was choosy since a jammed vickers could get you killed before you cleared it.
On the french 'sho sho" Assembled in many small shops without any semblence of quality control and the open sided magazine attracted mud. It's a wonder that it worked at all.
Now a story about that. The Marines had Lewis guns and were ordered tro turn them in for that fwench abortion
Why, Our chief of ordnance at the time HATED Col Lewis because he wrote a critique of one of his campaigns. After the war he was forced to resign by a congressional committee.
the Ross made a fine sniper rifle but not in the trenches. I have two and would have had a third, but I ran out of money, All three were different
Assemble the bolt wrong and it would come out of the rifle a lot faster than it went in . They fixed that by installing a pin in the bolt so some squaddie couldn't disassemble it
Fact. Canadian troops were quick to scarf up any SMLE's they could get from battlefield pickups only to be told to turn them in because they didn't have bayonets. (later rectified)
Crap ammo? sorry, the smle digested all that so-called crap ammo without a problem. Only the air service was choosy since a jammed vickers could get you killed before you cleared it.
On the french 'sho sho" Assembled in many small shops without any semblence of quality control and the open sided magazine attracted mud. It's a wonder that it worked at all.
Now a story about that. The Marines had Lewis guns and were ordered tro turn them in for that fwench abortion
Why, Our chief of ordnance at the time HATED Col Lewis because he wrote a critique of one of his campaigns. After the war he was forced to resign by a congressional committee.
- Location
- Tucson, Arizona
The wanderig zero was a myth. After the war, the MOD wanted to issue the No5 to everyone at a time when most countries were using self loading rifles. So the military came up with that story.
The Ross rifle was not liked in the trenches because they would not fire dirty ammo as good as the Enfields. First of all, the Ross was built to extremely tight tolerences whereas the Enfields were purposely built sloppy just for that reason. The Ross was so revered for it's quality that the snipers used it as their number one choice. The Ross got a bad rep because it was built too good, funny isn't it ! I love mine.
How can a piece of history be bad? These were all good rifles at the time they were designed and issued. However, some proved much better designs in combat than others. But if you are asking because you want a milsurp to target shoot or hunt with, they all will do the job. Just don't immerse your Ross in water, cake it with mud, and rapid fire with British .303 manufactured ammo.
