Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Guns.com
taking a look at some of the cool historical guns
in their warehouse. And today we have a
Smith & Wesson Model of 1917 US Army revolver.
And it's important to note that this is a Smith & Wesson Model of 1917,
because there is also a Colt Model of 1917 US Army revolver.
Yeah, the US actually adopted two different guns with the exact same designation.
Even more egregious than some of the later M1s of every different type.
Basically (let's go back a little bit) this starts off as Smith & Wesson's Triple Lock.
Which was fancy and super positive. And the idea was instead of just the normal
two cylinder locks that held the cylinder in place while you were firing it,
Smith & Wesson added a third lock on the cylinder crane.
That made it extra strong, and also a little kind of extra expensive in the process.
Well, when World War One breaks out the United Kingdom,
the Brits, the Canadians in particular need guns.
And what does the US do during World War One? Well, we excel at making arms for the
We make all sorts of guns in the United States for the French, the Russians,
the British, the Canadians, everybody who's on the Allied side.
And so the British and the Canadians ... want a revolver in .455 Webley
that can use ... their same standard ammunition.
What does Smith & Wesson have? Smith & Wesson has their Triple Lock.
"But you know what? We don't need that third lock thing,
cool, but we'd really much rather have something that's cheaper.
So ditch the third lock.
And while you are at it, take the underlug on the barrel covering the ejector rod
and you can just get rid of that too, like we don't really need that either.
Simplify the gun, make it cheaper, chamber it for .455 Webley and you've got a deal."
And Smith & Wesson did that, and they went on to sell
about 75,000 of these to the British and the Canadians.
Well, move the clock forward a couple of years to 1917.
The United States enters the war, and the United States
is now going to definitely need a whole lot more guns.
Because we're going to take a pretty darn small little army and scale it up really big, really fast.
And so the US Army goes looking for more handguns.
It's interesting, apparently General Pershing wanted to equip every US soldier
with a handgun in addition to their standard ... infantry weapon.
That didn't end up happening, but it did lead to procurement for a lot more handguns.
1911 production was ramped up as much as it could be.
But they needed more options, what's out there that's already in production?
Well, Colt and Smith & Wesson both adapt existing revolvers to .45 ACP, in this case the Triple Lock.
The N-frame Smith & Wesson was a pretty darn big revolver
and it was originally made for .45 Colt.
Which is a much ... longer cartridge than .45 ACP.
But the US Army wants these things in .45 ACP to standardise on pistol ammunition.
So OK, the cartridge is quite a lot shorter than the cylinder it's going into, but whatever, it'll work.
Problem is it's a rimless cartridge, so we need some way to work around that.
We'll take a look at what they came up with to fix that in a moment.
But let me continue on to say that the US Army ended up adopting
both .45 calibre revolvers from Colt and Smith & Wesson.
They both went into production and October 1917 the first deliveries
of US Model 1917 revolvers are sent to the Army.
Deliveries would continue until 1919, and there were about 163,000 of these Smith & Wesson 1917s
that were produced during ... those three years ('17, '18 and '19) until the war ended.
So let's take a closer look at the markings on this,
and how you adapt a rimless cartridge
to a revolver that's really designed for rimmed cartridges.
This is really quite the large revolver like I showed you earlier, but we can see it up close now.
A .45 ACP cartridge is like a full quarter inch shorter than the cylinder on this 1917 revolver.
And that's because it was designed for a much larger cartridge.
Smith & Wesson would continue to use the N-frame, like they still use the N-frame today.
And this is the frame that they would use for cartridges like .44 Magnum.
.45 ACP is a lot less powerful and a lot smaller.
Now as I alluded to, you have to do something
to make a rimless cartridge work in ... a revolver designed for rimmed cartridges.
So the difference here is this is called "rimless", it kind of looks like it has a rim
but what rimless means is that the case rim down here
is the same diameter as the body of the cartridge.
So the first solution to make this system work is to actually cut a step in the chamber.
You can see the line in each one of those chambers.
And the idea there is that line coincides with the front of the brass case.
This is a dummy cartridge, but you can see the step at the front of the case.
And so if I drop that cartridge in, even though it is a totally cylindrical case,
it catches on the step and that holds it in the proper position to fire, to work.
The problem is the ejector is designed to catch on the larger rim of a [rimmed] case,
and so the ejector doesn't work here.
So using this system, you would then have to go and have a manual ejector rod
and poke out each empty case individually, and that's not a great plan.
What Smith & Wesson came up with as a solution was the half-moon clip,
this very simple stamped piece of sheet metal
that has little loops to accommodate three cartridges.
Now early versions of this actually had cutouts, and they were a little more complex.
People realised they could simplify it and it would still work just fine.
What you do with this is you snap 3 cartridges into these little loops ... like so.
And now you have a unit that you can put into the cylinder.
You would use two of these to load the revolver, there's one.
That is going to cover both requirements.
So first off, that's also going to hold the cartridges ... at the appropriate depth for them to be fired.
And now the ejector rod (oops, put it in halfway there) the ejector rod will catch on that clip
and allow you to eject all 3 empty cases as a unit.
There's a nice benefit here as well, a bonus,
... it's a lot easier to load two of those (boop, put in a second one)
than it is to manually stuff 6 loose cartridges into a revolver cylinder.
So ammunition was actually packaged and shipped to the front already on these clips.
You would get 24-round boxes of ammunition,
because the standard web gear for the 1917 revolvers was a holster
and then sort of a stack of three individual pockets
that each held two of these half-moon clips.
So you'd got 6 rounds in the gun and then 18 rounds in your associated web gear.
Alright, we should take a closer look at some of the markings here.
We have Smith & Wesson marked on the barrel,
manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts, patent dates etc.
On the left side of the barrel is Smith & Wesson DA 45, so it's a double action .45 and they all were.
You can see here we have our ejector rod that just has a simple stop support for it,
instead of the full underlug of the original Triple Lock design.
We have a half-moon front sight.
This is one of the things that you can use to recognise a Smith & Wesson versus a Colt Model of 1917.
The Colt ones have a shark fin style of front sight, not semi-circular.
The bottom of the barrel is marked "United States Property".
And then the other important markings are on the bottom of the grip.
So it's marked US Army Model 1917.
Again, the Colt 1917 has this exact same marking on it, but the Colts are marked upside down.
So with the Smith & Wesson you point the gun muzzle down to read this,
with the Colt you point it muzzle up to read this.
And on the opposite side of our ... lanyard swivel,
we have the serial number, so 119578 on this example.
There's going to be a US flaming bomb military acceptance mark there.
And then there will also be a number of these little tiny marks
on various different parts of the gun. So these are inspector markings.
The stamp is intended to be a stylised eagle's head with an inspector's identifying digits.
And you'll get those to show that various parts of the gun
went through various parts of the inspection process.
So we've got one here, ... there's one right there on the inside of the frame under the crane,
we've got one on the back face of the cylinder right there.
Also worth pointing out we have the serial number repeated there.
And that's it for the markings, you don't have any big Smith & Wesson logo or anything.
The cylinder opens by pushing forward on the latch, typical of Smith & Wesson.
Colts you pull back, Smith & Wessons you push forward.
6 shots, eject your two half-moon clips all at the same time.
These were durable, dependable, well regarded, well-liked revolvers.
They are all double action of course, or you can manually cock it into single action.
And despite being named Models of 1917, they would go on to further service, let's talk about that.
Now Smith & Wesson got a patent for this half-moon spring clip idea.
But as part of their contract for selling the revolvers and the clips to the United States military,
they also granted a licence for the clip to the Colt Company,
so that Colt Model of 1917 revolvers could use this same solution.
That would of course simplify manufacture, use, ammunition supply, all that.
And in fact licenses were also granted to a couple of other
non-gun companies just to manufacture the clips for the government.
Now these revolvers were made for World War One,
but probably only maybe half of them actually got to the front lines
in World War One before the fighting actually ended.
Everyone was anticipating this big final push to end the war,
which would have been the spring offensive of 1919.
And armament production ramped up to prepare for this.
People didn't expect that Germany would collapse in the fall of 1918 like they actually did.
And so, you can think about ... why did they make so many revolvers right at the end of the war?
Well, people didn't think that was going to be the end of the war.
So it's interesting that these perhaps actually saw more combat use,
perhaps, in World War Two than they did in World War One.
Because come 1941 there are still 91,950 of these Smith & Wesson revolvers in US inventory.
And between those and the Colt 1917s about 20,000 revolvers
were actually shipped to combat fronts in World War Two, primarily for use by military police.
But you'll see them in holsters in ... period photography from World War Two.
They were used by a variety of different guys,
who maybe preferred a revolver over a semi-auto pistol.
And so they would continue to see service all the way through World War Two.
Probably more so, like I said, than they actually saw in World War One.
... I believe the last official production of them was in 1949 for use by occupation troops in Japan.
So quite the long and storied military career
for a revolver that was originally just sort of a simplified hack to sell to the British.
It ended up being quite useful to the United States.
For what it's worth, the other version of the 1917 that you will find
is one that has a Brazilian crest on it.
Because in 1937 Brazil actually purchased a contract for 25,000
of the US Model 1917 revolvers from Smith & Wesson, and a lot of those have come back into the US.
So if you see one with a weird 5 star South American crest on it,
you've got yourself one of the Brazilian contract ones.
You got the version like this with the flaming bomb on it, that's an American contract one.
So anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.