Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today what we're taking
a look at is the Lee-Enfield,
the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (or "smelly") Mark III.
And this is the rifle where
the British finally got the Lee into the form
where it would really be satisfactory for them for a very long time.
This is ... the rifle that went into World War One.
And it's basically the rifle that came out of World War One in British military service.
So, this was adopted in 1907.
And ... the most fundamental change to it is a replacement of
the old style of mobile charger bridge.
Where the left side of the stripper clip guide was milled into the receiver,
but the right side was attached to the bolt head.
So you only had a stripper clip guide when you opened the bolt all the way.
It's kind of a neat idea, but in practice it had some problems.
They had a lot of reports from troops in the field
that the charger guides got loose over time, and they didn't work very well.
Which is totally understandable looking at how that thing was set up.
So in 1906 they started experimenting at Enfield
with a couple of different patterns of the fixed charger guide.
Eventually they came up with the version that we have here, and adopted it in 1907.
At the same time they also adopted a new pattern of bayonet in 1907.
So, we're going to look at the details of this in just a moment,
but I wanted to give you a little backstory on the rifle itself first, this particular example,
because it has a really cool backstory to it.
This is basically a perfect time capsule of a rifle from 1912, so a pre-war SMLE Mark III.
And the reason for that is this came out of New South Wales in Australia,
and it was issued to a serviceman there during his compulsory military service, his training.
And at the end of his training, or shortly thereafter,
he actually purchased the rifle that he had been issued.
There are markings on this showing that it was sold out of service.
And then he died, and the rifle was in his family household.
During World War One they stuck it under a bed or something, and someone forgot about it.
And so it wasn't turned in to the government as basically service rifles were supposed to be,
"Turn them in because the government needs all the guns it can get for World War One."
Well, had that happened it probably would have been destroyed,
or it would have been updated at some point to newer patterns.
But it wasn't, it stayed under the bed.
And then in World War Two the same thing was supposed to happen,
"Turn in your guns, the government needs them for military defence of Australia."
But again, this rifle is still sitting under someone's bed, and no one realised that it was there.
And so it avoided military service in World War Two as well.
And it was only in the 1960s that the guy's last relatives passed away,
and someone found the rifle and it ended up in the collector's circles.
And it's really cool that it did because,
as I said, this is a perfect time capsule of the original adoption of the Mark III SMLE.
So, let's take a closer look at it.
The most prominent new feature on these rifles was the charger bridge,
the fixed charger bridge which you can see here.
If we compare that to an original Number 1 Mark I SMLE,
you'll see that we have on here the old style, the mobile charger,
which only works as a stripper clip guide when you open the bolt all the way.
This new fixed bridge - it's simpler, it's cheaper to make, and it's a lot more reliable.
... Even these kind of wobble around a bit, and that was a problem.
I do want to point out there was actually a little bit of a change.
This was considered just a manufacturing change,
and so it didn't get its own official designation.
But the very first rifles, and this particular one is ... 1907 production,
the first ones had a very squared off charger bridge like that.
And what they discovered is when cavalry units were using these
this tended to catch on their saddle buckets, or scabbards.
So the machining on the charger bridge itself was changed slightly.
And it was kind of angled back, bevelled a bit here on the side.
So this happened pretty darn quickly after initial production.
This is a 1907 rifle, this is a 1909 production one.
Which reminds me, I ought to show you what the actual socket markings are like on these.
So we have as usual our manufacturer, which was Enfield.
The date of production, which is 1909 on this.
And then the rifle designation, this is a Short Lee-Enfield (SHT-L-E) Mark III.
Now in addition to the charger bridge,
they also made some fairly substantial changes to the sights.
For one thing they significantly strengthened the protective ears on the rear sight.
So on the original Number 1s these were wood, and they were integrated
into this piece of the handguard, and they were just metal capped.
For comparison, here's our Number 1.
So you can see that those are pinned across on the handguard itself.
These guys are actually screwed down around the barrel.
And you can see the screw here that actually connects to them.
So these are much stouter.
They also significantly simplified the windage adjustment setup.
So we can take a closer look at that.
Those little notches marked on the rear sight here,
those indicate six inch increments at 100 yards.
However, you actually have a click every quarter turn,
you have a discrete click on this windage knob.
And each click is one minute of angle, so they had very finely adjustable sights.
And this was standard, I mean this is not like a competition version of the rifle,
this is the standard SMLE Mark III.
The British were quite concerned about encouraging good marksmanship.
This was still the repercussions of problems they'd had in the Boer War.
And ultimately this would lead to the BEF, the British Expeditionary Force,
being really the best group of marksmen probably anywhere
in Europe when World War One broke out.
And they acquitted themselves extremely well,
and there are many stories about the speed and accuracy of rifle fire from the BEF
at the beginning of World War One.
Before they all got slaughtered by artillery.
As for elevation, by the way, we have 100 ... yard increments here on this side.
The button allows you to easily make 50 yard adjustments,
and then this dial allows you to actually adjust the sight in 25 yard increments.
This one's pretty stiff, but ...
each notch of the dial, which is like half a rotation,
is a 25 yard increment in elevation. So very finely adjustable sights.
At the same time they also made a number of changes to the front sights.
So this is our Mark III, this is our early Mark I, and you can see what they did.
They took the front sight wings and they widened them,
and that was to allow more light in to get a better sight picture.
They also changed the barleycorn, or triangular, front sight to a square front sight blade.
That was considered a better sight picture, and I would tend to agree with that.
Now in the process they also changed the rear sight aperture.
The barleycorn front sight had been paired with a V notch,
and they updated that to be a U notch.
And that ... really gives a much more precise sight picture,
and I can understand why it would be preferable to guys like the marksman of the BEF.
Now one other thing to point out about the sights here is that, as originally manufactured,
the Mark III was still calibrated for the early British Mark VI ammunition.
This was round-nose ball. The British hadn't yet adopted a spitzer (or pointed) cartridge.
So the Mark VI was a 215 grain round-nose bullet
travelling at 2,060 feet per second.
This is a relatively heavy, relatively slow projectile.
And the curvature here on the rear sight base is calibrated for that.
The sight goes out to 2,000 yards.
Now the Mark VII ball would be adopted in 1910,
and most SMLEs would eventually be updated to use it.
And when they did that, they ground down the rear sight base to fit the flatter trajectory.
The Mark VII was of course a pointed bullet, a spitzer bullet.
It was 174 grains, and it was travelling at 2,440 feet per second.
So basically 20% faster, this was a substantial change.
And when they recalibrated the sights they stamped "HV"
here on the barrel under the rear sight.
And you can see this one doesn't have it.
And it's really because of this rifle's sort of time-capsule status
that it maintains that early sight calibration.
For the record we have a second rifle here, this is also a Mark III.
This is 1907 production, ... it's that same rifle I showed you with the very early charger bridge.
This one actually has been updated for Mark VII ammunition.
So ... the curvature is shorter, it's rather difficult to discern the difference.
However, you can see we have HV stamped here on the barrel.
There were a few other minor modifications, minor improvements,
that were made to the Mark III rifle at this time.
Probably the most significant of the ones left
is that the handguard was actually made a little bit heavier duty on the top.
So you can see on our Mark I here
the handguard is basically flush with that metal cap,
where on the Mark III the handguard is substantially taller than the metal cap.
So they're making the rifle a little bit more durable in a lot of ways.
The front sight protectors, the rear sight protectors.
The charger bridge being more durable than the mobile charger guide, and
this would really suit them well in the upcoming war.
So, a couple of little details I want to show you here relative to this particular rifle's story.
This is NSW, New South Wales.
4-12 is the date that the rifle was actually sold out of service.
And these tip-to-tip broad arrows are ... the stamp
that indicates that this rifle was officially sold out of service,
so it's no longer military property.
So this rifle was in this condition in 1912, and never changed after that.
Now in 1907 with the adoption of the new Mark III rifle,
the British also adopted a new bayonet.
And we actually have the bayonet that goes with that New South Wales rifle.
So the objections that they'd had were that the existing bayonet,
the pattern 1903 here, it wasn't long enough.
... This had been adequate on the Long Lee rifles,
but once they stuck it on the new Short Magazine Lee-Enfield,
well, it just didn't have the reach that they wanted. So,
the British did some experimentation, and they actually used
the Japanese Type 30 Arisaka bayonet as a model.
And we know this because the trials pattern bayonets are referred to as "Japanese pattern".
So they took the hooked quillion from the Japanese bayonet.
They actually made their new pattern bayonet slightly longer than the Japanese one.
You can see the difference in length here between the '03 and the '07.
And they went ahead and adapted this.
So they basically took the existing handle design they had from the 1903 bayonet,
same attachment method to fit the SMLE's nose cap.
They gave it a Japanese style quillion, and also a Japanese style of blade.
This was adopted as the pattern 1907, this particular one was made in July of 1909.
And we actually have an NSW, New South Wales, marking on the cap.
Along with that same sold out of service double broad-arrow strike.
So this is the bayonet that was sold to this reservist with his rifle.
Now the hooked quillion wouldn't last very long, but we'll get into that in the next video.
So in case you're wondering, the British did in fact jump from the SMLE Mark I and I*,
which were the original iterations of this rifle with the mobile charger bridge,
and they jumped to Mark III. And the reason is that the Mark II rifle was a ... conversion.
So they went to Mark III because there were substantial changes over the Mark I.
They would eventually simplify this rifle during World War One to the Mark III*,
and we'll take a look at that in a separate following video.
These rifles would remain (well, between these and the simplified Mark III* rifles),
these would remain the standard issue rifle for parts of the British Empire
through the end of World War Two.
So Australia and India continued to produce
Mark III rifles all the way through World War Two.
Where the British adopted the Number 4, the Canadians adopted the Number 4,
but the other half of the Empire didn't.
So you'll see these continuing in service all the way through World War Two, which is pretty cool.
One other thing that I want to touch on is the designation of "Rifle Number 1 Mark III",
which is how most people would identify this,
that is actually a designation that was adopted retroactively in 1926.
So up until then, throughout World War One,
this was the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield Mark III,
SMLE Mark III, the smelly.
It is only after the war, in the mid-20s, that they adopted the whole "Number something" system,
and then applied it retroactively.
So that's where the differences in that nomenclature come from.
If you enjoyed this, stick around because we have one more video about the early Lee-Enfields.
And that's going to cover the Mark III*, which was the wartime simplification version.
So hopefully you enjoyed this video. This is a fantastic example of a rifle
that ... it's extremely unlikely that you'll run across one quite like this.
So a big thanks to the collector who gave me the opportunity to show it to you guys.
Thanks for watching.