Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at
finally the last ... well it's actually not really the last,
but this is the last major version of the SMLE, the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield.
This is the Mark III* version.
Now, all of the previous iterations of the SMLE and the Lee, all the way back to the Lee-Metford,
every time they made a change it was making the gun better,
making it stronger, adding features to it, things like that.
Well, here we have a totally different motivation,
this is a wartime economisation model of the SMLE.
And that is because, when this was introduced in January of 1916, the war was looking pretty bad.
And the British realised, "We really need to make guns faster and cheaper.
And there's some stuff on here like, we designed this rifle with the war in South Africa in mind.
And it turns out that the war we are in now, over in France,
is kind of a different deal than fighting the Boers.
The snap-shooting, close-range targets are becoming much more important
than long-range volley fire across the grand vast steppe of South Africa."
So, they start simplifying.
This particular rifle, before we take a closer look I just want to mention,
has a really cool history specifically of its own.
This was manufactured in 1916, so the first year of production.
And in fact we know that it was manufactured rather early in 1916, because
it has a stock disc here that indicates that in May of 1916
it was issued out to the Cambridgeshire Regiment.
Which was being outfitted and transferred to what would become,
a month after this was issued, the Battle of the Somme.
So, let's take a closer look at this veteran of a Mark III* rifle.
Hopefully you will pardon the somewhat beat-up condition of this rifle,
considering that it went through the greatest British cataclysm of World War One at the Somme.
If we take a look at the receiver markings here,
we'll see that we have an Enfield produced gun, manufactured in 1916.
That was the first year of production of the Mark III*.
The designation is Short Lee-Enfield III*.
The star of course indicates a minor variation on an existing pattern.
Since I mentioned it, here is the stock disc with the date of May 1916.
This is rifle number 47 from the 2nd Company,
1st Battalion of the Cambridgeshire Infantry Regiment.
Now, what can we do to simplify these rifles without really impairing their combat functionality
in the modern warfare that we now recognise from the trenches of France?
Well, the first thing we can do is get rid of the windage adjustment.
We do not need one minute of angle, click adjustable windage
on a rifle that you are using at relatively short range, often in the dark,
under machine gun fire on the Somme.
So the rear sights were simply screwed in place in lieu of the original adjustment mechanism.
For comparison's sake, here is our original Mark III with the windage dial on the side.
Here the dial is gone and there is just a screw that locks this piece in place.
So the actual rear sight notch continued to be used,
it was the same component, it was just fixed in place now.
And if we're getting rid of fancy unnecessary sight embellishments,
we can get rid of the volley sights, or as they would call them, the dial sights.
So these rifles were made without ...
those nice, elaborate, fancy, long-range dial sights.
Starting in the summer of 1916, orders would also go out that if rifles with some of these features
were damaged in combat, they weren't to be repaired.
If the dial sight got damaged on an earlier gun, it was simply to be taken off and the hole plugged.
Of course, along with removing the dial front sight,
they removed the rear aperture that went along with it, so that goes away.
And you know what else is kind of an unnecessary World War One extravagance?
Yeah, the cartridge cut off, the magazine cut off, that's not necessary.
Not so much standing volley fire being done in the trenches.
So the Mark III* is no longer being cut here to take the magazine cut off.
Nor is the pivot hole being drilled in the front.
The stock discs would also disappear shortly after this, this is a very early Mark III* rifle.
The stock discs going away wasn't a matter of cost, it was a matter of military intelligence.
And the military starting to realise that, "Hey, you know what?
We don't really want the other side to be able to identify exactly what units are where at all times.
Because they can use that information to figure out where we are planning attacks,
or who we are using for reserves, or who we are using for front line troops.
All sorts of potential military intelligence they can get from that."
So you'll see a lot of this sort of information disappear in different countries,
they stopped marking the rifles with potentially valuable intelligence.
Now I also want to touch on the change in bayonets, but I want to make it clear that
this change in bayonet design ... did not happen at the same time as the adoption of the Mark III* rifle.
This in fact actually happened before World War One even began.
So when the ... original SMLE Mark III was adopted, it was adopted with a longer bayonet.
This was copied from the Japanese Arisaka bayonet.
It's got a hooked quillon there for stacking, or bayonet fighting, or
whatever else you want to do with it.
In 1913, so before the war started, the British revised the design to get rid of that hook.
They decided it just wasn't necessary.
So there are people who ... think that this was got rid of because it caught on barbed wire
or something, it was a hazard in the trenches.
In reality, this was deleted before the trench warfare was even a known thing.
So these bayonets did continue to get issued through World War One,
and there was a lot of ... arsenal modification getting rid of the quillons.
But the general pattern, which is what we have here,
was still referred to as the pattern 1907 bayonet.
And it's exactly the same, just without the hooked quillon.
So, Australia would keep the quillon until 1915, but the UK, the British, got rid of it in 1913.
And this is the bayonet that you will generally see associated with British troops in World War One.
So with this rifle we kind of reach the end of
really, effectively, I think I would call it the end of the SMLE story.
Now from here there would be a few other developments of the rifle.
After World War One the British start looking into getting a brand new rifle
and continuing on their path of improvements.
And what they are starting to look at are taking lessons from the Pattern 1914 rifle,
and they are wanting aperture sights now.
This would lead to the Number 1 Mark V SMLE.
Which I already have videos on, you can take a look at that.
... The Mark V didn't really go anywhere, the Mark VI would become the Number 4 Mark I Enfield.
So that's where the story continues after this point.
Hopefully you guys have enjoyed not just this video, but the whole ongoing series about the SMLE.
And the ... Lee action in British military service,
starting all the way back at the Long Lee-Metford Mark I rifles.
If you haven't seen those others, there is a whole playlist
on the development and history of the Lee, so definitely make a point to check that out.
Thank you guys for watching.