Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and today we're just gonna cover some basic fundamental terminology of military firearms.
We're looking at rifle lengths.
What are the standard lengths of rifle and what are they called and why?
Now it turns out if you just kind of look at it from afar it seems like you have rifles of all varying lengths.
But, in fact, these almost all come into one of three different categories,
and there are very specific reasons why those lengths are chosen and what went into them.
So we will start here with rifles – full-length rifles.
We have a couple here to take a look at: we have an 1891 Carcano,
we have an 1874 Gras and we have an 1891 Mosin-Nagant.
All of these pretty early guns for their respective country, for repeating or single-shot cartridge firing guns,
and you'll notice of course these are quite long barrels.
Full length rifles are typically 30 to 32 inch barrels. That's 760 to 810 millimeters,
and there was a reason that they had to be this long,
and it was firing in ranks.
Now this is a holdover from earlier black powder rifle days where you didn't have repeating firepower.
So the way you got a lot of firepower in the military sense was to stand a whole lot of guys in a line
and have them all fire simultaneously and then reload and fire in volleys on command.
This made a group of men very effective, that gave the group of men the most effective firepower you could get
for the rate of fire of the weapons that they had.
Now the best efficient way to do this is to have several ranks of guys, two or even three ranks,
and so the front rank fires and then while they begin to reload the second rank can fire,
and then while they begin to reload the third rank can fire,
and by the time the third rank has fired, in theory, the first rank is reloaded and ready to fire again,
and so this unit could keep up a pretty efficient continuous volume of fire.
Now in order to do this safely, you need to make sure that the rifles are long enough to clear either two or three ranks of men.
Well, the one or two ranks in front of the guys in the back.
It is definitely no good if the guys in the back have short little carbines – we'll get to that definition in a minute –
that don't go out past the heads of the guys in the front rank.
You don't want people accidentally shooting the front rank in the back while they're under the stress of combat.
So that was one of the primary reasons to have a very long barrel on these early rifles
so you could get two lines of guys in a row and the ones in the back would have their rifle muzzles past the ones in the front.
Now the other reason to have a long barrel is so that you can fit a bayonet to it.
Typically for this period you would have a fairly long bayonet.
That allows the rifle to be both the longest effective hand-to-hand weapon it can be
and also allows it to be a reasonably, sort of, at least hopefully effective weapon against mounted troops.
So if you had infantry on foot and they were attacked by cavalry on horseback,
the guys on foot would have, effectively, a long enough spear
that they could sort of defend themselves against a guy on a horse, or at least give the cavalry second thoughts
about trying to charge into a group of infantry.
In fact, the farther back you go, the longer the bayonets get.
This is the bayonet from a French Chassepot, which predates the Gras,
this is an 1860s era bayonet and you know what, this thing is basically a short sword.
You put this onto the end of a rifle this length, which is exactly what the French did with it,
and you have a weapon that is taller than the soldier who's carrying it.
So that gives you the best possible chance at an effective defense against cavalry.
If we move forward in time a bit to the 1891 Mosins we have something similar.
It's not quite as long, but we're still talking a very long bayonet here.
It's just a spike, this isn't meant to be a swordfighting weapon,
this is basically just to turn the rifle into a de facto spear for defense against cavalry.
So who are cavalry anyway? Well, cavalry are the guys who are both moving by and fighting from horseback.
Today we would apply this term to armored vehicles,
but for the time period that we're talking about here, these guys are on horseback.
And that means they have a substantially different set of requirements for their firearm than the infantry does.
For one thing, the guys on horseback don't care about this long barrel length for safety and volleys, that's immaterial to them.
They also don't care about the length of the rifle for basically turning it into a spear for defense against, well, themselves.
Instead, for a bladed weapon the cavalry typically are equipped with swords or sabers.
In fact, they would have been equipped with those before they had firearms at all,
and the saber was generally held over as a very symbolically important aspect of cavalry armament.
So most carbines don't have any sort of bayonet attachment at all.
This one does in this case, this one does not.
So we don't need a long rifle to add a bayonet to to make a spike against cavalry.
There really are no reasons that the cavalry need a long weapon at all – in fact quite the opposite, they need something that is short and handy.
There's a pretty decent chance that they're going to be called upon to do some shooting one-handed
because they're probably going to at some point be trying to hold on to reins with one hand
while shouldering or firing a rifle with the other hand.
Not always, but that was a consideration.
So the weapons that the cavalry is going to get need to be short, compact, and handy, and that is the carbine.
Carbine derives from a French term "carabine", developed from the name of the guys who are fighting on horseback.
Today, "carbine" has kind of split into two different meanings.
Today we use it to refer to rifles that are generally short in length.
We also use it to refer to rifles that are in small calibers, generally pistol calibers.
So you will often hear the term "pistol caliber carbine" today to refer to, for example, an AR-15 in 9mm.
You'll also hear about things like the M4 carbine, which is in the standard 5.56 rifle cartridge,
but it's a short version of the M16 rifle, which is longer.
The traditional definition of carbine is the one based on overall length.
So carbines typically have barrels that are 17 to 20 inches long – we're talking 430 to 510 millimeters, in that range.
They're very short and handy.
One of the downsides is they're typically chambered for the same standard cartridge as the infantry rifles of the period,
which means carbines tend to kick a lot because they're very light rifles.
Now there are some circumstances where this was recognized and compensated for.
In the US military, for example, with the Trapdoor Springfields the rifle version got a 70 grain charge of black powder, hence .45-70,
where the carbines were actually loaded lighter. They fired the .45-55 cartridge with 15 grains less powder – a 55 grain charge of black powder.
That's kind of the exception, though. Typically the carbines and the rifles fired the same ammunition.
So if you start looking at military rifles you're gonna find a lot of them fall into this very long pattern,
a lot of them fall into this very short pattern,
and you'll find that there's also one in the middle.
Now the reason for the middle set is about the time of World War I,
countries started to realize that, you know, the guys on horseback aren't really working out so well in this new age of machine guns.
And you know what, also this idea of lining guys up in ranks and firing in volleys,
also, not working so well in the age of machine guns,
and maybe we should come up with something a little better.
And so when you start to see the development of fire and movement tactics,
you see countries start to realize that they need some compromise between these two lengths.
The British were in fact one of the first countries to really recognize this and adapt it,
and that was with the Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield rifle.
The British took their long rifle Lees and they had their carbine Lees, and after the Boer War,
they realized we just need to come up with a universal new firearm that is a combination of the two.
And with that we got the universal short rifle.
Now there isn't really a distinctive term, like "carbine" or "musketoon" or "rifle",
there isn't really a distinct term associated with this pattern,
But this is the decision that virtually every major military in the world came to by the middle of the 20th century.
These have barrels that are 24 to 26 inches long, that's 600 to 660 millimeters or thereabouts.
This is the optimal balance, generally speaking, between the rifle and the carbine.
This is going to give a long enough sight radius, the length between the front and rear sights,
it's a long enough sight radius to be practically fairly accurate,
because if you have a very short distance between the sights it's harder to simply mechanically align the sights in a precise manner.
But this also keeps the rifles a bit shorter. They're handier, they're more maneuverable, they're easier to carry,
especially in the confines of mechanized transport, which is starting to become universal by the middle of the 20th century.
Remember, you know, in the early days, 1891,
if someone's carrying one of these full-length rifles
they're gonna be doing it over their shoulder and walking, or I guess maybe on a train.
Once we get to this period in time, now we're talking about armies equipped with trucks,
and if you're gonna pack a bunch of guys into a truck or a half-track or some light armored vehicle,
having the rifle a little bit shorter really does make a difference.
So the examples we have here are the early Lee-Enfield, we have the US 1903 Springfield,
the Japanese adopted this with the Type 99 Arisakas being of this universal short rifle pattern,
the French did it with the MAS-36, the Germans did it.
The Mauser 98 was a long rifle like this. They adopted the Karabiner 98k.
The Germans did have some cavalry carbines, but they're pretty obscure these days.
What they got with the K98k is a universal short rifle.
So this became the standard and again, if you start looking at the different military rifles out there
you'll find a vast majority of the ones that date from, say, 1920 or later
are going to be in this 24 to 26 inch barrel length, not counting the carbines.
What we would see after this is there were a few countries that then adopted carbines later,
like the Russians with the M38 and M44 carbines,
although the Russians are a bit of a special case because they never really had a universal rifle.
In fact the Russians had what was called a dragoon rifle, so let's check that out for a moment.
Dragoons. Now, dragoon is a term you may hear from time to time.
Dragoons, historically, are troops who travel on horseback but fight on foot.
So usually they're just equipped with a standard infantry rifle,
because they're not expected to be trying to maneuver this thing and fire it from horseback.
They also need the length and the bayonet capability for defending against cavalry when they are dismounted and fighting that way.
So the Russians started off with one of the longest rifles of this batch, with the model of 1891 Mosin-Nagant,
And they also had, at the same time, a model of 1891 Dragoon rifle,
And they did decide that, you know, this huge thing is just,
it's a little bit large even for guys who are going to be fighting on foot.
So they made a special shorter version of it, which they cut about two and a half inches off of the barrel,
that was the Dragoon rifle. Now conveniently, Dragoon rifles are very rare today, but conveniently,
they kept the exact same pattern for the Mosin-Nagant 91/30,
which was adopted basically in lieu of a universal short rifle by the Russian military.
So the Russians really kind of skipped this universal pattern,
and they went from the long rifle to a slightly shortened dragoon, and by 1938 they realized
this thing's still a bit long to give to everybody, this isn't a good compromise length.
This thing still has a twenty nine and three-quarter inch barrel on it.
And so they adopted a new carbine version at that point, and they kind of split the difference.
Instead of having one combination weapon for everybody they just came up with two instead.
So that's what makes the Russians a little bit different.
There are a couple other countries that stand out as having things a little bit unusual,
so let's take a look at a couple of those and then we'll wrap this up.
Naturally, the Italians had to be a little bit different, and they were a little indecisive in this.
They had the model of 1891 full-length rifle, and then they also had 1891 carbines, which is typical, that's what most countries did.
Now the Italians had two different versions of the carbine, they had the carbine for guys on horseback with a permanently attached bayonet.
They also had the carbine for other guys who might want a carbine, with a standard bayonet lug,
although the bayonet lug changed shape a couple of times,
and then they adopted in 1940, they tried to adopt almost a universal short rifle, the model 40 or 41,
which was a little bit shorter, it had a 27 inch barrel, so only about 75 millimeters shorter than the original 1891,
and it's a little bit beyond our envelope of 24 to 26 inches for what I'm calling a universal short rifle.
The 41 was a short-lived version of the Carcano, they ended up going back to the carbines,
and then they also had, because the 41 was a little too long and this was definitely too long,
they had the TS model, the special troops or Truppe Speciali,
and that's this guy which is about 3 inches longer than the carbines.
So this comes in just a little bit under our universal short rifle definition here,
Basically they never quite got the short rifle. They had one attempt that was a little bit longer than that,
and they had one attempt that was a little bit shorter than that.
I have to say this is actually a very handy rifle pattern, the TS. This is a model 38 TS.
And in the end, I kind of like what they ended up with with that special troops model,
but they really kind of dithered around and they had so many different versions of rifles that even the Germans had a hard time categorizing them all properly.
And, of course, we can't end this without looking at one particular French rifle, that being the Colonial Berthier.
So the French kind of discovered this right about the same time that the British were actually adopting it,
the French kind of stumbled into it by accident.
They have this problem of colonial troops in southeast Asia, who were generally short and light of stature,
and weren't well suited to handle this really huge and heavy Lebel rifle that the French had introduced,
and they didn't want to give them something quite as short as the cavalry carbines, so they came up with an intermediate length,
Which is, as you can see here compared to a K98k Mauser,
almost exactly the profile of the universal short rifle.
That being the model of 1902 Colonial or Indochina Berthier.
So, kind of neat, they would make these and then they would basically abandon them
and go back to full-length rifles for their main infantry,
all the way up until they finally adopted a universal short bolt-action rifle with the MAS-36, about 35 years later.
Anyway, hopefully you enjoyed this video, learned something new today,
and I think the more you go out and look at military, primarily bolt-action rifles,
you'll find that almost all of them fall into one of these three categories,
either the carbines, the short rifles, or the full-length rifles.
Thanks very much for watching.