In the early 1990s, Israeli Military Industries (IMI) developed the Galil MAR (Micro Assault Rifle) and the MAGAL at the same time. Both were intended to be very compact rifles, with the MAR in 5.56mm and the MAGAL specifically for police in .30 Carbine. The MAGAL offered the same handling and ergonomics as the regular Galil family, but with a reduced-power cartridge and only semiautomatic operation for better police suitability.
Mechanically, the MAGAL uses a totally standard Galil receiver and bolt carrier, with a bolt face made slightly smaller to fit the .30 Carbine case and the gas piston shortened slightly. A magazine well insert is permanently fitted, using M2 Carbine magazines modified to have an AR-style bolt hold-open (which also reduces their capacity to 27 rounds). It is a gas-operated action, not a blowback conversion.
The MAGAL was tested by Israeli police in 1999, and the guns had some problems. They were never able to get quite as reliable as everyone wanted, and ultimately the police acquired 4,000 of them but decided not to adopted to a wider scale. Attempts were made to market the gun internationally, but not many were sold and total production was only about 6,000.
Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this rare rifle! The NFC collection there – perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe – is available by appointment to researchers:
https://royalarmouries.org/research/national-firearms-centre/
You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:
“(…)magazine well insert is permanently fitted, using M2 Carbine magazines modified to have an AR-style bolt hold-open (which also reduces their capacity to 27 rounds).(…)”
As explained said alteration is required in order to work with MAGAL, but what if one would attempt to use alternated (MAGAL) magazine with M2 Carbine?
Good idea, on paper. The .30 Carbine ammo never got the usage it deserves.
But in this case, the guts should have been designed from scratch for the .30 Carbine, rather than trying to reuse the existing .556 geometry. This is where I think the reliability issues came from.
Could the tube inside the top cover be a M1 Carbine oil bottle holder? Just a wild thought.
No. Ascan be seen in those AK based SMG/PCC type guns, the cartridge sometimes bounces left after extraction and gets stuck between receiver cover, bolt (carrier) and receiver. With the bigger rifle cartridge cases that is not really a problem. They bounce back and fly out the ejection port on the right.
That is one ugly fat, useless, polymer device; think they ended up .22 rimfiring folks in the legs instead. “Popular” mind you better than .223, one imagines.
.30 cal look at the size of that fat pig, should be some amazing .50Bmg at that size foul plastic rubbish. Gone are the days eh, Roth Steyrs and swords – Not progress.
Comments are turned off on youtube for this one. Don’t know if that was intentional or just youtube being youtube. Too bad they didn’t get this to function reliably, strip all the excess polymer from it slap on a 16 or 18 inch barrel and import it.
Just YouTube doing YouTube things. I turned them back on, but they may do it again.
This looks like the kind of thing that might not be quite what government customers have in mind, but would probably sell ok on the US civilian market. Also, looks like a very entertaining feral hog gun to me XD!
PSA, please make a clone!
I think Ian nails it right on the head, in reference to that tube on the inside of the top cover… That is there to reduce the “bounce effect” of an ejected cartridge. There are some counterintuitive things that go on with an AK action so far as ejection goes, and I would wager good money that a straight-wall cartridge like the .30 Carbine inside an action meant for a 7.62X39 system that was half-ass converted to 5.56mm NATO is going to exhibit some oddities. Just a fact of life…
That said, I really have my doubts about the efficacy of a .30 Carbine round in today’s police and counterinsurgency environment. The problem is that you really need full-on lethality and range; the .30 Carbine may offer you reduced penetration and so forth, but… The day when that took paramount concern died about the time you had to start worrying about suicide vests, body armor, and all the rest of the modern threat environment.
Were I designing an optimized police shoulder arm, I’d have to do some serious thinking, but I’m pretty sure that the cartridge I chose would be something very much other than .30 Carbine. You need flat trajectory, lethal out to long range, and a whole host of things that the .30 Carbine just is not. The threat environment has opened up that much… You may be dealing with a riot today, with rock-throwing thugs, a suicide vest tomorrow, a hostage situation, and a full-blown infantry squad offensive action. If any of the defenders on October 7th had had .30 Carbines, they were at a severe disadvantage before the shooting even started.
I hate to keep harping on this, but “ye olde dayes” when you could have multi-tier forces are dead and buried. Today’s environment means that the enemy is going to be doing their best to avoid your actual highly-trained and “fully-equipped” combat forces, and going after anything that’s an easy target. Morally, you owe anyone in uniform the exact same training and gear that you’re giving your front-line infantry, because they’re likely to be the guys actually doing the most combat.
Sucks, budget-wise, but… That’s the way the bodies are bouncing.
As much as I personally like the .30 Carbine (I carried one in the car as a patrol rifle along with a ’94 Winchester), I agree. The threat environment has moved past Ed Pugsley & Co.’s masterpiece and its .32 WSL-inspired ballistics.
It’s probably moved beyond the admittedly pretty impressive capabilities of 5.56 x 45mm, if not in range then in protective gear defeating capability.
The same can be said of every button-counter’s favorite pistol round, the 9 x 19mm. It and the .45 ACP are century-old rounds that won’t stop somebody wearing even a basic modern ballistic vest.
Just as the answer in pistols may be a new 9 x 24mm round with .357 Magnum or even .357 Maximum performance, a new police/military rifle round should probably perform more like the nine-decade-old .220 Swift. 1,200 m/s with a 4gm bullet is not to be sneezed at.
Instead, we get one that thinks it’s a 7 x 57 Mauser circa 1892. And we’re supposed to get down on our knees like it’s the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
I don’t think so.
clear ether
eon
The thing is, I don’t think that the use case for “police shoulder arm” and “basic individual infantry weapon” are at all similar, and the difference gap is only widening as time goes on.
For one thing, you have to carefully evaluate your threat environment. Is basic infantry combat the same as police/internal security work, or not? If it is, then you can safely issue very similar weapons and call it good. If it isn’t…? Yeah; do the math.
In modern infantry combat, you’re very rapidly reaching the point where you’re not going to be able to issue a truly effective multi-role weapon that can “do it all”. The threat is likely going to include things like autonomous vehicles with at least some armoring on them, there are going to be aerial drones, and the threat of other light infantry personnel (whether wearing body armor, or not…) is likely to be proportionally reduced. The anti-material role is likely to start being paramount, and we’re gonna have to go back to the old days when being able to kill a cavalryman’s horse was way more important than shooting another soldier dead. I can also see “platooning” of small arms becoming a routinely automated task, and we may see volley fires return to use yet again… With the participants scattered about and only controlled via communications and automated aiming for elevation and so forth.
Going forward, I think we’re gonna see a hell of a lot of changes to both internal security and basic infantry combat, most of which I believe are going to come more in the form of command, control, and intelligence aspects of the sighting. Synthetic realities generated from overhead views supplied by drones are going to play a role, and the side that best puts these into implementation and use are going to win most of the firefights, while the losing side gets shot up like fish in a barrel.
Frankly, at this particular point on the technology tree, I’d be spending a lot more money on the C3I piece than the ballistics. The ballistics are effectively “solved” in that the current suite is providing a workable mix of high/low power options; the problem is, as always, control and intelligence sharing. You are not hearing either the Ukrainians or the Russians complaining about their cartridges/weapons; this is an indicator that the current caliber mix is at least adequate and fit for purpose. Body armor isn’t making that much of a difference, and the loadout compromises required for the NGSW do not seem to be necessary; indeed, they’re probably going to get a lot of guys killed. Mostly because we’ve fundamentally lost sight of what the individual infantry weapon is supposed to be doing, which is dealing with the near-in threats while the ones they designed the NGSW around are more properly dealt with via the good offices of crew-served weapons.
The US military doesn’t have an individual weapon deficiency; what it has is a failure to understand the modern infantry combat action, which does not need a heavier-caliber close-in weapon so much as it needs better machinegun command and control for the long-range fight. Which, I fear, most leaders in the US military fail to really understand; the targets they want to engage with NGSW are not individual weapon targets; they’re targets for crew-served weapons and area weapons, not things to be picked at with uber-rifles and individual marksmen.
Well, not if you want to win your engagements and eliminate the enemy, as opposed to running training courses in proper camouflage and operational security for the nine-tenths of the enemy your individual marksmen aren’t observing and engaging…
Swear to God, sometimes? In Iraq? I felt like most of our commanders over there, at all levels, were somehow in the same mindset as our OPFOR guys were supposed to be in, more concerned with “training” and “making a point” with the enemy rather than the destruction of said enemy… Too much “gamification” and not enough “slaughter”.
You only win when most of the enemy is dead, and the remnants decide they’d really rather not play. Leaving any of them to fight another day is an error of massive magnitude; slaughter and destruction of the “will to fight” is how you win wars. Do note the rather massive difference between WWI and WWII, so far as outcomes go. In WWI, they pulled back and did not bring devastation and death to the enemy in their homelands; had they done so, as we did in WWII? WWII would never have happened, at least not when it did. Might have taken another generation or two for the belligerents to forget what happened, but if you examine the current state of German aggression, I think we can agree that WWII broke something in their culture that badly needed breaking, if their neighbors were to ever live in peace again. You want to win wars, that’s the bare minimum of what you have to do.
Ugly as it is, that’s a fact.
“(…)WWI, they pulled back and did not bring devastation and death to the enemy in their homelands(…)”
Why does event known as Gothas over London https://www.military-history.org/feature/strategic-bombing-gothas-over-london.htm does not count as death to(…)enemy(…)homeland?
Daweo,
One, London in WWI wasn’t flattened the way Dresden and most of the other German urban areas were in WWII. Nor were the British defeated.
WWI left most of Germany and German cities intact. The occupation was relatively benign, and the point that they’d been rather thoroughly defeated on the field of battle did not penetrate the skulls of most Germans, else they’d have thought long and carefully before trying the whole stupidity all over again twenty years later…
From the way that the two wars ended, and the post-war results, we can say with some pragmatic authority that what was done to Germany and Austria in WWI was “not enough”, and what happened to them on their home territories emphatically were.
So, if you want lasting peace? You need to kill about ten-fifteen percent of the population, mostly the military-age males, and you need to flatten enough of their infrastructure that you’ve left much of the population homeless and on the verge of starvation. You should also do what is necessary afterwards to help them rebuild, while keeping an eye on them and their politics. What we did after WWII appears to have worked, maybe even a bit too well for the Realpolitik of the world situation, but here we are…
As a professional soldier, I loathe war and I would counsel always trying to avoid it. I’ve got no illusions about it all, there’s no “glory” there, and I’d cheerfully shoot my own officers and politicians if I thought they were engaged in some “adventure” the way the idjits all went off to war singing songs in WWI. That said, sometimes it is necessary, and once you’ve started one and shed even a drop of blood, you’re an amoral monster if you don’t carry through to a final victorious solution, which doesn’t include “negotiating” a peace that only lasts a generation or so…
Last bit of the third paragraph should include something to the effect that “…what happened to them on their home territories in WWII was enough…”
I gotta learn to watch that cut-and-paste editing.
“(…)WWI left most of Germany and German cities intact.(…)”
British planned aerial bombardment of Berlin and tools for that were in development but Great War ended before they could use it
https://www.aviastar.org/air/england/handley_v500.php
In WW2 you damaged fool Am is killed the one thing that could have preserved the West. Go reap your foul fate with millions pouring across your non-border and your urban pongoids ramp aging in your streets
One ought to consider the reality of WWII, which is not that the “superior” Aryans and their fellow partners in the Axis were destroyed by even more superior Allied forces, but that the morons we speak of brought about their own defeat, more than anything else. WWII was not a contest of giants striding across the battlefield, it was more a sad little contretemps of lesser incompetents contending, with the least incompetent winning. And, that wasn’t the vaunted Aryans, either.
Said Aryans mostly defeated themselves, with ill-judged strategic and industrial moves all across the board. If they’d somehow managed to eke out a victory, the world would not be a better place, it’d be the result of a legacy of incompetence and fantasy played out over real people and real nations. I’ve no doubt that the Aryans would have mucked it up even worse, given the utter lack of pragmatic realism and decent behavior; picture them trying to feed Europe, having slaughtered the Slavic peasants to replace them with good Germanic peasantry… Think those would have been willing to “stay on the farm” while their betters lived it up in the capitals of Europe? Think the idiotic economic decisions the Nazis made in their fundamental unreality would have worked out, and that things would have been somehow better, had they won?
They’d have reduced Europe and most of the rest of Eurasia to a howling wilderness, just the same as we are apparently hell-bent on doing. It just would have been on a much shorter timescale… The collapse of the Nazi empire would have probably come about 1950-1960, perhaps as late as the 1980s. The Soviets didn’t last, either… And, they had a somewhat more realistic grasp on things than the Nazis did.
I fear the real truth is that none of these assholes deserve any respect, not the old-timey totalitarians or the current lot of idjits. Do remember that the Nazis were the ones who spent the lives of millions of your vaunted “Aryans” to no real effect; they’d do the same with you, were they around today.
You want net improvement in the world? Start out from the premise that none of the elites have clue fucking one about what they are doing, and they’re all out more for self-aggrandizement than anything else. Then, move from that realization to figuring out that the only way to live in peace and righteousness is to eliminate those assholes like Klaus Schwab and his ilk, they who think they know better how you ought to live. All the Nazis were was an earlier iteration of the same essential fraud, just as Bernie Madoff was an early expression of Bankman-Fried.
The only thing that ever changes is the names on the headlines, and the only thing that never changes is the credulity and fecklessness of the average person. If you fell for the Nazis and their cons, you’re likely falling for today’s version.
I know this is really old school, but what about 7.62×25 Tokarev (or some variant of such)? Flat trajectory, accuracy beyond the distances for 9mm or .45 ACP, and will penetrate low level soft body armor. Yes, the cartridge has issues with overpenetration and won’t always expand to create a nasty wound channel. But with newer ammo technology applied, this might be the starting point for a better police round than going whole hog on a rifle cartridge.
I think that the 7.62 bottleneck pistol cases of yore were really more compromises meant to take advantage of rifle barrel production in the same caliber than they were “optimal solutions”. The issue with using something like the 7.62 Tokarev on modern targets is that once you’ve penetrated the armor, what’s your “after-armor” effect? Is it enough to do a good job of stopping someone’s activities, or are you going to have to wait a half-hour or so for them to bleed out enough for the fact of their impending death to make the point “STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING” get through to the central nervous system…?
I don’t know that there’s been enough study of this, but I suspect that the key reason they don’t want to use anything like the 7.62 Tokarev is that the issue becomes “Can I perfectly place my shot to hit that heart/artery/CNS target?” rather than “Yeah, I hit center-of-mass, and the idjit stopped what he was doing because “massive damage””…
Karamojo Bell killed most of his elephants with, as I understand it, a perfectly-placed 7X57 Mauser shot that humanely put them down. The overwhelming majority of people are not Karamojo Bell, and the odds that you’re ever going to find yourself in anything remotely analogous in a modern tactical context is just about nil; you have to take what shots you can, when you can, and those shots had better be fight-stoppers once you get inside the armor envelope. This militates against things like the 7.62 Tokarev, because once that projectile has expended most of its energy by penetrating the armor, there’s really not all that much left over to do the damage necessary to stop the fight.
Granted, you empty your PPsh 71-round drum entirely into the torso of someone like the Hollywood bank robbers, I doubt they’re going to be giving you much trouble, but… The courts tend to frown on that sort of thing for police work. Hell, that’s one reason I think the 5.7 and 7mm PDW cartridges didn’t get much take-up here in the US; they really almost demand multiple hits to be truly effective fight-stoppers, and the optics from that? Yeesh…
“So, Mr. Police Chief, you deliberately selected a weapon that requires your officers to fire and hit multiple times to do the job… Do you enjoy hurting other people and causing them unnecessary pain and suffering? What is wrong with you? Are you mentally deranged…?”
Like it or not, if you’re designing to a concept that envisions multiple strikes for it to work, you’re really not designing for the US legal system. Or, for that matter, much of anywhere else in the Western world…
A lot of Bell’s one-shots were with the even lighter 6.5 x 53 Mannlicher. Of course his SOP was to induce the animal to charge, dodge to one side at the last second, and put the bullet in the ear canal, where the heavy bone of the skull would cause it to basically go right into the animal’s brain. This had less to do with the effectiveness or otherwise of the caliber and more to do with Bell being the Baryshnikov of big game hunters.
“Public interest” lawyers have had far greater effect on police armament in the U.S. than most people imagine. Thanks to them police were not allowed to use hollow-point bullets through most of the 1970s. (“Violates the Geneva convention!” No, actually it was the Hague Accords, and they only applied to the military anyway.)
“Public interest” lawyers also put the kibosh on OC (pepper spray) until the mid-1980s. They were rather put out by the advent of the Taser, until they “discovered” that it could cause MCI. That fueled another bout of righteous fury, which made them happy, and a happy “public interest” lawyer is a nightmare for everybody else.
In each case, it was the threat of lawsuits by “public interest” law firms that caused city administrations to forbid such equipment to their PDs. In effect, the lawyers were getting the officials to do their dirty work for them, free of charge.
Based on my own experience, I’m not a fan of full-auto weapons for police work, not even “tactical teams”. Unlike the military, police have to deal with both innocent bystanders in the line of fire and/or on the far side of the intended target, plus the problem of overpenetration in structural materials, again posing a risk to uninvolved parties.
Police activity and MOBUA are two entirely different things in the United States, and should be elsewhere as well. (In countries like Venezuela, this is not true; in places like the UK, it is decreasingly so. YMMV.)
As far as crew-served weapons doing the job usually done by IWs, about a decade ago first FN and then SiG came up with MGs in .338 Norma Magnum (not .338 Lapua), the SiG in response to a RfP from USSOCOM. Both were specified as being crew-served and tripod mounted, the FN so optical sights could be effectively used.
The objective? Come up with a replacement for the M2HB in at least some applications.(Also a replacement for the overweight M240 in others…)
The result?
Ordnance rejected both but wanted the OS re-engineered for the NGSW. It’s the one on top of the SiG Spear/M7 now.
Until lawyers and Ordnance are no longer a factor in both police and military procurement and doctrine, expect nothing to change.
Except maybe the number and intensity of fuckups will get worse.
clear ether
eon
The Hague accords have always struck me as being really bizarrely ass-backwards.
The premise behind them was “Reduce suffering”, by all accounts. Yet… They came up with the idea of “no expanding bullets” back in the pre-antibiotic era, before modern wound care and the ability to control bacterial infection. So, instead of bleeding out rapidly from massive physical damage, the idea was to poke holes in someone, carry filth and dirt into the poked hole, and then let them die of gas gangrene and other infectious agents in the then-primitive hospitals of the era, over a period of weeks…?
This was humane? WTF?
Actually, I think the arsehole “humanitarians” of that era were actually well-closeted sadists that enjoyed the infliction of massive suffering on the innocent people ensnared in the wars that selfsame class of meddling jackasses got their nations into.
Frankly, at any point up until the post-WWII era of “modern medicine”, I think the actual “humanitarian” move would have been to mandate actual explosive rounds such that you get hit, you die as quickly as possible, rather than the lingering horror of a death induced by either draconian attempts at the primitive control of infection, or the joys of gas gangrene.
It’s always struck me that the efforts of “do-gooders” are often entirely wrong-headed and totally counter-productive to the actual effects of their stated intents. This is so consistent that I’ve come to view most of these people as deeply closeted sado-masochists who gain entirely too much pleasure at the destruction of society and the suffering of others.
This comment should have been in reply to eon’s above it…
“(…)Hague(…)”
If you mean Hague 1899 by that then according to https://www.jstor.org/stable/44636488
In popular perception it was
to be conference to promote disarmament, but(…)had a more
modest aim. The conference was only to “to put an end to constantly
increasing development of of armament.” It was not to disturb the current level
of armaments or upset the balance of power.
Go dig up what they were saying about the various conventions and agreements made, back then. It was all political one-upsmanship that they threw out when it was expedient. Except for the bit about forcing men to die from the joys of gas gangrene and other endemic diseases.
The popular press and the public perception was that they were outlawing human suffering. Many writers espoused that opinion, without thinking about the implications of their oh-so-lovely views about things like expanding bullets.
Reality? We saw that in the trenches of WWI. It wasn’t until the advances made during WWII that you could really make an argument that you were better off with a through-and-through wound than dying because the projectile expanded, tumbled, or “exploded”, causing massive tissue damage and blood loss. Until that point, every single death by wound-induced disease must be laid at the door of the humanitarians, along with all the human suffering.
If you go back and look, the Imperial German propagandists were the ones responsible for all the uproar about the “inhumanity” of the various expanding bullets like the “Dumdum” bullets the UK was supposedly issuing for use on the Boers. The same people who happily blew past the rules on poison gasses, and introduced us to the wonders of people suffocating while their lungs were destroyed by chlorine gas, and all the other future advancements.
You’ll have to pardon me while I laugh heartily at the whole charade. If I could, I’d put all of those assholes on trial, and force them to suffer through that which they inflicted…
I’ve got ancestral relations who died during WWI due to the nastiness of the not-quite-lethal-yet wounds they received from the supposed “humane” rounds mandated by the numpties. Took weeks, and it was ugly the whole time. Not a pleasant way to die, and while no death is particularly “nice”, the relatively shortened period of suffering while bleeding out from an expanding projectile wound would be far preferable, in my mind.
It’s rather odd that you aren’t allowed to hunt in most regions with FMJ projectiles, on the basis of the suffering of the game, but you’re positively mandated to use FMJ on people… Does that logic strike anyone else as a little, oh, off?
Hague also mandated “No explosive projectiles of less than one pound weight”, one of the last “international agreements” to use the English measurement system. It was an extension of the earlier Congress of St. Petersburg restrictions (14 oz. minimum).
At that time, most navies had “anti torpedo-boat guns” like the Hotchkiss revolving cannon;
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/manual-machine-guns/hotchkiss-revolving-cannon/
Of around 37mm to 40mm bore, firing contact-fuzed explosive shells.
Then of course came the Maxim 37mm aka “One-Pounder Pom-Pom”;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QF_1-pounder_pom-pom
Also firing explosive shells.
By WW1, aircraft cannon firing explosive shells began showing up in smaller calibers.
Then in the 1920s, the Swiss Birkigt 404 gas-operated gun (ancestor of the Oerlikon-Hispano family) showed up in 20mm (.79 caliber) as an “anti-tank” weapon. It of course evolved into a shipboard anti-aircraft (Oerlikon) and aircraft-mounted anti-everything-else (Hispano) system.
Somehow, in all the enthusiasm for 20mm and 30mm automatic cannon, that bit about no explosive projectiles under 14 oz. weight sort of never got mentioned anymore.
Funny, innit?
clear ether
eon
I’ve honestly got very little brief for any of the “Rules of War”, mostly because if you’re only going to have one side bothering to obey them, what’s the damn point?
By the very nature of what they’re doing, every single Muslim terrorist is breaking the laws of war, usually in multiple ways. Out of any identifiable uniform? Check. Fights from among civilians, using them as protective cover? Check. Targets non-military targets, deliberately? Check…
I could go on. And, on… But, why bother? The “authorities” don’t bother to ever hold these creatures to the standards, so why the hell are we ever prosecuting any of our own for failing to follow the letter of the various “laws”?
My take? If you’re going to ignore the enemy breaking the rules, and prosecute your own troops for violations? You are, without doubt, an illegitimate authority on the face of it. Either you enforce things evenly, without fear or favor, or you don’t enforce them at all.
Frankly, I honestly can’t think of a quicker way to have your enemies “come to Jesus” about the rules and customs of war than to simply inform them that if they don’t follow them, then we won’t, either… And, then throwing out the rulebook entirely. You want to fight in civilian clothes, hiding in among civilians? Well, fine… So be it: We’ll treat those civilians as that which they really are, namely participants in the conflict, and legitimate targets. I figure that after enough neighborhoods go up in a cloud of smoke, people might begin to get the idea that rules-lawyering warfare ain’t a good idea.
You’d have to kill a bunch of people there in the beginning, but after that? The rules being followed again would tend to save a lot more lives than you’d take with such a policy.
@ Kirk;
Here’s an article about those “accords”;
https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/reviews-pdf/2022-11/humanitarian-bullets-and-man-killers-920.pdf
The St. Petersburg Declaration was in 1869 and was “aimed” (sorry) not at artillery projectiles but at the explosive bullets that were being used in both warfare and sporting (?) use at the time. The Gardiner and Jacob bullets being typical examples;
https://americansocietyofarmscollectors.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Gardiners-explosive-musket-shell-Civil-War-Hamilton-v120.pdf
The thing is, if you look at the wounds explosive bullets created, they weren’t really that much more extensive than those caused by typical “ordinary” projectiles of the day. A .58 Minie’ bullet caused the same sort of destruction when it hit flesh and bone, even without a charge of black powder inside (Gardiner) or a copper tube of fulminate in the nose (Jacob).
As far as I can tell (keep in mind, I’m a ballistics lab geek…) what we would call the “hollow point” bullet began with John Jacob. He developed his explosive bullet for his muzzle-loading rifle in 1854-55, and had a special head on the ramrod with a hollow in it, so that when the bullet was rammed down there was no contact with the fulminate tube in the front end- which could fire it off in the bore.
It still sometimes went off, and Jacob tried loading and firing it without the fulminate tube. He was surprised to see that it expanded about as much with just the hollow tip, as it did with the fulminate tube going off. (Jacob’s testing medium? Shooting live tigers in the hunt. It was India, don’t you know.)
By 1867, the Snider Enfield .577 bullet had a hollow cavity in the nose that was not “open”. This was to change the CG to improve accuracy. It still expanded like a “hollow point”.
It was bullets like this that resulted in the development of the British 0.303in MK IV “dum-dum” bullet- in 1897. But similar bullets had been used in sporting ammunition from the 1870s on, as indeed they still are today.
The whole idea of the “dum-dum” and similar bullets in the new smokeless powder magazine rifles (and machine guns) was to have a small-caliber, high-velocity, jacketed bullet that still wounded and killed like the big, slow lead bullet of the previous generation of single-shot, black-powder breechloaders, and before that, the muzzle-loading rifle-muskets.
The ostensible reason was “savages”; they supposedly were as indifferent to small, neat wounds as tigers were. (“Juramentado” Moros, anyone?)
The real reason, of course, was still the horse. Large animal, often ill-tempered, under an ill-tempered cavalryman who wants to cut your head off with his saber.
Kill the horse, the cavalryman is now an under-armed and poorly-trained infantryman. Assuming that he didn’t break his neck when he hit the ground, that is, which he frequently did.
Note that Britain never signed on to St. Petersburg in 1869 or Hague in 1899. Neither did the United States, Germany, France or Japan(!).
The ostensible reason was the prohibition on “explosive projectiles”.
The real reason was chemical weapons. Even then, everybody was trying to develop them. They just weren’t talking about it.
Then 1914 rolled around, somebody helpfully slew an archduke and, well, you know what happened next.
All of a sudden, nobody was talking about “dum-dum” bullets any more.
cheers
eon
@eon,
Thank you for those citations; both of those are valuable additions to any discussion, and I find they’re well-researched, footnoted, and informative.
I wish I could say that they changed my opinion, but… They really don’t. The whole “humanitarian” impulse in the laws and customs of war dating back to the days when they were adopting this line of BS is precisely what I really cannot support. You rather get the impression that the Russians and the Germans were more worried about having the same weapons used on them that the British forces were using so effectively in India and Africa, and they did not like that one damn bit. The fact that they themselves were not that far removed from the Fuzzie-Wuzzies when it came to conduct in war? Apparently, lost on them.
Frankly, I still find the whole “Let’s just wound them… A little bit…” mentality from those days to be highly disturbing. Had none of the people discussing this crap ever visited a field hospital before the advent of antibiotics? Did none of them grasp the fact that by merely poking holes in people, you were effectively condemning them to a lingering, nasty death?
The difference in treatment between the game animal and the average soldier should be lost on nobody… Humane deaths for the trophy; lingering nastiness for the human being. WTF? This is “kindness”, “humanity”? Strikes me more as sado-masochistic depravity on an industrial scale, to be quite honest.
@ Kirk 2
I’ve always suspected that the whole “humanitarian impulse” thing was basically an alibi for what the various chancelleries (as opposed to the armies) really wanted. Namely, to bury their opponents under a lot of wounded soldiers so as to present a major logistical and economic crisis.
According to Ian Hogg (Gas, Ballantine, 1973) that was the entire point of gas warfare. War gases prior to the G agents only killed a small percentage of the men exposed to them, but they rendered pretty much anybody who got a whiff hors de combat and often permanently at least partly disabled. The one made further operations a problem; the other was a financial problem over the course of a war.
Send enough soldiers “to the rear” in varying states of disability and you’ve given your enemy a worse problem than anything short of actually bombing his cities. In fact it can be argued (and has been in the past) that one reason nobody in the ETO resorted to CW was that both sides saw aerial bombing as a more effective way of wrecking each other’s “war economy”. (Douhetism run amok?)
In the CBI, of course, the Japanese started using CW in China in 1932 and kept at it right up to 1945. And still deny it to this day. But then their strategic bombing capability was about at the level of Italy’s. (In one case early on, even using the same aircraft, 90 or so Fiat Br.20 medium bombers bought from il Duce; by IJAAF standards they were heavy bombers.)
The army commands went along with their political masters, and the grunts paid the price. As usual.
I would argue that strategic nuclear weapons are what every other weapon going back to the original Gatling gun was advertised to be; the weapon so dreadful that it can’t be used. Of course such weapons were also supposed to frighten everybody into not going to war, and we all know how well that’s worked out since 1945.
I’m waiting for somebody to break the paradigm at least to the extent of using tactical nuclear weapons. My only question at this point is who’s going to be first- a nation-state or a “non-governmental” group?
clear ether
eon