Vaclav Holek’s first machine gun design for the Czech military was the Praga I, built in 1922 and based heavily on the Vickers/Maxim system. However, it became clear that the military wanted something lighter and more portable, and so the next year he heavily updated the design to this, the Praga I-23 (for 1923). It remains a belt-fed weapon chambered for the 8mm Mauser cartridge, but the locking system has been much simplified into a tilting bolt arrangement. The recoil operation from the earlier model is also gone, now replaced by a long stroke gas piston. Some elements of the Maxim remain in the belt feeding elements, but the overall gun is much more a light machine gun than the mounted heavy machine gun that was his first design.
A total of 40 of the Praga I-23 were ordered by the Czechoslovak military, and they were tested in 1924 (only 20 examples were actually delivered of the 40). The I-23 performed well, but it was again clear that it wasn’t quite what the military really wanted. Holek revised the design again to the model 1924, using a box magazine instead of a belt feed – and that is the gun that continued the path to the ZB-26.
Video on the Praga I machine gun that came immediately before this model:
Many thanks to the VHU – the Czech Military History Institute – for giving me access to this fantastic prototype to film for you. The Army Museum Žižkov is a part of the Institute, and they have a 3-story museum full of cool exhibits open to the public in Prague.If you have a chance to visit, it’s definitely worth the time! You can find all of their details (including their aviation and armor museums) here:
“(…)using a box magazine instead of a belt feed(…)”
This seems… at odds with how full-automatic weapons most often evolved, which was magazine -> belt, for example RP-46. Are other cases when belt-fed machine gun spawned magazine-feed one known in history?
@Daweo,
You have to look at the needs of the user, here. The reason they evolved the guns towards magazine feed has a lot to do with two words: “Wet” and “Canvas”. The belts of the era were just too heavy and unwieldly compared to magazines, magazines were becoming “possible” due to the revolution in consistent precision manufacturing, and if you’d ever hauled around an MG06/18 in the trenches, you’d probably have a reflexive visceral response yourself, contemplating the idea of “belt”. It wasn’t until the Germans came up with the metallic ones that anyone really began to consider putting belts on what might be termed “machine guns for the assault”.
To be quite honest, I’m not sure that there is a “natural evolutionary flow” in weapons. It sure looks that way, but I think a better model would be less biological and more cultural; it’s a conversation between the user, the designer, and the people paying the bills. User says “I need portable…”, designer says “Well, I guess that rules out the MG08/16 belt…”, and the bill-payer says “Here’s the money; see if you can make it work…”
The really disturbing thing from the standpoint of an outside observer is just how chaotic this entire process really is; you want for there to be a clear conception-creation-fielding-use line, but there often is not. This is why iterative design like what SpaceX and the history of US individual weapons from 1960-ish forward looks the way it does; it’s the “desire path” of weapons procurement. Nobody in the US military set out to wind up with the M4 carbine in 2001 as our standard infantry weapon, but there we were. Very little in the way of mindful, cognizant design/thought: Nearly all “desire path”, since the people who should have been doing the conceptualization and actual thinking behind it all didn’t bother, or got everything wrong, as in the M16A2.
It only resembles evolution in the most vague and nebulous manner possible. It’s actually something else that we really don’t have good terminology for, because it happened as a series of misadventures, rather than cold rational thought processes.
If you examine post-WWI German machinegun design, you can make out an outline of something akin to what SpaceX is doing with rockets… Iterative design, with a lot of failure and “not quite right” going on.
Another point that just occurred to me… Note the flow of belt design: Canvas to metallic link permanent belts, and finally the effectively disposable disintegrating link. You started at canvas because the repeatable consistent manufacture of the metallic link was problematic, when you got that to the point where you could do it on a limited basis, you had the German belts, and then once you could churn out disposable disintegrating links reliably… You went to that. It was all predicated on what was possible in terms of affordable manufacturing.
The big thing to look at with a lot of “Why didn’t they do this earlier…?” in firearms manufacture has to do with that intrinsic problem: The rejection rate. If you have to throw too many stamped receivers away, then you need to go back to machined ones, as the Soviets learned. Same with everything else… Repeatable, consistent precision is hard as f*ck to do, and that’s the major secret of it all… And, why we see so many things in retrospect and think they should have been able to do them, only for it to founder on that reject rate in serial production.
As an aside… Contemplate the wonders of the humble M13 disintegrating link: Produced in the billions, yet sufficiently consistent and precise that the damn things are ubiquitous trash everywhere the US fights its wars. We throw them away, just like expended cartridge cases.
If you were to build yourself a time machine, and go back to the 19th Century and propose to some entrepreneurial industrialist that he undertake manufacture of that little chunk of steel, he’d likely laugh you out of his offices, especially when you asked for the quantities necessary to fight a war. You’d be in the same situation as though you were asking for aluminum to use in airframes before the era of affordable electrolysis…