La Decena Tragica (the Tragic Ten) is the common name for the ten days in February 1913 when Mexican president Francisco Madero was deposed and executed by military coup.
Vintage Saturday: La Decena Tragica
Semiauto Rifles
M1908 Mondragon Semiauto Rifle at RIA
The M1908 Mondragon is widely acknowledged to have been the first self-loading rifle adopted as a standard infantry arm by a national military force. There are a couple earlier designs used by military forces, but […]
Manuals
German Infantry Weapons (World War II)
A little while back, we posted a US military booklet on Japanese Infantry Weapons from WWII, and today we have a similar booklet on German Infantry Weapons of WWII (also thanks to our friend Hrachya). […]
Bolt Action Rifles
Differentiating Models of the 1894 Mondragon
I recently had a chance to examine 4 different examples of the 1894 Mondragon straight-pull bolt action rifle. These rifles were the predecessor to the self-loading Mondragon design which would be adopted by Mexico in […]
Are those single stack mags? They look real thin.
Yes. The Madsen used single-stack magazines.
The bipod on that early Madsen looks flimsy! And look at the determined gaze by the guy holding the Mauser. Seems ready to engage the enemy, whomever that might be.
The Madsen bipod is a solid steel rod with a spike on the bottom that gets a good purchase on earth. These two hombres malos are on concrete, probably posing in a garrison somewhere!
At this moment, the Mexican army was still a professional organization as this trained gunner and a/gunner with three mags (at least) display. It would get pretty run down over the next few years as it fragmented into separate formations in a messy, multilateral civil war.
The US Army did not have an LMG as good as that Madsen at the time. The most influential MG inventors were Americans, but they went to Europe to sell their wares (and some of them put down roots there, notably Maxim and Hotchkiss). The Madsen was always an underrated weapon, perhaps because it’s so ugly. The later, belt-fed ones are particularly good. There was once a brief block on it in SF weapons school, and we actually found some in caches in Afghanistan in 2002. (Along with ZBs andDPs and a lot of other obsolete stuff).