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 pistol
Systema OBREGON: The Mexican Rotating-Barrel 1911
This is Lot 1500 in the upcoming October Morphy Extraordinary auction. Patented by Alejandro Obregon in Mexico in 1934 and in the US in 1938, this pistol is an adaptation of the classic Browning 1911 […]
Revolving Rifles
Mexican Pieper Revolving Carbine
I often find myself answering the question, why didn’t anybody adopt a revolving rifle based on the M1895 gas-seal Nagant revolver? It does seem like a natural solution to the gas-related problems inherent to a […]
Light MGs
Mendoza 1934: Mexico’s Domestic LMG
Rafael Mendoza was Mexico’s premier domestic arms designer, and the Model 1934 LMG is probably his most successful design. He began work on it in 1929, and it entered testing with the Mexican Army 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).