Self loading rifle used by German observers in early war?

[Romani]

While reading "Germany's War in the Air" by von Hoeppner I came across this interesting passage

"Lack of armament was another conspicuous weakness with the German aviators. From the very beginning of the war our planes had been under machine fire from hostile planes and after October 1914 the use of machine guns on hostile airplanes became general. Pistols, rifles, and the recently-introduced self-loading gun used by the German flyers were no match for the machine guns"

A semiautomatic rifle in WWI? Never heard of such a thing! I thought the first ever was the M1 Garand. Anybody can shed light on this?

[R Pope]

The self-loader you seek was the Mauser Flieger-Selbstladekarabiner Modell 15, the first success in a series of autoloaders. They were used until machineguns came into widespread use, whereupon they were given to the Army. In profile, it vaguely resembles the Swedish Llungman.

[Sreiko]

Nothing strange- one of the first air to air combat [and maybe the real first] was in the 1914 when the Austro Hungarian two seat plane attacked Serbian airplane- with their pistole. My friend in Belgrade had in his collection Rot-Steyr pistole for aviators from WW1.

[ottodog8]

The Mexican designed Mondragon was also used. Here's a link:


http://world.guns.ru/rifle/rfl26-e.htm

There were actually a lot of semiautomatic rifles before the Garand. The early history of semiautos is quite fascinating.
Steve

[Uhlan]

Originally Posted by Romani

While reading "Germany's War in the Air" by von Hoeppner I came across this interesting passage



A semiautomatic rifle in WWI? Never heard of such a thing! I thought the first ever was the M1 Garand. Anybody can shed light on this?

Semi automatic rifles were common way before WWII, come to think of it the grand daddy of what we today call a squad automatic weapon (SAW) was the the Madsen Model 1903 which saw service in the Russo Japanese war of 1905.

Early in the war when the Allies began to arm aircraft like the Vickers Gun Bus and Various Farmans, Vosins etc.. with machine guns the Germans scrambled to arm their various Albatros, Aviatik, LVG etc.. B type recon aircraft. In some cases the front line squadrons helped them selves, either by trading with the infantry unofficially or with the direct aid of local infantry commanders and added captured allied machine guns to their arsenals. In the mean time the German high command began to issue Automatic rifles to these units while they organized light machine guns suitable to being used by aircraft. Common models of automatic rifle issued to German Aircrew were:

1. Mauser Selbstladegewehr C06/08, caliber 7.92 mm. It seems this designation actually covered three separate weapons some of whom were issued to ground troops were but found to be to fragile for the muddy trenches.
2. Mondragon Flieger Selbstladegewehr Modell 1915, caliber 7mm. These guns were bought from a Swiss company who licensed the design from a Mexican army officer. This weapons was better than the Mausers since it could fire full automatic. It was often issued with a 30 round drum and sometimes had the wooden cladding around the barrel removed and replaced with a metal brace to steady the barrel.

German ground troops also liked the Mauser Model 1896 and the snail drum equipped long barrel Luger self loading pistols both of whom had a detachable stock and used them as a kind of proto sub machine gun. These pistols also seem to have been used by aircrew although I am not sure the Luger snail drum was available in 1914-15. Another popular, but non standard, weapon used by German aircrew in 1914-16 was the Madsen M1903 lMG which IIRC the Germans bought some quantities of, presumably directly from Madsen A/S in Copenhagen (neither the Swiss nor the Danes seem to have taken their neutrality any more seriously than the USA did when it supplied guns to the allies), and probably captured even more from the Russians. These guns were also issued to German ground troops for use as an early form of squad automatic weapon. They were issued to Storm troops as well as mountain troops who needed an easily portable machine gun. Among the early users of the Madsen as a SAW in a way that approximates the modern meaning of that concept seems to have been Erwin Rommel and his Wurtemberg mountain infantry during the Battle of Caporetto.

Except for the Madsen (and possibly some of the Mauser self loading rifles which were kept on as emergency weapons in case of a forced landing behind the lines on the eastern front) all of these guns were phased out in favor of the Bergmann MG 15nA, the Parabellum lMG 14 and the short lived lMG 08 observers gun.

This has become a bit longer than I intended it to be but hopefully it does something to dispel the popular notion that: "Before WWII there was nothing."

[TonyWilliams]

The British and French aircrew also made some use of the Winchester M1907 semi-auto rifle in .351 WSL calibre, and the Winchester M1910 in .401 WSL. Incendiary bullets were developed for these.

Incidentally, the British army very nearly adopted a semi-auto rifle in WW1: the Farquhar-Hill. This was approved for service at the end of 1917 after extensive testing, and approval was given early in 1918 to make an initial batch of 100,000 of them, but the war ended before production could start.

[Ransom E. Olds]

The French army developed and issued its M1917 gas-operated semi-auto rifle in some quantity during the Great War. The concept was better than the execution, but it did in several significant ways foreshadow Mr. Garand's M1 Rifle. Ransom