Matchlocks to Assault Rifles: Part 9, The Magazine Bolt-action Rifle (Page 2)

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This sort of weapon can fire a dozen aimed shots a minute in skilled hands, and finally made frontal attacks on a line of riflemen suicidal, at least if they hadn’t been forced to keep their heads down by overwhelming covering fire from the attackers’ comrades.

So how did the bolt-action magazine-fed rifle develop?

Well the idea of a bolt with a firing pin came first, earlier than the Enfield and Snider rifles I described in parts 6 and 7, though it was only the Prussian Army that adopted mechanism this early, in their famous Dreyse Needle Gun.

(Note: for those who don’t know, Prussia was the eastern-most of the patchwork of loosely associated states that made up early 19th century Germany, and is now mostly within the borders of Poland. It shouldn’t be confused with Russia, which is a completely different country.)

The Dreyse Needle Gun was the invention of German gunsmith von Dreyse. It fired paper cartridges with the detonator cap sandwiched between the main gunpowder charge and the base of the bullet, so to fire it the firing pin had to pass through the base of the cartridge case and the gunpowder within. This required a long sharp-tipped firing pin, earning it the name of needle gun.

Dreyse developed the gun between 1824 and 1836, hence its use of paper cartridges. It was adopted by the Prussian Army and introduced by them from 1848, and later by other German states too. It was the primary weapon of the Prussian Army in their 1866 war against Austria and was credited by many as a major reason why the Prussians beat the Austrians so decisively – specifically that as a breechloader it could be loaded lying down and allowed the Prussians to make better use of cover, though rate of fire and accuracy were also good.

Figure 1: Dreyse Needle Gun (photograph Kevin Murray under Creative Commons attribution licence)

Right from the start, the Needle Gun had one serious problem: the long thin firing pin had a tendency to break. Troops had to be issued with spares and be trained to replace them in the field. But at least at the start of its service life the advantages outweighed that one problem.

However by the time the Prussians were trouncing the Austrians, other armies (not yet the Austrians) were introducing breechloader rifles using metal cartridges. In a bolt-action rifle, hot gas from the propellant can leak around the bolt if it is not a perfect fit and if there is not an additional way of sealing the breech other than relying on the bolt alone. The metal cartridge case provides this because the case expands on firing, pressing tight to the chamber walls and sealing the gases in so that they can only escape by pushing the bullet forwards. This means all of the explosive power goes into firing the bullet. Because the Needle Gun used a paper cartridge, too much gas leaked around the bolt and the weapon would soon find itself outranged by rifles using metal cartridges. That was the position the Prussians found themselves in when they went to war against France in 1870, though they made up for this deficiency with better artillery and won the war decisively.

Continued on page three