Category: History

The Menz Liliput is one of the smallest functional firearms ever put into mass production. It was offered in 4.25mm (.17 caliber) in addition to the more popular .25ACP and .32ACP. The 4.25mm cartridge is used generated about 17 foot pounds of muzzle energy – trivial by most pistol standards, but still several times that […]

The Steyr-Hahn is one of the less glamorized pistols used in WWI, despite being made in quite large numbers (250,000-313,000, depending on who you read). The gun is an interesting mix of features, including bits from the Roth-Steyr M1907 and the early Colt/Browning 1900/1902/1903 pistols. The gun was the standard pistol for the Austro-Hungarian Empire […]

The Ortgies is a pistol whose interested aspects are often overlooked on the assumption that it is just another identical .32 ACP blowback pistol. Well, it is that – but it is also more. Mechanically, the Ortgies has a rather unusual grip safety mechanism that is quite different from what we expect to see today. […]

Smith & Wesson’s first venture into the autoloading pistol market was done under the leadership of Joe Wesson, Daniel Wesson’s son. He was quite the automatic pistol enthusiast, and made an agreement to license patents of Liege designer Charles Clement for adaptation into a pistol for the US market. The resulting Model 1913 featured a […]

Alkartasuna SA was a company formed in 1914 by a handful of disgruntled Astra (well, Astra was still called Esperanza y Unceta at that time) employees. This was a difficult time for the Eibar gun industry – demand was low, their reputation for quality was not good (the lack of a central proof house didn’t […]

My good friend Ian over at Forgotten Weapons, get’s to play with some AMAZING toys!!! The RPD was the first belt-fed light machine gun (or squad automatic weapon) developed by the Soviet Union. It was designed in 1944 for the then-new M43 cartridge (7.62x39mm), although wartime exigencies followed by post-war rebuilding prevented it from being […]

The Savage is one of the many revolvers that saw purchase and martial use during the US Civil War – and in this case, martial use on both sides. About 13,000 Savages were bought by the Union army and navy, and another 11,000 were sold commercially. Many of those commercially-sold guns were later smuggled through […]

An unidentified family in the Deep South made the discovery of a lifetime when they found a letter written by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in which the third president extols the virtues of American independence and hails victory in the War of 1812. (FOX)- “As in the Revolutionary War, [the British] conquests were never more […]

A tunnel in Lithuania that allowed Jewish prisoners to escape to freedom has been discovered at an infamous location called Ponar, decades after they used it to flee the Nazis one night in April 1944. (FOX)- The escapees were part of a group tasked with the horrific job of burning bodies to cover up the […]

The Italian military went into WWI having already adopted a semiautomatic sidearm – the Model 1910 Glisenti (and its somewhat simplified Brixia cousin). However, the 1910 Glisenti was a very complex design, and much too expensive to be practical for the needs of the global cataclysm that was the Great War. In response to a […]