Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

90 страница из 495

SMITH & WESSONS OF THE GREAT WAR

BY TOM OSBORNE

Smith & Wesson Hand Ejectors such as these saw service with British, Canadian and American forces during the First World War. In skilled hands they proved to be very effective weapons for close-quarter, trench combat. Bottom to top: .455 First Model, .455 Second Model, Model 1917 .45 ACP.

World War I brought dramatic changes to the way nations waged war. The development of the machine gun abruptly rendered horse-mounted cavalry obsolete and relegated open-field, frontal infantry assaults to little more than mass suicide missions. Technical advances in artillery enabled German and Allied forces to shell each other from unprecedented distances with deadly accuracy. This conflict signaled the inception of mechanized warfare, with the introduction of armored tanks by Great Britain and the ever-expanding use of aircraft by both sides.

It was a war in which Allied troops spent miserable weeks in trenches awaiting the order to attack. When the command came, the men who went over the top faced murderous machine gun fire and the threat of poison gas. Those who survived the carnage of no-man’s-land and made it to the enemy entrenchments at times found their four-foot-long bolt action rifle, topped by another fifteen inches of bayonet, to be a greater liability than asset in the close-quarter fighting that followed.