THE BRITISH ARMY AND THE SLR

The story of the British Army and the SLR is not an entirely happy one. There have been British SLR designs since the turn of the twentieth century, with such weapons as the Gabbet-Fairfax of 1896 and the Farquhar-Hill of 1909, but the British military mind was not ready for such newfangled ideas. It is of interest, however, that cal- iber .276 was under serious study just before World War I, but the outbreak of hostilities put the work on hold.

So the British soldier fought World Wars I and II with a bolt- action rifle, variations on the Lee-Enfield theme, and it was not un- til after World War II that serious thought turned again to the possi- bilities of an SLR for British troops. In 1945 it was decided that British troops were to have an SLR, and the ideal caliber was thought to be .276 inch (7mm). Interestingly, this is the same cal- iber as had been chosen in 1913 and also in the early 1930s for the U.S. Pedersen rifle. Two cartridges were designed, one at .270, the other at .276 (known as the .280 in typically perverse British fash- ion). The .270 cartridge soon turned out to be too underpowered and was abandoned; work concentrated on the minimally larger car- tridge, with an eventual muzzle velocity of 2,530 fps with a 140- grain bullet. This became known as the 7mm Mark 1Z,5 3 _{and the}

Belgians used it in their designs for the FN short rifle (a bullpup) and long rifle (eventually the FN FAL).

To go with the cartridge was a new rifle, developed at the Royal Small Arms Factory under the control of Noel Kent-Lemon, who de- cided on the bullpup concept as the basis for his work. One design team was led by Stanley Thorpe and came up with a gas-operated ri- fle with a locking system based on that of the German StG 44, with a number of steel pressings in its manufacture. The steel pressings proved impossible to obtain reliably, and this design was scrapped. The other team, under Stefan Janson (and Stalowa Wola on weapons design), came up with a successful design that was to be the center of an international storm.

The EM2, as the new rifle was known, was also a bullpup design and suffered from being somewhat complex in the field. Neverthe- less it was a good design, and the developers had high hopes for the weapon in comparative tests that were due to take place in 1950. Standardization of weapons and ammunition, especially in NAT O and between the United States and the United Kingdom, had been a dream for years, but little had come of it, with the two world wars intervening to delay the process. In 1950, however, the dream might have come true if it had not been for the efforts of Colonel René

Studler (director of ordnance for the U.S. Army, based at Springfield Armory) and others. Colonel Studler already had a pet project, the T25 (later the M14), and it seems that he was unwilling to allow any other weapon to stand in the way of his ambition to provide the next generation of service rifles for the U.S. Army. The fact that NATO was now in existence, and standardization the watchword, mattered little in his approach to the problem.

The tests began in February 1950, and Janson and Kent-Lemon led the British designers together with A. W. Dunclift from the .280 Ideal Caliber Panel, a group set up to examine the whole concept of caliber change in the British A r m y.5 4 _{The brief for the tests laid}

down that

there is a requirement for a rifle having a lighter weight and incorpo- rating several features not found on present standard arms. It is de- sired to develop a rifle and cartridge meeting this requirement and then to standardise these items for use in Armies of Allied countries. . . . It is desired to obtain a comparison of the features and perfor- mance of these models when subjected to a test agreed on by the rep- resentatives of the countries submitting the test items. It appears likely that a rifle meeting the above requirements will replace several present shoulder weapons.55

The British EM2 performed well and actually proved more than a match for the U.S. T25 and the FN .280 caliber rifle, the other competitors. However, this was not entirely to the liking of the U.S. observers, and Lucian Cary, the American firearms writer, wrote a most revealing article on the subject.

The new British military rifle is the subject of sharp controversy, verg- ing on the bitter. Our Army Ordnance disapproves. . . . You would think . . . that the British had no business developing a new rifle. Our people take the line that in introducing a new rifle the British are not helping to standardise the military equipment of the armies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. . . . The British might retort that we are also planning a new rifle and a new cartridge. Of course from our point of view that’s different.56

Cary comments that ammunition standardization had got nowhere, which was true, and that all were agreed that a new, lighter SLR was needed. The Americans, however, would not admit the value of the EM2, still relying heavily on the old one-shot, one-

kill principle, which had actually almost disappeared from view dur- ing World War II. Firepower was what mattered in the face of massed enemies, as the United States was soon to learn in Korea. Further anti-British arguments centered on the cartridge, and it was here that the EM2 was to fail. The United States was set on .30 cal- i b e r, and even Prime Minister Winston Churchill recognized that this was a stumbling block of insurmountable proportions. The Americans argued that the .280-caliber bullet did not work well over 600 yards and would not penetrate a steel helmet at 1,000 yards. They had forgotten that the average infantry fight occurred at about 50–150 yards, and such long ranges were the stuff of dreams.

So the EM2 died a political death, and the Americans promised that if the British would accept their new cartridge, the 7.62mm x 51mm (.30-caliber short) round, as the standard to be imposed upon NATO, they in turn would accept the FN FAL in that caliber as their service rifle. The British agreed, the Americans went ahead with the eventual M14, and there was a deep frost over the Atlantic. Britain turned to FN for its new SLR, and the British Army, after a period of weapon development and fine-tuning, was issued with its new service rifle, the L1A1 SLR. This rifle was in caliber 7.62mm x 51mm, the new NATO caliber, and the caliber of the U.S. M14. The original test report on the FN .280 rifle mentioned that it was the only rifle in the test capable of being maintained in the field without the use of a special tool, and when the SLR was issued to British troops in the larger caliber, the same was true. The cleaning kit in- cluded a combination tool that was used to adjust the sights to zero, but field maintenance was about as simple as any SLR could be. All parts that were field-stripped were of a size that would not easily be lost, and the hammer and internal mechanism of the rifle were read- ily accessible once the top cover had been removed and the bolt car- rier and bolt were withdrawn.

The action was extremely simple—a tilting block within a bolt carrier, actuated by a gas trap about halfway along the barrel. The gas energy was transmitted through a piston that hit the face of the bolt carrier to start the rearward movement of the carrier and the bolt. Extraction and ejection followed, with the bolt feeding another round into the chamber as the action returned to the forward posi- tion where, with the rifle cocked, all the user had to do to fire the next shot was to squeeze the trigger. Sighting was simple, with a leaf sight mounted on a range slide from 200 to 400 yards. Loading and unloading the magazine were easy, and the magazine latch was very firm. The safety on the British version allowed firing single shots as

well, but the full automatic option was removed to prevent ammuni- tion wastage. The weapon was easy to carry, and although a carrying handle was fitted, it was rarely used, and some units had it cut off altogether.

The SLR remained in British service until the mid-1980s, when the fateful decision to adopt the SA80 was slowly implemented. The legacy of the EM2 was a belief in British decision makers that the bullpup-style weapon was the way to go. Certainly, the shorter length of the weapon made it easier to handle in confined spaces (such as in vehicles or when house-clearing), and it was easier to handle in arduous terrain, especially when wading in water. How- e v e r, it was chambered for the new U.S. round, the 5.56mm x 45mm NATO round. To improve accuracy it was to be equipped with the optical Sight Unit Small Arms Trilux (SUSAT) sight, and the choice of this sight has certainly improved the performance of British marksmanship.

The real problem of the SA80 was that it was not thought through, and in the haste to adopt the NATO cartridge the rifle was “made to fit.” A report57 _{chronicles the initially disastrous history of}

this rifle from first design stage to its adoption and issue. The rifle went into service with the British Army in 1986 and almost immedi- ately came under criticism that was justified. Pieces fell off the rifle, the trigger would not return to the fire position, firing pins broke, the safety catch could break, the cleaning kit was inadequate, and magazines were badly made. The British soldier began to have seri- ous doubts about the weapon.58

Things came to a head when British troops were engaged in the 1990–1991 Gulf War during OPERATION GRANBY. Following a great

deal of criticism in the newspapers, the House of Commons assem- bled the Defence Committee to look into the problems and find out if any solutions were, or would be, implemented. It issued a report in 1993, and despite efforts from the British Army to cover the many failings of the weapon, the report contains much that is admonitory. The committee notes that it was “astonished that the Ministry [of Defence] should accept into service, and pay for, equipment such as the cleaning kit that appears to us to verge on the shoddy.”

There were no fewer than 32 faults with the two weapons, only five of which were unique to the LSW (Light Support Weapon—ca- pable of firing fully automatically from a bipod, and issued to each infantry section as a light machinegun). The remainder were firmly of the SA80. Serious faults (breaking firing pin, magazine catch fail- ure, wrong-sized bolt carriers) and minor irritations (brittle butt

plates and safety plungers) are all described in the report, and it is interesting to note that it took no less than eight years to start solv- ing the trigger retention problem, ten years to sort out the faulty fir- ing pins, and eight years to replace the deficient cleaning kit. The story of the faults and their repair is a sorry one and is a serious gov- ernmental and military failure: soldiers were being sent out to fight with weapons that were unreliable and that the soldiers knew were untrustworthy.

In common with the M16 and its variants, the SA80 also had a dislike of dust and sand. The SA80 is described as being a “preci- sion weapon.” The SLR, the report says, “in a sandy environment did not require a great quantity of oil and the reason for that quite simply was that it was a weapon of much greater tolerances.” There is little doubt that if it had been a toss-up for the soldiers between greater tolerances and less technology or the SA80, the choice would have been simple. Indeed, the sand and dust problem con- tinues to bedevil the SA80, and in recent operations in the Pe r s i a n Gulf (O P E R AT I O N T E L I C) many British units still suffered prob-

l e m s .

A recent article59_{claims that the faults are a thing of the past, but}

one begins to wonder why the rifle needs such a boost if it is as reli- able as it is claimed to be. Certainly some troops returning from the Iraq War have said that the weapon would fire the first round and then jam. Others, however, reported that if the SA80 was kept ab- solutely dry until actually going into action and then oiled liberally, it worked well. The doubts still remain, however, and rumors are be- ing heard of a change of caliber to the .276 inch (7mm) of the Ped- ersen and the EM2.

It seems that the main criticism of the small-caliber round is that it does not always deliver its energy, especially at short ranges, where it tends to go straight through the target without dumping the en- ergy needed to wound or kill. Complaints have been made that even three rounds at 10 or 15 yards are insufficient to knock the target down, which is, after all, the primary aim of any infantry cartridge. Certainly the return to a slightly larger bullet would satisfy the longer range aficionados (although their argument is tenuous, in that most infantrymen are unable to hit targets beyond 300 yards, and the ranges beyond 300 yards probably belong to the medium machine gun); most important, even with less penetrative ability the bullet would cause wounds at the close ranges now used for battle. House- and trench-clearing operations would certainly benefit, es- pecially as the troops involved would have more confidence that

their rifle was delivering a substantial amount of energy where it was needed.

CONCLUSION

The rifle as an infantry weapon is over 200 years old. It has gone through various important stages in development, reaching maturity in the late nineteenth century as a bolt-action, integral magazine- fed weapon of high accuracy, reasonable rate of fire, and adequate killing power. It reached its apogee in this form in the Mauser Gew 98, the Lee-Enfield No. I, and the Springfield M1903 (although the last was really a copy of the first). Soldiers, to whom performance and reliability were paramount, liked these rifles and found little in them of which to complain. The semi-automatic or self-loading ri- fles of the twentieth century are no more than technological devel- opments, often prone to faults that never affected the simple bolt- action weapons.

Before these rifles appeared many efforts had been made to bring the rifle onto a par with its forerunner, the long bow. The long bow had been rightly famous for its range, firepower, and effect; these factors were not exceeded by rifles until the very last years of the nineteenth century, and it is reasonable to suppose that had one of the armies at Waterloo or even Sebastopol fought with the long bow the effect upon the enemy would have been equal if not greater. The long bow, in the hands of massed trained archers, could deliver dev- astating firepower at 300 yards, sufficient to deal with massed cav- alry or infantry. Perhaps the equivalent effect was seen in the Re- treat from Mons in 1914, when trained British infantry quite convinced the Germans that they were being fired on by massed ma- chine guns.

The machinegun overshadowed the rifle in effect. From the mo- ment that Hiram Maxim and his co-inventors showed that the com- posite metallic cartridge could be fed continuously to a repeating weapon, it was this weapon that caused far more death than the rifle ever would. From World War I there are statistics to show that the machinegun was far more a killing machine than the rifle, and that artillery far outperformed the machinegun in dealing death out on the battlefield.

H o w e v e r, the individual infantryman cannot be expected to go into battle without a personal weapon, so the rifle has survived as a

local warfare weapon, even though it is not particularly effective in comparison with the machinegun and the artillery piece. But in- fantrymen have, time and time again, been issued weapons that were suspect in their reliability and/or performance even before they got into their hands. The M14, M16, and SA80 rifles are perhaps the best known of these weapons because of the speed with which news travels around the world these days. But the Martini-Henry was prone to jam, and the Prussian needle rifle and the Fr e n c h Chassepôt had their faults too; the story is ever the same.

It is of fundamental importance to all nations that will send their men into battle to send their men armed with a weapon that will function in all conditions, does not require excessive maintenance in the field, and will stop the enemy when the user wants it to. Fur- ther it must be capable of delivering accurate fire, and the user must be trained to aim his weapon at the target he wishes to hit. Far too often television shows infantry firing their weapons blindly over or around cover in the belief that noise alone will deter the enemy from approaching. This fallacy is not restricted to the armed militias and insurgents of Third World countries.

H o w e v e r, the emphasis must lie in providing reliable battlefield rifles that will inflict sufficient damage on the target so that it is re- moved from the possibility of causing harm to the user of the weapon. To have the “very latest” in technology does not ensure that the individual will be able to use it, or that it will always work; it is far better to use rifles (and other weapons) that have had some test- ing to prove that they are reliable, and that testing be in the hands of those who will depend upon them for their lives. The technologies may change, but there is no substitute for giving new weapons to troops away from the battlefield initially and letting them try to de- stroy them. Testers must think along the lines of those who will use the weapon for real: will it go on firing, can it be fired without too much distress, can it hit the target, and if so, does the target stay down or come back for more?

ENDNOTES

1. Published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1929.

2. 2 March 1863. Sir Robert Moray FRS was reporting this matter to the Society; see Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1863.

3. Including a reference in Pepys’s Diary for 4 March 1664, which prob- ably refers to the same weapon as noted immediately above.

4. Of Mr. Regulus Pilon, a patent for recocking the hammer by barrel