Breech loading rifles
Although breech loading firearms of several types were known as far back as the fourteenth century, the first known use on a battlefield by troops armed with rifles loaded through the breech was at the battle of Brandywine, during the American Revolutionary war. A British regiment deployed about 200 of the expensive and somewhat unreliable Ferguson Rifle, designed by British Major Patrick Ferguson, who was wounded in the battle. The rifle’s presence on the battlefield was short lived, at least as far as the British Army was concerned, due to its rapid fouling from gunpowder residue clogging the breech,
Ferguson’s unit at Brandywine was an experimental rifle corps which he formed by selecting light infantrymen from other units of the British Army under Sir William Howe. After Ferguson was wounded in the battle the unit was dispersed and the Ferguson rifle was withdrawn from service. Although the rifle had performed well enough in combat, it was complicated, difficult to clean, and if not maintained properly it quickly became unserviceable. None of these attributes boded well for its success in the rank and file of the British Army of the day. After recovering Ferguson returned to action and was later killed leading loyalist troops at the Battle of King’s Mountain.
It took the development of cleaner burning propellants and a modern style cartridge to make the breech loading rifle a true battlefield weapon. Many of these improvements in cartridge design and manufacture were the result of research by French gunsmiths. During the American Civil War at least 19 different types of breech loading weapons were used on both sides. The Henry rifle of the Civil War used a tube magazine beneath the barrel to feed cartridges into the chamber. The Spencer rifle was fed via a detachable tube loaded magazine, with a lever operated bolt. All of the breech loaders of the Civil War improved fire power and rate of fire, and the American Civil War was the last to be fought primarily with muzzle loading weapons.
Rifles on the battlefield changed the way war was fought, though it took some time before the generals commanding the troops realized they needed to change tactics. The massive casualties suffered by all sides in the early days of the First World War, with men marching straight ahead into fire from automatic weapons and repeating rifles, was the result of 1914 generals trying to use 1814 tactics. Much of the trench warfare which marked World War I was based on the generals’ inability to come to terms with the need to change the manner in which troops were sent forward, as they learned to do by using cover, supported by mechanized vehicles and eventually air power.
The rifle remains the primary weapon of the infantryman and marines in all of the world’s armed services today, and the infantry remains the primary fighting force. They are the “boots on the ground” ultimately tasked with taking and retaining control of real estate in war. For the foreseeable future the rifle is likely to remain in their hands, though now fully automatic and possessing rates of fire which rival the machine guns of earlier wars. The most produced rifle in history, if all of its variants are considered in the count, is the Kalashnikov AK-47, one of the widest distributed firearms of all time.