Quote:
Originally Posted by L.J.Steele
I saw that and I'm going to see if my reference librarian is up to the challenge of finding it via ILL. 1920s has been my pulp focus.
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I've read the book, and it has some stuff that would be useful, and a lot of references that could be followed up.
Quite by chance, I found an interesting titbit today, while browsing through
Cartridges of the World. The German military rifle calibre in WWI was 8x57mm Mauser, the same as they used in WWII. The Treaty of Versailles specified how many rifles the small treaty army could keep: enough for them and a reasonable amount of spares. That meant there were millions of rifles that needed to be destroyed, many of whom had been taken home by soldiers. Most of them were never recovered. Some armed the various paramilitary organisations between the wars, and some were just kept by the soldiers.
It became illegal to privately own rifles in that calibre, which got some of them handed in, but many more were not. In about 1920, somebody created an 8x60mm cartridge, with performance remarkably similar to the military cartridge. Converting an ex-army rifle was a simple matter of lengthening the chamber, which was not expensive, and gave you a military-equivalent rifle that was nonetheless legal. Converting them back would have required a new barrel, and I don't know how many were done.