Firepower Firsts: Breech-Loaders, Volley Guns and Anti-Armor Weapons

The petronel was a muzzleloading cavalry firearm of the sixteenth century, described by Robert Barret in 1598 as a horseman's piece, between a pistol and a carbine in size. It was braced against the chest or slung across the body, used matchlock or wheellock ignition, and gave its name to the light cavalry who carried it.

Patrick Ferguson's rifle entered British service in 1776 as one of the first breech-loaders issued to any army. Turning the trigger guard opened the breech, so a soldier could load from the rear and fire six to eight rounds a minute, but only about 200 were made and its cost, roughly four times that of an ordinary musket, kept it from becoming standard issue.

The French mitrailleuse, adopted in 1866, was a volley gun whose crank fired 25 cartridges loaded at once, about 100 rounds a minute. French commanders kept it secret and used it like long-range artillery rather than close infantry support, so in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 it did far less than its rate of fire promised.

Adopted by the British Army in 1871, the Martini-Henry paired Friedrich von Martini's falling-block action with Alexander Henry's rifling. A trained soldier could manage about twelve rounds a minute, and it stayed standard issue until 1918, seeing action in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and at Rorke's Drift.

The Mexican Army adopted General Manuel Mondragon's M1908 as Mexico's first self-loading rifle, and it was the first such rifle of any nation to see combat, during the Mexican Revolution. In the First World War the German army found it unreliable in the trenches, but the Imperial German Flying Corps issued it to aircrews with thirty-round drum magazines until synchronized machine guns replaced it.

Germany built the Tankgewehr M1918 as the first rifle designed solely to destroy armor, after its standard 7.92mm armor-piercing round failed against British tanks. It fired a heavy 13.2mm cartridge, needed a two-man crew at a static position because of severe recoil, and about 16,900 were built before production ended in April 1919.

John M. Browning's M1919, introduced in 1919, was an air-cooled .30 caliber development of the water-cooled machine gun the United States used in the First World War. At about 31 pounds in its M1919A4 form, with ground, coaxial and aircraft versions, it served through the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam.

Germany developed the Panzerschreck in 1942 as an enlarged copy of the captured American bazooka and fielded it from 1943 to 1945. Its 88mm shaped-charge rocket out-penetrated the bazooka's, but the backblast forced gunners to wear gloves, ponchos and gas masks. Roughly 314,895 were built.