Rifle Rivalry

Some 200 hand-picked Allied officers (and a Yugoslav) watched intently one day last week on Salisbury Plain as Britain demonstrated her prize new .280-cal. rifle. More than simple curiosity was involved: this is the weapon with which Britain hopes to equip not only her own infantrymen (who have been using the bolt-action, single-shot .303-cal. Lee-Enfield since the South African War), but all the North Atlantic Treaty nations. Disagreement over it caused a hitch at the recent small-arms conference in Washington, where Britain's Defense Minister Emanuel Shinwell argued for the .280.

The .280 proved to be an odd-looking, straight-stocked, semi-automatic (i.e., one shot for each trigger pull), weighing 8 Ibs. and equipped with an optical sight. On the firing range it seemed fairly impressive: it rattled off 84 rounds per minute, ripped steel helmets at 600 yards and punched through 46 inches of planking at 100 yards. The .280 has a 20-round clip; the .30-cal. U.S. Garand only an 8-round clip. But the .280 has less punch and less range than the heftier Garand or the Russian Tokarev (caliber .299994) rifle--and given the new Garand 20-shot clip, it has no higher a rate of fire.

The .280 had been tried out before, in 1950 tests at Fort Benning, Ga. by a joint U.S.-Canadian-U.K. board, and failed to carry the day. The U.S. didn't like the lighter-powered bullet or the optical sight. Growled one critic: "Send an infantryman off on a foggy morning through wet brush or grass, and then let him try to get accurate fire with a wet, fogged-up sight." Another objection, and a big one, is that other NATO nations use rifles of heavier than .28-cal. (some being supplied by the U.S., free). To switch to a new caliber, retool the plants (in the U.S.) and equip whole armies with the British piece, would cost billions of dollars and years of time, not to mention scrapping huge stocks of .30-cal. rifles and ammunition.

At the Fort Benning tests, the U.S. demonstrated its own new .30-cal. T-25, a 7 1/2-pound rifle with a 20-round clip which can be fired automatically or single shot, and theoretically is capable of firing 750 rounds per minute. Almost everybody but the British went away thinking the new U.S. rifle was the No. 1 choice for NATO. British military men are still giving the impression that Britain will adopt the .280 regardless of NATO, but they have agreed to postpone going into production.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.