Testing The War Weapons : Rifles And Light Machine Guns From Around The World

Rating:
Summary: Of Limited Value
Review: I'm not sorry I bought this book, yet I was a little disappointed by it.

First the good news:

This is a nice thick book that really does cover a lot of weapons from many different countries. The author appears to have begun shooting and collecting military firearms shortly after birth and has actual military combat experience, so his opinions ought to be considered carefully. And he certainly deserves credit for rounding up so many oddball guns in shootable condition. Except for the ordnance museum at Aberdeen Proving Ground, I'd have no idea where to find so many even to look at them in glass cases.

And now the bad:

1) This book contains a lot of silly errors. Words spelled wrong, sentences that don't make sense, photographs mislabeled or printed in reverse.

2) The book's "testing" didn't really amount to much. I had imagined - perhaps unrealistically - that these guns were going to be dragged through mud, submerged in water, buried in sand, and frozen in blocks of ice. In reality, Mr. Mullin seems to have borrowed many of the weapons from his rich collector buddies and couldn't treat them so badly. And uniform accuracy testing procedures would have been nice. Most of the test firing appears to have consisted of informal plinking on warm sunny days, leaving many questions unanswered.

3) The overall organization of this book leaves a lot to be desired. I would have liked to seen separate sections for combat rifles, sniper rifles and light machineguns, with tables in each section comparing such vital statistics as length, weight, magazine capacity, caliber, bullet weight, muzzle velocity and accuracy test results. This would be handy for comparing the different designs intended to fulfill the same role. Instead, Mullin goes by country, jumbles the different types together, gives no tabulated information, and if you're lucky he might happen to mention in the text how much the gun weighs or how long the barrel is.

4) In the absence of any real testing, this book basically boils down to one guy's opinion of how these guns "felt" in his hands, or how they measure up overall to his personal concept of what a fighting rifle ought to be. In many cases I tend to agree with his opinions. I never felt that French and Italian guns were total junk. I never was all that impressed with the M1903 Springfield. And the original M60 surely was about the most stupidly designed machinegun ever. On the other hand, Mr. Mullin repeatedly places great importance on rapidity of fire with bolt actions while not seeming to give any special credit to the semi-auto designs. My own personal idea is that the semi-auto's ability to fire multiple shots without attention-attracting arm movements is a priceless advantage for grunts and snipers alike. Opinions are like bellybuttons - everybody's got one.

Anyway, I think the reader should regard this book more like a stoveside chat with a respected buddy than the last word on combat rifle reliability. And I highly recommend getting the book "Cartridges of the World" along with "Small Arms of the World" or Smith and Smith's "Book of Rifles" to fill in some of the missing vital statistics.

Rating:
Summary: A must for the shooter / collector
Review: If you like to !shoot! rifles and want to buy military surplus rifles, this is the book for you. The author covers very practical details - are the sights easy to use, is it well balanced, what is the minimum range on the sights. You might be tempted to buy a wonderful WWI rifle only to discover the minimum distance on the sights is 400 yards!

This is not a 'for collectors only' book with details about how to interpret the serial numbers or the three different types of sling swivels, this is about how they feel to shoot.

Very helpful for the shooter / collector - those with Curios & Relics licenses, or for those shooters who wonder what it was like for soldiers in a particular time period with regard to the weapons they were issued.

Rating:
Summary: A must for the shooter / collector
Review: If you like to !shoot! rifles and want to buy military surplus rifles, this is the book for you. The author covers very practical details - are the sights easy to use, is it well balanced, what is the minimum range on the sights. You might be tempted to buy a wonderful WWI rifle only to discover the minimum distance on the sights is 400 yards!

This is not a 'for collectors only' book with details about how to interpret the serial numbers or the three different types of sling swivels, this is about how they feel to shoot.

A must for the collector.

Rating:
Summary: Not that great..
Review: This could have been a really great book on testing current and past military rifles and light machine guns. Unfortunately it is marred by a few glaring errors that place it well down the list of books I think important to the rifle or military enthusiast:

1) To me, the reviews are quite inconsistent in nature. For example, once in a while a rifle's accuracy at 100 yards may be given, while other rifles aren't tested at all. So when the author describes a certain rifle as 'accurate' you usually have no idea what he means by that term. More seriously, the author sometimes praises a rifle's features in a test, then, in another section of the book, criticises those same features.

2) I thought the reviews utilize historic background in a selective manner. For example, the author repeatedly praises the M1 carbine and its cartridge as a suitable offensive weapon, and mentions 'real fighting men' subscribe to this viewpoint. But he completely leaves out the carbine's horrible record of malfunctions and poor stopping power during the Korean War conflict, a record that started a intensive Army investigation and ended with the carbine being phased out of service (not to mention continuing problems with poor stopping performance during the Vietnam War with the LRRPs). Presumably these soldiers were no less 'real fighting men.'

3. I think the book contains insufficient research. I know that the book is intended as a 'current test review', but nevertheless the author frequently wonders what a rifle's design or features must have been intended for, when in fact that fact is already known to history.

4. Some of the test reviews are just too much to swallow whole. I mean, who could think that the French Chauchat and its 16-round .30 U.S. counterpart (a cartridge that could literally shake the weapon apart) could be anything but a piece of junk, given the well-documented history and obvious design faults? The book shows a closeup photo of the Chauchaut magazine with its huge side cutouts, but there's not even a mention of what trench mud could do and did to cartridge feeding.

5. Some of the writing contains errors and the photos are really bad. The author needs to use a pro photographer who understands that not using fill flash in daylight for photos of rifles results in shadows and black darkness instead of details.