PREPARATIONS FOR OFFENSIVE
GERMANS' NEW SMALL-BORE MACHINE-GUNS
LONDON, 13th February. Mr. Hamilton Fyfe, the Daily Mail's correspondent at British Headquarters, states that tho German preparations for an ear.lv offensive include the training of picked troops seventy or eighty miles behind the front, over areas resembling the coming battlefield. They are also employing new light • machine guns of a quarter-inch bore, firing four hundred shots per minute.
[If the correspondent's statement about the enemy's new machine gun is correct, the Germans appear to have, adopted a weapon firing a bullet which is popular among the European armies. The standard German rifle is .311-inch calibre, or eight-thousandths of an inch larger than the British. Greece, Holland, Italy, Japan, Portugal, and Rumania use rifles of .256-inch bore, practically a quarter of an inch; and jn 1914 the .'British Government was adopting a new pattern of .276-inch calibre, but had to abandon the change when. laced with the war. The chief advantage of small-bore ammunition is that higher velocities can be attained for a given weight of rifle, and,a smaJl-bore machine gun is lighter, and has lighter ammunition, than one firing bigger builets.]
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Bibliographic details
Evening Post, Volume XCV, Issue 40, 15 February 1918, Page 7
Word Count
189PREPARATIONS FOR OFFENSIVE Evening Post, Volume XCV, Issue 40, 15 February 1918, Page 7
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