An old rifle(man's) journey: From England to India and Wisconsin, via Pakistan and Afghanistan

As any amateur historian knows, you can have a great adventure without ever leaving your Barcalounger.  All it takes is a trip through your grandparents’ attic, an old steamer trunk stuffed with letters posted from long ago and far away, and a sense of wonder and curiosity.

Or, in my case, an old British-made Enfield No. 4 Mk. 1 rifle, some musty old records, the Internet, and a knowledgeable, observant gunsmith.

Before we begin this journey, please keep in mind that on a grand exploration like this, you have to be willing to ask a lot of questions based upon what you learn from your virtual travels … and you have to occasionally be satisfied with a dearth of definitive answers. 

It’s the exploring that’s fun .. not always the findings.

My virtual journey through military history began in 2012 with this old, beat-up – and thoroughly malfunctioning – British firearm.

This rifle was manufactured in June of 1943 at the Royal Ordinance Factory Fazakerley, just outside of the city of Liverpool in the UK.  What would later be called World War II had been raging since 1939, and wasn’t going particularly well for the anyone but the Germans, Japanese and Italians.  America had only been in the war for a year, and fighting was heavy along the periphery of the Axis Powers.  From North Africa to Burma in the Far East and from the Coral Sea to Guadalcanal, Allied troops were just beginning to slowly grind the Axis advances to a bloody halt. 

But British troops and their allies from the far-flung nations of the British Empire had a particularly nasty problem besides an intractable enemy.

Two years previously, more than 330,000 members of the ill-starred British Expeditionary Force retreated from France before advancing German armies, and had to be rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk, France.  But in their haste to get to sea, the British and allies had to abandon all but a few of their individual weapons and all their vehicles and crew-served weapons.  That left the rebuilding British armies with a crying need for new weaponry, and not much time to design, test and build them.

Fortunately, the British Small Arms Factories at Enfield and Fazakerley were filled with master gunsmiths, designers and tinkerers, all of whom were geniuses at innovation and at building upon other’s work in short order.

The Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle, first invented in 1895 and which had performed yeoman service in the trenches of World War I, was quickly redesigned to make the rifle simpler and easier to manufacture, simpler to maintain in the field, and devastating to any army coming up against it on the battlefield.  As one blogger put it, “This particular version was made in the largest quantities of any L-E and it provided sterling service in the trenches, not least because it was among the fastest operating bolt action rifles extant, as well as possessing the largest magazine capacity. The former was a result of its rear locking bolt, which shortened the bolt travel compared to front lug designs, as it simply has less bolt to withdraw before a new round can be stripped and fed, plus its very smooth internal machining.” 

The round it fired, the redoubtable .303 caliber firing a 174 grain bullet at 2.450 fps, was a rimmed, gently tapered case with a minimal shoulder.  While this mean easy feeding and extraction, especially in the tropical and sub-Saharan reaches of the Empire where its low operating pressure was an advantage, the round wasn't quite the ballistic thunderbolt that the German 8mm Mauser or the American 30-06 rounds were.  Who cares?  The rifle-and-round combination did devastating work in the hands of British soldiers.

Records show that all the British small arms factories, Maltby, Enfield and Fazakerley -- as well as some in the U.S. and what would later become Pakistan -- got involved in making hundreds of thousands of these rifles as more and more troops from colonies of the British Empire were drafted into the fighting.  Colonial troops from Africa, The Caribbean and Central America, Southwest Asia and the Far East all were called upon to aid the British Empire as (perhaps unwilling, perhaps not) soldiers.  Whole shiploads of Enfield No. 4 Mk. 1 rifles were dispatched to arm these doughty troopers, more than 600,000 of them from Fazakerley alone. 

So it thus becomes easier to see how Indian and Pakistani troops got their hands on the Enfiels.  What is fascinating, however, is finding out about a few intermediate stops my rifle may have made after the war.  That's where master gunsmith Roger Williams of Northern Magnetic Gunsmithing (Fredonia, Wis.) comes in.

You see, I'm a fair marksman with just about any firearm.  I pick one up and it just "makes sense" to me.  Now mind you, I can no more calculate a ballistic trajectory than I could do some multi-billion-dollar corporation's tax return.  

But, when  I look down a rifle barrel, I can pretty much "will" the projectile to go where I want it to.

So, it was with no small amount of unwelcome surprise that, the first time I fired my weather-beaten old rifle, I had NO idea where the fired rounds were landing.   After firing off a full ten-round magazine, my target remained virgin white and unmarked.  I had to rely upon the "tracer method," spotting the dirt geysers on the berm behind the target stands and walking the bullets (finally) onto the paper.

When I walked downrange to eyeball my target, I saw keyhole-shaped holes in the paper instead of the neat, round cuts that a properly placed bullet makes.  (Not a good sign.)  When I tried to activate the safety mechanism and put the rifle down to scratch my head in wonder, the normally fine British-crafted safety lock refused to budge.

I laboriously unloaded the rifle, pulled out the bolt and looked down the barrel ... wincing at what I found there.  Where normally you would see a bright bore, its grooves spiraling aay like some sort of steel tunnel, I saw a large dark area about one-third of the way down where the barrel had bulged outward due to a badly loaded round exploding unevenly inside the chamber.

So I purchased a new(ish) Enfield barrel -- which was an adventure in itself -- and took the rifle to Roger-the-gunsmith.  That's where this got really interesting.

When he had the Enfield disassembled on his workbench, Roger noticed a distinct difference between the exquisite British craftsmanship in the old weapon, and those in the rifle's safety assembly.  Enfield craftsmanship is justly noted for its consistency and fine finish, while the many pins, locks, levers and springs that constituted the safety were coarse, gritty and barely fit their housings.

That, in itself, was the final clue as to the post-war whereabouts of my old rifle.

The border area around Peshawar, between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is famous for master craftsmen who -- given an original of anything from a toaster to an anti-tank gun -- can turn out an exact working copy using only elbow grease and the simplest of hand tools.

"Upon inspection," Roger wrote in his post-work report to me, "it can only be concluded that these parts were hand-made, probably during the Russo-Afghan War." 

The Internet is alive with eye witness reports of Taliban fighters swapping their once-beloved Kalashnikov AK-47s for the far older, more accurate Enfields, once the latter have been rebuilt in the gun shops of Peshawar.  And as warriors go, these Afridi, Pathan and Pashtun tribesmen would have as much use for a working safety mechanism as they would a turn signal.

Additionally, some enterprising tribesmen have been reported using old Enfields with wooden dowels shoved down the barrels.  The gunner attaches an old Soviet-era hand grenade to the sawed-off stick, and Voila -- a poor man's grenade launcher, albeit one that's as dangerous to the grenadier as it is to the enemy.

To fire this Rube Goldbergian grenade gun, the Afghan gunsmiths also had to pick up old spent brass cartridges lying around the battlefields, reload them with aged, second-rate gunpowder, and turn them into black cartridges.  But working without the modern digital scales and tools that modern reloaders rely upon for consistency and accuracy, it would have been easy to over-or-underload the gunpowder in a shell -- resulting in a rather spectacular failure (i.e., an explosion).

I speculate, and Roger agrees, that this is likely how the barrel came to be bulged in the first place.

As I mentioned earlier, this rifle's virtual journey leads us down a lot of interesting dead ends and blind alleys.  We trace it's travels as much "by Guess and by Gosh" as we do by consulting records of the British Imperial War Museums.

Nevertheless, records show that sometime in the mid-1990s, my old Enfield was found lying in a dusty warehouse in Pakistan, and came to the attention of Century Arms International, a U.S.-based arms importer.  As part of a huge consignment of similar Enfields, my rifle eventuall made its way to Mill's Fleet Farm store in Germantown, Wis., where I picked it up for a pittance and on a whim.

And now, after a year's worth of loving attention from Roger (much of that spent waiting for a parcel of new safety parts to arrive from the U.K.,) my old Enfield is an Enfield reborn.  But as much as I like refinishing old wood, I have decided not to install a new stock on this old warhorse.  As the salesman at the Fleet Farm store reminded me, "Each scratch and dent tells a story.  They're all part of this weapon's history."

When I was a graduate student at the US Naval War College, I wrote my Master's Thesis on how the Kalashnikov AK-47 became Africa's weapon of mass destruction -- how it's simple, rugged design coupled with devastating firepower enabled mostly illiterate fighters to face down the more heavily armed government troops they were up against.

But history shows that the Enfield No. 4 Mk. 1 rifle had a head start on the AK.

As one historian put it, "The Lee-Enfield influenced the ebb and flow of the geo-political landscape as did no other rifle of its time.  It helped the Afghans defeat the Soviet Army, and it can still be found serving as a police weapon in India and wielded by Afghan or Pakistani troops, a service life far in excess of any of its contemporaries."

And just picking up this magnificent old blunderbuss and taking it out to the rifle range gives me a direct connection to the young men who rewrote history with it.

An armchair adventure indeed.