- rifle
- carbine
- No
While it has long been accepted that the Mondragón rifle was the first self-loading rifle to see military adoption, this may actually not be the case. It is well-documented that Mexico ordered 4,000 Swiss-made Mondragón rifles in 1910, a small portion of which were issued to Mexico’s 18th Infantry Battalion during the Mexican Civil War (the order was terminated after only 300 were delivered), thus making them the first military in the world to be equipped with a self-loading rifle - or maybe not. As it happens, Italy was experimenting with adopting a self-loading rifle around the same time as Mexico, and may possibly have beaten them to the punch.
The Italian Army in the late 19th and early 20th century was experimenting with new forms of warfare; they were among the first to utilize aircraft and armoured cars in battle. In the early 1900s they made tests of several self-loading rifles, including the selective-fire Cei-Rigotti, the Freddi, and the Ricci. In particular, there was a desire to equip the Bersaglieri, Italy’s mobile cyclist infantry, with an automatic infantry rifle to compensate for the fact that machine-guns were too heavy for them to effectively transport.
Genovesi-Revelli patent sketch (1905)
In response to this, a self-loading, recoil-operated conversion of the standard Carcano 6.5mm rifle was patented by Filippo Genovesi in 1905. This rifle operated on a rotating bolt with a series of locking lugs around the bolt head. The design was further refined at the Terni National Rifle Factory under the direction of Col. Abiel Revelli, who was responsible for most of the Italian Army’s automatic weapons including the Glisenti pistol, FIAT-Revelli machine gun, and later the Villar Perosa submachine gun. Tests were carried out by the Bersaglieri in 1908 - 1909 and by 1910, the Italian government decided to order some 6,000 Genovesi rifles, to be manufactured at Terni for the cost of over one million Lira.
The Genovesi rifle was by this time known interchangeably as the Genovesi-Revelli or the Revelli-Terni, and a preliminary batch of 150 were delivered to the Bersaglieri in 1911. These rifles actually did apparently see combat use in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War (1911 - 1912), but performed so poorly in the desert that the entire order was prematurely cancelled before the 6,000 guns could be produced. This was around the exact same time that Mexico was fielding the Mondragón rifle.
- tt
- bp
- event
- premium