William Brophy 1st Ed 1986 The Krag Rifle US Smokeless Powder Rifle HC w/DJ

Up For Sale Today is

The Krag Rifle

by

William S. Brophy

Hardcover. 4to. Beinfeld Publishing, North Hollywood, CA. 1980. 257 pgs. Illustrated with Black and White Plates. First Edition/First Printing.

DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. Previous owner's reciept pasted to the front pastedown. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid.

The Krag rifle and carbine were the first smokeless powder, magazine loading arms used by the United States Army. The arm was adopted from a Norwegian design in 1892 and reached the troops starting in mid-1894. 

It was the ideal time to introduce a new rifle. The U.S. Army in the mid-1890s was a peacetime organization. The frontier had been settled in the late 1880s and the Army had been reduced in strength to not quite 18,000 strong, and was scattered halfway around the world from Plattsburgh, New York to Anchorage, Alaska to Honolulu, Hawaii. All but two troops of cavalry were still stationed west of the Mississippi River and no military formations in regimental strength had been assembled since the Sioux Wars in 1876-1877.

The Krag was the first precision-machined, small caliber, magazine loading rifle adopted by the U.S. Army. This meant that the production facilities and work force had to be completely rebuilt and reorganized. In just four short years, the entire U.S. Army, both mounted and dismounted branches, were completely equipped with the new rifle and carbine. So successful had been the design and initial production phase, that only minor changes were made to the rifle and carbine afterward. The combination of Spanish imperialism in Cuba and the sinking of the battleship, USS Maine, led the United States into a short, sharp war in 1898 that gave way to a longer, more bitter fight in the Philippines. In 1900, Chinese revolutionaries styled the "Boxers" threatened to murder all foreigners in China. The U.S. Army and Marines brought their Krag rifles to mainland China in concert with forces from other European nations and quickly relieved the siege of the Foreign Legations at Peking and then helped clear the country of insurgents. Even though the Krag only served the U.S. Army for eleven years, it did so admirably and saw much hard fighting. It only gave way to the Model 1903 Springfield as the latter rifle could be loaded quickly and easily with a five round clip of more powerful ammunition.