n.

A firearm that can be carried in the hand.

Small arms is a term first recorded in use in English in the early 18th century and used to define firearms capable of being carried in the hand. The exact etymological position of heavy and medium machine guns in this context is unclear, but they are now generally included within the term, to the exclusion of ordnance and machine guns and cannon mounted on aircraft and ships, but including anti-armour weapons and light, portable mortars. Essentially a military term, the development of small arms has generally been stimulated by warfare, driven by technological advances, and has accompanied significant changes in battlefield tactics.

Notwithstanding the first use of the term c.1718, a chronological survey of the history and development of small arms must begin 400 years before that, with the earliest known use of gunpowder as a propellant in a military portable firearm. Cannon are first referred to and illustrated respectively in a Florentine decree and an English illuminated treatise of the late 1320s, and from the 1340s European manuscript references to guns, cannon, firearms, and other descriptive terms multiply, many references containing the implication that firearms had been around for some time previously. By the mid-14th century, the references include mention of implicitly small cannon—later called handguns—with rudimentary stocks or tillers; this was in the year 1346, in which the English victory over the French at Crécy occurred, although it was rendered decisive by the English longbow rather than the English handgun. Before the end of the century, references exist to handguns having separate chambers, an indication of the earliest experiments with types of breech-loader. The term ‘handgun’ itself, now so inevitably associated with the popular press and thus shunned by the scholar, appeared first in 1388.

Hand-held firearms - 'small arms' - have retained the same basic shape for half a millennium. Even if the use of chemical energy to propel a heavy metal projectile is superseded by directed energy, the shape of the human body and the relationship of arm, eye, and shoulder are likely to ensure that future weapons would remain recognizable to anyone from 1500 or 2000.
(Click to enlarge)

The earliest surviving such gun, less than 12 inches (30.5 cm) long, bottle-shaped, and with a calibre of 1.4 inches, dates from the 1300-50 period and is now in the National Historical Museum in Stockholm; it may, originally, have been intended to be set into a heavy wooden tiller-shaped stock but this has not survived its interment and subsequent excavation. From this rudimentary form developed handguns with truer cylindrical barrels, similarly stocked and often with hooks below their barrels which, when the barrel was rested on a parapet, reduced the inevitable and uncomfortable recoil; such hooked guns became known in German as Hakenbüchsen, or hook-guns. Ignition of these guns would have been achieved by the application of a lighted match or heated wire to their touch-holes—inevitably a hit-and-miss process not guaranteed to ensure the relaxation of the gunner. Early in the 15th century rudimentary matchlock systems appeared, in which the match was held in the screwed jaws of a hinging S-shaped lever, now called a serpentine, and brought to the touch-hole by hinging the serpentine downwards. By 1500 triggers had been developed, which remotely operated the serpentine and thus removed the gunner's hand from the area of the touch-hole. By 1500 too, shoulder-held long guns had reached a stage of appearance and development that they were to retain, in essentials, for the next 350 years: muzzle-loaded with powder and bullet, fired from the shoulder—usually the right shoulder, the concept of a left-handed soldier being a relatively modern concept—by pulling a trigger which ignited a primary charge to fire the main charge in the chamber of the barrel. Breech-loading systems had been experimented with and rifling, although probably not for soldiers' weapons, was in its infancy. The 16th century saw the refinement of the military long arm into types: the arquebus or heavy carbine; the somewhat heavier caliver; the currier, a long caliver; the petronel, another heavy carbine; and the carbine proper. All took up their places in the military armoury beside the musket, the largest and heaviest of all of them.

During the course of the 16th century the invention of the wheel-lock system of ignition greatly facilitated the development of the pistol. It also, for the first time, widened the use of the firearm from being merely the tool of the ordinary foot soldier to becoming not only a weapon suitable for use by mounted officers but also one desired by sportsmen. During the 16th century the gunmaker became a craftsman, designer, innovator, and artist, spurred on by an increased interest in small arms by the rich and powerful. Although such developments as occurred took time to trickle down to the military level, their encouragement by those in power, who often held military office, inevitably resulted in the soldier eventually obtaining increasingly sophisticated firearms. Few common soldiers were allowed close to the delicate and complicated mechanism of the wheel-lock, however, and its military use tended to be restricted to pistols carried by officers or horsemen who, for the first time, were provided with a firearm usable from the saddle. Aside from the necessity of training horses to bear the noise of firearms fired close to their ears, the availability of the pistol to the cavalry not only gave them a back-up weapon to their sword and lance but also changed their tactical role as—very gradually, since it was so well entrenched—the headlong charge gave way to the more circumspect caracole, in which ranks of horsemen would advance, fire their pistols, and then wheel to the rear to reload. By 1700 the caracole, initially so fashionable, was obsolete and the cavalryman's pistol—by that time a snaphaunce or flintlock—was reserved for the mêlée or as just another item in the horse soldier's armoury.

The development of the snaphaunce and then the flintlock systems in the late 16th and 17th centuries brought up-to-date, and soldier-proof, technology to the armies of the West and the flintlock system dominated warfare in Europe, and wherever else Europeans fought, throughout the 18th century. Military small arms multiplied in type in a century of wide-ranging, large-scale, and almost constant wars or rumours of wars in Europe and across the increasingly discovered globe. The musket remained the standard arm of the infantry soldier, although he might occasionally be equipped with a metal socketed cup for its muzzle, from which to launch grenades. The carbine, a shortened musket of smaller bore, was a popular cavalry weapon and one much modified, reinvented, and improved upon as the cavalry's use of firearms continued to attract the scrutiny of governments, the interference of cavalry regiments' colonels, and the innovations of gunmakers. Cavalry pistols were improved upon and sometimes fitted with removable shoulder-stocks, in the hope of their replacing the carbine and thus simplifying the trooper's weaponry. For seamen, special patterns of musket were introduced and the musketoon, or blunderbuss, became a shipboard weapon useful for discouraging both boarders and putative mutineers. Rifles began to appear in military units from the Urals to the Appalachians and, by the end of the century, had achieved—largely through their much-publicized success in the hands of the rebellious American colonists—the kind of notoriety, as sniper's weapons, that crossbows and their operators had enjoyed on medieval battlefields. Wall guns (debatably not small arms per se) and swivel guns, which were really no more than huge versions of the military musket and musketoons, became used in fortifications and on board ship; volley guns, multiple-barrelled weapons, joined them as part of the arms chests of a number of navies. Rocket-firing muskets were experimented with towards the close of the Napoleonic wars but not pursued.

During the 19th century, no less than in the previous hundred years, warfare stimulated military and sporting small-arms development and, in the case of the percussion system and many other firearms developments, the requirements of the sportsman led to the equipment of the soldier. The effects of the industrial revolution, a burgeoning of scientific experimentation and development either side of the Atlantic, and a constantly bubbling cauldron of national aggressions in Europe took small arms from the musket to the machine gun in well under a century. The US army adopted the rifle in 1803. The Prussian army adopted the Dreyse needle-gun bolt-action breech-loading rifle in 1841, at a date when every other European infantry soldier loaded his smooth-bored musket with powder and ball from the muzzle, as his predecessors had been doing for three centuries. American soldiers used Colt's revolving-chamber pistols and rifles against the Seminoles in 1838 and the Mexicans in 1847. British officers took Colt's 1851 pattern Navy revolver, and its British competitors, to the Crimea in quantity in 1854; of the soldiers they led, many were still using smooth-bored muzzle-loading muskets, although some had rifles firing Minié bullets. While the American civil war produced the Gatling machine gun, most of its soldiers fought with muzzle-loading rifles; in 1870, on the Franco-German border, the soldiers of France, Prussia, and Bavaria used breech-loading rifles firing self-contained cartridges and France had its own version of the Gatling, the Montigny mitrailleuse.

In the final quarter of the 19th century most of the technical developments familiar in modern small arms were experimented with and essentially perfected. Rifles became breech-loaders, then repeaters, then with reduced bore and increased velocity, then with smokeless powder; semi-automatic or self-loading rifles became a not-too-distant possibility. Pistols, initially large-bore revolvers, became smaller bore, higher velocity, and self-loading, or ‘automatic’. Machine guns developed from being hand-cranked and firing big, fat, black powder cartridges to being fully automatic, liquid-cooled and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute. All these developments had a profound effect upon battlefield tactics but these, for the most part, had to be learned the hard way in the early years of WW I. Every infantry soldier was encouraged to become a marksman, now that he had the technology to be one; every cavalry soldier had to relearn his role and fight as an infantryman (but, with the tank, his time would come again). The operation of machine guns became a study in the mastery of the battlefield and, as they became lighter, more portable, and more personal, so the sub-machine gun—introduced too late for widespread use in WW I—became the ancestor of the modern soldier's personal weapon. Grenade launchers reappeared, their projectiles ideally suited for trench warfare, and the appearance of the tank on the battlefield in 1917 inevitably produced the first of a family of portable anti-armour weapons: just as predictably, it was a scaled-up infantryman's rifle, the 13 mm calibre version of the Mauser Gewehr 1898. Trench mortars were developed and became the ancestors of the modern light and portable infantry weapons.

Small-arms developments since 1918 have focused upon lightness and versatility, factors in which Germany led the way, closely followed by the USA, prior to and during WW II. The mass-produced German assault rifle, or SturmGewehr, adopted in 1944, is the ancestor of modern such weapons, notably the Avtomat Kalashnikov, or AK, models of 1947 and 1974. The light, air-cooled, and very fast-firing machine gun was born with the MaschineGewehr 1934 and 1942; later versions of the MG 42 are still in use worldwide. The self-loading rifle became familiar with the American M1 Garand and the personal sub-machine gun with the Maschine Pistole 1938 and 1940 and the American M-3 or ‘greasegun’. Developments since 1945 have concentrated upon calibre-reduction and, recently, on caseless ammunition and weapons employing plastic components: all these contribute to reducing the carrying load of the soldier who, however small his arms become, still has to carry them and their ammunition.

Bibliography

• Blackmore, Howard L., British Military Firearms (London, 1961).
• Blair, Claude (gen. ed.), Pollard's History of Firearms (London, 1983).
• Cormack, Alexander J. R., Small Arms: A Concise History of their Development (Windsor, 1982).
• Reid, William, The Lore of Arms (London, 1975).
• Roads, Christopher H., The British Soldier's Firearm, 1850-1864 (London, 1964)

— Stephen Wood

Portable firearms, especially rifles, pistols, and light machine guns.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

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Weapons of small calabre and usually requiring only one person to operate as opposed to crew-served weapons. This is not a precise term as some crew-served weapons, such as smaller machine guns are usually called small arms.

(DOD) Man portable, individual, and crew-served weapon systems used mainly against personnel and lightly armored or unarmored equipment.

IN BRIEF: n. - A portable gun.

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