The Army is celebrating its 250th Anniversary this week, and we hit the road to visit the museum dedicated to the American infantry, the grunts, and found some amazing guns.
The National Infantry Museum, located in Columbus, Georgia, just outside Fort Benning, is a non-profit organization that opened its 190,000 sq. ft. facility in 2009. It holds over 100,000 historical artifacts dating from the 1600s to the present, covering uniforms, equipment, bayonets (they have a whole wall of bayonets), small arms, relics, and trophies.
With so much to see, any visitor could spend days there and not be able to take it all in. We’ll do what we’re good at and stick to the guns, but encourage you to visit the museum yourself (it’s free) as we’re only covering a small portion of the exhibits.
Benning is the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence and supports over 120,000 active and reserve service members, their families, military retirees, and civilian employees daily. It spans some 182,000 acres across Georgia and Alabama. (All photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
The “Follow Me” sculpture at the entrance to the National Infantry Museum depicts a 1950s Korean War-era Soldier, complete with bayonet-affixed M1 Garand. The model for the statue was Eugene Wyles, a 20-year Army veteran, and was created by two soldiers.
The museum “emphasizes the values that define the Infantryman, as well as the nation he protects: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage.”
One of the most striking parts of the museum is “The Last 100 Yards,” a chronological walk through the American infantry experience over the years, where the weapons and uniforms change, but the courage endures. It is as life-like as possible and gives the visitor a very immersive feel.
For instance, check out this display of the storming of Redoubt #10 at Yorktown in 1781, with the Colonials fighting the British at eyeball-to-eyeball range. The night assault on the key position helped seal Cornwallis’s fate, leading to the end of the Revolutionary War.
The brother-against-brother hell of Antietam. Of note, the figures in the Last 100 Yards are not mannequins; they are cast sculptures of Active-Duty Soldiers “who auditioned for the opportunity to represent their predecessors.”
Fighting inch-by-inch with the Doughboys “Over There” at Soissons, France in 1918. Note the M1903 and M1911.
Storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and landing atop the “Rock” at Corregidor on opposite sides of the world in WWII. Note the M1 Carbines, M1918 BAR, and M1 Thompson.
The bayonet charge of Capt. Lewis Millett up Hill 180 at Soam-Ni, Korea in 1951, leading his company of the 27th Infantry Regiment to rout the enemy.
Setting down from a Huey at Landing Zone X-Ray during the Battle of Ia Drang, where the 7th Cavalry Regiment was the first American unit to fight a set-piece battle against NVA regulars in Vietnam in 1965. Note the 40mm M79 “bloop gun,” the early M16, and the M60 GPMG.
The much more recent desert wars, with a dismount team and their Bradley. The era of M4s, M203s, and ACOGs.
The museum also has a sweeping series of galleries, highlighting the development of the U.S. Army over the years. For instance, the Revolutionary War, complete with British Brown Bess, French Charleville, and Colonial Committee of Safety flintlock muskets and assorted pistols.
The New Army, immediately after Independence, with the first Springfield Armory and Harper’s Ferry Model 1795 .69-caliber flintlock muskets. Of note, the musket on the Army’s Combat Infantry Badge is the Model 1795.
How about this impressive evolution, spanning from the left with the Model 1803, Model 1814, and Model 1817 flintlocks, to the M1841 percussion rifle made famous in the War with Mexico, the Model 1855 rifle with its interesting Maynard priming system? To the right are the Civil War-era Sharps and Spencer rifles, breechloaders with a rate of fire of 10 and 20 rounds per minute, respectively.
The innovative breech-loading Model 1819 Hall rifle.
This rare gem is a Lefever & Ellis .45 caliber percussion rifle used by a private of the 1st Battalion New York Sharpshooters during the Civil War. Made in Canandaigua, New York, it had a 30-inch octagonal barrel and an adjustable trigger. Never produced in great quantity, Lefever only supplied something like 75 of these guns with the sort of telescopic sight shown, complete with a crosshair reticle. You just don’t see these floating around.
Securing the Frontier with the Model 1866 Springfield Allin “Trapdoor” conversion rifles, which took .58 caliber percussion muzzleloaders and converted them to .50-70-450 caliber cartridge breechloaders. This led to the Model 1870, 1873, and 1884 Trapdoors in the now-famous .45-70 Government. The museum has all these incremental models on public display.
A 10-barrel Colt Model 1877 Gatling gun in .45-70. The Army used Gatling guns, which had a rate of fire as high as 200 rounds per minute, until 1911, when they were replaced by more modern machine guns.
The cavalry isn’t missed, for instance, showing the troopers from the Civil War (left) complete with their M1860 Colt revolver and M1859 Sharps carbine, next to the Indian Wars trooper with his M1873 Trapdoor and Colt Peacemaker. The circa 1916 cavalryman, of the era that chased Pancho Villa into Mexico, sports his M1911.
The Spanish-American War was a time of the side-loading bolt-action Krag-Jorgensen .30 caliber rifle, along with the Army’s staple revolvers of the time: the Colt 1873 in .45 and the S&W .44 top break. To the left is a captured German-made Spanish Mauser, brought back from Cuba in 1898.
The Great War, with the legendary M1903 Springfield, a French Mle 1907/15, and the dreaded Mle 1915 Chauchat LMG. With an open magazine like that in a muddy trench, what could go wrong?
Lots of other hardware abounds, including a British .303 caliber Mark III Lee-Enfield and Mark I Lewis gun, along with companion German Mauser Gew 98 and MG08/15 in 8mm.
Bringbacks from France in 1918, including a 35-pound German Tankgewehr 13.2mm anti-tank rifle and a Spandau MG08 machine gun, both captured by American troops.
The original “Belly Flopper,” an experimental two-man weapons carrier developed at Fort Benning in the 1930s, complete with an M1917 water-cooled Browning machine gun and not much else.
The iconic M2 .50 cal “Ma Deuce” has been around for over a century and is still “making friends and influencing people” worldwide. It is seen next to its smaller cousin, the .30-06 M1919 light machine gun. Both have the same father, John Browning.
The M3 Carbine, a select-fire version of the WWII-era M1 Carbine, was outfitted with an early infrared scope during the Korean War. With the battery pack, it “only” weighed 31 pounds.
A Viet Cong-made pistol captured in Vietnam. The museum also has a carbine that looks even crazier.
Cold War experiments on display include the circa 1964 SPIW, chambered in XM144 5.6x44mm with its box-magazine fed 40mm underbarrel grenade launcher.
Can you say, “Stoner?”
The museum has an amazing display on the evolution of the modern “black rifle” from the Winchester .224 caliber LWMR, Eugene Stoner’s early 5-pound AR-10s complete with carbon fiber furniture, and the slab-sided Colt-Armalite Model 01
…to the XM16E1 in gray phosphate to the rare M1 HAR, and the Colt “Shorty” whose 10-inch barrel led to the XM177 and today’s M4. The green guy in the corner is a drum-magged SPIW variant, of course.
The museum even has the Next Generation Squad Weapon winner, SIG Sauer’s M7 and M250…
…along with the other competitors in the NGSW program.
Who doesn’t love a good steel-on-steel Mossberg M590 12-gauge? The Army has used shotguns going back to World War I.
Speaking of shotguns, how about the M26 MASS? Fed via a 3 or 5-round detachable box magazine, this 3-pound 12-gauge can either be mounted Masterkey-style under the handguard of an M16/M4 or used in a stand-alone configuration.
A gold electroplated Romanian AKMS clone captured by the 3rd Infantry in Iraq in 2003. Even the internal parts are plated. Note the “Vader” style helmet of Saddam’s Fedayeen.
Hallowed relics: M4 and M249 remains after an IED strike in Iraq.
Again, we only scraped the surface of the holdings of the National Infantry Museum, and if you are ever within striking distance of it, you should stop by– and block off your day. It is ever more important to visit such places and remember why they are there.
Keep in mind that the Army plans to close more than 20 base museums in the next few years, and places like this carry the torch for future generations… lest they forget.
Denmark had a very brief baptism of fire during WWII. On 9 April 1940, the German Army swept across the unfortified border while simultaneously landing paratroops (the first use of such in combat) and conducting seaborne landings as well.
The Danish government, which had been controlled by socialists in the 1920s and 30s, had gutted the military and, while the rest of Europe was girding for the next war, the Danes were laying off career officers, disbanding regiments and basically burning the bridge before they even crossed it.
This made the German invasion, launched at 0400 that morning, a walkover of sorts and by 0800 the word had come down from Copenhagen to the units in the field to stand down and just let it happen.
That doesn’t mean isolated Danish units didn’t bloody the Germans up a bit. In fact, they inflicted some 200 casualties on the invaders while suffering relatively few (36) of their own. (More on that in detail here)
Five Danish soldiers with a 37mm anti-tank gun outside Hertug Hansgades Hospital in Haderslev on the morning of 9 April 1940
The head of the Royal Bodyguard, Colonel Mads Rahbek, in his function of Commandant in Copenhagen, installed a wreath in remembrance at the Vestre Kirkegård to the April 9 invasion on Friday. The large traditional ceremony was canceled due to COVID concerns.
To further commemorate the event, the Danish Ministry of Defense just released the two circa 1939 training films “Angrebet” (Attack) and “Forsvaret” (Defense) by Danish filmmakers Theodor Christensen and Ingolf Boisen. A total of 80 minutes in length, they detail field camouflage as well as basic small unit infantry tactics, and the like all while showing lots of really neat Danish military gear including Krag rifles and Madsen machine guns.
The films were reportedly also used extensively during the 1941-45 occupation era to train direct action cells in the Danish Resistance, a group that emerged strong and ready in April 1945.
Danish resistance fighters note the mix of arms to include an SOE-supplied BREN, several Danish Army Nagant revolvers, and a couple of very Darth Vaderish Royal Danish army helmets, the latter no doubt squirreled away in 1940 no doubt.
In April 1940, Russell Lee, a 37-year-old prolific shutterbug who worked for the government’s Farm Security Administration, crisscrossing the country to document American life, stopped in at the Navajo Lodge along U.S. 60 in Datil, New Mexico.
Pretty cool looking place. A rustic relic of the Old West filled with Navajo rugs, trophies, furniture crafted long before the days of pressboard IKEA junk, and guns. Oh, the guns.
Battle scene from a Danish movie, April 9th, about the German invasion of Denmark 9April 1940. Pretty correct and interesting use of Danish uniforms including “Vader” helmets and shoulder boards, Krag-Jørgensen rifles and the very Bren-like, but Martini action (!) Madsen machine gun. The first light machine in the world. Patented in 1901 and mass produced from 1903-1955. Also, it looks like it would have sucked to be a German scout car machine gunner.
For those who don’t know, the plucky Danes in their brief morning of fighting against Hitler’s battle-tried forces inflicted some 200 casualties on the invaders while suffering relatively few (36) of their own.
As a country, the United States has a long history of inventing and perfecting some of the best military systems in the world. However, there was a decade or so that included one of our first foreign wars in which Uncle Sam’s GIs carried a rifle designed by a team of guys named Ole and Erik who hailed from Oslo. Officially designated as the Springfield Model 1892, it’s commonly just called the Krag.
Why was it invented?
In the early 1890s, the standard rifle of the U.S. Army was the Model 1873 “Trapdoor” Springfield, which was basically a single shot rifled musket only slightly evolved from the Civil War through the addition of a breechloading door conversion that allowed it to take a .45-70 blackpowder cartridge. Custer’s men carried these rifles at their last stand. Thoroughly obsolete when compared to the new Mauser, Lee-Metford, and Lebel bolt-action rifles used in Europe, Uncle was fast looking for a new gun that did the same.
This led them to Norway.
Major Ole H. J. Krag of the Royal Norwegian Army, along with gunsmith Erik Jorgensen of the Kongsberg munitions factory had in 1886 produced a very decent rifle chambered in 8x58mmR to replace the Danish Army’s Remington Rolling Block rifles single shot rifles in the same caliber. This Krag-Jorgensen design was bolt-action with a side-opening speed-loading magazine that could be rapidly charged with five rounds in just a second or two.
A magazine cut-off, which allowed the rifle to be shot, reloaded, and shot again without touching the 5-rounds in the mag, gave the Krag a “reserve” of ammunition that at the time seemed impressive. The Krag-Jorgensen has one of the smoothest bolt travels ever due to its single forward-locking lug because of this design.
Strong and accurate, the Danes had adopted it in 1889 to be ready to use it if the Mauser-armed Germans came and the Norwegians were looking at it for much the same reasons.
The two Norwegians however had heard of the U.S. Army’s notice for rifles to trial in 1892 and sent a few to Governor’s Island New York to compete for the much bigger prize there.
