Faced with a rapidly expanding military and a need to conserve primary small arms for the front lines, the US would turn to a simple but effective bolt action trainer in .22 Long Rifle.

The Gewehr 98 had served the Imperial Army well in the Great War, but was showing its age by the 1930s. This would lead to a program of modernization, and its product would become the standard service weapon of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War.

With the onset of the Second World War the British found themselves short of handguns, and just as they had in the Great War they looked across the Atlantic for a solution. They found the popular Smith & Wesson Military and Police Model, and promptly placed an order for a large number in their .38/200 cartridge.

The Soviet M38 was intended for issue to specialists and non-combat troops, but its handy nature made it a popular choice in the brutal urban combat that came to characterize the popular image of the Second World War’s Eastern Front.

As the Second World War loomed, a need to update the venerable Lee Enfield rifle in British service saw the design modernized into the new #4 Rifle, with a series of improvements on the same core principals.

The iconic standard issue rifle of the United States during the Second World War, famously deemed by no less a figure than General George Patton as “The Greatest Implement of Battle Ever Devised”.