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This now leads us to the strange saga of the Rifle-Which-Nearly-Was-But-Wasn’t and Nearly-Wasn’t-But-Was, generally known as the P-14.

The reasoning behind my somewhat excruciating hyphenated conundrum will become clear once we examine the history behind that odd rifle, the P-14. No sooner was the hapless No.1 Mark 3 adopted than there were plans afoot to replace it. Experimentation led to the adoption on a trial basis of the P-13 in 1913, and this was a different rifle indeed (although, confusingly, it is generally referred to as the “Enfield” rifle). It was far more Mauser like, having double front locking lugs on the bolt and the Mauser non-rotating claw extractor. It also had the Mauser integral five round staggered magazine. A very good peep sight was fitted, which was ahead of its time, but protected by rather cumbersome “ears” machined into the receiver bridge. The calibre was also different, being a .276" (7mm) rimless round similar to the .280 Ross. Although it had its points, the whole rifle strikes me as being a Bisley target shooter’s idea of what an infantry rifle should be. Nonetheless, British Ordnance were impressed with it (who cares what a bunch of dumb old troops think, anyhow??), and testing proceeded with a view to adopting it.

Unfortunately, these tests were beset with problems. Great difficulty was experienced, not so much with the rifle but with the ammunition. The new 7mm round produced excessive blast and flash, overheated the barrel and quickly eroded and fouled the bore. Much head scratching was done, but before any solutions could be obtained World War 1 intervened. It was wisely decided to shelve all development work on this troublesome new ammunition and to stick with the .303 round, for the time being at least. As such, a few minor modifications were made to change the new rifle to .303 calibre, and it now became the Pattern 1914 (or P-14) rifle.

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Ironically enough, when the Americans entered the war in 1917 they, too, faced a critical shortage of U.S. Army Springfield rifles. The Springfield was similarly difficult to mass produce, but guess what? There was all this machinery and tooling already set up to produce P-14’s for the British, the contracts for which were now fulfilled. It was but the work of a moment to do the few design changes necessary for it to be changed from the British .303 to the American .30-06 calibre, and hey presto - the Americans now adopted the self same rifle in .30-06 calibre as the P-17 to offset the shortage of Springfields. Again, the P-17 was never intended to replace the Springfield, but it turned out that there were more P-17’s used by front line American troops than there were Springfields. Thus it was that a rifle which looked set to replace the Lee, which was then abandoned in the light of combat experience, came to at least partially equip two of the major armies of the conflict.

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