THE G41(W)

When General John J. Pershing was born in 1860, many American state militia units were still armed with smoothbore muskets, some of them flintlocks. By the time his U.S. troops marched in the victory parade in Paris in 1919, the semi-automatic pistol, the light automatic rifle, the submachine gun, and the portable flamethrower were all established infantry weapons. Most infantrymen were still armed with bolt-action rifles, however, the core design of which was about as old as Pershing himself, with a magazine and centerfire cartridges utilizing smokeless powder and jacketed bullets being the primary improvements added in the intervening time.

It wasn’t that many hadn’t