The title of this article might sound like the marquee sign for a magic act. But this piece is more like a segment of Ian McCollum’s Forgotten Weapons [1] video series.
In the late 1860s, the Swiss inventor and gunmaker Johann-Friedrich Vetterli designed a bolt-action repeating rifle (“Repetiergewehr“) that was a true innovation. With its very large magazine capacity, I consider the Vetterli an 1870s Sturmgewehr predecessor.
Far Ahead Of its Time
The Vetterli rifle saw Swiss army service from 1869 to 1889. The Vetterli rifle combined the American Winchester Model 1866’s tubular magazine and cartridge lifter with a turning bolt with the innovation of two opposing rear-locking lugs. This type of bolt was a major improvement over the simpler Dreyse and Chassepot bolt actions. The Vetterli was also the first repeating bolt-action rifle to feature a self-cocking action and a relatively small-caliber bore. With the Swiss Federal Council’s 1866 decision to equip the Swiss army with a breechloading repeating rifle, the Vetterli rifles were at the time of their introduction the most advanced military rifles in the world.
To put this development in context:
- In 1841 the German state of Prussia adopted the Dreyse Needle Gun. It was a single-shot design that used paper cartridges with 500-grain 15.43mm egg-shaped bullets. This was the world’s first military-issue bolt-action rifle.
- In 1866, the French army was still issued muzzleloaders, but they acquired the Chassepot Model 1866 Needle Gun in small numbers. The original Chassepot was a single-shot design that used paper cartridges with 11mm bullets.
- In 1867, the U.S. Navy ordered a fairly large batch of Remington Rolling Block single-shot carbines chambered in chambered in in .50-45 centerfire.
- In 1867, the Danish army began issuing licensed Remington Rolling Block single-shot rifles in 11×41.5mm Danish. The forward-thinking Danes ordered their rifles in a variant that could shoot both rimfire and centerfire cartridges. Rolling Block rifles and carbines were also soon purchased under contract by Egypt and eventually by more than a dozen other countries.
- In 1867, Austria adopted the single-shot 11.15mm Werndl-Holub as their service rifle.
- In 1870, the U.S. Army adopted the single-shot .50-70 Trapdoor Springfield as a service rifle. It was designed by Erskine S. Allin to use as many parts as possible from the more than 1 million percussion muskets still on hand after the Civil War. The Union Army had briefly flirted with the repeating Henry lever-action rifle during the Civil War, but they took a step backward with the Trapdoor Springfield. That proved to be disastrous for the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn. They had turned in all of their Henry repeating rifles, just a few months before, having replaced them with single-shot Model 1873 Trapdoor Carbines. If they had brought along a Gatling Gun and still had their Henrys, the outcome of the Battle of Little Bighorn might have been much different.
- In 1870, the Imperial Russian army adopted the American-designed single-shot 10.75×58 mm Berdan II [2] as their service rifle.
- In 1871, the British army adopted the single-shot .577/450 Martini-Henry as their service rifle. (It was later adopted by Turkey and many British colonies.)
- In 1871, the German army adopted the single-shot 11.15mm Mauser M1871 as their service rifle.
- In 1873, the U.S. Army adopted the single-shot .45-70 Trapdoor Springfield as their service rifle.
- Starting in 1879, the U.S. Army and Navy bought small numbers of magazine-fed Remington-Lee rifles. But they would not standardize with a repeater until the adoption of the Krag-Jorgenson rifle, in 1892.
[3]The magazine tubes on Swiss military Vetterli rifles held 12 rounds of 10.4x38mm (commonly called “.41 Swiss”) rimfire cartridges, giving them a prodigious capacity of 13 rounds, with one cartridge in the chamber. That was a lot of firepower, for their day. In the 1870s and 1880s most of the rest of the world’s soldiers were still fumbling with individual cartridges, to fire each shot.
The Italian Army adopted their own variant of the Vetterli design, in 1870. The progression of M1870/87/15 Vetterli-Vitali variants saw service for 70 years in Italy, and even longer in Ethiopia.
The Swiss Vetterli rifles were supplanted by the higher-velocity smokeless Schmidt-Rubin straight-pull rifles, in 1889.
Sadly, a large number of the Vetterli rifles imported into the U.S. were converted into sporting rifles in the 1920s and 1930s, but a few can still be found in original condition. I recently lucked into a small batch of original pre-1968 imported Vetterli rifles from a collection for our inventory at Elk Creek Company [4]. To recover my investment, I am eager to sell at least six of them, quickly. You will get a special bonus item if you order a pair of Vetterli rifles.
Unobtanium: .41 Swiss Rimfire Ammo
[5]Since Swiss Vetterli rifles shoot the obsolete .41 Swiss Rimfire cartridge, they are considered “collector” guns, rather than shooters. The .41 Swiss Rimfire ammo is almost impossible to find. But these rifles can be converted to centerfire [6] by any well-experienced gunsmith. That conversion is reversible. It is mainly of interest to folks who reload. As you can see in a couple of videos, a centerfire-converted Swiss Vetterli is great fun to shoot [7]. And they can be surprisingly accurate at fairly long range [8]. There are a couple of commercial makers of .41 Swiss Centerfire ammunition. They can be found with a quick web search.
Conclusion
From 1869 to 1889 the 12-round magazine Vetterli rifles were Switzerland’s champions of firepower. All-in-all, the Vetterli rifle is a wonderful piece of Swiss history. – JWR