I'm the first to admit that my area of expertise is the US military, that having been said, the British, French, Germans and Italians all tinkered with the idea of the trench rifle, for the most part, these seem to have been rigged up by the soldiers themselves, to be sure, some people did try to develop and sell to the various militaries, such a device, but I have not been able to turn up any paper trails showing where such a device had been demonstrated to, or the military had started talking about puchasing such devices.
The C-Y device has such a paper trail.
I also have a friend now living in Italy, who came across a mention of such a version, demonstrated to the War Ministry, but he is still reseaching for any paper trails.
Finally, there exist about a dozen photos from British (and Commonwealth) and French sources that show these various "home made" trench rifles.
I'm certainly not saying that they didn't exist! It really was a wonderful idea, and it had to have had a more extensive use than the handful of fading photos and yellowing documents, however, a lot of the records for critical portions of military history have been discarded or otherwise destroyed, a very fustrating point for the historian!
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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