The SIG-Made Mexican Battle Rifle You Probably Don’t Know About (But Should)

More than four years ago, friend and occasional contributor Peter Schechter, who’s an avid firearms collector and fan of historical battle rifles, wrote a piece for us at that other blog about the SIG-made Mondragon M1908 rifle. Designed by Mexican General Manuel Mondragon, it was a surprisingly innovative rifle. As Peter wrote . . .

The action’s design was well ahead of its time. It has a gas-operated cylinder and piston arrangement to drive the bolt carrier by way of an operating rod – startlingly similar to the gas operating system of the M1 Garand. It has a rotating bolt with forward-positioned locking lugs that engage helical lugs in the barrel block to go into battery – virtually copied by Eugene Stoner more than fifty years later.

Cleverly, the charging handle/bolt assembly could be instantly disengaged from the gas system, the rifle then operates as a straight-pull bolt action rifle. Conventional military doctrine at the time disfavored rapid-fire infantry rifles, as commanders believed that soldiers would simply “waste” ammunition if they could fire their weapons faster. Even the M1903 Springfield bolt action rifle had a switch preventing soldiers from reloading cartridges from the fixed box magazine with each cycle of the bolt handle.

While the M1908 had a non-detachable box magazine with ten-round capacity that was charged using two five-round stripper clips, the magazine box doubled as an integral magazine well for receiving removable high-capacity magazines, as the Germans proved, a feature not seen again in a battle rifle until Dieudonné Saive’s FAL design in the late 1940s (though it was seen in the intervening decades in a few machine guns and submachine guns).

Now the impressively thorough folks at C&Rsenal have done one of their history primers on the M1908. If you’re at all interested in the taxonomy of firearms, this one is well worth your time.