Did the Enfield use a clip like a Garand?
Not in the same way. The Garand charger remained in the rifle until the last round had been shot, at which point it was expelled. This was an unexpected tactical fault, as the Germans soon learned to listen for the distinctive "tinkle" of the falling charger, knowing that they had an opponent with an empty weapon. The Lee-Enfield rounds were loaded into the magazine using two 5-round chargers, but only the rounds themselves stayed in the weapon. In fact, you could cheat and load the ten rounds into the magazine and then place an eleventh round into the receiver. Until the Germans got wise to this, in a one-on-one duel they thought: "Aha, Tommy has fired off his ten rounds and must now reload. I'll get up for a clearer shot and ... "
BANG! (Today it would be 007: "That's an Enfield. You've had your ten.")
Anyone who has shot an Enfield and a 1898 Mauser (or its knockoffs) will remark on the very easy, silk-smooth action of the Enfield bolt, compared with the relatively clumsy and slow Mauser. Unlike "conventional" rifles of the time, on its introduction in 1895 the Enfield had a cock-on-closing" bolt with locking lugs at the rear. The designer was Scotsman James Paris Lee, and the production rifle was fitted with the Enfield type rifling named after the British weapons design and production center.
Initially Lee's design was rejected, as it was thought rear-locking bolts were dangerous, but after intense testing, including with 50% over-filled cartridges, it was accepted. The bolt was so smooth that in the 1914-18 war a practised British rifleman could fire 12 aimed shots in one minute, including the necessary reloading of one charger for shots 11 and 12. In unaimed suppressing fire, they could lay down nearly three time that many so that, at the neginning of WWI, the Germans thought they were facing machine guns. The small British professional army soldier was taught to operate the bolt by using forefinger and thumb on the bolt handle, and middle finger on the trigger.
The Lee-Enfield was so good that it remained in service, in many marks and produced in many countries, for well over 50 years and through three wars, and was still being produced in Australia and India in 1955. However, this was in some ways a snare; while other countries increased the infantryman's firepower with self-loading rifles like the Garand, the British serviceman was using, essentially, the same shoulder weapon as his father and grandfather. (However, so was his German opposite number.)
Canada had its own rifle at the start of WWI, the Ross. It had many faults, among the chief of which was its strange straight-pull bolt and varying pitch rifling. As the name implies, you operated the bolt with a straight pull to the rear, rather like cocking a Browning 30-cal M/G. An internal spiral unlocked the lugs. The other oddity was the fact that the rifling changed in pitch as the bullet went down the barrel, the grooves getting slightly closer together. The benefits of this must have been perfectly obvious to the designer, but in fact it tended to shave metal off the bullet because the initial grooves made on leaving the receiver would no longer fit into the different-pitch rifling near the muzzle.
The Ross had another annoying fault: If you reassembled the bolt incorrectly it would propel itself rearwards (into your head) when fired, at approximately the same speed as the bullet leaving the muzzle. I had the chance to handle a Ross many years ago at the rifle club where I used to shoot in England, and remember the chilling wording of the instruction manual, which mandated the number of turns to be applied to the bolt head on reassembly: "If you assemble the bolt incorrectly it may blow back and kill or injure you."
The Canadians in WWI were so disgusted with their rifle that they generally threw them away and instead used Lee-Enfields that they picked up from dead British soldiers. However, as is so often the case, politics killed men; nobody in the Canadian high command or government would listen to the men at the front, so they kept issuing Rosses until finally changing to the Enfield in 1917. Reminds one of the initial problems with the M-16.
QUIZ TIME: Guess which rifle and sidearm Sergeant York used? (Clue: not as shown by Gary Cooper.)
