By Mike Cecil
Head of Military Heraldry and Technology

Today’s soldiers tend to take the selective fire weapon for granted. Squeeze off a round, the weapon cycles automatically and another fresh round is ready to go. But it was not always so. Until the late 1950s, the Australian Army continued to use essentially the same rifle as had been used since before the First World War. This was the Short Magazine Lee Enfield, generally abbreviated to ‘SMLE’ and simply pronounced as ‘Smelly’. Although more correctly described by its military nomenclature of ‘Rifle, No1 Mark 3’ or ‘3*’, depending upon its configuration, the abbreviation ‘SMLE’ provides more than a clue to this weapons origins.

The term ‘Short’ is to distinguish it from both the carbine version and the full length rifles that preceded it. By 1901, the British services had a variety of barrel lengths and fittings, so in simple terms, the Short rifle was introduced as the standardised rifle for all military applications. It was longer than the carbine by about 110-mm, and shorter than the infantry rifle by 125-mm.

‘Magazine’ simply indicates that the rifle is magazine fed, in this case a detachable box magazine capable of carrying ten rounds of the .303-inch service cartridge. The cartridges are rimmed centre-fire rounds, tapering toward the bullet tip, which in turn necessitates that the magazine is deeper toward the rear than at the front, and gives the SMLE magazine its distinctive profile.

‘Lee’ stands for the derivation of the rifles action which was based on the designs of Scotsman James Paris Lee. Interested in firearms from an early age, he had moved first to Canada then to the United States, all the while tinkering with weapons and making improvements to his designs. It was his basic, rear-locking bolt action which was to be the basis of what is known as the Lee-Enfield family of rifles.

‘Enfield’ is the home of the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, in England. Here, several noted designers and gunsmiths contributed improvements to the basic design, eventually to evolve into the SMLE service rifle, the first version of which was introduced into service in 1902. The most common version however, was the Mk3, first introduced in Britain in 1907, and the first to be manufactured at the new Australian Small Arms Factory that opened at Lithgow, NSW, in 1912. Using tooling and machinery purchased from Pratt and Whitney in the United States, it turned out first the Mark 3 and later the simplified Mark 3* version. The main differences were the elimination of the long range tangent sight, the windage adjustment on the rear sight, and the magazine cut off mechanism. Elimination of these fittings was based upon experience early during the First World War: they were simply not needed on the ‘modern’ battlefield, and their elimination sped up the production rate of new rifles.

The rugged and dependable SMLE rifle served Australian well. From its initial introduction in 1902, Australian soldiers carried it into battle in the First and Second World Wars, and in Korea in the early 1950s. A shortened and lightened development, the No5 carbine, commonly known as the ‘Jungle Carbine’, was also carried by Australians in the early stages of the Malayan Emergency. But by that stage, the bolt action battle rifle has been superseded by more modern self loading or semi-automatic rifles. Even during the Second World War, the basic weapon issued to United States forces was the M1 Garand rifle, an 8-shot, semi-automatic rifle that could lay down a formidable rate of fire. Other countries had also issued semi-automatic rifles in limited quantities during the war, but it was the post-war development of the so-called selective fire ‘assault rifle’ that changed the battlefield forever. By the mid-1950s, Australia had selected the L1A1 self-loading semi-automatic rifle chambered for the NATO standardised 7.62 x 51-mm rimless cartridge as the replacement for the venerable SMLE. As quantities of the new rifle became available, the SMLE was relegated to Cadet Units and finally was finally withdrawn from service in the 1970s. 

Still serving in the Second World war, an infantryman aims his SMLE during gas attack practice. The rugged and dependable SMLE remained largely unchanged for its entire career.