6mm Lee Navy

The US Navy adopted this cartridge in 1895 to replace the black-powder .45-70, seeking a modern smokeless small-bore round to match what other navies were fielding. Officials expected the new cartridge’s higher velocity to flatten the bullet’s trajectory at range and let a sailor carry twice as many rounds for the same weight, and it penetrated more deeply than the .45-70 in period testing. It was paired with the M1895 Lee rifle, a straight-pull bolt action by James Paris Lee that won the Navy’s rifle trials.

Its service life was short. Round-nosed bullets like this one were being superseded across the world’s armies by the pointed spitzer shape, its semi-rimmed, beveled case proved needlessly complicated and expensive to manufacture, and inconsistent chamber pressures wore Navy barrels faster than expected. When the US services standardised on a single rifle cartridge, they chose .30 Army in 1899, and the Navy moved again to .30-06 Springfield in 1907.

No C.I.P. or SAAMI standard exists for a cartridge withdrawn from military service before either body was founded, so every figure here is converted from the reference works Barnes & Amber and Sharpe’s The Rifle in America, via the Wikipedia infobox, and carries estimated status. No maximum-pressure figure is published for it.