I did a little looking into this, and it looks like the Sweden-Norway union was a system not entirely unlike the Austro-Hungarian one, in that Norway and Sweden were still nominally separate countries with a common monarch. They shared a foreign service, because that was directly subordinate to the Crown, but had separate everything elses, including armies. In practice, that probably worked about as well for them as it did for Austria-Hungary, although at least, unlike Austria-Hungary, they didn't go ahead and have a third army for the union-as-a-whole. :)

Anyway, that may explain why the Norwegian Army didn't get around to adopting the homegrown rifle until a few years after the Danes and the Americans did, and why they ended up using the same ammunition for it as the completely different rifle the Swedes adopted—logistical concerns and all that. Certainly they didn't wait for the dissolution of the Union before adopting the Krag, since the final break didn't happen until more than 10 years later.

(I was amused to find a note that the Norwegian and Swedish 6.5x55 ammunition were slightly different in practice, with the Norwegian cartridges tending to be just a little bit oversized, and that some people assumed—evidently wrongly—that this was so the Norwegians could use captured Swedish ammunition in the expected civil war but not the other way around. Seems more likely it was just one or the other ammunition plant getting it slightly wrong. Ockham's razor and all that. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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