Vetterli rifles...

only the Italians made ones that had box mags that loaded from a charger, correct?

Not the Swiss...?

http://www.militaryrifles.com/switzerland/SwissVet.htm

/Bryan

not as far as i know... im pretty sure they stuck with the tube...

The only one I ever handled had the tube magazine with a side loading gate. Pretty sure it was Swiss.

Vetterli was the designer of that bolt action. The Swiss Vetterlis used a magazine tube and carrier system copied from the U.S. 1866 Winchester rifle. The Italians adopted the Vetterli, but combined it with a magazine system designed by Vitali which could be loaded with a rather awkward clip. The Dutch converted their Beaumont rifles to use the Vitali magazine, creating the Beaumont-Vitali.

In WWI the Italians, desperately short of arms from heavy fighting against Austro-Hungary (horrible fighting with massive casualties in the Eastern Alps, an area seldom even mentioned in U.S. and British WWI histories), converted many of the old Vetterli-Vitali rifles to take the 6.5 Italian cartridge; these have magazines like the Model 1891 Mannlicher-Carcano and use the same en-bloc clip.

Jim