What makes the Lee Enfield rifles good and reliable rifles?

 There is more to it than even this.  It is the weapon i learned on and will always rely upon.

I was also taught, without the actual rifle to hand, the correct method of rapid fire for the so called Mad Minute.  I address this because i have yet to see it properly demoed on any video.  My informant was in the first uptake for the future SAS under Montbatten in WWII.  He shared a bit of his training with me.

Properly handled you can lay down ten rounds of aimed fire literally as fast as you can settle and aim.  It is really uncanny just how effective it can become.  Nothing else is engineered to do this.  That plausibly includes our semis which will pull you off your aim point.  And i am not going to tell how it is really done here.

Ample practise will make you steady and very fast.  That is why the Germans thought that they were under machine gun fire.

What makes the Lee Enfield rifles good and reliable rifles?

The Lee Enfield is the best “battle rifle" ever made until the AK-47.

It was designed to shoot quickly even when it was hot, and used a clip fed 10-round magazine.

I just can't say it enough: when the Taliban fought American Marines they used Kalashnikovs and Lee- Enfields.

In WW2:

The Germans went to battle with a hunting rifle.

The Americans went to war with a target rifle.

The British went to war with a battle rifle.

The Brits knew what they were doing b/c of a century of hard experience when they landed upon the Lee - Enfield rifle design. British battle doctrine focused on pouring out firepower (I e. rounds per minute). They learnt that in the Napoleonic Wars.

The British were the only Army in World War I that allowed soldiers to go to the rifle range anytime they wanted and shoot all the rounds they wanted (without paying for them).* The British did a fine job of encouraging marksmanship and rapid fire.

The Lee Enfield had a cock-on-closing feature. This was to minimize the resistance of pulling a spent cartridge casing out of a hot breach.

The Mauser and (Mauser rip off) Springfield bolt had bolt locking lugs close to the cartridge base where they got hot too. Not so the LE. The LE locking lugs are at the rear of the bolt: to minimize heat expansion at a definite compromise in accuracy.

Even so, there is abundance anecdotal evidence of Lee-Enfield rifles killing Germans in World War I and World War II at five hundred yards over iron sights.

Lastly British seemed to have presciently created the perfect balance of ballistics and firepower with the .303 Lee-Enfield. Ballistically, it is almost identical to the NATO 7.62.

*Reported by John Keegan, military historians at Sandhurst.