Bayonet Ya

"My fixed bayonet was my only hope. I had been an enthusiastic bayonet fighter during training. Even with the odds of three to one against me, I had complete confidence in the weapon and in my ability… and I prevailed that day!"

- Irwin Rommel, Infantry Attacks

Cool Guns are great ... until you run out of ammo. Thankfully, you won't be lugging around dead weight when you attach a sharp blade on it, allowing the empty gun to improvise as a Blade on a Stick. Even better when you can detach it and use it as is.

This is a common form of Mix-and-Match Weapon. Many fictional examples have a blade (or blades) permanently attached or even molded to a gun, which will often be used as a melee weapon with a Ranged Emergency Weapon attached. Rule of Cool dominates in these cases.

As a look through a history book will tell you, this is very much Truth in Television.

A Sub-Trope of Gun Accessories. See also Knife Nut, Swiss Army Weapon, Emergency Weapon, and Blade on a Stick. Do not confuse with Bayonetta.

Anime and Manga

 * Highschool of the Dead: Rei carries a rifle with one attached.
 * Father Anderson in Hellsing uses blessed bayonets as weapons.
 * Gunslinger Girl: Triela has one either attached to her Winchester 1897 Trench Gun or sheathed at her waist (with her size making it a virtual sword).
 * Various mobile suits from the Gundam metaseries use bayonets, sometimes solid and sometimes beam, and occasionally removable to serve as an extra melee weapon. Some MS (such as the Zeta Gundam) can generate a beam blade from the barrel of their rifles, saving on space. A more unique example is the Gundam GP01 from Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, which has a beam rifle with a "beam jitte", essentially just a small beam blade generator mounted beneath the barrel, allowing it to block enemy beam sabers without having to draw its own.
 * Gundam SEED X Astray has the Hyperion Gundam, which can fire it's beam bayonet.

Live Action TV

 * Dad's Army: Corporal Jones was always advocating the use of the bayonet - see the quote page.
 * Deadliest Warrior: As attachments for the musket of the musketeer and the AK-47 of the Taliban.
 * Seen occasionally in Sharpe. The elite Rifles use longer bayonets for their weapons, which must be referred to when deployed as 'fix swords!' rather than 'fix bayonets!' as for the musket-wielding regulars.

Real Life

 * British Royal Guards typically march around (or stand completely still) with bayonets fixed to their guns.
 * It's not just for show. The Army are still very keen on their bayonets on the battlefield. There are multiple reports of firefights in Afghanistan ending when some likely lads from a Scottish battalion fix bayonets and charge. Seems the Taliban don't like it up 'em either.
 * Not only the Scots. "Fix bayonets and follow me."
 * "Alreet get yourselves sat doon there so you can all see... THE BAYONET!!!"
 * Bayonets can be very effective in combat for two psychological reasons: First, soldiers who are prepared to fight with bayonets will often be trained to go into a certain mindset, which is traditionally ingrained into them in Basic Training in some armed forces such as the US Army. Second, and perhaps much more relevant: Having a bunch of guys running at you with improvised spears and screaming for blood is pants-shittingly terrifying.
 * Bayonets for pistols.
 * Before the invention of the bayonet, early gunpowder age infantry would often be split into musketeers and pikemen. The muskets fired too slowly, inaccurately, and with too short a range to reliably defend against cavalry charges, and proved less than adequate in hand to hand fighting. Therefore, it was the pikemen's job to keep the horsemen at bay with a medieval style pike formation, while also serving as a buffer between the gunmen and hand to hand combat. The Bayonet revolutionized things by turning the musket into a spear, allowing a musketeer to both shoot volleys and stop cavalry, all while not being useless at hand to hand. Due to the early musket's aforementioned disadvantages, bayonet charges also served as a surprisingly effective means charging enemy infantry, something a single shot gun could hardly be used for. The bayonet started out not as an emergency weapon, but as primary form of armament.
 * Even in the eighteenth century the bayonet's primary use aside from anti-cavalry was not the generation of casualties for as suregons noted only a small percentage of wounds were from bayonets. It was for the destruction of units that had already been softened by fire. A bayonet charge was like a game of "chicken" and the unit that had it's morale at a lower ebb ran first.
 * In modern times most hand-to-hand fights including those with bayonets, are fighting for corners and crawl spaces.
 * Bayonets are in fact used more often as camp tools nowadays. Later models have been made with this in mind.
 * Giuseppe Garibaldi once said "The rifle is no more than the grip of the bayonet."
 * Famously used in The American Civil War by the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry under Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. During the battle of Gettysburg, Chamberlain's troops were suffering heavy casualties and running out of ammo, and he knew they would be unable to defend their vital position on Little Round Top against the approaching Confederate army. So, in a complete Badass move, he ordered a bayonet charge, which even at the time was considered an old-school textbook maneuver, but which Chamberlain realized could be used as a simultaneous frontal attack and flanking. The Confederates were utterly cowed and the 20th Maine won the day. Chamberlain himself received a Medal of Honor for it.
 * At the battle of Eylau, has the Russian forces progressed towards his HQ, Napoleon ordered general Dorsenne to stop their advance with the 2nd regiment of foot grenadiers of the Old Guard and the 2nd regiments of Chasseurs. Seeing one of the grenadiers take aim with his rifle, Dorsenne ordered "Grenadiers, l'arme au bras ! La vieille garde ne se bat qu'à la baïonnette." (Grenadiers, weapons at rest! The Old guard only fights with bayonets). The Russian assault was then routed by the Old Guard.
 * Erwin Rommel, with an empty rifle and bayonet, won a 1 vs. 3 victory against several French soldiers in Infantry Attacks. He only received a leg wound.

Tabletop Games

 * Some systems allow you to fix bayonets as a standard action. This turns your gun/crossbow into a polearm, and often prohibits firing the weapon.
 * In one Paranoia mission, the experimental equipment from R&D includes a bayonet attachment for a cone rifle. This being Paranoia, it breaks the rifle (which was designed to be used as, y'know, a rifle, not withstand being banged around like a sword or club). It's also worth noting that despite the name, a cone rifle is actually closer to a bazooka in size.
 * Quite common in Warhammer 40,000. They even had chainsaw bayonets before Gears of War did.
 * The silver bayonet (the "straight silver") is one of the symbols of the Tanith First Imperial Guard regiment.

Toys

 * Bionicle: Kopaka Nuva's Blizzard Blade in his Adaptive Armor form. When attached to his Midak Skyblaster, he can simultaneously shoot Light and Ice.

Video Games

 * World At War: You could get a bayonet attachment for the bolt-action rifles, the M1 Garand, the M1897 shotgun, and the Type 99. It gave you a much longer melee range, at the expense of a longer melee recovery time.
 * One oddity about the melee on the shotgun was that it would gib enemies, while other bayonets would not do the same.
 * Super Smash Bros Brawl has Wolf, whose blaster has a claw on the end of it that can deal an extra hit in addition to the fired shot.
 * Imperial monks' rifles are equipped with bayonets in Final Fantasy X though they never use them.
 * In Parasite Eve 2, one of the numerous attachments you could get for the assault-rifle was... a humble Bayonet. Considering that you could, instead, mount it with a flamethrower, a triple-size magazine, a giant Taser, or Frickin' Laser Beams, you probably won't use it. Ever ... unless you play on 'Nightmare' difficulty, where most of the good weapons and attachments simply aren't there, and ammo is rare. Then that bayonet becomes a lifesaver which will carry you through the later half of the game.
 * Halo: the Brute Shot, Spiker, and Mauler.
 * In Halo 2, the reverse-end bayonet on the Brute Shot was the second best weapon at dismembering Flood forms and the second best melee weapon in multiplayer right behind the Energy Sword.
 * Gears of War: the Lancer has a chainsaw bayonet. The original has a blade, though, but they crammed the chainsaw in when they discovered that the Locust were Made of Iron, and could just shrug off a regular bowie-knife bayonet.
 * Gears of War 3 features regular bayonets on the older Pendulum war era variant of the Lancer, the Retro Lancer. At first look, the regular bayonet seems perfectly effective at killing Grubs, though that weakness of the bayonet may be considered to be represented by how the bayonet on the Retro Lancer cannot be used unless the player builds up enough momentum from charging for a few seconds - melee attacking with the Retro Lancer with have the player swing with the rifle's back end instead, and running into a target with the Retro Lancer charge's with insufficient momentum will be ineffective.
 * Early Marine designs for Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty had bayonets attached to their gauss rifles. The community did not approve. Cut to the A Card To Play cinematic in the shipped game, where Badass Normal General Warfield is ambushed by the Zerg and runs out of ammo. He brings out the bayonet and... the rest is history. Take That indeed.
 * An early version of Doom includes the rifle's bayonet as the melee weapon. This was later dropped in favor of fists/chainsaw.
 * In the first-person areas of Banjo Tooie, Kazooie can eventually learn the Beak Bayonet to perform an ammo-less melee attack. It's only used for one task, but it's useful in the first-person areas in general.
 * Wild ARMs 2: the bayonet is Ashley's Weapon of Choice.
 * Musketeers in Age of Empires III use bayonets as their melee attacks. It's fairly effective against cavalry.
 * Saika Magoichi of Samurai Warriors has a bayonet on his musket. They get bigger with each weapon tier, culminating in his fifth weapon, which seems to have a longsword welded under the barrel.
 * Several weapons in Project Reality have the option to fix bayonets on them for close-quarters melee combat. The weapons even have convincing lunge/stab animations when used in this fashion.
 * In Empire Total War bayonets are a technology that can be researched. First plug bayonets, which can be fixed but prevent firing the weapon, then ring and socket bayonets. Each increase the melee ability of line infantry substantially.
 * Another technology increases damage for bayonet charges. The description states that the musketeers are simply drilled now to charge with the bayonets held at waist height instead of head height, as one would with a spear. Stopping a cavalry charge, however, requires the use of the square formation, allowing the unit to defend all angles and brace the bayonets.
 * Despite this, several melee units in the game can be more effective than musketeers, if they can get close without being battered down by volleys, that is. The Indian Gurkhas with their kukri swords can easily cut up a squad of professional musketeers.
 * Haken Browning of Endless Frontier wields the Night Fowl assault rifle with an underslung pile-driver below the rifle's barrel in place a normal bayonet. However, the actual bayonet is a fold-out variant built into the stock of the rifle.
 * The Burasta of the Second Super Robot Wars Z Hakai-hen carries the Bayonet Spiker, where its handheld gun emits an energy-variant of a bayonet. Should the player make the Burasta a melee-oriented machine, its ultimate attack works in conjunction with its SPIGOT-VX Attack Drones to create an even bigger bayonet.
 * The M5A2 Carbine from Resistance 3 has a bayonet as its first upgrade.
 * Andrew of Samurai Shodown wields a rifle with a large bayonet as his weapon. His fighting style is described as "Bayonet drills handed down through the family lineage for generations", and his moveset largely revolves around the bayonet as his primary weapon rather than the actual gun itself.
 * Several weapons in Brink feature a bayonet as a possible customization; equipping it improves melee power, but melee strikes will no longer knock enemies down.
 * Borderlands features handguns with huge blades attached to them that increase melee damage. The only other class able to provide a melee damage bonus, shotguns, instead receive a spike near the grip, for gun butt action.
 * Incubation provided bayonets on Advanced Combat Guns and Standard Assault Rifles, the second and third weapons the player received. Since the blade's damage was great (easily enough to decimate lesser aliens) and ammo was very limited, the fairly weak SAR remained a mainstay through much of the game.
 * The expansion pack finally introduced another bayoneted weapon, the Light Plasma Gun... which had good damage and unlimited ammo anyway, making it pointless.
 * As of Mass Effect 3, shotguns can be equipped with bayonets, which increase melee damage and change the sound so it's a little less thwack and a bit more stab.
 * Krogans like bayonets.
 * Dead Rising 2, which uses MacGyvering as a gimmick, gives you the option of creating a shotgun with a pitchfork bayonet.
 * Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 allows standard riflemen to attach bayonets to their rifles.