The Great War

A War of Bolt Guns

The 1914-1918 War was a horrific, world-changing event.  I won’t go into the causes of the conflict or the issues that arose from it, as that’s a story to be told some other time.  But whatever else it was, the Great War was the war of the bolt gun.  The War to End All Wars was the crucible in which the modern bolt-action rifle was formed, hardened and tempered.

In this conflict, all the major players were using bolt-action rifles.  Autoloaders were at this time a novelty, considered too unreliable for martial use.   (There was at least one exception, which we’ll note later.)    Single-shot breechloaders were obsolete.  With a few exceptions lever guns never caught on as primary battle rifles.  World War I introduced the horrors of the machine gun, the airplane and the tank, but the primary soldier’s weapon was a turn-bolt rifle.

The Allies

Britain and her Empire entered the war with the No. 1 Mk III Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) as their primary service rifle.  The “Smelly” was a good infantry rifle, reliable, powerful and with twice the magazine capacity of most of its competition.  Its smooth action, rear-mounted bolt handle that placed the firing hand near the bolt handle when in operation, and the high magazine capacity for the time all combined to make for a high rate of fire.  Lee-Enfield rifles were at this time made around the Empire, mostly in the UK at not only the Enfield arsenal but also at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Smallbrook, the BSA and LSA small arms companies, the Lithgow Small Arms factory in Australia and the Ishapore Arsenal in British India.  Post Great-War variants were also made at the Long Branch Armory in Canada and by Savage Arms in the United States.

France entered the war with a few older Gras, Kropatschek and Lebel rifles in inventory, but their primary Great War arm was the various marks of the Berthier rifle, a 3 or 5 round bolt gun firing the good old 8mm Lebel cartridge and later adapted to the new 7.5x54mm French service round.  The Berthier-pattern rifles were invented by a French civil engineer, Emile Berthier, whose primary occupation was the building of railroads; nevertheless, he came up with a pretty fair infantry weapon.  About two million of these guns were made in various configurations.

In 1917, though, France did something unexpected; preceding America’s famous M1 Garand by quite a while, France adopted an autoloader, the Fusil Automatique Modèle 1917.  I know this is discussion of bolt guns, but this merits a mention; the Model 1917 was a gas-operated semi-auto that held five rounds of 8mm Lebel ammo in a clip-fed internal box magazine.  The rifle had some serious issues with reliability; from 1917 to 1921 only about 90,000 were made.

The Kingdom of Belgium used a variety of rifles in the Great War, including the French Gras and Lebel rifles, but their primary arm was the 1889 Belgian Mauser, which were produced for the Belgian Army by the famed Fabrique Nationale until that works was overrun by the Germans, the first of two times that would happen in the 20^th century.  While FN was in German hands, the Kingdom outsourced manufacture of the M89 rifle to Greener in England and Hopkins & Allen in the United States.  The M89 Belgian Mauser proved to have some serious staying power, as some were still in use by the Republic of Congo/Leopoldville as late as 1960.

The Russian Empire’s participation in the Great War was cut short by two uprisings that saw the Tsar and his family dead and, in time, a new Bolshevik government in place.  The result of this was the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922, but the primary arm of the Red Army didn’t change; the Mosin-Nagant served Red Army soldiers as it had Imperial Russian soldiers before.

I’m probably overly fond of twitting Mosin-Nagant aficionados with the roughness of that arm.  (All in good fun, of course.)  But the fact is that the Mosin-Nagant is a rifle admirably suited for what it was designed for:  Rough use in the field and casual maintenance by poorly educated peasant soldiers.  Years after the Mosin-Nagant first saw service a Soviet designer named Mikhail Kalashnikov designed a select-fire, medium-power short rifle with much the same types of soldiers in mind, and that arm was as successful in peasant armies worldwide as the Mosin-Nagant before it.

It’s the mark of a good martial rifle that it suits the intended user.

The Central Powers

The GEW 98 saw the Imperial German Army through the Great War for the most part.  But the need for a shorter, lighter arm for cavalry and artillery units had led to the development of the kar98a in 1902, and that small-ring 98 carbine saw service with those mobile units in the Great War.  Some years ago, I managed to obtain a kar98a with an original bayonet.  I ran a few boxes of 8mm ammo through it – it kicked like a mule – and eventually, regrettably, ended up trading it off.

I really need to think twice before selling/trading away a gun, given how often I end up wishing I hadn’t; but I also lack a giant Scrooge McDuckian vault to store my collection in, so…

We’ve already discussed the Gewehr 98 in the last segment, so I won’t revisit that ground.  It’s worth remembering that the Gewehr 98 was produced and fielded in great numbers, over nine million being made.  It’s not particularly hard to find decent examples of this rifle today.  This first of the 98 Mauser service rifles was a great success, and it proved to only be the beginning of the career of this famous bolt gun action.

In 1918, with the British beginning to field the MkI tank in some numbers, Mauser responded with their first attempt at a anti-armor weapon, that being the 13.2mm Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr, or anti-tank rifle.  This single-shot behemoth fired a .525 caliber, 795 grain bullets at about 2500 fps, and proved dangerous to the armor of the time.  While post-Great War advances in armor would swiftly make the anti-tank rifle obsolete, the T-Gewehr nevertheless remained in use until 1933.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks were building their own version of the Gewehr 98.  The M1903 Turkish Mauser was more or less a clone of the German rifle, using a large-ring 98 Mauser action and much of the same specifications.  There was one oddity in the Turkish guns; while they had a large-ring action, they used a barrel threaded to the pattern used for small-ring actions.

When examining the Turkish Mausers, it’s important to note the manufacturer.  Guns made by Mauser were of good quality, but the guns I have examined that were built at Turkey’s Ankara appear to be of rather slapdash workmanship.  Also, late in the Great War and for a few years afterwards, some guns were assembled from parts with little regard for such things as tolerances and headspace.

While the Turks were whiffing at the quality pitches, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had examined the rifles produced by one Ferdinand Mannlicher and found them worthy, and that evaluation was spot-on.  The Mannlicher designs included the M1890 carbine and the M1893 rifle, both traditional bolt guns, and the M1895 straight-pull bolt rifle.

The United States: Early Player, Late Entry

By the time the Great War’s western front had settled into an entrenched, fixed war of attrition, the British Empire was having trouble producing enough Lee-Enfield rifles to meet the needs of the troops.  In what was to prove a prescient move, they looked across the Atlantic to one of the Empire’s estranged offspring, who had grown mighty.

The United States already had a substantial firearms industry by 1914.  Designers like John Browning and Sam Colt had made their name on the firearms world, so it wasn’t unreasonable for the British to think that America may be able to help supply their Tommies with shooting irons.

For a bit of relevant history, we must go back to 1899, to the Second Boer War.  The British were faced in that conflict by sharp-shooting Boer farmers mostly equipped with 1893 and 1895 Mausers firing the high-velocity 7x57mm cartridge.  To match that performance, in 1910 the British War Department developed their own 7mm cartridge, the .276 Enfield, and built a Mauser-pattern bolt gun to fire it, which was designated the Pattern 13 Enfield.  But the outbreak of the Great War dissuaded the War Department from attempting to field a new rifle and a new cartridge, so production of the No. 1 Mark III SMLE continued.

But the pattern was not forgotten.  In 1914, the British Army contracted with the American manufacturers Remington and Winchester to produce a version of the Pattern 13 Enfield modified for the standard .303 cartridge.  This new rifle, the Pattern 14 Enfield, was slow in the developing and the British Army received no rifles until 1916.  Relatively few of these guns were delivered, and their long barrels and excellent accuracy resulted in most of them being used as sniper rifles.  The Pattern 14 was well suited for this, with a long (26”) barrel, good sights with the rear peep solidly protected by big steel mule-ear projections and the front sight likewise surrounded by steel guards.  It was a heavy, long piece but not unusually so for the time, and proved to be a good shooter.

But the Enfield pattern didn’t end there.  When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, Remington, Winchester and the Eddystone Arsenal (a Remington property) quickly retooled to produce the Enfield design in the standard American rifle cartridge, the redoubtable caliber .30 Model of 1906.

This new piece became the Pattern 17 Enfield rifle, and with three manufactories putting them out, the Enfield surpassed the standard issue 1903 Springfield in numbers supplied to American doughboys.  In fact, no less a figure than Alvin York performed his famous acts of marksmanship not with a Springfield, as has been shown in movies, but with a Pattern 17 Enfield.

A bit over two million Pattern 17 rifles were built, and about one and a quarter million of the earlier Pattern 14 guns.  Later, the Pattern 14 actions became popular for rebarreling to the big new belted magnums that were making their appearance, as the .303 case head was similar in diameter to the belted magnums introduced by Holland & Holland.  Any reasonably-sized gun show in the United States to this day will have a few of these rifles on display.

The Aftermath

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Great War ended.

In the United States, 4.7 million doughboys returned home, bringing their new-found familiarity with the Springfield 03 and Pattern 17 Enfield rifles with them.  Many of them who were outdoorsmen and shooters, a proportion of the populace likely higher today than now, had cut their teeth on lever guns, but the accuracy and power of the military bolt guns and the .30-06 cartridge had made an impression.

The Springfield Armory got in on the action, producing a civilian-sale version of the 1903 rifle known as the NRA Sporter, and plenty of surplus rifles were converted to sporters, as were many captured and surrendered Mausers and Mannlichers as well as Smellies and others.

But that wasn’t going to keep up with demand.  American gun companies responded, and Remington was an early bird, adapting the Pattern 17 action into a civilian sporter and releasing it in 1921 as the Remington Model 30, initially available only in .30-06 but later in a variety of chamberings.  This was, of course, just the beginning.  Winchester and many other manufacturers were quick to follow; things were, as the kids say nowadays, about to get real.

And Then This Happened

The War to End All Wars…  didn’t.  The sequel, World War II, again saw most of the major players operating bolt guns at the outset; the Brits used their updated Lee-Enfield throughout that conflict, the Soviet Union and Germany started with bolt guns and experimented with autoloaders   The United States mostly used the ground-breaking semi-auto M1 Garand throughout, although a fair number of 1903 and the later, cheaper 1903A3 bolt guns saw service early in the war.   And, of course, today, the bolt gun is absent from military use except in certain highly specialized applications, like snipers.

But the Great War Part Two didn’t see much change in martial bolt guns.  There were some minor updates to Enfield, Mauser, Carcano, Mosin-Nagant and other rifles, but the form was pretty much set, and the rise of the military autoloader would see the bolt gun slowly phased out of the world’s armed services.

On the civilian side, though, things were just getting started in 1918.  The bolt gun, with its strong, solid action capable of handling high-pressure cartridges, with its solid attachment of barrel to receiver with sights permanently fixed in place, had proven to be reliable, accurate and powerful.  What’s more, that solid receiver was ideal for mounting the newfangled telescopic sights that were becoming popular.

The new trend in the game fields post WWI was towards bolt-action sporters, and a great expansion of rifles and cartridges was about to take place.  More on that in Part Five, in which we shift focus from military rifles to civilian sporters, which in my opinion are more fun.  And finally, in Part Six, we’ll examine the state of the bolt gun today.  Stay tuned.

When Gunpowder Went Smokeless

Germany Makes a Move

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not much bandwidth, and this will be an image-heavy post to support that.  So hang on.

While the French were developing the Lebel, Europe’s first military smokeless powder repeater in mass production, the Germans weren’t hiding behind the door.

In response to France’s adoption of the Lebel rifle, the Germans did something that almost never happens – they formed a government commission that successfully designed a cutting-edge infantry rifle.

The 1888 Commission rifle had a five-round magazine and a bolt with two locking lugs at the front of the bolt body.  While the 1888 is frequently referred to as the 1888 Mauser, this is incorrect, as Mauser had no hand in the design of this weapon and, in fact, made few if any of the almost three million Commission rifles; most were made by the Ludwig Loewe works (later renamed the Deutsch Waffen und Munition-Fabriken, or DWM) by the Steyr works in Austria and by Imperial arsenals at Amberg, Danzig, Erfurt and Spandau.

The 1888 Commission rifle was only in primary German service for ten years, but it did have one outstanding characteristic:  Its cartridge.  The 1888 Commission rifle introduced the 7.92x57mm (generally known as the 8×57 Mauser) cartridge, in its original Patrone 88 J-bore configuration, firing a .318 diameter, 227-grain round-nose slug at about 2400 fps.

The 7.92x57mm cartridge would effectively father an incredible variety of rifle cartridges.  Such legends of riflery as the great .30-06 Springfield, the .308 Winchester and the .270 Winchester share its case head, which has become damn near standard for medium-power bolt gun rounds.  Unlike the rimmed Lebel case, the 7.92x57mm was rimless, using an extraction groove in the case to remove fired cases from the chamber; this made it easier to feed rounds from a magazine quickly, smoothly and efficiently.

Down in Oberndorf, Paul Mauser was, to put it mildly, displeased at the German government’s bypassing his design people to build their own infantry rifle.  Mauser-Werke was at the time still churning out the 71/84 rifle, but Paul Mauser had some ideas, and if the German government didn’t want an improved Mauser, there were other governments in Europe and elsewhere that would.

The Run Up to The Final Mauser

Mauser’s late-nineteenth century battle rifles went through three main phases, each marked by several technological innovations.  Those phases included:

1. The 1889 Belgian, 1890 Turkish and 1891 Argentine Mausers
2. The various 1893-1895 small-ring Mausers, which include the 1894 and 1896 Swedish Mausers
3. The 1898 Mauser

So, let’s look at each in turn.

By today’s standards, the 1889/90/91 rifles looked a little odd, at least if you’re used to more modern Mauser-type actions.  Missing was the big claw extractor.  The magazine was a protruding single-stack affair, loading five of the new 7.65x53mm Argentine cartridge, a fast, powerful round for the time.  But these rifles did retain the 71/84’s over the top safety and the bolt locked securely into the receiver ring by the expedient of two large opposed locking lugs at the front of the bolt.

Some years ago, I picked up an 1891 Argentine that had been rebarreled with a 7x57mm tube and had a Redfield peep mounted on the receiver.  I put on a nice blonde walnut stock with a narrow Schnabel fore-end; I re-blued the action and refinished the wood, had the bolt body jeweled and a butterknife bolt handle installed.  It was a beautiful rifle, handy and light; I fed it mild handloads and killed a few deer and a couple of javelina with it.

The Belgian Army used their 1889 model in the Great War; the Ottoman Turks still had some by that fateful day in 1914.  All in all, a little over a quarter-million of these rifles were made.

Following close on the heels of the Belgian/Turk/Argentine rifles came a new design, which entered the market with what became known as the 93/95 action.  This was a more modern-looking piece, retaining the safety but exchanging the single-stack magazine for a flush-fitting staggered-stack magazine, and introducing the characteristic claw extractor.  Previous Mausers were, like many modern bolt guns, push-feed operated; the bolt simply stripped a round from the magazine and pushed it into the chamber.  The new Mausers big claw extractor engaged the extraction groove on the cartridge and guided it into the chamber directly, making for what most bolt gun mavens consider a more reliable feed; the down side of this system is that one cannot simply drop a round in the action and close the bolt.  Loading a single round requires the shooter to place the round into the magazine so the bolt can engage it as designed.

Most of the new Mausers were chambered for the new 7x57mm rimless cartridge, a low-recoil, high-velocity round that would prove popular in martial circles and, later, in the game fields.  In fact, of all the Mauser cartridges, the 7x57mm alone remains popular among American shooters to this day.  The first models turned out by Mauser went to Spain, and these rifles still are often referred to generically as “Spanish Mausers.”  But many of these guns were made and sold all over, seeing service with the armies of Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Congo, the Ottoman Empire and Serbia.

In Sweden, the Carl Gustaf works turned out what may be the finest of the pre-98 rifles in the M94 and M96 Swedish Mausers, chambered for the excellent 6.5x55mm Swede cartridge.  Many Swedes have been imported into the States, and as they are easily converted into lightweight sporters, make excellent rifles for deer-sized game.

In 1898, though, Paul Mauser produced his finest work.

The 1898 (or, simply the 98) was the culmination of Mauser’s design work.  Most bolt-action sporters today are adaptations of the 98 Mauser.  This new action had a larger receiver ring with a stout reinforcing web, a solid bolt with the usual two big locking lugs but also a third safety lug at the rear; the bolt shroud was larger and had a large flange to direct hot gases away from the shooter in the event of a case rupture.

There was one other major innovation.  Prior to the 98, Mauser actions combined the initial lift of the bolt handle with a slight camming action to initiate the extraction of a fired round.  When closing the bolt, the shooter was required to push the bolt home against the mainspring, thus cocking the piece.

The 98 changed that, using the camming action of the bolt to cock the striker on opening, rather than closing.  This made operation of the action faster, more secure, and allowed the force of the run forward to be devoted to chambering the next round.

It was with this action and the Gewehr 98 rifle built around it that Paul Mauser finally regained the attention of the German Army.  Germany entered the Great War fielding this long, heavy, powerful rifle and its 7.92x57mm S-bore (.323) cartridge; over 9 million Gewehr 98s were made, many millions more rifles were built around the basic M98 action, and the 98 Mauser action would become the basis for martial and sporting rifles all over the world.  I have in the past mentioned my favorite hunting rifle, built on a 98 Mauser action made by DWM in Berlin around 1911 on contract for Brazil; if you own a Winchester Model 70 or a Remington 700, you are shooting a rifle closely modeled after the 98 Mauser.

Mauser produced a wonder, but across the English Channel, the Brits were developing a gun that may well have surpassed it as a pure battle rifle.

Meanwhile, in Britain

In 1879, the British Army was looking to replace their single-shot black-powder Martini-Henry rifles with something more modern.  Enter a sporting chap named James Paris Lee.  Lee had developed a practical box magazine that allowed a shooter to load multiple rounds with a new device called a stripper clip, or to simply stuff single rounds into the magazine.

Working with another inventor named William Ellis Medford, the two came up with a bolt-action repeater with an eight-round (later ten round) magazine, locking lugs on the rear of the bolt, and a cock-on-closing mechanism similar to the pre-98 Mausers, the thinking in Blighty being that the cock-on-close action was quicker to operate.

My personal experience is just the opposite, but I’m just one guy, after all.

While Lee-Enfield’s the short bolt throw (60 degrees compared to the Mauser’s 90) was probably as much to do with that quick operation as the action, nevertheless the new rifle proved acceptable and in 1888, after nine years of tests, the British Army adopted the Lee-Metford magazine rifle and its .303 rimmed cartridge.

Important note:  In the last issue I incorrectly identified the Italian Vetterli as the first mass-produced bolt gun with a box magazine; as a sharp-eyed reader noted, the Lee-Metford preceded it.

The Lee-Metford rifle would, however, only stay in primary service until 1895, when a modified version was adopted.  This was the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) rifle, a ten-shot magazine-fed adaptation of the Lee-Metford built at the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield.

The Lee-Enfield would prove successful indeed as a battle rifle.  Its ten-round capacity was double that of most magazine rifles of the time.  Like its competitors it would be loaded by stripper clip or with single rounds; unlike them, the magazine could be removed from the rifle and replaced with a loaded one, although this practice was not encouraged at the time due to fears that the common soldiery would simply lose the detached magazines.

Over seventeen million Lee-Enfield rifles would be manufactured in several variations.

But about this time, across the Atlantic, the United States Army was finally thinking of moving past single-shot black-powder breechloaders, and another Lee design would be part of that calculation.

The Americans Upgrade

In 1894, the same year the immortal Winchester Repeating Arms Company brought out the immortal 1894 lever gun, the U.S. military was looking around for a smokeless-powder repeater to replace their single-shot black-powder Springfields.  The Navy chose to adopt a semi-rimmed 6mm cartridge, and the Navy Test Board invited manufacturers to submit repeaters for their testing at the Naval Torpedo Station.

After screening a mess of rifles, including no less than five Remington bolt-action prototypes, the Navy settled on a straight-pull bolt gun designed by no less than James Paris Lee.

The M1895 Lee Navy rifle had a fixed box magazine that was loaded with a five-round en bloc clip, which had the advantage of speedy reloads but the disadvantage of not being able to top off the magazine with single rounds.  Nevertheless, the Lee was an interesting design and, in 1895, the choice of the small-bore cartridge was unprecedented.

That cartridge design survives today, incidentally, necked down to .22 caliber, as the .220 Swift.

The Lee Navy rifle only ended up in front-line service for three years, though, as in 1898 a board of Army, Navy and Marine officers determined a standard rifle was in order.

The story of the first inter-service standard turn-bolt repeater begins in Norway with a gun designer named Ole Herman Johannes Krag and a gunsmith named Erik Jørgensen.  Krag had been in the small-arms business since 1866 and was unsatisfied with the tubular magazines in military rifles of the time; he sought out Jørgensen to design something new.  What they came up with was a solid bolt gun with a 5-round magazine that loaded through a loading gate on the right-hand side of the rifle.  This novel loading system had two big advantages; it allowed for topping up the magazine with single loads, and allowed for fast reloads as loose rounds could be dumped into the open magazine gate and, when the spring-loaded gate was closed, the rounds would automatically be aligned for proper feeding.

Denmark had adopted what became the Krag-Jørgensen repeater in 1889.  In 1892, after a competition among 53 rifle designs, the U.S. Army, Navy and Marines adopted what would be called the M1892 Krag rifle, firing the .30 Government cartridge, later known as the .30-40 Krag.

The Krag was a good, solid reliable rifle.  About half a million were manufactured by the Springfield Armory between 1892 and 1907.  Krag repeaters saw service in the Spanish-American war, the Philippine Insurrection, the Boxer Rebellion and the Mexican Revolution, and as a reserve weapon in the Great War.  But during the Spanish-American War, the Krag performed poorly against Spanish troops armed with 1893 Mausers and their 7x57mm cartridge.  The Army determined that a more modern rifle was in order.

Thousands of Spanish Mausers were surrendered by Spanish soldiers in Cuba.  Many of those found their way to Massachusetts, where Springfield Armory gunsmiths examined that design and came up with an American counterpart.  Features of the 93 and 98 Mauser patterns were combined along with some American requirements, like a knurled cocking knob on the striker rear and a magazine cut-off.  A new, powerful rimless cartridge was designed that fired a 220-grain round-nose jacketed bullet at about 2200 fps, but after three years and a distinct lack of zap, the original .30-03 round was replaced by a new round with a slightly shorter-necked round firing a 150-grain spitzer bullet at about 2800 fps.  Now the combination of rifle and cartridge was complete:  The M1903 Springfield and the Ball Cartridge, Caliber .30, Model of 1906, or simply the .30-06, which remains today one of the most popular centerfire rifle cartridges in the world; it has been claimed that more North American big game has been killed with .30-06 rounds than by all other centerfire rifle cartridges combined and while I have never seen numbers to support that, I don’t find it outside the realm of possibility.

This rifle would be the primary weapon of the U.S. Army and Marines when the U.S. entered the Great War in 1917.

In Russia

The story of bolt-action repeaters in Russia is the story of the Mosin-Nagant.

Russian troops were armed with the Berdan single-shot rifle when they went off to fight the Ottoman Turks in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877.  Unfortunately for them, the Turks were equipped with Winchester repeaters.  Although Russia eventually won that conflict, the Russian troops fared poorly in direct action against the fast-firing Turks, and this was enough to make even Russian military planners realize a change was in order.

In 1889, the Russian Army evaluated three rifles:  Captain Sergei Ivanovich Mosin’s “3-line” (.30 caliber) rifle, Belgian Leon Nagant’s “3.5-line” (.35 caliber, more or less) rifle and third design by one Captain Zinoviev.  Trials continued until 1891, when the officers in charge of the evaluation commission decided to combine the best features of the first two rifles, resulting in the M1891 Mosin-Nagant rifle.

The Mosin-Nagant was certainly a robust piece, even if most examples I have seen lacked the fit and polish of German, British and American-made rifles of the time.  The M1891 used two big opposed front locking lugs like the 98 Mauser, a fixed single-stack magazine like the 89/91 Mausers and a push-feed system.

Like the Kalashnikov rifles that succeeded it, the Mosin-Nagant was stoutly built, made to withstand slapdash maintenance and hard use by poorly educated peasant soldiers.  Its 7.65x53R cartridge was on a par with the German, British and American rounds, and the Russian rifle, however rough in design, certainly stood the test of time.  Like the AK, it was service all over the world; also, like the AK, it is impossible to know precisely how many Mosin-Nagant variants have been built, but the number probably approaches forty million.

And Then This Happened

There is a saying among bolt gun aficionados that among Great War battle rifles, “the Mauser is the best hunting rifle, the Springfield the best target rifle, and the Lee-Enfield the best battle rifle.”  (The Mosin-Nagant, on the other hand, made the best tent pole.)  The Great War provided us with plenty of evidence of how these three guns worked in action, but truisms aside, the impact of these pieces would go well beyond the war.

With the breakout of the Great War, the Allied powers and the Triple Alliance were all equipped with bolt guns.  While the European powers went into the fray well-equipped, the British found themselves struggling to produce enough Lee-Enfield rifles for their troops.

Enter that industrial powerhouse across the Atlantic.  Great Britain’s estranged offspring, the United States, was about to bail out the Brits (not for the last time) by producing a new bolt rifle for the .303 British round – and later, in 1917, another version of that same rifle to supplement the standard-issue Springfield.  The result of that was almost five million American doughboys who became accustomed to shooting bolt guns at the detested Hun, and an American firearms industry that was suddenly proficient at building bolt guns.  More on this in Part Four.

This trend would continue through the inter-war years.  While the American bolt gun trend started with service rifles, the various gun companies here would quickly bring out their own bolt-action sporters, and competition among the companies resulted in a great variety of rifles available for sale.  We’ve already examined the career of the prescient Charles Newton in a separate work, but Newton had plenty of competition.

Americans then and now love them some guns.  Plenty of shooters then and now like to be in on the latest big thing, and after the Great War and on into the rest of the 20^th century, bolt-action sporters were the New Hotness.  Not to be left out, European manufacturers weren’t about to miss this growing market either.  But that’s a story for Part Five.

History Repeats Itself

Meanwhile, in Switzerland

When most folks – well, most non-gun folks – think of Switzerland, they think of discreet banking, skiing and chocolates.  But Switzerland is a country with a martial tradition as well as a tradition of turning out fine firearms; for example, the Sig P-210 may well be the finest semi-auto pistol ever made.

In 1866, well before the P-210 came into being, the Swiss Federal Council were looking around their neighbors and seeing the various brass-cartridge, single-shot breechloaders that were coming into vogue in military circles.  They looked at the Dreyse and Gras bolt guns fielded by the Germanic states and France.  Being Swiss, they figured they could do the others one better; being Swiss, they were right.  But the original idea came from an American innovation.  Being Swiss, they would never admit that.

At the time the Swiss Army was using the Eidgenössischer Stutzer 1851 (Federal Carbine 1851) which was an Amsler-Milbank metallic cartridge conversion from the previously used muzzle loading rifle/musket.  The Federal Carbine 1851 was a trapdoor action roughly similar to the U.S. 1874 Springfield rifle, but firing a 10.4mm (.41 caliber, more or less) cartridge.  This single-shot arm put the Swiss on an even footing with their neighbors, rifle-wise, but that situation wasn’t destined to last.

In 1867 the Swiss military adopted the Repetiergewehr Vetterli, Modell 1867 (Model 1867 Vetterli Repeating Rifle).  The 1867 and the various iterations of the same rifle that followed, the 1868, 1869, 69/71, 1871, 1871 carbine, 1878 and 1881, all had several things in common.  First among them was a different locking mechanism; unlike the guide rib-locking lug combo seen on the Dreyse, Gras and early Mauser rifles, the Vetterli guns had two locking lugs at the rear of the bolt.  While the 1867 version had an external hammer, the 1868 and later models used a coil spring-driven striker inside the bolt.  But the major innovation was an 11-round tubular magazine under the barrel that was loaded through a loading gate on the right-hand side of the action.

Sound familiar?

Now, I’m not saying the folks at Vetterli looked across the Atlantic and noticed the feeding setup of the highly successful 1866 Winchester repeater, but if they had, it would certainly explain their adoption of a very similar mechanism for their repeating rifle.

The Vetterli was very successful but had a few drawbacks.  It fired the .41 Swiss rimfire cartridge, which only developed slightly more performance than the .44 Henry round used in the ’66 Winchester.  Its tubular magazine worked well but limited the soldier to topping up the magazine one round at a time.  For a hunting rifle this isn’t anything more than an inconvenience, but in a military weapon a fast reload could literally be the difference between life and death.

But in 1870, an Italian artillery Captain named G. Vitali looked at the Swiss Vetterli and had an idea; what about a box magazine under the receiver, rather than a Winchester-style tubular magazine?  The result of this was the Modello 1870/87 Vetterli-Vitali, an adaptation of the Swiss design with a fixed box magazine, which was charged with a four-round stripper clip.  While this innovation reduced the rifles’ capacity, it greatly reduced reloading time.  This was the first mass-produced bolt-action repeater with a box magazine.

Mauser Steps Up

Over in Oberndorf, Paul Mauser wasn’t missing the trend.

The Vetterli rifle had given a European power a bolt-action repeater for the first time.  Mauser was at that time cranking out the 1871 Mauser single-shot, but the engineer in Paul Mauser saw room for improvement; it took an alliance with an Austrian to make that happen.

Alfred Ritter von Kropatschek was a general in the Austrian Army as well as a weapons designer of note.  One of his own designs, the Kropatschek rifle, a bolt-action repeater with a tubular magazine, was adopted by the Kingdom of Portugal in 1886; Kropatschek also dabble in revolvers, and had several other rifle designs used by France and Portugal manufactured at the Steyr/Mannlicher works in what was then the Austrian Empire.

In fact, one of Krotpatschek’s contemporaries in his affiliation with the Steyr company would soon have significant impact on the bolt gun world; that contemporary’s name was Ferdinand Mannlicher.  We’ll talk more about him in a later segment.

Back to Mauser.  In 1884, Mauser-Werke updated with 1871 Gewehr 71 with an 8-round tubular magazine designed by Alfred von Kropatschek.  This new rifle became known as the Gewehr 71/84 and was the first production Mauser repeater.

Peter Mauser, the marketing side of the Mauser family, had died in 1882 but Mauser’s marketing effort before and after the alliance with von Kropatschek had led to company to look beyond the military market.  Germany has a long-standing outdoor tradition as well, with German sportsmen going afield after red deer, roebuck and wild boar; the powerful 11mm Mauser black-powder round was well suited for the larger game of the German states.

Speaking for myself; I’ve never fired one of the black-powder Mausers, but I once had the chance to examine a very interesting sporting rifle, this one a 71/84 repeater with a carbine-length barrel, butter-knife bolt handle, a nice European walnut stock with a half-length forearm that left much of the 6-shot magazine tube exposed, and some kind of aftermarket open sights that I couldn’t recognize and which were presumably contemporary with the rifle’s origins.  I would have loved to have fired it, but the venue (a Denver-area gun show) and the difficulty in obtaining 11mm Mauser ammo in this modern era precluded it.  But I would have enjoyed taking this carbine into the game fields.  The rifle was light and handy and, in a tribute to Mauser engineering, even after well over a hundred years the action was still tight and crisp.

The 1871 and 71/84 were the first big commercial successes for Mauser.  Beside civilian sales, the 1871 and its descendant saw service in the German armies as well as those of the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, Transvaal.  The 1871 was used by the Irish Volunteers in the Easter Rising; the Japanese samurai used 1871 Mausers in the Satsuma Rebellion.  Other nations that used this rifle included Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Uruguay and on the other side of the planet, China and Korea.  All in all, almost two million of these guns were made.

With the 71 and 71/84 Mauser had made their mark in the military world as a bolt gun designer.  That mark would only broaden and improve as the world turned into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Speaking of Japan

Its important to remember that Japan was a country with a proud martial tradition and was, in fact, a rather militarized culture up until about 1945, when the thrashing they received at the hands of folks like Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz and Curtis LeMay forced them to re-think that stance.

But in 1880, Japan was just pulling their military structure and equipment into what was then the modern era.  They had been importing various weapons for their army, including French Chassepot and Gras rifles, British Snider-Enfields and even some American Spencer repeaters.  The experiences the Japanese Army had in the Boshin War brought home the need for a domestically produced, standardized infantry weapon.

At this time a young fellow named Murata Tsuneyoshi was a Major of infantry in the Japanese Imperial Army, and in addition to his military duties, he fancied himself a designer of infantry rifles.  He had examined a number of French Gras rifles and adapted their design to local production, producing a single-shot bolt gun that became the Murata Model 13, named so as it was adopted in the 13^th year of the reign of the Emperor Meiji, the standard by which Japan reckoned calendar years.

Like their European counterparts, the Japanese were not long content with a single-shot rifle.  The Murata rifle went through several innovations including experimentation with box and tubular magazines; these experiments culminated with the Murata Type 22, which had a tubular magazine under the barrel.  The Type 22 entered service in 1889.  Murata rifles saw service in the first Sino-Japanese war, the Donghat Peasant Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the Siberian Intervention and the Great War.

Meanwhile, in Russia

The Russian Empire’s first breechloader was known as the Berdan 1, another trapdoor breechloader which was manufactured in the United States by our old friends at Colt.  Adopted in 1868, the Berdan 1 fired a .42 caliber Berdan-primed (obviously) black-powder cartridge.  But in 1870 Russia adopted the Berdan 2, a single-shot bolt gun.  As seems often to be the case with Russian designs, the Berdan 2 was something of an odd duck.  Like the Dreyse, Gras and 1871 Mauser, it used the guide rib as a locking lug; unlike the other guns, when the action was closed the bolt handle projected upwards about 30 degrees above the horizontal.  The reasons behind this are unknown.

But in the meantime, the French were once again about to set a new standard for martial bolt guns.

The French Break New Ground

In 1884, the same year that the brothers Mauser were converting their successful 1871 model into a repeater, a Frenchman named Paul Vielle was experimenting with cartridge propellants based on nitrocellulose.  In case you weren’t aware, this was the basis for the first smokeless gun powders, which was what Vielle came up with, inventing Poudre B, which packed about triple the punch of black powder.  Two years prior to that another Frenchman, this one an Army Captain by the name of Eduard Rubin, had come up with a rather interesting new bullet that had a protective copper jacket completely wrapped around the lead core, allowing the bullet to be fired at high velocities without deforming.

In 1886 the French Minister of War, one General Georges Ernest Boulanger, determined that these two French inventions, combined, could be the basis for a fine new infantry rifle.  He wasn’t wrong.  The result of his intentions was given form in the 1886 Lebel rifle, a bolt-action repeater with an 8-roung tubular magazine under the barrel.  The Lebel used the 8mm Lebel cartridge, which fired a fully-jacketed spitzer bullet at about 2200 feet per second, a pretty impressive performance for the time.

Incidentally, it’s a common worry among those who shoot guns with tubular magazines that a pointed bullet in the magazine may set off the round ahead of it under recoil, which in spite of a lot of ink spilt on the topic, most gun cranks can’t produce an example of this actually happening.  The Lebel used just such a pointed, full-jacketed bullet, and got around it with the expedient of a groove around the primer of the 8mm Lebel cartridge that caught and held the point of the bullet to the rear in the magazine, preventing any possible chain fire.  This was a solution that, while awkward, would appear to be successful inasmuch as there are no known examples of a chain-fire in the Lebel rifle.

The Lebel proved popular among the soldiers of the French Army despite the difficulty of loading its tubular magazine one round at a time.  The rifle and its 8mm smokeless powder cartridge were clearly superior to the black-powder 71/84 Mauser, the Swiss and Italian Vetterli and the Russian Berdan rifles in use elsewhere at the time.  The Lebel rifle was used to good effect in several pre-Great War conflicts such as the Boxer Rebellion, the first Italo-Ethiopian War and the Monegasque Revolution.  When the Great War broke out it was still the standard French infantry rifle and turned in a good performance in that war to end all wars.  Lebels found their way into military service from Algeria to Vietnam, and civilian versions without the bayonet lug and stacking rod were sold all over to sportsmen as well.

But while the Lebel denoted the entry of bolt guns into the smokeless powder era, it was soon eclipsed by developments in German, Russia and elsewhere.

And Then This Happened

We’ve already examined how the introduction of smokeless powders and the resulting increase in performance and chamber pressures changed the lever gun world.  The changes were even more dramatic in the bolt gun world, as the simple design of the bolt-action repeater allowed for some very tough actions capable of withstanding serious chamber pressures.

Both military and civilian arms would take advantage of this innovation.  Rifles were now built for the new propellants whose names would live on in gun making history; besides the Mauser folks, such names as Mannlicher, Lee-Enfield, Mosin-Nagant, Krag and Springfield were now about to come to the fore.

Also, in 1914, the Great War would begin.  This, the world’s largest war of attrition in history (so far), would be more than any other the war of the bolt gun.  Big things were about to happen – but that’s a story for Part 3.

In the Beginning…

There Were Needles.

Unlike our previous two historical studies, this one begins in Europe.  The story of bolt-action guns begins in 1824, with a German inventor named Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse.

This was a time when the percussion ignition system was just beginning to replace the flintlock in the game fields and militaries of the civilized world.  Most of the guns using the newfangled fulminate ignition systems didn’t change much from the flintlock pattern; they were still single-shot front-stuffers, differing only in a slightly cleaner and more reliable means of igniting the powder charge.  Across the Atlantic, the Rocket Ball self-contained cartridge was not yet a gleam in Walter Hunt’s eye, but Johann von Dreyse was already thinking of what the percussion ignition system might allow one to do.

It’s important to note that, at this time, breech-loaders were hardly a new thing.  Henry VIII owned a breech-loading fowling piece.  In the American Revolution, some British troops were even armed with Ferguson flintlock breech-loaders, a single-shot affair where the trigger guard rotated to lower a plug to allow ball and powder to be loaded. In 1811, an American named John Hancock Hall invented another breech-loading flintlock, this one using a lever to raise a portion of the breech that loaded from the front.

In 1824, in his home stadt of the Archbishopric of Mainz, von Dreyse started a factory to manufacture the new percussion caps.  Not content to supply the demand for fulminate ignitors, Von Dreyse wanted to make a breech-loader for sale to the Prussian Army, but the new percussion system led to better ideas than the previous flintlock breechloaders were capable of; what von Dreyse came up with was quite a bit better, in fact, than Hunt’s anemic Rocket Ball.

The cartridge resulting from von Dreyse’s work was a real oddball by today’s reckoning.  The new round used an 15.4mm (roughly .60 caliber) egg-shaped bullet held in a paper sabot, with a black powder charge in a paper case behind the bullet.  The percussion primer was placed at the base of the bullet, requiring a striker to pierce the paper case and pass through the entire powder charge to ignite the primer.  This required something longer and thinner than what we are accustomed to nowadays as firing pins; it was, in fact, something very needle-like.  What von Dreyse came up with in 1836 and the Prussians adopted five years later (apparently military procurement in those days was several orders of magnitude more efficient than today, requiring only five years to test and approve a new service weapon) was the Leichtes Perkussionsgewehr Model 1841 (Light Percussion Rifle Model 1841) but which became better known as the Zündnadelgewehr, or Needle Gun.

The Dreyse Needle Gun had several virtues.  It was simple, the breechloading mechanism being a cylindrical receiver in which the breechblock rotated and drew to the rear to load the paper cartridge; the breechblock was moved with a simple projecting handle with a round knob, forming the first bolt-action breechloader to be adopted by a major military.  The Dreyse breechloader allowed Prussian troops, no slouches by any measure, to increase their rate of fire and therefore be even more efficient at slaughtering their enemies.

The needle gun cartridge even had an advantage that cannot exist with metal-case ammunition.  Igniting the powder charge at the front of the load actually results in a more efficient burn, with the propellant gas expanding from just behind the bullet and consuming more of the charge within the barrel rather than blowing a portion of the unburnt powder from the muzzle, making the flash so characteristic of black-powder arms.

But the Dreyse Needle Gun likewise had several weaknesses.  The needle, while designed for easy replacement, was fragile and prone to breakage.  The gun, like most black-powder pieces, fouled quickly.  When hot and dirty from repeated firing, the bolt took considerable strength to open.  But the needle gun was successful enough to warrant an upgrade to cast steel barrels and a stronger action in the 1862 model, and eventually the factory in Mainz was cranking out 30,000 rifles a year; all in all the various militaries of the German states fielded over a million needle guns, and orders came in from as far away as Romania and even Japan.

In one of history’s little ironies, it was in a Prussian triumph that the Dreyse needle gun saw its end.  In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out.  While the Prussians won that war, the French Chassepot breechloader, also based on a turn-bolt action, proved so superior to the Dreyse as to make the German states look to upgrade.

How they would do that would lead to the rise to prominence of one of the most famous names in gun-making.  But before we examine that, let’s look at the French pieces that led to this decision.

The French?  Yes, the French.

In the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, the Prussian troops found themselves facing French soldiers armed with the Chassepot rifle.  That weapon’s history has some interesting parallels with the Dreyse.

In the mid-1850s, a French inventor and gunsmith named Antoine Alphonse Chassepot was, like the German von Dreyse, messing about with breechloaders.  Like von Dreyse, he had ambitions of selling a breech-loading rifle to the military, albeit the French Army rather than the Prussian.

What he came up with was the single-shot bolt-action breechloader adopted by the French Army as the Fusil modèle 1866.  Like the Dreyse, it used a paper cartridge, firing an 11mm (more or less .44 caliber) bullet at a higher muzzle velocity than the bigger bullet of the Dreyse; this led to greater accuracy at longer ranges.  Like the Dreyse, the Chassepot was technically a needle gun, using a long, sharply pointed firing pin to fire the primer located inside the paper case, although in the French arm the primer was loaded at the rear of the cartridge.

Unlike the Dreyse, the Chassepot had a better gas seal in the form of a rubber “obdurator” on the bolt, which along with the lighter bullet led to higher muzzle velocities.  The French rifle also had sights marked up to 1,600 meters as opposed to the Dreyse’s 600 meters.  However, like the Dreyse, the Chassepot rifle was prone to fouling in the action, making the rifle difficult to use when heated and dirty.  This was in large part due to the paper cartridge’s inability to form a good gas seal.  The addition of the rubber gas seal helped, but the paper cartridge was the problem.

Because of this, the Chassepot rifle was only used in its original form for eight years.  To properly examine what came next, we must first look across the English Channel, and across the Atlantic.

A New, Better Cartridge

Paper cartridges had several disadvantages.  They were fragile, unsuited for use in any kind of repeater, primers were difficult to fix in place, and they could not form a good gas seal in the action.  In the Americas at this time several gunmakers like Spencer and Henry were experimenting with rimfire cartridges, but those also had the limitations of only being suitable for low-powered rounds due to the weakness of the case head and not being reloadable.

But in 1866, two men were working on a solution to that problem and, in an inarguable case of convergent evolution in technology, the solutions they came up with were very similar.

In the United States, the man in question was a New Yorker named Hiram Berdan, who patented a solid-head brass case with a centerfire primer.  Berdan’s primer was a simple cap that tightly fit the aperture in the case head, forming a good seal, while the anvil for the primer formed part of that case head, while the flash from the primer entered the case through two small holes on either side of the anvil.

Meanwhile, in Great Britain, Colonel Edward Mounier Boxer of the Royal Arsenal in Woolrich, came up with a primer that, like Berdan’s, fit tightly in an aperture in the solid brass case head; unlike Berdan’s primer, the anvil was contained in the primer, while the flash entered the case though a central aperture.  This made the Boxer primer better suited for reloading, as the central flash hole made de-capping much easier.

In one of life’s little ironies, today the Berdan primer is used primarily in Europe, while modern American ammunition uses almost exclusively Boxer primers.

As was true with lever guns in the United States, the advent of brass-cased, fixed ammunition would have significant influence on the development of bolt guns in Europe.

The French Adapt

In 1870 the British Army adopted the famous falling-block Martini-Henry rifle, immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his poem The Young British Soldier:

When ‘arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch,
Don’t call your Martini a cross-eyed old bitch;
She’s human as you are — you treat her as sich,
An’ she’ll fight for the young British soldier.

Cross-eyed old bitch the Martini-Henry may have been, but the .450/577 paper-patched brass cartridge it used caught the attention of the French.  France responded by adapting the Chassepot design to use a new brass cartridge, the 11x59R Gras, resulting in the Fusil Gras Modèle 1874.  This was a singular improvement over the paper-cartridge Chassepot, and Gras rifles were used up until the Great War, at which point 140,000 or so Gras rifles were modified to use the 8mm Lebel cartridge then in front-line use.

The Gras was a very successful single-shot bolt gun, and there was even a repeating version, wherein the regular Gras rifle was fitted with an awkward, cumbersome gravity-feed hopper.  That part was not successful; but the Gras saw service with many armies besides the French, including Greece, Monaco, Russia and Spain, among others.

But while all this was going on, across the Rhein in Bavaria, two brothers were looking at the success of the Gras and thinking they could go one up on the French designers.  Those brothers were Paul and Wilhelm Mauser, and theirs was a name that would end up as one of the most significant in firearms history.

Back to Germany – Two Brothers Named Mauser

Back in Germany, in the little village of Oberndorf am Neckar, two brothers were getting into the gun business.  Paul (given name Peter Paul, but generally referred to as Paul in documentation I’ve seen) and Wilhelm Mauser were a good team of industrialists; Paul was the engineer and designer, while Wilhelm was the businessman.

I’ve had the good fortune to have visited Oberndorf.  It remains a pleasant, scenic little town along the Neckar River south by southwest of Stuttgart, home not only to the original Mauser-Werke but also to the Heckler & Koch plant – or, at least it was all those things in 1997 when I was there.  It’s a typically beautiful little Bavarian village, set in a valley in the Bavarian forest; the Neckar river winds placidly through the town, and there are several wonderful gasthauses where one can enjoy a plate of schnitzel and an early-afternoon pilsner.  I was lucky enough to have done so and would love to do so again.

I think the H&K works has moved, but Mauser is still there, now part of the enormous German Rheinmetall complex of factories.  It’s an interesting note that the main guns used in the American M1A1 and M1A2 main battle tank is a Rheinmetall design, making that formidable 120mm smoothbore main tank gun a first cousin to the Mauser bolt guns found in armies and game fields all over.

Oberndorf was no doubt an equally pleasant place in 1870, when the brothers Mauser put the finishing touches on a single-shot bolt rifle intended for the various German militaries.  Their final design became the Infanterie-Gewehr 71 (Infantry Rifle 71) and was the first commercial success for Mauser in a rifle design.  Firing an 11mm (.44 caliber) black-powder cartridge, the single-shot 71 Mauser didn’t look much like the iconic Mauser rifles of later years.  The action lockup was accomplished by combining a single locking lug with a bolt guide rib, and of course the piece had no magazine.  The one feature the Model 71 had was the over-the-top Mauser wing safety on the bolt shroud, which would eventually become one of Mauser’s more recognizable features.

The 1871 Mauser would see several modifications and variations over the years, until it was eclipsed by later designs.  But the famous name Mauser started here, with that single-shot 11mm infantry rifle.  Wilhelm Mauser died in 1882 but lived to see the 71 and its variations used all over Europe, by the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, Austria, by the Irish Volunteers and in as far-flung places as China and Uruguay.  His brother Paul would continue designing bolt guns, eventually coming up with the model that would set the standard for bolt rifles until… well, today.

For the best history on Mauser rifles available, I cannot recommend Ludwig Olson’s Mauser Bolt Rifles strongly enough.  A copy of that work is in my permanent arms-reach desktop reference collection.

And Then This Happened

All over Europe, the various militaries were switching to single-shot bolt guns firing brass black-powder cartridges.  But in Switzerland, a nation better known by most folks for discreet banking and chocolates, the Swiss Army was quietly adopting a different kind of bolt gun, one that borrowed an idea from an American design.  We’ll examine the rest of Europe’s forays into bolt guns in Part Two.

But there was another big change in firearms technology on the horizon.  Remember the big impact smokeless powders had on the development of sixguns and lever guns?  Well, the impact on bolt guns was no less profound, and while many manufacturers were about to spring on this new technology, when it comes to bolt guns the designers at Mauser-Werke were ahead of the pack.  But that’s a subject for Part Three.