Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois

 Phil Davis, holding a German rifle in front of an
 American flag.  Davis often shares his knowledge
 of firearms and history at SCRA meetings.

The 8mm cartridge was developed by the German Ordinance Bureau of Spandau Arsenal in 1888.  It looked a little different than what it looks like now.  It had a large round nose 215 grain bullet.  Its bullet diameter was 318.  Its original designation as 7.92 mm by 57 mm long, and on many Euuropean guns you'll still see that designation.  It was a round nose bullet that went just a little over 2,000 feet per second.

Davis showed us a long-barreled, 29 inch barrel,  model 88 rifle, a strange-looking gun also known as the Commission rifle.  The original one took a Manlincher clip that was kind of like the M-1 Garand en bloc clip.  You had to push it down in there and when the last round was stripped out magazine, this little metal clip would fall out of  the bottom your gun.  It also had a shroud around the barrel to keep you from burning your fingers when you were firing rapidly.

In 1905, because of increases in smokeless powder and different developments around the world, the German Ordinance Bureau revised the 7.92 mm cartridge.  They made the bullet diameter larger to .323 inches and they lightened the bullet to 154 grains and made it a pointed  bullet.  This is called a Spitzgeschoss or pointed nose bullet.  That's where the word Spitzer comes from.  All German weapons from that point forward that were chambered for this bullet had an S stamped somewhere on the barrel or on the receiver to say that it was the proper bore diameter to take the Spitzer bullet.

New ammunition, .323 diameter, being stuck into an old type rifle which it will chamber in with a weaker action and a 318 diameter bore.  Anybody seeing a problem here? You're taking a watermelon and stuffing it through a garden hose.  You're taking a larger diameter bullet with a copper jacket on it and stuffing down a bore that is a smaller diameter.   That's in 1905 that this switchover happened.  That's why you will hear so many people, if you see an old Commission rifle, a model 88 Mauser lying around on a gun show table, "Or, for God's sake, don't shoot that."  Davis said he will pick them up and look at them and as he looks them over he says, "Yep, can't shoot it, it ain't worth a hoot, I'll give you 90 bucks for it."  Because you know what Davis just saw, an "S" stamped on the top of the chamber.  That means we're good to go.  You can shoot modern 8mm in it and Davis just bought a $240 rifle for $89 because people were ignorant of the switchover.

The manlincher Mauser system that was on the 88 became obsolete almost as fast as it was adopted.  In 1891 Paul Mauser of Mauser Works in Berlin, actually of Orbendorf, Germany, came up with a new magazine system.  It was called a clip loaded box magazine system.  This is called a charger or stripper clip.  The 1891 Mauser actions which were used by the Belgiums and the Argentineans, the first countries to use this type clip.  It made loading the rifle much faster and easier plus unlike the manlincher clip, it held all the rounds together.  This one, if you had a lull in the action, you could take some loose rounds and thumb them into the top of the magazine to top off.  That's something you couldn't do with the manlincher type clip and that was one of the main failings of the M-1 Garand rifle because if you had eight rounds to start with and you fired seven rounds, you still had one in the gun.

Let's juxtapose that against what the United States was using at that time period. The .30-.40 Krag rifle did not use a clip, did not use any type of magazine like this at all.  It had a trap door on the side that you flipped open and you dumped five rounds in loose and closed it. The Spanish American War in Cuba,  proved how much superior the Mauser box magazine bolt action rifle was to the American Krag system.  Every time you opened that door, garbage could get into that action.  1,2, 3, 4, 5, close the door or zip, close.  Which is faster?  The Mauser is much faster.

The 91 Mauser action, the Belgium/Argentine versions are the ones you see at the gun shows that have a funny box type thing hanging down below the stock.  It's a single stack box magazine.  These were unwieldy.  These were not the strongest of actions.  They only had two locking lugs, they didn't have the third locking lug like a lot of later ones.  In 1893 came the first box magazine Mauser.  It had an open box double stack magazine that was completely enclosed within the stock.  It gave you faster cycling of the bolt.  It was a much smoother action.  That was the 1893 Spanish Mauser.  That's the one that Teddy Roosevelt and his boys and Leonard Wood and his boys and all those people ran up against in Cuba.  They called it the Spanish Hornet, it was in 7 mm Mauser.

Let's get back to 8 mm however.  In 1898, possibly the most famous bolt action was born.  Paul Mauser of Mauser Works, Orbendorf, Germany, came up with Gewehr, model 1898.  Gewehr is German for rifle.  It had a 29 1/2  inch barrel and a really cool looking rear sight that kind of looked like a roller coaster, it went way up and way down.  It was called the Lang sight.  It was graduated to, Davis believes, 2,000 meters. It had a very long barrel and a straight bolt that stuck straight out, very graceful, very beautiful, very long rifle that was reminiscent of all the battle rifles of that time period.  Of the main infantry rifles of that time period, there was maybe one of them and that was the British Enfield, that had a barrel length longer than 26 inches.  Almost everybody's rifles had a 26, 27, 28 or 29 inches.  They were a long barreled rifle designed for the musketry drills or rifle shooting drills of the last century.  It was of course chambered for this cartridge, 7.92 by 54S, the S bore.  All the old ones are known as the J bore or the Jaguar bore, the hunters bore, because many sporting rifles were still chambered for that ??? cartridge.

The 98 Mauser was unique in that all other Mausers had been cocked on the closing.  You had to slam it forward and bring it down to close the bolt, you cocked it at the same time.  The 98 Mauser action, this is your cocking piece right here, as you open the bolt it cocks the weapon.  It makes for a much smoother and quicker action.  It also has a third locking lug for the rear here.  This was a departure from other Mauser actions.  In the past you only had two locking lugs.  This is what made the 98 Mauser action the benchmark that all other bolt action rifles had to go by.  The American Springfield is a rip off of the Mauser action and the United States had to pay, Davis believes, three million dollars to the German government for patent infringement.  We did not copy it, we stole it, and we had to pay for it.

The 98 Mauser action was used by sporting companies all over the world.  As a matter of fact, the British sporting arms market was devastated in 1914 when America went to war with Germany because they would have no more fine Mauser actions to make their sporting rifles on. The 8 mm Mauser cartridge was nose to nose with the 303 British and the 8 mm Lebel in the trenches of World War I in 1914 through 1917 before the United States got into it.  Davis frankly admits that as much as an Anglophile as he is, he has to admit that the German cartridge is a far superior one.  It's rimless which means that it feeds from the magazine much smoother. It is also head spaced on the shoulder which makes it a more accurate cartridge.  It had the pointed bullet that was very ballistically balanced which means it is very accurate and it penetrates like crazy.  German accuracy in World War I was notable to say the least.

A German infantry soldier in World War I would have marched off with either a Gewehr 98 which is the long infantry version or, if they were in the cavalry or artillery, they would have had a Karabiner K98, which means a shortened rifle, a carbine.  There were two different types.  The British were ahead of the Germans in one facet.  In 1907 the British did away with the use of carbines and long rifles for their military service.  They went to one standardized length for rifles.  The British service was called the SMLE, the shortened magazine Lee-Enfield.  That did not happen in German service until well after World War I.  The 98 Mauser in conjunction with what we not call the 8 mm Mauser cartridge was known worldwide through the wars and between the wars in all the German colonies around the world.  Everybody knows about the British colonies.  The sun never set on the British empire.  They said, you know what, it didn't set too long on a German one either because Kaiser Wilhelm and his buddies had a pretty vast empire stretching from the East Indies to Africa.  The 8mm Mauser was pretty popular with all the German colonies for hunting because ammunition was readily available.  Mauser rifles were readily available.  It is very potent.

Davis was asked earlier in the day by someone whether this would kill an elephant.  Absolutely, it has many times.  The 8mm Mauser projectile will penetrate deep and it will hit hard.  In places like Tanzania, German East Africa, all those places, elephants have been killed by the 8mm Mauser.

Davis decided to go ahead and dispel a myth at this point.  He said he was about ready to gore a sacred ox. When Theodore Roosevelt went to Africa in 1907, he carried with him a 405 Winchester lever action rifle which he did not shoot an elephant with.  Do you know what he did shoot the elephants with and killed them with one shot.  Davis said he would wager that many of us have fired the same rifle and the same cartridge, a 1903 Springfield, caliber 30.06 with a 220 grain round nose full metal jacket bullet and killed them deader than stone.  Roosevelt called the 405 big medicine for lions, not for elephants.  He said it is singularly unsuitable for pachyderms not for its lack of power but for its poor construction of projectiles.

The Versailles treaty hamstrung the German army.  When people ask Davis what the cause of World War II was, he responds, "World War I, or the way it ended anyway."  The German government was now allowed to have a large standing army. They were not allowed to develop air forces.  They were not allowed to have weapons beyond a certain length (everybody knows infantry rifles have to have long barrels).

 When the Nazi's came to power, they developed police forces, they developed shooting clubs, and they standardized their weapon.  They did what the British did in 1907.  In the 1930's they did away with the long Gewehr 98 and the short carbine 98 and they came up with roughly this, the K-98k, carbine model 1898 Kurz or short.  It's a short rifle, it's not a carbine, it's not a long rifle, it's a Kurz, a short rifle.  This was to be issued to every branch of the military, of course they called it a police force at that time, of the German Reich.  Many of the old Gewehr model 98 rifles were modified to this pattern by shortening the barrel, changing the rear sight and bending this down.  You will see that a lot of these old rifles will bear many different stages or steps of modification.  The Germans were very frugal, they didn't throw a lot away.

When the war started, the backbone of the German army was the k-98 rifle.  Again 5-shot magazine fed, very simple, very robust didn't foul up in mud, very accurate.  Various different types of stocks were issued on this rifle.  This is a laminated stock made up of layers of wood facing different directions, a lot stronger than regular hardwood, a lot more impervious to warpage due to temperatures, not going to split when you knock someone's door in because it has a cap that goes over the butt stock.  It also keeps the wood from swelling on the end grain.  All Mauser rifles have this little device (disk) right here which were designed for disassembly of your bolt.

The German system, because they were not allowed to manufacture new rifles during the interim war period, they needed to disguise the number of rifles that they were making.  They didn't want to put the name of the factory on the rifle.  So they came up a code system.  This particular one was made by DUV, Luebeck Metal Works of Berlin, made 1941.  On the serial numbers of these rifles you will notice that you hardly ever find a German Mauser rifle that has a serial number of numbers more than 9,999.  For example, this one number 2749 but then below it in little bitty script is a k.  That means all the way through, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j.  This is number 2749 of the k series made by DUV Arsenal.  Any idea how many rifles Uncle Adolph was putting together before the war started?  Quite a few.

When facing the Russians and the French the Germans were not to be outdone in any way, shape or form.  They had superior tanks.  As a matter of fact they took on the Polish and the Polish tried to attack their tanks with cavalry which didn't work very well.  The Russians tried to take on their air force using biplanes, again didn't work to well.  The Messerschmidts kind of made a mess out of them.  They had modern submarines when we were still sailing S boats that were top state of the art for 1916 and 1917.  The British navy was still sailing Dreadnots when the Germans were making modern battle cruisers.
















Phil Davis holds up a German Mauser from
World War II, in sniper configuration.  The little
forward-mounted 1.5 power scope was crystal
clear and perfectly suited to its role.

The Germans were not to be left behind.  In 1941 they came out with the ZF41 Sharpshooters rifle. The ZF41 means a 8mm Mauser with this on it.  And on that, Carl Zeiss developed this and it slides on like this.  And it still returns to 0 because Davis went and tried it out.  This is the ZF41 sniper rifle, a selected lot of K98k's selected for accuracy, fit and finish, were fitted with Carl Zeiss' scopes.  To tell you how far ahead of time the German's were they zeroed the rifle at the factory.  They installed a little drum right here and if you turn it you will notice it has numbers from 1 to 8.  That is a built in bullet drop compensator, from 100 to 800 meters, and it works.  The reticle of this scope is a post with a very thin cross here.  This is probably the finest reticle there is for picking up a moving target.  It is only a half-inch scope but it is set far forward.  Do you know what Colonel Cooper calls this kind of setup?  It is called a scout rifle.  You would think with this small of a scope it would be impossible to pick this up and pick out a target very quickly but Davis can pick it up, throw it on his shoulder and be looking at someone's license plate right now.  Sixty-five years later the optics are still crystal clear. 

This was the number one issued sharpshooters rifle of the second world war on the German side.  More of these were made than any of the other more famous, the high turret, the low turret and the k-43 versions of the sniper rifle.  This is an early war one.  This one probably saw service in Russia.  This particular rifle is not an import, this is a veteran's bring back rifle.

The serial numbers are mismatched but Davis has had people tell him that sometimes they would actually mismatch them to find the parts that fitted together properly to wring the most accuracy out of the rifle.  This particular rifle has had a cap fitted over the nose.  This Davis has been told is not because of some defect in the muzzle but to keep some dumb schmuck infantryman from attaching a bayonet to it and screwing up the bedding on the stock.

What's nice about this as opposed to some of the sniper rifles, what can you still do with your cartridge clip?  Zipa de do dah, right down through the charger rails.

The magnification on the ZF-41 is 1 1/2.  You're not supposed to look five-million miles away.  Under German sniper doctrine you stay concealed.  You move forward quietly, you find yourself in lair, you stalk your enemy and you fire a single shot.  You don't need a 12 power scope to shoot someone at 300 yards.  If you have a 12 power scope and you're shooting at someone at less than 200 yards, more than likely you would be wondering, what the heck part of that person am I shooting at?  Davis went to Missouri with a rifle that had a 3 to 9 power scope.  Davis thought he had to have it on 9 power, by gosh, make the rifle shoot farther.  He saw a deer coming out into the open so he took the safety off, raised the rifle and was looking at brown fur.  Okay, what part of the deer was he shooting at?  He lowered the rifle and another guy said, "What's wrong?"  Davis said, "I saw fur, lots of it."  He turned the scope down and by that time the deer was gone.  He turned the scope down to 3 power and thats where he left it the whole time he was there.

This is a ZF-41 sharpshooters rifle.  If it had all matching numbers, this rifle would be worth $3200.  Because its not matching numbers its worth decidedly less than that.  It was given to Davis by a relative to sell for him.  Davis figured since he had it he might as well share it with some people.  Not many people get to see an authentic German rifle that hasn't had all the eagles and swats stickers chiseled off of it and with the original Zeiss scope which is marked DUV which says it was put on at Luebeck in Berlin as well

Everybody thinks the end of the second world war was the end of the 98 Mauser.  That could not be farther from the truth.  The 98 Mauser reincarnated again in 1948 in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and most of the Balkan countries with the M48 Mauser.  You can buy these on the surplus market still for under $200 and they are fine rifles.  If you find Yugoslavian Mauser that is marked Tradusia 44 you're buying a German rifle.  Its a German K98 thats had all the Nazi marks scrubbed off of it and a Yugoslavian crest put on it.

The Mauser action is still the benchmark today of a fine bolt action.


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