Mauser Military Rifles by Neil Grant

Author:Neil Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mauser Military Rifles
ISBN: 9781472805966
Publisher: Osprey Publishing

The Mauser M1918 T-Gewehr and its 13.2×92mm cartridge. The three holes drilled in the cartridge and bolt are to deactivate the weapon, not original features. (Author’s photograph, © Royal Armouries PR.1725)

New Zealand gunners with a captured T-Gewehr anti-tank rifle near Grévillers, August 1918. (© IWM Q 11264)

To put the relative importance of rifles into context, official German estimates in 1917 indicated that machine guns used between two-thirds and nine-tenths of the cartridges issued, and this ratio would only have increased, since the numbers of machine guns in service increased as the war dragged on, and the number of rifles did not. This did not mean that rifle fire was negligible in effect, as this German description of rifle fire against British troops advancing on the first day of the Somme indicates:

… a murderous fire spewed against them from foxholes, shell-holes and what was left of the trenches. The gaunt and dust covered shapes of our soldiers, some of them in shirt sleeves, hastened out of their collapsing cellars and ploughed-up shelters. Seized by an indescribable lust for battle they stood, kneeled or lay flat as best enabled them to send a murderous massed fire into the continuous ranks of the British... Wave after wave was being cut down by the accurate fire which was being maintained by our officers, NCOs and men, regardless of hands which were bleeding from contact with the red-hot barrels of their rifles. (Quoted in Duffy 2006: 154)

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