Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
We're out here today to do a little bit of shooting with a German Gewehr 43.
These are, I guess, kind of commonly called Hitler's Garand.
And it was the most common self-loading rifle
that the German military had during World War Two.
As the name implies, these went into production in early 1943.
They were actually a kind of an evolution of the Gewehr 41 that Walther made.
So, actually as far back as the 1930s the German
military had been looking into self-loading rifles
to replace the Mauser, or to supplement the Mauser.
And, of course, the [outbreak] of war kind of threw a wrench in those plans
because you needed to produce a lot of what you could
and not be goofing around with experiments.
So, the first self-loading rifles that they came up with were the Gewehr 41,
a model made by Walther and a model made by Mauser.
The Walther was the better of the two guns, but it still had a lot of flaws.
The main problem with the 41 made by Walther was that it had this kind of funky gas trap system to operate.
And the reason for that was that the the German Ordnance Department insisted that they could
not drill a gas port hole in the barrel. This was actually not that uncommon of a concern at the time.
The thought was that drilling a gas port would cause premature erosion of the rifling and
accuracy problems and serviceability problems.
So, instead what they did was capture gas after it had left the muzzle and then route that back to run a piston.
We've actually done a video on the 41(W) and it's worth watching if you're not familiar with the gun.
Anyway, the bolt system that Walther developed for that rifle use this pair of matching locking flaps,
the piston came back (it's a short-stroke gas piston under the hand guard),
... knocks the the bolt carrier backwards, the two flaps
(which are kind of like a miniaturized version of a Degtyaryov, a DP or an RPD machine gun),
those come in and then the whole thing cycles backwards.
Well, ... when they realized the operational problems that the Gewehr 41 was having,
Walther redesigned the system to basically copy the gas piston from the Soviet Tokarev rifle.
Which is the G43. That design was far more successful. It's a lot more reliable.
Gas trap designs have never worked very well.
Basically German Ordnance got their hands ... on G43s for testing,
pretty much immediately recognized that they were much superior and
ordered G41 production to pretty much immediately change over to G43 rifles.
So beginning in early 1943 these were put into production.
Between then and the end of the war about 400,000 of them
were made, which is really kind of a staggering number
given the conditions of German industry at the time.
The early ones were quite nice. As they got later into production,
they had to make some sacrifices, and as you can see
some of these forged parts were never actually finished.
So, they're taken basically out of the forge and the important
moving elements get nicely cleaned up on the machines, but
surfaces like this exterior surface that really don't
have any functional need, they just left those raw.
So, these guns look cruder than they really are.
In the places where precision machine work is necessary,
it's been done and been done pretty well.
The one possible exception to that is the Gustloff company built a large number of these G43s
... and some of their production took place actually in the Buchenwald concentration camp with slave labour,
and there's actually been a significant amount of sabotage of those rifles that was noted.
The most common ... way POWs or Jewish concentration camp workers there would
sabotage these rifles is to either not drill the gas port hole or drill it only partially and then pin
... the gas port over the barrel. And once you've got that in place, you can't really tell if the hole goes
all the way through to the barrel or not. So, there was actually a notable amount of that that happened.
Now, you may also see reference to a K43, a Karabiner 43.
The G43 and the K43 are basically the exact same gun.
Over the course of production they made an couple of small changes,
mostly detail stuff, serrations on the front sight blades that sort of thing.
And the name was changed from Gewehr to Karabiner just as a nomenclature thing,
kind of like the change with the Sturmgewehr from machine pistol to Sturmgewehr.
Like I said, this particular one is a 1944 manufacture G43.
And let's see, a couple other things to point out. It has a scope rail on the side here.
That's actually the case with every one of the G43s and K43s, with a few limited exceptions.
They're all manufactured with scope rails and about
50,000 scopes and mounts were made for these guns.
Not necessarily all of them were actually used as sniper's weapons,
but the idea was that any of them could be.
It made it a lot simpler than taking Mausers
back into the factory to outfit them with scopes.
With one of these, get a scope, slide it on
and you've got a designated marksman's rifle.
This particular one also has an interesting stamp here.
This actually indicates that the rifle was used by ... French police forces
after the war, which is kind of cool.
Obviously there were a lot of German weapons lying around at the end
and it made sense to make use of them when it could be helpful.
So, a couple last little bits. These did use 10 round detachable magazines.
The idea was to issue troops with one mag in the gun and two spares.
As the war progressed that probably didn't remain possible for everybody, but that was the original idea.
They have a safety in the back here, this rotates 180 degrees.
That's fire and flipping it over here is safe.
We'll go ahead and field-strip this in a few minutes and give you a look at the internals.
But right now, I want to put some rounds through it.
It really is a nice smooth shooting rifle.
The gas system works well, there's a long enough travel time in the bolt that it has kind of a smooth recoil.
It doesn't really kick you, it pushes you more.
And the mass of the bolt and carrier going forward actually kind of helps pull the muzzle back down onto target.
Makes for fairly nice fast follow-up shots.
All right, let's take this G43 apart and get a look at some of the internals.
Actually, first I want to point out this piece here is actually
a sliding dust cover. There were a couple different versions.
Early on they had an automatic one that actually hooked into
the bolt carrier here and would slide back and forth on its own.
Then they later on simplified it to be a manual thing, some of them
have a little loop on the back to give you a better thumb grip on it.
Now, to disassemble this we're going to make use of the manual hold open here. Take the magazine out first.
Then pull the bolt all the way back,
and, hear it click, we engage the hold open here.
And then, ... go to the back here
(the rifle is on safe, which it needs to be for disassembly),
we're gonna push this button in and then the whole bolt and carrier assembly lifts out.
We want to be pretty ginger with this. The entire mainspring is, at this very moment, compressed inside here.
So if I drop this on the floor it'll probably spew bolt parts for yards into the next room.
We're going to go ahead and leave this one at this point,
not disassemble it the rest of the way. If you do want to see the internals, they are in fact basically
identical to the G41(W) and we have a video on that that I would highly recommend you take a look at.
So go put this down for the moment. Now another interesting element here
(see if we can get the camera in real close),
this safety lever is held in place by a kind of, like, a C-clip back here
that's seated in a groove in the rear of the receiver,
and you need ... special needle nose type pliers to get it out.
And once you do, of course that's not exactly the kind of part that you want to be taking out
in the field, say, in Russia at night in a snowstorm.
The special tool required to remove it I'm sure wasn't all that common among troops actually in the field.
Parts like that really should be avoided on a serious combat rifle and
... not a huge shortcoming of the G43, but it's something to be aware of.
In fact, because that is so easy to lose when you take it apart or difficult to get back in,
it became common knowledge or understood knowledge that these rifles
will in fact function without the safety lever in there at all.
If you take this ring out and then take the safety lever out,
without the ring the safety lever won't stay in and, well,
if the Russians are coming over the top and you're trying to figure out how to get the rifle going,
you just leave that safety out and it'll still work.
So, moving to the front of the rifle, we'll go ahead and take off the hand guard.
There's just a little spring-loaded clip that holds the nose cap on.
Take that off.
Hand guards were really quite prone to cracking,
they're fairly thin, this one is cracked.
Then, anyone who's taken apart an SVT-40 will recognize this type of gas piston.
You can actually see right here,
on the top of the rear trunnion, when the gas piston comes back
it extends out of the top of the receiver there.
That's what hits the bolt carrier. It's a short-stroke piston,
so it only goes ... about this far. Maybe as far back as there.
So, it only moves part of the way that the bolt moves.
Then inertia takes the bolt the rest of the way back.
The piston itself is made up of three parts which makes it easy to take apart.
The middle piece there.
We've got the front cup.
The gas actually comes back to here,
so there's there's a nice overlap which kind of helps seal the gas in.
And then, our rearmost chunk of the piston.
This is what actually impinges on the bolt carrier
and then we have a return spring on it as well.
So really it's a great design for the piston. It's almost identical in function to the SVT-40.
It's simple to maintain. It's easy to take apart, and it works very well. So that's the basic operation of the G43.
They took the complex but workable bolt from the G41,
and they took the excellent gas piston from the SVT-40,
put them together and, presto, you have a pretty darn nice service rifle.
Let's go ahead and put this back together.
Compress that one all the way, slide that in
Put that guy in, and then the hand guard covers it up.
... underneath ...
All right, to ... reassemble the bolt mechanism, pretty simple, just going to ...
slide this in. Push the button in again which allows it to drop back into the rear of the receiver.
Just like that, and then disengage the bolt catch, and away we go.
All ready to go again.
So thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed it. It was really cool to get to take out one of these kind of iconic
German World War Two self loaders. I had a good time shooting it and
definitely something to add to your collection if you ever get the chance.
These used to be dirt cheap because no one wanted them, and ... for some time people
have realised how kind of cool and interesting they are, and they're getting pretty expensive now.
So if you have the opportunity to add one of these ... to your collection, you should jump on it.
And, of course as always, tune back into ForgottenWeapons.com to see more cool German self-loaders.
Thanks for watching!