[ Troop Trials G41(W) ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a troop trials Walther Gewehr 41.
This is an extremely rare piece and it's really cool.
Now in ... the spring of 1941 the German Army
really wanted to get itself a semi-automatic rifle.
The American Army had a semi-auto rifle, the Soviet Army had a ... semi-auto rifle.
And here the Wehrmacht had gone and invaded all of Russia with bolt action Mausers.
So a lot of German troops were taking Soviet Tokarevs
wherever and whenever they could, they liked them.
And there was quite a lot of complaint coming back
that the German Army didn't have the equivalent itself.
So the German Army puts out a request to manufacturers for a self-loading rifle.
And there are two primary guns that they get back in response,
one is from Mauser, and one is from Walther.
These are both gas trap style systems, ... objectively speaking, they're pretty clunky guns.
But the Mauser is really, really clunky, and the Walther is only kind of sort of clunky.
In fact Walter would eventually win this trial by ignoring
a bunch of the really dumb requirements from the Army.
Which kind of pissed off Mauser, who was looking at it like,
"Hey, we did exactly what you asked, and those guys cheated and they won."
Well, Walther cheated because they recognised that what the Army was asking for was stupid.
Namely, no moving parts on the outside of the gun,
and essentially having it duplicate the handling of a bolt action rifle
in case ... the semi-auto function stopped working.
Anyway, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here.
In the spring of 1941 testing and deliveries were just beginning
and even from the very beginning Mauser was having trouble.
The Mauser ... proposal for the Gewehr 41, the G41(M), was a really complex gun.
(I have a separate video on it which I'll post a link to at the end of this one.)
It required a lot of specialised materials, special steels,
and Mauser was having real trouble building them.
Like by April/May of '41, the spring of '41, they've managed to submit like 40 of them.
Walther's already got 400 rifles of its pattern delivered, and it's got another 800 on the way.
Ultimately Mauser would be limited by the
complexity of their design and material requirements.
Walther's limitations were simply factory production capacity.
And so what would ultimately happen when the ... Walther gets adopted
is it's contracted out to several different factories, aside from just Walther.
Anyway, deliveries continue, ultimately by the ... summer of '42
Walther has got a contract for 5,000 rifles for troop trials.
They've delivered them, they've gone through trials, they're well-liked by troops.
Mauser is still struggling to complete its original troop trials.
And so December of '42 Walther is formally acknowledged as the winner,
and the rifle is accepted and the "G41" is officially designated as Walther's rifle.
However, in that first 5,000 guns that were produced by Walter
and ... sold to the German government, there were a number of different features.
Those are the guns that were used for the initial troop trials.
And the most substantial difference on them is that they have a
push-button bolt release on the left side of the action.
That, and several other features, would be dropped basically by the second contract.
So after the very first 5,000 guns a lot of these features disappear,
the gun begins to be simplified for mass production.
So, let's take a look at what the troop trials guns have that distinguishes them.
Let's start by taking a look at some of the markings here.
We have our serial number, 4641. And of course German standard practice
was to make guns in batches of 10,000 with letter suffixes ... every time they needed a new 10,000.
Well, there are no letter suffixes on this, that "ac" is the factory code for Walther.
This is actually the 4,641st Gewehr 41(W) that was ever made.
So that right there puts it in the first 5,000 aside from the features that we'll go over in a moment.
We also have the designation: Gewehr 41 (W).
Until the trials were formally completed there were different proposed Gewehr 41s,
a (W) from Walther and an (M) from Mauser.
Once the trial finished this would be replaced with just "G41",
once the G41 was the Walter design.
We don't need to go totally nuts showing you every internal serial number,
but here's the nose cap.
The muzzle nut. The front sight block.
The trigger guard.
The rear receiver cover. The safety flag.
The butt plate there. The Germans were big fans of
serialising every single little tiny part of the guns.
Now the Gewehr 41 looks like it has a detachable magazine,
but this is actually a fixed 10 round magazine.
It can be removed as part of the field stripping process, but for actual reloading
well, when the rifle is empty the bolt locks open.
And you can then reload this with a pair of 5 round stripper clips.
And then for the ... weapons that were mass produced ... for use in the field,
you would then just pop the bolt handle back slightly,
that drops the hold open and then the bolt can go forward.
However the very first batch, as the gun was originally designed,
actually has a bolt ... release button on the left side.
So you can press that and it'll drop this closed.
The idea being you would reload this with two stripper clips,
and then your hand's right there, and you just push the button and it closes.
That's convenient, but is it really strictly necessary?
And is it something that's easily removed to make the gun faster and cheaper to produce?
Yes. Yes, you can just get rid of that, and they did get rid of that.
Alright, if we take a quick look on the inside at how this actually works.
I'm going to pull the bolt back slightly. This button is going to
right there, when you push it over it cams the back of the floor plate down.
Which is going to pull in that bolt hold-open tab.
And so the bolt can go forward. That's all there was to it.
Now what happens here is when the bolt's locked back,
spring pressure from the bolt pushing forward is going to hold that tab in place
even when the follower is depressed.
And that's why what you can do is just pull the bolt back manually, which will reset it.
Let's see, push that down, there you go.
You can see when that's down and I pull the bolt back, that tab goes in,
allows the bolt to go forward. This is just a nice little shortcut.
There are a couple of other elements to the rifle
that are early production features that would change over time.
One is this bolt guide rail here.
For comparison here, we have our troop trials gun,
and we have another very early, but not troop trials first contract example.
And so the first thing I can point out is this bolt guide [rail] gets lengthened.
And you can see they also add actually an undercut ... rail to it,
where this is just a flat short rail. So that's one change.
The G41 was not originally intended to be a sniper weapon,
but Hitler really wanted scopes on stuff, so they went ahead and added scope rails.
Now they basically never put an optic into production.
There's some prototype optics, but this was never really issued with optics.
But they did put rails onto them, and you can see that the profile of the cuts
on the rear sight block have changed a bit to accommodate those rails.
Note of course G41(W) pre-adoption,
and G41 post adoption.
And then we have the serrated surface on the receiver cover.
That's useful because you have to push this forward to disassemble the gun.
The serrations here would remain, but on the troop trials gun
they also serrated the back of the spring guide.
That serration would go away and the spring guides were just smooth.
I hardly need to say this, but it's really unusual for a troop trials gun
from 1941 Germany to have survived all the way through to the present day.
These are guns that would have been used in the heat of combat at every opportunity.
This was by far the best and most technologically advanced German rifle
in combat service when it was developed.
These guns continued to be used on the Eastern Front
basically until they broke down and were unserviceable,
because it was the best thing out there.
And the German Army in Russia would need all the firepower it could get,
and even that wouldn't save it.
So, extremely cool to get an example like this, numbers matching no less. Very, very cool.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.