Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at a trio of Mauser K98k rifles
that are going to be for sale in their upcoming December of 2018 auction.
And I picked out these three because I think they do really a quite nice job of illustrating
the change in the actual production quality of the
Mauser 98k over the course of World War Two.
If you think about, like, last-ditch, poorly made, you know,
substitute rifles, what most people think about are Type 99 Arisakas. We all know about the Japanese
going from this really awesome super fancy rifle, down to this really very crude last-ditch thing.
Well, the truth of the matter is the Germans did pretty much the same thing.
And we're gonna take a look at that today starting with an
S/42G marked rifle (which is one of the the German secret code
designations that indicates a 1935 production rifle, when
they were still trying to hide their rearmament from the Allies).
So we have this, we have a 1944 production gun,
and then we have a Kriegsmodell, a 1945 production gun
that really is scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as K98 production goes.
So, let's dig right into this and see what happened to German production during the war.
Alright, so I'm going to give you a quick introduction to each
rifle individually, and then we're gonna go through each
feature of the guns and look at all three, early, middle and late
side-by-side so you can see how each feature changed.
We'll start with this guy. This is an S/42G.
And S/42 was one of the very early codes for Mauser.
Of course, they would use codes instead of actual manufacturer
names throughout the war, with the exception of BSW.
Just as a way to try and obfuscate where the guns
were being made and how many were being made.
So in this case, S/42 is Mauser and then G indicates 1935.
So this is really, like, the second year of actual Kar98k production.
Notice that this is early enough that it doesn't actually have Waffenamts, it has German commercial-type proof marks on it.
So, no swastikas anywhere to be found on a rifle this early.
Our mid-war gun here is a 'bcd', and that is Gustloffwerke,
and this is a 1944 production gun.
A lot of these markings are standardised, except they vary quite a bit.
And the 1944 bcd is one example where they only used
the second digit of the year, so this is 1944.
And this one is a pretty good example of a point at which some changes are starting to be made,
but we're not really in full Kriegsmodell panic mode yet.
And then this guy is full Kriegsmodell panic mode.
The you know what has hit the fan at this point.
This gun is code marked 'byf',
which is Mauser (Mauser went through a bunch of different codes through the course of the war).
And this is a 1945 dated gun. You'll notice that the stock on
this thing isn't even finished, it's just plain raw wood.
Anyway, let's get on to the specific features.
There are a few things here that may actually be a little bit counterintuitive.
So, you'll notice that the mid and the late war guns
both have these sheet metal front sight hoods,
where the early gun has ... well does not have one.
And the early guns actually don't even have the little rails
with little notches to use the front sight protector.
And the reason for that is very early on they actually issued a
separate sheet metal muzzle cap. It was a protector, it covered
the front sight. The problem was it was detachable ...
it wasn't permanently connected to the rifle in any way, so it could
get lost. It was found that it would be a much more effective
solution to just put a permanent front sight hood on the guns.
So this is a change that was made not to ease production,
but actually to make the rifle a little bit better in the very early years.
And we'll see one more example of that on the very other end of the rifle.
But, before we get that far, let's consider a couple other elements here.
We have cleaning rods and bayonet lugs on the early and middle term guns,
none on the Kriegsmodell. By the end of the war it was like,
"the cleaning rods, like ehh, you know what? Your expected
survival period in combat against the Russians and the Americans
is probably shorter than the time period in which you're likely
to have to clean the rifle. So we'll just leave that off entirely."
That way they didn't have to drill the hole,
didn't have to make the cleaning rods, none of that.
And the same goes for the bayonet lug.
By the end of the war people finally realise that look, sticking this
short little knife bayonet on the end of the rifle is not actually
practical for anything. So just forget it, leave them off.
As for the early and mid-term guns, these features didn't change.
Well, went from in the white to blue, but that's it.
Staying here at the muzzle end of the gun, We can take a look at
the nose caps, which also changed rather substantially.
The very earliest guns have this very finely finished, H shaped
sort of nose cap. You know, remove a little bit of material to remove weight, polish it up very nicely,
serialise it.
That's all fine and good until
time starts to actually be, like, important in making these guns.
And by the mid-point of the war they had really very much simplified that nose cap.
So there's no reason to be cutting these you know ... curved H shaped weight relief things, you know, forget it.
Just make it solid, stamp on the serial number and we're good to go.
By the end of the war we don't even have time to deal with milling the thing.
Just stamp it out, bend it around, weld it together kind of crudely there.
And by the way, you know, you've got these nice fancy spring-loaded retaining bands?
Forget it, stick a little wood screw in there, that'll hold it in place, good to go.
We can see a similar progression in the barrel band. Here at the beginning
(well, before the war even on this one), we have this nice single piece, milled barrel band.
That survives for a while, but it gets simplified.
So you can see that the profile here gets a little bit less
complex, a little bit finely contoured, we'll simplify it.
And then once again by the end of the war, it's all hands on deck,
can't even bother with milling, we'll stamp it.
Note that the inside of the sling loop here is a second stamped piece of metal ...
rolled inside it ...
and once again, the main component is stamped, bent,
crudely welded together at the side, and held in place by another little wood screw.
Now, if we take a moment at the midpoint of the rifles to take
a look at the wood stocks, we'll see some more changes.
So pre-war they were using very nice, solid, walnut for
the stocks. That's great, it's strong, it's available,
it looks really nice. The problem is it has to be cured.
So, if you're gonna make a million K98k rifles,
you have to cut down a crapload of walnut trees and then
you have to let that wood season. Like, it has to dry out
before you can actually carve it into shape and use it effectively.
So it actually didn't take all that long, by the time the war had just barely begun
Germany had run out of cured, ready to use, wooden stock blanks
for the K98k. And at that point they had to make a substitution.
And what they did was go to laminate wood, aka plywood.
If we look up close here, you can see all the little layers of wood in there.
Now, this was a simplification made necessary, or a change made necessary,
by the rate of production that they were trying to achieve.
But this actually (despite not looking nearly as nice), this isn't a sacrifice in any way.
This laminate wood is actually stronger than
the walnut and it doesn't require any curing time.
You can build these stocks (assemble them together, glue them together) and they're ready to go.
So arguably this is one of those things that maybe they should have started with because it's stronger and it's quicker.
That laminate stock usage would continue all the way to the very end of the war,
although this one has a stock that hasn't
even been finished, it's just raw wood.
Moving along, we can take a look at the trigger guards
and magazine floor plates. These of course
start, as with everything, quite nice.
We have a milled trigger guard here,
we have a milled magazine floorplate.
Note that we have a screw back here holding it in place,
and then this fancy second locking screw to make sure that this screw doesn't come loose.
Ooh, la la, how very high quality.
Mid-war, still not bad. We still have a milled floor plate
We've still got the secondary locking screw, even in 1944.
But some accommodation has had to be made, and we now
have a stamped inner section here on the trigger guard.
So the the trigger guard itself has gone from being milled
to being assembled from a couple stamped components,
even though the magazine floor plate is still milled.
And then of course by '45, dear Lord, the Russians are
coming, just for whatever it takes, make more rifles.
We now have a stamped floor plate to go along with the stamped trigger guard.
The secondary locking screws, that craps long gone, like forget it.
Just put in a screw, tighten it down. It'll be fine.
What we don't see changing here is anything substantial
in the actual receiver or bolt or barrel of the gun.
These parts had to be made, of course, to a certain
standard to be safe and accurate and functional.
And those elements were not sacrificed at any point during the war.
So, even when we got beyond the Kriegsmodell into some of the really last-ditch Volkssturm rifles, even then
the lock-up was safe, the locking lugs were well made, properly heat treated, the barrels were good,
the guns would be accurate, maybe they had to counterbore them to make them accurate,
but ... the guns would shoot safely.
No nation, Germany, Japan or anybody else is going to
actually issue rifles that are legitimately unsafe to their soldiers.
Like, that is so counterproductive that nobody is going to do it.
We have one small change to point out in the rear sights.
And this is truly an example of some kind of goofy levels of production
finesse at the beginning of the war. Before the war the
underside of the rear sight had the range markings on it,
just like the topside. And this isn't even one of
those sights that, like, there's a reason to stand up.
You know, this can make sense if you have a second
sighting aperture back here, and you stand the
sight up for the pointlessly long-range settings.
But, on the K98k all of your settings are done just like this.
You never are going to look at the bottom, and yet they engrave
range markings on here just as nicely as they had done on the top.
It should of course come as no surprise that it didn't take long for
someone to point out how stupid that was, and those things are long gone by the middle of the war.
Even by the very end though
the sight had not degraded any further.
You might think that they would stop bothering
to mark the sight out to 2,000 metres by 1945,
but no, this is exactly the same as it was partway through the war.
And with the exception of the excessive markings
on the bottom, this is the same as the pre-war guns.
And now we have reached the butt-stocks,
and there are two things to look at here.
One is the disassembly disk and the other is the butt plate itself.
So we'll start with the disassembly disk.
Early on, this is a nice milled part, you know, both sides, through the stock
(and by the way this is here because when you disassemble
the K98k bolt, the Mauser 98 bolt in general,
you want to press the firing pin down against a surface
to relieve firing pin spring pressure, and you ...
don't want to damage the tip of the firing pin itself.
So this is put in there as a place where you can put the firing pin
in the centre, press the bolt down against this to compress the
spring and take it apart. So it's a nice handy little tool to have.)
However, it doesn't necessarily need to be finely milled
and by the middle of the war they had simplified it.
So it's still there, but now it's a pair of
stamped pieces that are connected by a hollow rivet through the centre to hold them in place.
Still works just the same though.
By the end of the war (maybe you saw this coming),
they were trying to cut production time anywhere they could,
and the idea of both drilling a hole in the stock and then
making a 3-part stamped assembly to go on top of it,
well, maybe we can do something simpler.
Maybe we can just drill a hole straight through both
the butt plate and the back of the stock right here at the toe,
and you know what? That'll work just fine.
You can cram the firing pin into that for disassembly,
if you're gonna live long enough to need to disassemble your bolt for some reason.
And now the one last
bit is something I mentioned at the very beginning.
I said that there was a change that was made early in the war that was
actually an improvement, not a sacrifice, and that's the butt plate.
You might look at this and figure well, this had to be early
and they went to a flat butt plate because it was less material.
It's actually the other way around,
The K98k design actually started with this nice flat butt plate.
(So, you got a nice diagonal screw up there.)
And the problem was they found that this didn't do all that good of a job of protecting the stock.
So, because it's flush with the edge of the stock here,
you leave open the opportunity for chips and scuffs
and you can damage this fairly easily.
So early on, before there was any need to do so from a,
you know, materials or a working time point of view,
early on they changed this to a cupped butt plate
that actually encompasses the entire bottom of the stock.
And they did that because this is going to do a much better job of protecting the stock.
You can see down here at the toe, you're not gonna, you know,
make a chip in the bottom that's going to turn into a crack that runs up the length of the stock.
So this was a product improvement that happened to take place
at the same time that they were also starting to look for simplifications.
And with the exception of the change in the disassembly hole, by the very end of the war
they were still going with this same cupped butt plate.
This was something that could be stamped out and they didn't find any further room to simplify that.
You know, a lot of people would argue that they should have
gone straight to this thing in the very beginning.
That the idea of equipping your infantry with a rifle that has all of the fit and finish of a fine commercial
sporting rifle is kind of a foolish waste of resources.
And there's some validity to that. It's like, you know, did they ever really need the sight gradations
on the bottom of the sight? Really? Do you have to have these finely milled and polished barrel fittings.
Is there anything that this fancy version actually does better than the last ditch Kriegsmodell?
Not really, I suppose there is ...
a morale element to what you're equipping the troops with.
If they see at the very beginning of the war that they've got some really crummy looking gun,
it may give the impression that the country is just not up to snuff,
and can't handle it, can't manage to get any good weapons production.
Where you give them something fine and fancy and very expensive, it gives you some pride and some expectation in, you know,
... if they're able to make you this for a rifle, well the air support and the artillery support must be great.
Ultimately, the Kriegsmodell worked just as well as the standard 98k in the field.
Of course, changes like this aren't going to affect the course of the war.
It wasn't like ... you know, reducing to this standard at the beginning
would have allowed them to make just enough more rifles that Germany could have won World War Two.
Yeah, that never would have had any possibility of happening.
But of course, it is primarily interesting here just to take a look at what did happen during the course of the war.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, learnt something about the K98k today.
If you would like to add any one of these three to your own collection, they're all very nice
K98k examples, and they are all coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
If you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from there you'll find follow-up links to each of the three catalogue pages
Rock Island has for these three rifles. And if you want to poke around in their catalogue
they have a bunch of other K98ks as well, including a whole lot of snipers this time.
So anyway, thank you very much for watching.