Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House checking out
some of the guns in their September of 2015 Premier auction.
And I noticed there are actually a couple of anti-tank rifles in this auction,
and it was a perfect opportunity for me to pull out this beast of a Mauser.
This is a Tank Abwehr Gewehr, Model of 1918,
and it is really the world's first purpose-built anti-tank rifle.
So what had happened was in 1917, sort of in 1916, but largely in the Battle of Cambrai,
the first real British use of combined arms and a whole lot of tanks. This was in 1917.
And one of the results of this battle was the Germans started putting a big R&D effort
into developing some sort of gun that the infantry could use to destroy these new tanks that were a problem.
And what Mauser came up with was this thing, which is basically just a scaled-up Mauser rifle.
It's a single shot gun, it's got this ginormous bolt back here, four locking lugs.
We'll take a closer look at that in a moment, but they were using a cartridge, a 13.2mm,
you'll commonly see it referred to as TuF, that is Tank und Flieger, or tank and aircraft.
It was a cartridge that the Germans intended to be used in a new heavy machine gun
that they were working on developing.
Frankly, the German equivalent to the Browning M2 that would come out later.
So they took this cartridge, and they put it into service in this single-shot rifle as an anti-tank round.
So it was a hardened steel cored, armour-piercing projectile.
A total of a 795 grain bullet moving at about 2,650 feet per second.
Now if you do a little bit of math you'll to come to the conclusion that that is about
just under 12,500 foot-pounds of energy. Which is about five times as much energy as a .30-06 rifle.
So, I've seen some conflicting reports on just how unpleasant these guns are to shoot.
Some people say that after a couple of rounds your ears will start bleeding.
Or at the very least, you will be not desirous of shooting more.
I've read from some other people who shot these, you know, fairly recently who say they're actually not that bad.
Now the the only thing going for you to mitigate the recoil of this beast, is the fact that
with the bipod in place the thing weighs 41 pounds. So that's also about five times a typical .30-06 rifle.
I have not fired one myself, so I can't speak to it directly.
However, these definitely would have been an unpleasant gun to carry around the battlefield.
They are very heavy, 41 pounds with the bipod, 35 pounds without.
They have no sling points, you'll notice that on here. There's no sling on it, there are no swivels on it.
That's original, these things never had slings.
So either get a guy at the muzzle and a guy at the stock, or one person slinging it over their shoulder.
Just not really a convenient gun to be dragging around in the trenches or in mobile warfare.
They did have a bipod for stability and shooting. Sights go out 500 yards.
And reportedly these were actually pretty effective, pretty good guns. They got the job done.
This was of course World War One, armour in tanks wasn't all that thick yet.
It was primarily intended for .30 calibre rifle fire protection.
This thing could penetrate about 20mm of vertical armour at 100 yards,
and that was enough to get the job done in 1918.
So, by the end of the war they were getting production of this thing really kind of moving.
They produced in total a little over 15,000 of them. Production started in April of 1918
and ran, of course, till November at the very end of the war. That's really quite a lot of these guns.
You'll see a lot of pictures of them captured.
Interestingly the US army actually ended up in possession of quite a lot of them and
used them for, in some cases, destructive testing in the development of the .50 calibre
Browning machine gun cartridge, the .50 BMG.
So they have an interesting place in history after the war in that developmental program,
as well as during the war as the first effective anti-tank rifle.
Alright, so let's take a little bit of a closer look here. The bolt on this functions just like a regular Mauser.
We have a bolt release on this side.
Frankly the difference is you could use this thing as a police baton if you needed to.
Instead of the typical Mauser two locking lugs this has four,
because it's a massively higher pressure cartridge. And we just have a striker back here,
just like you would with a regular Mauser.
Blade ejector, normal extractor. Really they simply took a Mauser rifle and scaled it up
to take a humungous cartridge.
Now you'll see they did add a pistol grip to this thing, that is because of course the stock has to be
really huge, very wide in order to withstand the recoil of the gun.
There's no way that you can have a traditional style grip on this thing.
So the sights are pretty typical of Mauser, again scaled up but the same as a regular Mauser 98,
with the exception that the rear sight only goes out to 500. Of course an armour-piercing
cartridge is velocity dependent, and as it gets out to long range it loses that velocity.
So the rear sight is just an open notch, the front is a peaked barleycorn, just like you'd get on a Gewehr 98.
So the bipod here is also worth taking a closer look at.
This is the original welded tube steel style of bipod. It does not have any cant forward and back,
but it does rotate quite easily, a full 360 degrees.
So when you rotate this 90 degrees so the legs are parallel with the barrel, you can pull the bipod off.
Got two big spikes here to hold it in the ground.
And now a lot of the guns that you'll find don't have this tube steel bipod,
instead they actually use an MG 08/15 bipod, which is a
bent sheet metal style of bipod. They both work, they both fit,
that was one of the ideas. It has the exact same bipod mount that the 08/15 does.
I can show you, pull that latch down to remove
and there's our bipod mount.
There we go.
I've never had the chance to shoot one of these before, I would like to someday, I think.
I could be talked out of it, probably, but the ammo is pretty scarce for these ...
Oh, I should mention despite the fact that these are 13.2mm, which is significantly over .50 calibre,
they have been specifically removed from jurisdiction of the NFA. So they are not legally destructive devices.
Legally, they're treated just as any other typical rifle, so if you can own a rifle, you can own this behemoth.
And if you would like to own this behemoth, check out the link in the description text below.
That will take you to Rock Island's auction page on it, and see their pictures,
set up an account on-line, place a bid on it if you think this has a place on your wall.
I would suggest a whole bunch of hooks going into studs to hold this thing up, so it doesn't tear your drywall down.
But definitely a cool piece. Hope you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.