Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
and I am taking a look at a couple of the guns that are coming up
for sale in their February of 2016 Regional Auction.
One that a lot of people have been very interested in that
I actually have an opportunity to take a look at here today,
is this Model 1895 Winchester rifle. Now the Model 1895
was kind of the last gasp of the lever action rifle for the Winchester company.
It was the most modernised of their lever actions,
and unfortunately ... it's kind of a little too late to really
catch on commercially. ... At this point there were bolt action rifles,
and starting to become self-loading rifles that were doing a
better job of competing in the marketplace than the Winchester 95.
So if we look at the history of this rifle a little bit from the American perspective,
what we see is in 1886 John Browning develops the Winchester 86, which is
the first Winchester lever rifle that's really capable of firing powerful rifle ammunition.
It's got a much stronger lock up than the previous rifles that Winchester had.
And then they introduced the 1894 which is the first Winchester developed for smokeless powder rifle ammunition.
It was chambered for the now ubiquitous .30-30 cartridge. That was remarkably popular,
and then they followed that very quickly with the 1895.
This is similar in lock up to the 94, the big difference is that it has a box magazine instead of a tube magazine.
So the idea here was that this rifle would be capable of using pointed cartridges, spitzer cartridges.
Where you wouldn't have this issue of the cartridges lining up bullet tip to primer
and potentially detonating in the tube under recoil.
So that was the idea of the 95 is you've got a 5 round box magazine. You can handle
top-of-the-line, current production military cartridges. The problem was it was just a little bit too late.
So by ... 1914, at the beginning of World War One, Winchester 95 production was basically shut down, basically over.
At that point they had sold about 67,000 of the guns, both military and sporting.
But they'd sold 707,000 of the Winchester 94s, so 10 times as many 94s as these guys.
And it just wasn't viable to keep producing them.
However, then World War One breaks out.
And here's the US with a lot of industrial potential capacity, and the US is neutral in the war.
A lot of the combatants in World War One turned to the United States as a source of munitions.
Initially, Winchester actually attempted to sell these rifles to the British government.
They chambered one in .303, standard British .303 military ammunition.
Unfortunately, while the British needed guns pretty badly, they really wanted a bolt action rifle.
And what they ultimately did was actually went to the Winchester company
and signed a contract for Winchester to make them Pattern 1914 rifles.
Which basically is the same as the US Model of 1917 Enfield.
So Winchester, undeterred, turned to Russia and offered Russia Winchester 1895s.
Now Russia was in a particularly tight spot here, they had started the war with
about a million more soldiers than they had rifles in the first place.
And then in the early months of combat Russia was losing something on the order of 200,000 rifles per month simply to
combat casualties, destruction in the field. I mean, this is a just mind-boggling shortage of arms for the Russian Army.
And they needed guns. They were scrounging guns from pretty much anywhere they could find stuff.
They ... bought Arisakas from the Japanese, they were buying ... Gras rifles.
(Lebels were cutting edge, and the French were kind of using all of those themselves.)
They bought Kropatscheks from Portugal. Anything they could get their hands on.
And one of the major contracts that the Russians put through,
was with the Remington company as well for Mosin-Nagant rifles.
Ultimately between Remington and Westinghouse, the Russians would order 3,000,000 91/30 Mosin-Nagant rifles from the United States.
Which is great, ... they're cheaper rifles than something like this, they're a little simpler.
The problem was these massive orders required a significant amount of start-up time.
Companies like Westinghouse and Remington literally had to go and build
entirely new factories to fulfil these orders, and that took time.
So the advantage Winchester had here was they had a production line. They were able to approach the Russians and say,
"We can give you these guns, and we can start shipping them next month."
And that was something the Russians needed. That was a good balance, you know, getting a smaller number of these rifles right now,
while they were waiting for the major production of Mosin-Nagants to tool up. And that's exactly what they did.
Ultimately the Russians signed a contract ordering 100,000 of these the day after,
literally one day after they signed their first contract for Mosin-Nagants.
So the contract was signed in November of 1914. Deliveries were supposed to start the next month, December of 1914,
and the final delivery would be in ... November of 1915. So it's going to take about a year to produce 100,000 of these.
Well, ... it didn't quite work out that way.
Between a couple of different factors the first deliveries didn't actually happen until June in the summer of [1915].
Now part of that was Winchester's fault. It took them longer to tool up that production line.
You know, they'd been making Winchester 95s here and there, kind of almost a custom order sort of basis.
And changing that up to major mass production wasn't as easy as they thought it would be.
There were also a couple of modifications to the rifle that they had assumed would be pretty easy
that turned out to take a little more time. The main one being adapting the mechanism to take Mosin-Nagant stripper clips.
And at the same time we can also blame some of this on the Russian military,
they appear to have been really protective of gauges that were necessary for
confirming that parts were made to the proper tolerance. And they wouldn't release them to ... Winchester.
That delayed inspections and delayed acceptance of the rifles, and it was kind of a mess.
But what are they going to do? ... It's not like
they're going to go to someone else to get rifle contracts, because everyone else
is either already making rifles for them, or for someone else, or is actively fighting in World War One themselves.
So the US was in this financially extremely good position through most of World War One
where we were kind of the only go to source for much of the Allied powers.
Now impressively, Winchester actually managed to finish the last delivery of this contract only two weeks behind schedule.
And a second order was also made. In August of 1915 a second order for another 200,000 of these rifles was put in place.
Ultimately about 294,000 guns were completed and delivered to the Russians.
The difference between that and the 300,000 ordered was shipping losses,
these things had to cross the ocean on boats, and a few of those boats got sunk by the Germans.
So some of the rifles ended up at the bottom of the ocean.
There was also a substantial rejection rate by Russian inspectors at the Winchester plant.
And so there's a substantial number of additional rifles that were made
and were rejected for various, potentially stupid, reasons.
Things like the wood grain not looking right would get a rifle potentially rejected.
So those ended up being sold by Winchester on the commercial market after the war. ...
When we take a closer look at this we'll go over some of those details and how you can tell the difference
between a Russian accepted one and a commercially sold one.
Anyway these guns they went to Russia, they were put into service, and they actually saw quite a lot of use in World War One.
These things didn't just sit in the rear lines, these were highly effective, modern rifles for the Russians.
Especially compared to some of the other stuff that they were having to scrounge.
So in particular there aren't a whole lot of documents, but there is some photographic evidence that you can make assumptions from.
And it appears that a lot of these rifles were given to Russian units from places like Latvia and Estonia,
and Finland, Finnish volunteers. ... Places in Eastern Europe.
These were areas where the German threat was the highest, because the German threat
was geographically closest, and it was important to arm these guys right off the bat.
In particular there's good photographic evidence for Latvian units equipped entirely with Winchester 1895s.
That gets potentially even more interesting when you consider that some of those Latvian units
were the same guys who were major participants in the ultimate communist overthrow of the Czar.
And so it's probable that a lot of these rifles ended up
in Moscow in the middle of political turmoil and chaos.
Now, a lot of the guns were destroyed during the war. Like I said, they were seen in front line use.
A lot of the pictures you'll see from combat show guns that have heavily worn finish.
They were used, you know, if you had one of these and you got shot and became a casualty,
someone else was going to pick this rifle up and use it because this was a good rifle.
What was left appears to have been mostly sent to Spain during the 1930s.
Russia was a supporter of the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, which included a lot of socialists and communists.
... Russia kind of cleaned out its post-World War One arms inventory and sent all of the miscellaneous,
mismatched and generally difficult to deal with guns to the Spanish.
And charged them for it too, got ... most of Spain's gold bullion in the process.
However, if not most of the rifles that Russia had left, certainly many thousands of these did go to Spain.
So you'll also occasionally find them here in the US with some marks indicating Spanish re-arsenal and refurbishment.
Alright, why don't we take a closer look ... at the details of this thing, because
these really are a very cool example of a World War One combat rifle.
Alright, let's start by going through the various markings that you'll find on these.
On the rear tang you'll find the standard Winchester
model identification information: Model 1895, Winchester, trademarks, patents etc.
On the bridge of the receiver, now the finish on this is kind of worn, it's a little hard to see here,
but these are marked 7.62mm, because these are chambered for the standard Russian 7.62x54mm cartridge.
We then have a little mark in an oval that was a Remington [Winchester] acceptance mark.
On the side of the receiver we have all the various patent dates. And various scratches from being through World War One.
Alright, this is difficult to see on this particular rifle, but right here on the receiver and right here on the barrel,
this little rounded corner square with an X, there's a cyrillic letter that's a backwards N which I ought to know the name of, but I don't.
We'll call it XN3 marking, that was the Russian inspector's mark. So when these rifles were inspected
and approved as being fit for Russian military service, that's when Winchester would officially get paid for that rifle.
And the rifle would be packed up and shipped to Russia for use. So on the rifles that were
rejected and later sold commercially you will not find these inspection stamps.
Now there should also be one of those stamps on the buttstock of the rifle.
It should be typically right about here, on this particular one that stamp is gone.
The stock is worn enough that you just can't see evidence of it.
However, given that we do have the ones on the receiver and the barrel, this was definitely an actual World War One rifle.
You can see here that there is substantial pitting on the magazine under the finish,
so this gun was refinished at some point. That's why some of these markings are faint.
Now, right up here we have a set of stripper clip guides. These are one of the things that are
particularly distinctive to the Russian pattern of the Winchester 1895. They were added at Russian insistence.
The standard 1895 rifles did not use any sort of clip.
In fact interestingly on these the way you're supposed to load them is to
put a cartridge in vertically and then pivot it down 90 degrees into the magazine.
On these Winchester agreed to go in and modify the action to accept Russian stripper clips.
That took them more time and was more difficult than they anticipated,
but ultimately what you have are a pair of stripper clip guides that are attached to the receiver by screws.
And I have tried one of these, and lo and behold, a standard 1895 stripper clip fits in and strips off into the action.
Now mechanically these are a pretty strong action. What you have here are a pair of locking bolts.
These slide in recesses in the receiver, and when you close the lever completely they get pushed upward
and they lock just behind this notch in the bolt. So they lock the bolt into the receiver, keep it safe.
You'll also notice that these 1895s have a grip safety,
well, not really a grip safety, but they have a manual safety built into the lever.
So if you don't have this pulled down, you cannot open the lever.
It's a little hook that catches on the lever itself, so if I don't pull that down
that won't open. And that just prevents the lever from being knocked out of battery.
One of the potential issues for a rifle like this in World War One is when this is open
you've got all sorts of places for crap to get into the gun.
So if you were actually carrying this in combat during the war,
you would absolutely want to keep this thing closed up as much as possible.
One other marking to make note of here. On the bottom tang you will find a Remington [Winchester] inspection mark
and the serial number, so this one is 210,000 and change.
The first serial number range for that first 100,000 order for these guns was 74,000 to about 174,000.
It starts there because it picks up at the end of the other Winchester 1895 production.
And then the second order goes from 174,000 to 374,000, give or take.
So this would be one of the early-ish rifles in that second major order.
The sights on these rifles were specifically made to match ballistically the 54 rimmed cartridge.
And these are regulated in arshins, so you'll see the flip-up sight goes out to 32, that's 3,200 arshins,
which is about 2,500 yards. An arshin is equal to 28 inches, about three quarters of a yard.
And it was the standard Russian land distance measurement. In fact it actually comes from the length of a man's stride.
A slightly shorter person perhaps than is typical today.
On the side of the rear sight we have this series of steps, and this is where you have 400 out to 1,400 arshins.
So ... like 300 to 1,000 yards approximately.
And of course on the side of the barrel we have another 7.62mm marking.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. These are difficult to find
but pretty darn cool. This one's a bit rough but a very neat rifle.
If you would like to have it yourself, it is coming up for sale here.
So take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page on the rifle.
You can go there, check out their pictures, and if you want it you can place a bid right there on-line.
Thanks for watching.