[ Swedish m/96 Mauser in Finnish Service ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I have here today a Finnish used Swedish m/96 Mauser.
Now, just last week Henry and Josh over at 9-Hole Reviews did a video on the m/96.
They took one out to their 1,000 yard course, and essentially clobbered it.
It proved to be their best performing iron-sighted rifle on their course of fire to date.
So if you're interested in how these fantastic rifles can shoot,
check out their video, which I'll link at the end of this one.
And if you're interested in the developmental history of the Swedish Mausers,
well, Othais and Mae over at C&Rsenal have a pair of excellent videos
that go way deep into the development and the production,
and the well the use in World War One in particular of the Swedish Mausers.
They actually have an episode on the rifles, the m/96 like this,
and also one on the m/94 carbines that came first.
And I'll link to one of those at the end of this video as well.
So you may be wondering where does that leave us, why am I talking about one of these as well?
And the answer is: I'd like to talk about the use of the m/96 in Finland during the Winter War,
because that is actually a pretty significant part of this rifle's history.
Especially its actual combat service history where these rifles saw warfare in Finland,
not so much actually in Sweden.
So let's start in 1917 when the Finnish Civil War begins.
There are already over 1,000 Swedish Mausers in Finland at that point.
They'd been acquired privately by individual Finns,
and they were used in the Civil War.
These are, as you will see if you watch Henry's video, these are fantastic shooting rifles.
And that quality was very much understood and appreciated
by Finnish marksmen, competitive marksmen as well as Civil Guard members.
And so the first recorded like proper inventory numbers we have are in 1919,
when the Civil Guard was really being set up.
And it was ... officially given 1,390 Swedish m/96 rifles,
which accounted for most of what was in Finland at that time.
By 1924 we know that there were about 2,000 of them in Finland.
About two-thirds of those being in private hands, and another third in Civil Guard inventory.
Now what happened, in the early 1920s the Finnish Civil Guard had an assortment of different weapons.
They had some Swedish Mausers, they obviously had a lot of Mosin-Nagants.
And they also had a lot of Arisakas
that had come through Russian ownership and ended up in Finnish possession.
And in the early 1920s the Civil Guard used all of these different things.
In fact, what's interesting about the m/96s is they were really good target rifles,
as I've already said a couple of times.
So good in fact that guardsmen in official shooting competitions
were actually given handicap bonuses if they were using Arisakas or Mosin-Nagants.
Now that's not so much necessarily because, especially by the late '20s,
... the Mosins in Finnish service weren't very good,
part of this was the poor availability
of good quality ammunition in 7.62x54 in the early '20s in Finland.
But the m/96 was such a good rifle that if they didn't artificially compensate
the scores of people shooting other rifles that were in fact more common in Finland,
they were worried that, "Well, everyone's going to switch to shooting Swedish Mausers.
And ... then we're going to have some trouble because that's not actually our issue rifle.
We don't have a lot of them, we want people to actually train with their service weapons."
Anyway, I'm getting a little bit off topic here.
By the late 1920s, the Civil Guard had standardised on Mosin-Nagants.
And so the Swedish Mauser wasn't really a major element in Finnish military planning,
until we hit 1939-1940 when the Winter War breaks out.
And at that point Finland is not very well prepared.
Field Marshal Mannerheim is really quite vocal to the Finnish government
that they are not ready for a war with Russia.
That this will be a major problem, they don't have enough armament,
they don't have enough training, things are out of maintenance.
And one of the responses is that, with the outbreak of the war,
the Finns purchase a whole lot of Swedish Mausers from Sweden.
Now in 1925 Sweden had sort of unilaterally reduced the size of its military pretty significantly.
And so Sweden actually had a lot of these rifles available that they didn't need.
In fact, if you look at the data, you'll see that production of these rifles
kind of ends in 1925, they ... had more than they needed.
And so they were happy to sell Finland ultimately what would be 77,000 of them.
To put this in context: that's approaching, it's not quite, but that's getting close
to the total number of Finnish M39 Mosins that were ever produced.
There were a lot of these things that came into Finland in the first couple of months,
essentially during the Winter War: January, February, March of 1940.
So many in fact, and ... in such a rush, that when the Winter War ended
there were still something like 15,000 Swedish Mausers
that were in their original packing material.
The Finns hadn't even got a chance to unpack them.
They also hadn't paid for that last batch yet.
Let me follow up on that in a moment and first say, these also did see service in Finland.
If you look at the data you will see that these rifles typically ... were assigned to things like
anti-aircraft units, and naval units, and coastal ... artillery units, and coastal infantry units.
And that kind of makes one think that these are second-line rifles.
And yes, to a large extent the idea was the guys who are in the heaviest fighting,
the guys who are in the Karelian Isthmus,
give them standardised Mosin-Nagants, simplify the ammunition ... that sort of thing.
And give the Swedish Mausers to people in other areas
where ... you're not going to have those logistical issues.
Well, those other areas did include a couple of places that saw a lot of service.
So a lot of these went up into the northern areas of Finland.
There were about 8,000 men of the Swedish Volunteer Corps
who came to Finland to join in the fighting in the Winter War.
Sweden was officially neutral, but the vast majority of the Swedish population
supported the Finnish cause in the Winter War.
There was fundraising, in fact the rifles that were brought by the Swedish Volunteer Corps
were all paid for by volunteer fundraising in Sweden.
And the Swedish Army was willing to grant leave to Swedish Army officers and men
to go fight in Finland, as long as their jobs weren't judged as essentially crucial in Sweden.
So the Swedish government tacitly approved of these volunteers coming to Finland,
they just weren't willing to take on Russia by officially taking a side in the war.
At any rate, these 8,000 volunteers left all their guns behind
when they came back at the end of the Winter War.
And so that was another 8,000 Swedish Mausers that came into Finland,
including, by the way, close to 1,000 carbines.
The Finns never purchased any of the m/94 or 94-14 carbines, but the volunteers did bring some,
and there were some that were privately acquired in Finland.
And by the end of World War Two the Finns had about 900 carbines as well.
Anyway, in addition to being used up in the northern areas,
that's where the Swedish volunteers were mostly deployed.
And that's an area where resupply was difficult anyway,
so send them all the ammunition that we get from the Swedes,
send them Swedish Mausers, they'll work out nicely up there.
And then coastal infantry, like the Finnish Navy doesn't actually have a lot of boats,
it actually also has a lot of infantry units.
And the coastal artillery and the coastal infantry units
saw a lot of fighting during the Winter War,
especially ... towards the end of the Winter War.
And so those guys armed with Swedish Mausers did in fact see quite a lot of combat.
Now this all comes to an end after 105 days.
And like I said, the Finns never even got a chance to unpack
the last batch of Swedish Mausers that they had got.
And at this point, like no sooner had the Winter War ended really,
than Germany goes and starts sending troops into Denmark and Norway.
And Sweden gets rather nervous about this and kind of asks,
"Can we get like some of those rifles back?
That whole we downsized our military 1925 thing, like maybe we're going to rethink that now."
And so about a third of Finland's Swedish Mausers went back to Sweden
in the spring, the summer, maybe the fall of 1940, about 30,000 rifles in total.
Including 6,000 of the guns that the Volunteer Corps had brought.
15,000 that had been packed up and never actually unwrapped or been paid for,
"Well, we don't have to pay for them, we'll just send them back."
And then about 10,000 additional guns taken back out of Finnish inventory.
So let's take a closer look at this,
... there's one particular specific marking that identifies this as a Finnish used gun.
And then we'll talk about what continued to happen to these
after the Winter War and the Continuation War.
Alright, so here's our basic receiver marking.
This is one of the rifles that was made at Carl Gustafs Stads, the Swedish ordnance factory.
This one dates from 1925, which makes it one of the later production m/96 rifles.
It's after 1925 that production basically is tabled for 15 years.
And then what we see here that identifies this as Finnish is this "SA" in a box.
And that SA stands for Finnish Army, Finland in Finnish is "Suomi".
So this is ... a Finnish Army property stamp.
And what's interesting is ... Finland started using this stamp in 1941.
So about two-thirds of the rifles,
basically the rifles that Finland kept in its possession after 1941 would have got this stamp.
And this indicates that this was in Finnish service or in Finnish property
during the Continuation War.
... As well as being in service or in property during the Winter War as well.
We have a couple of other numbers here, we have a serial number.
"BH" are the initials of the Swedish armourer inspection officer
who approved this rifle into ... Swedish service when it was first produced.
So different Swedish Mausers you will find different initials here because
the officer in charge of the inspections changed every few years, BH is appropriate for 1925.
Mechanically speaking this is an 1896 pattern of Mauser, it is a cock on close Mauser action.
So it holds 5 rounds of Swedish 6.5x55mm ammunition.
This was initially a 160 grain round-nosed projectile,
and that was actually used all the way up until 1940.
So it's that cartridge that the Finns would have been using in the Winter War,
the old style of round-nosed flat-based bullet.
At that time these rifles had stock discs in them that were attached with two screws
and had an abbreviation for the unit that the rifle was issued to.
In 1941 Sweden would adopt a new ... bullet design for their same 6.5x55mm cartridge.
This was the m/41 cartridge and it was a spitzer, a pointed bullet with a boat-tail base.
139 grains, higher velocity, a much more modern cartridge.
And it is after that happened that this new style of stock disc was included.
And there are lots of details on the internet you can find about decoding this.
This essentially tells you the bore condition,
and the potential holdover necessary for that m/41 ammunition.
And so this indicates that this rifle was in Swedish hands at some point after 1941.
So we'll get to that in a moment, but for ... the time being
let me just say that this is normal and appropriate to find on a Finnish-used Swedish Mauser.
One of the things that makes these such good shooters ...
are the new sights that were introduced in 1941 with the new ammunition.
This is a nice square-topped flat front sight post
with a matching rear tangent sight that has
a U-notch rear sight.
They got rid of the old barleycorn-style sights,
and went to this much more effective pattern instead.
So these rifles would see continued use in Finnish service in the Continuation War,
although Finland was better equipped with, say, a lot of m/39s by that point.
But these still saw service.
By the end of the Continuation War the Finns had about 50,000 of these rifles still in inventory,
along with their 900 or so carbines.
But after World War Two ends, they're in less of a position to need non-standardised rifles.
And so all of these would end up being surplused by Finland between 1951 and 1953.
Now what makes this even more interesting to me is
when the Finns sell these rifles off as surplus,
Sweden buys up ... almost all of them.
And they go back to Sweden, and they go back into military service.
And that is why ... the Finnish marked ones will ... usually be found with
these Swedish stock discs for m/41 ammunition.
It's because Sweden had not adopted 7.62 NATO in the 1950s.
They wouldn't adopt the G3 rifle for actually a little while still to come after that.
And ... they had a lot of 6.5 ammunition,
and being able to put these rifles back into service made sense for them at that time.
So these are rifles that were originally made in Sweden.
First few made in Germany, the majority of them, including this particular one,
made in Sweden, served in the Swedish military.
Then sent over to Finland, served in the Finnish military in actual combat.
And then came back to Sweden, went back into the Swedish military,
before ultimately being surplused.
And ... many of them at least, like this one, then coming into the United States
with a mixture of both Swedish and Finnish identifying marks and provenance.
So that's I think a very interesting history to a particular class of rifles.
... Like, don't underestimate how much combat service these did actually see in the Winter War.
And the total of 77,000 (ultimately more like 85,000 if you count the volunteer's rifles),
like close to 10% of Swedish m/96 production actually was in Finland at one time or another.
And a significant proportion of that saw combat service.
So I think that makes these really quite interesting rifles.
Now like I said at the beginning, if you would like more information on
the original development of the Swedish Mausers, check out Othais and Mae's video.
If you want to see just how well these things can shoot on a 1,000 yard course with open iron sights,
check out Henry and Josh's video. Hopefully you enjoyed this one.
Thanks for watching.