[ Steyr M95 Sniper Carbine ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company where we are taking a look
at a very rare World War One sniper rifle.
This is specifically an Austro-Hungarian
M95 carbine sniper.
And ... the Austro-Hungarian Empire is rather unusual,
... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say actually unique among World War One Powers,
in having actually manufactured and issued a sniper version of a carbine.
Now their standard ... infantry rifle in World War One was of course the
M95 Mannlicher straight-pull bolt-action rifle.
And most of what they made were in fact like full-length, very long, rifle versions of this firearm.
However, they did make carbines, virtually everyone made carbines,
but what they did in particular was they made sniper versions of the carbines.
Now these things are really scarce today, and we'll touch on why in a few minutes.
But I do want to point out that during the war there were actually a fair number of them.
About 13,000 of these were made,
most of them were long rifle snipers,
but something like 1,000 of them in total were these short-barrelled carbine snipers.
So let's take a closer look at this. Let me show you how they did the scope bases,
and what sort of markings you can expect to see on one of these.
As with many other sniper rifle patterns from World War One
from different countries, this guy does use an offset scope.
So you can see that the scope is set to the left of the action.
Now in some cases, like the British and some of the German rifles,
there wasn't a whole lot of need for that.
In this case you really had to offset the scope,
because this feeds from a 5 round en bloc clip.
You have to load the whole thing as a packet, and if you have a centre-mounted scope
it's going to be impossible to load the rifle.
So that's a given on an M95.
We would normally have a manufacturer's mark right under this scope mounting block.
These were manufactured by two different factories, because of course
the Austro-Hungarian Empire was two countries, Austria and Hungary.
So the Steyr factory in Austria and the FÉG factory in Hungary both manufactured these guns.
Normally their name would be right under there, so
I'm not sure ... which company actually produced this one.
However if we look right here, that is our Austrian acceptance mark.
It's 1918, so this was a pretty late production gun that was actually proofed and accepted in 1918.
The serial number is located here on the left side of the barrel, so 7258 S.
The ... Austro-Hungarians did use this suffix system,
so they made rifles in batches of 10,000 with a letter suffix.
The scope mount is quick detachable, so you can see this obvious lever on the bottom.
The top piece is just a tensioning spring,
because this is a claw that holds the scope onto the base down here.
So if we lift that up we can then pop the rear end of the scope mount off.
There's a single claw in the front that locks it into
that mounting lug, and the whole scope can come off.
This is pretty typical of World War One snipers, and even later snipers.
The idea would be if you're not ... actually shooting, keep the scope off.
Keep it in a nice safe protected pouch on your belt
rather than risking it getting damaged being banged around on the rifle.
You can see how the windage was adjusted here.
You've got a set screw, and you can see that stake mark right there.
If you needed to adjust windage, because there is no adjustment on the scope itself,
you would loosen that screw, tap this front base left or right to where you needed it,
and then lock it back down with the screw.
We have a bunch of different numbers and markings on the scope,
and we'll get to those in a moment.
But to start with I want to point out that ... the only adjustment on the scope is for elevation.
It has a BDC, so a bullet drop compensator, which allows you to set it from 100 out to 600 metres.
That's your 600 mark.
The reticle inside here is what's called a German post.
It is a big thick horizontal line,
and then a vertical line that comes up to a point from the bottom.
So when you adjust the range, what you're doing is
actually adjusting the reticle inside the scope body.
So as you dial this up, that reticle pointer drops down
to have you aim higher and higher, to hit a target at longer range.
This scope was manufactured by a company called Reichert in Vienna (Wien, right there).
However, there were like five different companies
that produced scopes that were used on these rifles.
Reichert is one of the most common, also Kahles at the beginning.
The Austrians bought a lot of scopes from Germany to build these rifles,
also ... a company called Süss, [also] OIGEE and Fuess.
So a bunch of different possibilities for the scope manufacturer.
They are generally, but not always, 3x power scopes, and this one is a 3x power.
We'll go ahead and put the scope back on here.
Hook it down in there, and then snap it in place like that.
Now obviously, since the scope comes out, you need to have a way of keeping track of
which scope goes with which rifle, because you zeroed the scope to the rifle.
So there are a couple of different markings on the scope bases.
If we start here on the front block,
this is going to be the serial number assigned to the sniper rifle itself.
So 15,000 is a really high serial number. This may have actually been manufactured
as part of war reparations payments after the war.
It's higher than the numbers that I have recorded for wartime production,
but there's very little documentation on these,
and so all of those numbers are kind of suspect to me.
At any rate, this number is made to match the scope,
or rather the rings on the scope.
So this doesn't relate to the rifle's serial number,
it's just so that you can keep this and this together.
And if we look on the rear mounting block of the scope, that should be the same number.
So this one is a mismatched set, which, again, for a rifle as rare as an M95 sniper - not uncommon to see.
So normally ... you would be able to match the scope here to the mounting block up here.
The other thing on there, AZF and then EAXI, that's actually EA and then Roman numeral 11.
That is the arsenal where the sniper conversion was done.
And that EA stands for an unpronounceable German thing that you can see down at the bottom. [Erzeugungs Abteilung XI = Production Department XI]
[Erzeugungs Abteilung XI = Production Department XI]
Now if we flip this over and look at the left side of the rear scope base, [Erzeugungs Abteilung XI = Production Department XI]
we have yet another number. This should be the serial number of the rifle.
So on the left side these two numbers should match each other.
And again, this is a mismatched set, and they don't.
But if we look at this, you can see that this scope was originally paired with gun 352-Z, "Z".
And we actually know for a fact that the X, Y and Z suffix rifles
were manufactured between 1918 and 1921 after the war.
So this scope (and if we remember from the opposite side, this scope is 12,000 and change),
was originally partnered with a post-war rifle.
So that does tell us something about production timelines for these things, which is kind of cool.
One last question I think a lot of people might be curious about
is the cartridge that this rifle is chambered for.
These were in World War One chambered for the 8x50 rimmed Austrian cartridge.
Note that the French Lebel cartridge is also 8x50,
but they are totally different and not interchangeable.
That said, ... in the 1930s a lot of these M95 Steyr rifles were converted to 8x56,
which was an improved spitzer cartridge developed by the Austrians.
This one does not appear to have had a conversion to 8x56.
There are a couple of points that suggest that to me,
although I haven't actually done a chamber cast.
First off: that conversion is generally indicated by a big "S"
on the top of the barrel, which is not there.
We do have a little "S" on the side of the scope, but I'm pretty sure that is different.
I can't tell you exactly what it means, but I don't think it indicates a re-chambering.
Secondly, we still have the original carbine rear sight on here.
It's graduated up to 2,400 schritt, which is a unit of length a little bit shorter than a metre.
When these were re-chambered they were re-sighted,
and the carbine length sights should go up to 2,000 metres on ... the re-chambered ones.
And lastly, we still have the original height of front sight.
So again, when they re-chambered these they went to a taller front sight
to accommodate the ballistics of the new cartridge.
So I mentioned earlier on that these are really scarce today.
And they are in fact one of the hardest World War One sniper pattern rifles to find today.
There are very few of them surviving, and I believe a big part of the reason for that
has to do with war reparations.
So Austria-Hungary, like Germany, had to pay war reparations at the end of World War One.
And that wasn't just cash.
Most people think of it as well, big war debt, you have to pay money.
This was also done in the form of military equipment.
So, for example, Germany provided a whole mess of MG 08
and 08/15 machine guns to the United States.
And that's actually why we have a lot of them, relatively speaking,
in this country under civilian ownership, in VFW posts, in military bases.
We got just a whole pile of those things.
Well, the Austro-Hungarians supplied a lot of rifles to Italy as war reparations,
and those were these M95 Mannlicher straight-pull rifles, and that included a lot of their snipers.
However, the Italians never really did anything with them.
The Italians didn't integrate them into the Italian armed forces,
probably because the straight-pull system was substantially different
than the Italian turn-bolt Carcanos, the cartridge was totally different.
It probably just didn't make logistical sense for the Italians to try and
like integrate these M95s into the Italian military.
And so they ended up staying in storage until they were ultimately scrapped.
And that's a big reason why none of them survived to get onto the collector's market today.
So even in museums sniper M95s are fairly rare,
and the carbines are also particularly rare.
Now like I said, the production of these rifles continued after
World War [One] for a couple of years, largely to fulfil the war reparations requirements.
And that did include assembly of snipers.
And I think more carbine snipers were done after the war
compared to long rifles than during.
So I think the preponderance of carbine snipers really goes up at the very end.
Details beyond that are really difficult to track down,
there's very little written published information about the M95 snipers.
So, all that being said, if you'd like to see detailed pictures of this one,
if you'd like to see Rock Islands catalogue description of it or their value estimate,
... I'm actually rather curious to see what this thing ends up selling for,
because I just don't have a good feel for what kind of value the market places on an M95 sniper.
At any rate, if you go to the description text below,
you'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com.
And from there you can bounce over to Rock Island Auction Company's catalogue page
on this particular gun, and check out all that information for yourself.
Thanks for watching.