Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I want to mention briefly scout scopes and their military application.
And what makes this interesting to me is there is
basically only one instance of the military application of a scout scope.
And that is the German ZF-40 and ZF-41 scout scopes.
Which I will have a video coming on shortly, and which
we have an InRange video from several years ago
where we did some range testing with one that I think is pretty interesting.
So I'll link to that at the end of this video.
But, the reason that I am doing this is I was
poking through Askild Antonsen's book on the Norwegian G3,
which ... by the way it has great pictures
and I can't tell you much more about it because it's all written in Norwegian.
But in there ... are a couple of pictures and a brief description of
a Norwegian military experiment using a Leupold M8 scout scope
... on a sniper model of the G3.
And I thought, "Wow! That's unique." And do you know what?
The Norwegians seem to have this on and off again thing with the scout scope.
So, let's talk about the 3 different times
that I have run into the Norwegians using scout scopes.
So before we start off: the idea of a "scout scope".
The name basically comes from Jeff Cooper's definition of a scout rifle.
And ... the most distinctive visual element
that he included in that rifle was a long eye-relief scope.
And that's the proper technical description of these things.
And the idea is the eye relief is a measure of
how far the back lens of the scope is from your eye,
in order that the light comes to the right place
and you can actually see a picture through the scope.
And most telescopic sights have a couple of inches of eye relief.
And you get your eye ... fairly close, you don't want it right in the lens
because on recoil it'll come back and hit you in the face.
But you don't want it too far away, it's that sort of thing.
Well, if you are going to mount a scope on a pistol, you don't want that
because you don't want to hold the pistol back here, you want to hold the pistol out at arm's length.
So you need a longer eye relief so that holding the pistol all the way out
you can still get a proper field of view through the scope.
This doesn't necessarily mean that it's more or less magnification, it's just
characteristics of how the lenses are configured so that the light from the scope focusses
and puts the image at whatever correct distance you are looking for.
Anyway.
From pistol scopes we have the idea of what if I want to put a long eye relief scope on a rifle?
Say, forward of the action so that I could still load it with stripper clips, for example.
Now the Germans are the one country that really did this in substantial numbers militarily.
And that is the ZF-40 and ZF-41 long eye-relief, forward-mounted scopes
that were designed as sort of substitute sniper scopes for the Kar98k.
And they made something like 100,000 of these during World War Two.
Designated marksmen kind of liked them, they had an application.
Snipers detested them because they ... were 1.5x power magnification,
and they had a very small field of view.
... That's not what the German Army snipers were looking for.
So, they were rather disappointed when they got those instead of proper 4x or 6x power telescopes.
At any rate, ... so the Germans used them.
And now where we get to the Norwegians is ...
(and this is the first use that I was aware of aside from German)
Norway at the end of World War Two had
several hundred thousand German troops still stationed in Norway.
One of the main things that the Norwegian Resistance pulled off,
one of their big accomplishments during the war,
was destroying a large transport ship that would have allowed Germany
to relocate some soldiers from Norway down further south in Europe
to help counter ... Russian, American, French, British advances into Germany.
Without that transport ship these guys were basically stuck in Norway.
And so at the end of the war Norway takes the surrender of a whole ton of Wehrmacht troops,
and as part of the process, gets a bunch of their guns.
And there was enough of their guns
that the Norwegian military would just decide to use the Kar98k.
Prior to this they had been using the Krag-Jørgensen rifles,
and those were a bit obsolete compared to ... a good, proper Model 98 Mauser.
They had a ton of these things, so they just decided to use them.
In the 1950s they decided to re-barrel them in .30-06.
They had got a lot of M1 Garands and .30-06 calibre machine guns as war aid from the Americans.
And they have all these Mausers.
Rather than run a dual-calibre system
or try to find new rifles, well, we'll just re-barrel these things in .30-06.
And among these rifles were somewhere between 400 or 450
German ZF-41 marksman or sniper rifles.
And the Norwegians simply continued using them.
And even modified them to .30-06 as they did with a lot of the standard just plain K98ks.
And the Norwegian Home Guard would continue to use ... what they termed the M98F1.
It was the M98 in 8mm, when they converted it to .30-06 it gained the designation F1.
They continued to use ZF-41s in .30-06 as well. Not many of them.
... I should say, the serial numbers, and for this FYI I am using
another Norwegian language book as a reference,
and I am not even going to try and pronounce the name of this thing.
But apparently the serial numbers will be between 150,001 and 150,450.
That's the Norwegian serial number that was added when ... the Norwegians used them,
and retained when they were converted to .30-06.
So, there we go, ... interesting choice, the Norwegians choose to continue using German ZF-41s.
Now, the second place that I found these, and where it went from,
"Well, that kind of makes sense. They had them, why would they not use them?" to
"Huh, they must have actually had some interest in the scout scope, long eye-relief thing."
was when I was at the Imperial War Museum. And noticed that in one of their displays
they have a US M1A1 folding stock carbine with a ZF-41 that has been attached to it.
Some armourer did this for the Resistance.
This gun was actually presented to, I believe, a British General
who worked with the Commandos dropped into Norway.
And they presented him with this gun at the end of the war. It's not something that he made up. ...
It would have been a very odd choice to be presented as a one-off thing.
It makes me think that they did in fact actually do this more than once.
... While the gun is on display behind glass,
(I, of course, wasn't able to get my hands on it to actually examine it or take it apart),
it looks like it's a pretty well done modification to add that scope on there.
And frankly it's one of the more interesting uses of a scout scope that I have seen.
The open top of the M1 carbine is not really all that well suited for scope mounting.
The US tried a little bit of it with a bar bolted across the top of the receiver.
You do certainly introduce the potential for malfunctions
if ejected cases ... hit the scope mount and get bounced back into the action.
Mounting a very light, very small scope up forward on the handguard,
... like that's almost a very compelling sort of thing to do, and I think it's really cool.
By the way, the modern equivalent would be something like an UltiMAK rail,
which in fact they did make for the M1 carbine.
And it's kind of the best way, I think, to retro-fit an M1 carbine with a scope.
It doesn't do any permanent modification, although this Norwegian conversion obviously did.
So that's number two. Like OK, so the Norwegians kind of liked this scope,
or at least a few Norwegians did.
I can't really extrapolate this to include everyone in the country. But
I've never seen use of a ZF-41, aside from German issue use,
except in these Norwegian instances, and that's interesting to me.
And then the third one came in this G3 book,
where we have a couple of pictures of a one-off experiment from 1968,
with a Norwegian engineer by the name of Olaf Nisi.
(Whose name I am probably mispronouncing, it seems simple, n-i-s-i, ... Nisi.)
The Norwegian Army is looking for a sniper solution to use with their G3s.
And there is a concern that mounting a scope on the receiver of the G3
is not stable enough for good accuracy.
Which makes sense: this is a stamped steel component,
it wasn't designed to have a scope mounted to it.
The scope mounts are all kind of afterthoughts.
That German claw mount that goes on there, ...
like, if you attach it too tight you'll actually dimple the receiver.
This isn't something the gun was really designed with in mind.
And so Nisi has this idea of instead of mounting it to this bendy, flimsy receiver,
let's mount the scope to the barrel.
Well that gives you kind of your second issue,
is the barrel is mounted underneath the charging handle tube.
But what he did is he took a (then in production) Leupold M8 scope,
(I think it was the M8), it was a 2x power long eye-relief scope.
And came up with this interesting custom mount that
actually clamps it to the barrel and then comes up around ... the charging handle tube.
And the forward handguard is inletted a bit to give it some space.
And you end up with this 2x power Leupold scope.
And what's funny about this is, it's the Leupold M8
that would ... develop into the 2.5x power scope
that was used on the Steyr Scout as the official Cooper scout rifle.
So this is truly like a scout scope on a G3.
They make one for trials ... as an experiment,
and in trials it turns out to be in fact more accurate
than the test guns that they did using clamp-on scopes on the receiver.
And it seems like a fairly interesting idea.
In fact, apparently the HK factory at Oberndorf was even curious about it.
And the Norwegians loaned Oberndorf this gun to ... examine, or investigate, or test with.
I don't know what Oberndorf ended up doing with it.
As far as I know they didn't actually develop it into anything.
But, here we had yet another Norwegian use of the long eye-relief scout scope.
Now ultimately this G3 pattern was not adopted by the Norwegian military.
It appears, from the book, it appears that this was because
the military decided that it did not want permanently modified, purpose built, sniper rifles.
It wanted the snipers to have a standard G3 with like an add-on sniper kit.
And this scout scope mount was not something you could just add on in the field.
It required lathe work on the barrel to turn a chunk of the barrel
to be nice and cylindrical, and then mounting the scope.
You have to remove the front sight block,
you have to remove the charging handle tube to mount the thing.
The claw mounts you can simply clamp on to any rifle and you are good to go, so.
There is the number three instance of the Norwegians using scout scopes.
So, what long-term implications or conclusions can you draw from this?
Pretty much nothing. I just found it really interesting that
you've got the Germans issuing the things during World War Two,
and then every other instance I've been able to find is Norwegian.
So, it doesn't really mean anything, but it's an interesting series of unusual firearms.
So, hopefully you liked this little diversionary path into Norway.
Thanks for watching.