Forums.NitroExpress.com

About the start of sniping in WW1 on the other (German) side, may I draw your attention to this thread?

http://forums.nitroexpress.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=207835&an=0&page=6#Post207835

Here is what I wrote some time ago in the GGCA www.germanguns.com publication Waidmannsheil #47 on the German early snipers and their militarized sporting rifles:

AS C.N.Parkinson stated in his law on military matters, "every army is well prepared to fight the next-to-last war". When the Great War broke out September 1914, none of the adversaries envisioned the course it would take. The armies were prepared to engage adversaries attacking upright over open battlefields at long and even longer ranges, whole companies firing volleys on command. So the German Gewehr 98 had a sight calibrated up to 2000 meters, nearly one and a quarter mile, but the lowest "battle sight" setting was a full 400 meters, 437 yards. This made the rifle shoot about 7 inches high at 100 yards. No one had yet envisioned the effect of the new-fangled machineguns firing flat-trajectory smokeless loads. This and the massed fire of infantry rifles made any movement more than a foot over ground suicide. This forced the opposing armies to dig themselves into trenches, where they remained stuck for the next four years. The usual fighting ranges shrank to 30 to 150 yards and targets grew small. The greatest menace to any attempt of attack were the machine guns. Both sides soon emplaced their machineguns behind protective steel plates, firing through small loopholes. The destruction of these MGs in spite of the armor plates was of utmost importance. The British tried in vain to solve the problem using raw power: They tried to use big-game rifles, .40" caliber up, firing solids, to smash the plates. Jeffery of London even supplied a few single-shot rifles in .600 NE to the Royal Navy Marines, who opposed the German marines in the flat fields of Flanders, close to the sea.
Late in 1914 some young German officers tried another approach to the problem. One of them used his scoped 8x57 hunting rifle. With five shots at ranges of about 100 yards they managed to hit into the small steel plate apertures, each time putting the enemy gun and/or gunner out of action. After their report of such success, the German army deemed a scoped rifle an useable tool for trench warfare, but the army had never thought about riflescopes. As usual with any army, developing and testing an issue scoped rifle would take some time, so stop-gap action was necessary.
In January 1915 Prince Ratibor, the then president of the German Hunters Association, openly appealed to the German hunters to donate their scoped, 8x57 hunting rifles to the war effort. Soon many such rifles of all makes and action types were sent to the frontlines. As civilian cartridges and loads were not standardized than, many break-open rifles for the rimmed numbers perhaps mixed in and some of the private rifles were used and misused before, firing the issue S cartridge led to some unspecified accidents. So the rifles were withdrawn from the front shortly to be inspected by military arsenals. Only rifles on Mauser M98 actions were to be accepted and issued. Those suitable for the then standard .323" bullet S cartridge were stamped with a Z-prefix registration number, while those deemed suitable only for the limited standard old .318" bullet Patrone 88 cartridge got a D-prefix number. Apparently arsenal staff thought this D or Z marking sufficient at first, as rifle D 771 shows no other markings. But soldiers usually don't read instruction manuals, so soon the .318", D-marked rifles got a metal plate too, with the warning "Nur für Patrone Mod.88" (for cartridge 88 only!) and a sketch of the distinguishing round nose bullet of that load. Rifle D 2241 shows the traces of this plate, and there is a photo of a German sniper in Senich's book that shows such a plate.
After acceptance both rifles were issued to the German marines, evidenced by the KM stamp.
By April 1915 the Prussian Army (yes, there were still the armies of the other German states, f.i. the Bavarian, Saxonian and so on) alone reported having 3700 donated rifles issued plus 1000 bought in from dealer's shelves, but this supply still did not meet demand. Jon Speed, the well-known author of books on Mauser, gave me additional documents from the Mauser factory. Many thanks! Additional to a photo showing German soldiers with scoped commercial "African model" Mauser Sporters, there are three ledger entries from 1915: In February 1915 Mauser shipped 334 "Repetierpirschbüchsen" = hunting rifles to the "Königliche Gewehrfabrik Spandau" = Prussian rifle factory in Spandau. Another 600 sporters went to Spandau June 15, 1915. The "Artillerie Depot Karlsruhe" received 1282 such rifles in 1915, intended for the Southern German armies.
By 1916 the military bureaucracy had finally accepted a way to convert selected Gewehr 98 infantry rifles to snipers: Bolt handles were bent down with a stock cutout below and commercial scopes mounted by several gunsmithes using several mounting systems. During summer 1916 the stop-gap sporting rifles were withdrawn from the fronts, put into storage and replaced with "Scharfschützengewehr 98" sniper rifles. As scopes were in short supply these were removed from the sporters and mounted on the new rifles.