Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I'm here today at the
Rock Island Auction House checking out some of the guns in their
September of 2015 Premier auction. And I noticed there are actually a
couple of anti-tank rifles in this auction, and it was a perfect opportunity for
me to pull out this beast of a Mauser. This is a Tank Abwehr Gewehr, Model of 1918, and it is really the world's first
purpose-built anti-tank rifle. So what had happened was in 1917, sort of
in 1916, but largely in the Battle of Cambrai, the first real British use of combined arms
and a whole lot of tanks. This was in 1917. And one of the results of this battle was the
Germans started putting a big R&D effort into developing some sort of gun that the infantry could
use to destroy these new tanks that were a problem. And what Mauser came up with was this thing,
which is basically just a scaled-up Mauser rifle. It's a single shot gun, it's got this
ginormous bolt back here, four locking lugs. We'll take a closer look at that in a moment,
but they were using a cartridge, a 13.2mm, you'll commonly see it referred to as TuF,
that is Tank und Flieger, or tank and aircraft. It was a cartridge that the Germans intended
to be used in a new heavy machine gun that they were working on developing. Frankly, the German equivalent to the
Browning M2 that would come out later. So they took this cartridge, and they put it into
service in this single-shot rifle as an anti-tank round. So it was a hardened steel cored,
armour-piercing projectile. A total of a 795 grain bullet moving
at about 2,650 feet per second. Now if you do a little bit of math you'll to
come to the conclusion that that is about just under 12,500 foot-pounds of energy. Which is
about five times as much energy as a .30-06 rifle. So, I've seen some conflicting reports on
just how unpleasant these guns are to shoot. Some people say that after a couple
of rounds your ears will start bleeding. Or at the very least, you will be
not desirous of shooting more. I've read from some other people who shot these, you
know, fairly recently who say they're actually not that bad. Now the the only thing going for you to
mitigate the recoil of this beast, is the fact that with the bipod in place the thing weighs 41 pounds.
So that's also about five times a typical .30-06 rifle. I have not fired one myself,
so I can't speak to it directly. However, these definitely would have been an
unpleasant gun to carry around the battlefield. They are very heavy, 41 pounds
with the bipod, 35 pounds without. They have no sling points, you'll notice that on here.
There's no sling on it, there are no swivels on it. That's original, these things never had slings. So either get a guy at the muzzle and a guy at the
stock, or one person slinging it over their shoulder. Just not really a convenient gun to be dragging
around in the trenches or in mobile warfare. They did have a bipod for stability
and shooting. Sights go out 500 yards. And reportedly these were actually pretty
effective, pretty good guns. They got the job done. This was of course World War One,
armour in tanks wasn't all that thick yet. It was primarily intended for
.30 calibre rifle fire protection. This thing could penetrate about
20mm of vertical armour at 100 yards, and that was enough to get
the job done in 1918. So, by the end of the war they were getting
production of this thing really kind of moving. They produced in total a little over 15,000 of
them. Production started in April of 1918 and ran, of course, till November at the very end
of the war. That's really quite a lot of these guns. You'll see a lot of pictures of them captured. Interestingly the US army actually ended
up in possession of quite a lot of them and used them for, in some cases, destructive
testing in the development of the .50 calibre Browning machine gun
cartridge, the .50 BMG. So they have an interesting place in history
after the war in that developmental program, as well as during the war as
the first effective anti-tank rifle. Alright, so let's take a little bit of a closer look here.
The bolt on this functions just like a regular Mauser. We have a bolt release on this side. Frankly the difference is you could use
this thing as a police baton if you needed to. Instead of the typical Mauser
two locking lugs this has four, because it's a massively higher pressure
cartridge. And we just have a striker back here, just like you would with a regular Mauser. Blade ejector, normal extractor. Really they
simply took a Mauser rifle and scaled it up to take a humungous cartridge. Now you'll see they did add a pistol grip to this
thing, that is because of course the stock has to be really huge, very wide in order to
withstand the recoil of the gun. There's no way that you can have a
traditional style grip on this thing. So the sights are pretty typical of Mauser, again
scaled up but the same as a regular Mauser 98, with the exception that the rear sight only goes
out to 500. Of course an armour-piercing cartridge is velocity dependent, and as it
gets out to long range it loses that velocity. So the rear sight is just an open notch, the front is a
peaked barleycorn, just like you'd get on a Gewehr 98. So the bipod here is also worth taking a closer look at. This is the original welded tube steel style of
bipod. It does not have any cant forward and back, but it does rotate quite easily, a full 360 degrees. So when you rotate this 90 degrees so the legs are
parallel with the barrel, you can pull the bipod off. Got two big spikes here to hold it in the ground. And now a lot of the guns that you'll
find don't have this tube steel bipod, instead they actually use an
MG 08/15 bipod, which is a bent sheet metal style of bipod.
They both work, they both fit, that was one of the ideas. It has the exact
same bipod mount that the 08/15 does. I can show you, pull that latch down to remove and there's our bipod mount. There we go. I've never had the chance to shoot one of these
before, I would like to someday, I think. I could be talked out of it, probably, but
the ammo is pretty scarce for these ... Oh, I should mention despite the fact that these
are 13.2mm, which is significantly over .50 calibre, they have been specifically removed from jurisdiction
of the NFA. So they are not legally destructive devices. Legally, they're treated just as any other typical rifle,
so if you can own a rifle, you can own this behemoth. And if you would like to own this behemoth,
check out the link in the description text below. That will take you to Rock Island's
auction page on it, and see their pictures, set up an account on-line, place a bid on it
if you think this has a place on your wall. I would suggest a whole bunch of hooks going into studs
to hold this thing up, so it doesn't tear your drywall down. But definitely a cool piece.
Hope you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
Been watching a lot of his videos lately too
lol 41 pounds was it? The guy in BF1 must be fucking ripped to be able carry that shit around.
Try watching C&Rsenal's stuff on YouTube