Mae's Top 10 Rifles of WWI

hi i'm orthias and i'm mei and this is a special episode that has been very heavily requested from our own fans the series however i know i know it's going to bring in a lot of new viewers and so many of you might not know who we are so may and i have been working on a series known as primer and up until this point the focus has been on world war one firearms and we finally reached a point where we're comfortable making a top 10 list of rifles from the conflict we've shot through a fair bit of them that we feel like we can give a good assessment uh we have some more pistols to go however yes we've also done an assessment on light machine guns with the help of ian mccollum from forgotten weapons it's our project lightning lightening series i get so much crap for that one because everybody says i don't know how to spell lightning is in bizarre yeah but it's supposed to be lightened automatically oh the lights so like a feather right so uh but we've talked machine guns we're not gonna talk rifles in a much shorter package and then eventually we'll get the handguns not in this episode now uh when we talk about rifles for world war one we need to cover something very quickly because i know it's going to turn up in the comments yes how long did you serve on the front lines of world war one absolutely none okay how many years did you serve as frontline infantry in any conflict none whatsoever i have no experience in either and i will not feign any either so what is your experience for being able to sort of make this personal assessment of what you prefer to be the firearms that we're about to list well probably just that i have shot all of the guns for our series so far with exception of maybe i think one or two but that's about it all of them otherwise i have shot that's just the few that we didn't shoot we had to dequeue them because they were not available to shoot right and realistically when we looked at the list there's not really anything we would wish for we we have enough rifles under your belt to make a very good call and there's going to be some obscure stuff in here as to what you find to be your preferred rifles for the war yeah i'm sure we're going to get some interesting comments on that the expectations for these guns will of course should be how they felt in your hands and how they did perform on the range however many people may notice that if we review this footage some of your preferred ones shot worse than some of your less preferred ones that has a lot to do with condition condition and also um i i when we first started the series i was less experienced so i wasn't as natural when it came to operating those firearms so when i go back and think on it yeah it's a different experience it could also be exhaustion some days you filmed eight rifles back to back to back some days you filmed one some days you have your shooting for fun not that difficult but if you're shooting on camera and trying to get the perfect scene eight rifles can get a bit exhausting so what we did is we challenged may to sit down and we ran some preferential numbers to get a score for each of these guns we're not sharing it because it's very subjective because once we got those scores we lined up the guns and then you got to have a final call in which you said actually these two need to be flipped right they would be close enough that i was like no i really do feel like this one did perform better right and this is all going to be may's personal opinion if you want an attempt at an objective view of these guns we're going to give it at the very end using only mainline infantry rifles all of which would be you know either the absolute adopted rifle or uh we made one exception we included second standard guns assuming that they were producing greater number than the original yes which meant their second standard but they're actually right so uh that's going to be at the very end so if you don't want to hear me's opinion at all and you want sort of a more overt yeah go to the end in the meantime we're going to explore your feelings because we've got a lot of requests for this oh yeah so where do we begin what is our first rifle number 10. short light and chambering a mild bottle-nosed 6.5 millimeter cartridge the ts is just about the most mobile rifle from our series all right i'm suspicious because just by the fact this is a top 10 list a lot of guns have already been left off and now i see spaghetti rifle [Music] which i want to be honest here they just imported a batch of those ts's so i'm pretty sure you're getting paid on the table and i need in on that because you're obviously a shill there's no other reason for that carcano to end up on this list move along why why is the carcano in the top ten realistically it's because that little ts carbine is so incredibly light and then on top of that we took it out to the range and it it did not look like it was in its best condition we honestly expected a poor performance not just from that one but the other ones as well and yet it shot straight it shot true i mean even as the bolt is rattling as i'm pulling it back and it you everything about it feels like it shouldn't shoot as well as it did and yet it still it hit paper just fine all right let me argue for getting this gun off the list are you ready okay uh split breech receiver uh-huh bolt handle way up in front of the trigger does not deposit you anywhere near it yeah okay uh lack of controlled feed so it can double feed okay in other words the cartridge is not under the control the extractor from the moment you start working okay now why you gotta break my list up like this uh very little in the way of gas mitigation controls weird floated safety button thing and n block clip loading which you and i have both voiced that we like and block clips for their speed but the way they're implemented you end up being very dependent on the condition of the clip for how well the gun runs you also end up uh dependent on or not dependent but a vulnerable to the hole in the bottom of the magazine yep for mud and muck right uh and then anybody that's worked at coconut will tell you the minute you unbolt that gun that bro yeah they're just everywhere right uh how the sights unfortunately they are kind of busy they're kind of hilly like it's it's not a clear sight picture and then at that you still fold four for the battle site and it still wouldn't get much better 400 meters or so yeah you have to take a six o'clock hold on everything oh yeah okay and yet i still shot straight with him is that there's lots of guns you shot straight with what is the defining feature here like is it just that it's light yes it's because it's light i have to march around everywhere and i don't want to have to notice that i'm holding my gun all the time it'd be kind of nice to just throw it on my back and not have to care with my other stuff and guess what i can do that with the ts because it's like six pounds that thing weighs nothing yeah i will say uh and everybody's gonna have kennedy comments that's a different cricano but not by much not by much so uh the guns shoot and they're highly mobile and most of war is actually you know long periods of boredom than then brief periods oh my god yeah and having a light handy and otherwise usable gun it's not so bad the other thing that's interesting about the crocodile in this case i'm not sure it counts towards being on a top 10 list because this is more personal choice but in terms of resources spent money spent time spent it's a gun that italy could produce oh yeah it was such a cheap rifle then produced they could just keep pushing them out i'm giving it away but there's a country that had even less industrial capacity than italy that adopted a much more complicated firearm yes and they kind of suffered for it and we've also seen that in countries we're not going to mention like romania and things like that italy adopted a gun that they could produce and that they could produce in large numbers and reliably and they are safe it has a bad reputation due to misunderstandings about true bore diameter ammo loads things like that people have abused the carcano in order to just you know get one to do something wrong right realistically though i've never been afraid to shoot a carcano not once you understand them yeah once you've got the cartridge right you you should be okay and 6.5 is one of the milder cartridges that we're going to see across our entire series oil is very manageable is that too light of a cartridge or no i don't think it's too light i think it actually fit the gun that was the thing is it with the weight of the rifle and the recoil matching with that with the cartridge i thought it was actually a pretty good blend yeah in the modern era we found that you know in these sorts of conflicts you really don't need to have a 30 ought six everywhere you go yeah and cartridges like 6.5 cricano end up being fairly good in hindsight although it did not make the adaptation to spitzer before world war one or even necessarily world war iii yes but spitzer again and by the way for those of you who don't know who they're new a spitzer cartridge is a pointed cartridge and it was done as a way to get larger cartridges or larger bullets like eight millimeter uh getting them to go a little bit faster a little bit straighter in flight so that you have a longer point blank range however when you try to spitzer an already flat shooting 6.5 bottlenose you lose a lot of sectional density and while you do get a flatter you know trajectory it's one of those things where it's like well yeah we get it a little bit flatter out over a thousand yards but is it really worth it to get rid of that extra mass when it hits its target in this case if you're fighting yeah a lot of these bottleness cartridges i don't think are unintelligent for staying the 6.5 cartridges that stay in bottlenose we're going to see this on a number of guns yeah um i think it's perfectly fair that they stayed bottlenosed for the sacrifices that for that exchange and the amount of effort it was easier to sleep in boldness i agree uh what puts us what's next on our list number nine the ross model of 1910 adopted in canada as the mark iii was the final and radically changed evolution of the raw straight pool rifle family chambered in 303 despite charles ross's objections these guns have a notorious service history and would be recalled from the fight however i believe the problems were corrected and its abandonment may have been premature now i'm going to encourage anybody who has not seen our episode on the ross rifle to please do so because that is a wacky gun in terms of it's basically a military rifle that exists because of one man's persistent charisma dogged determination sanity all of the above yes so the ross mark iii is a straight pull 303 rifle which means up on the shoulder and which we actually did do it from the shoulder for that episode we realized it was important to do that now this gun uh had a number of problems the ones we listed in our episode were specifically the fact that it had a very commercial style of chamber cut and wartime 303 not so compatible with that too right they needed some more room for failure like the knight the lee enfields did and so tight chambers mean you have to blast it open you know you fire it it sticks you fight with it okay this is probably proven out more by the fact that uh they were favored as sniping rifles uh by marksmen who used better quality more match grade ammunition is the way to think of it uh the sort of ammunition that was issued to these marksmen was much tighter in tolerances and behaved apparently very well on the ross rifles so that's good for them that's a big clue as to the chamber thing being the real problem now here's where it gets worse you have a street full rifle and the chamber's stuck what do you do well it's a straightforward rifle you just kick it that's really all you can really do on the ground and drop the heel right pretty straight forward and that will kick it open one way or another the problem is the ross rifle also had sort of an interrupted screw style of locking along it's really weird so you have these three locking lugs on either side and the problem is when you kick it open the left side lugs come down on the bolt stop now the bolt stop had been properly designed to go beyond those three lugs it would have been fine but done no damage the problem is it wasn't and so that a left rear log gets bent and once it's bent you close the action back up and now you're really stuck which means after you fire the next round you kick it open even harder it only gets worse as you go on essentially right those were the biggest issues there's also been some note of possibly internal um shaping that needed to be redone a little bit because it was tying up due to heat so you have a number of interlocking cuts that cause the bolt to rotate the camming action of it so you turn linear force into rotary force there's too many surfaces at play when the gun gets very hot those may expand and cause problems i've not been able to run all of that down from a primary source but i've been assured that there's also an issue with the gun fair so all of these were resolved though yeah there's also an issue that you could assemble the gun incorrectly and it would close in an unlocked position and when you fired the gun the bolt would come back into your eye i wish we have seen somebody do a video on that at one point yeah i believe it was the end actually a very dangerous scenario however you do have to assemble the bolt incorrectly to get that to happen yes do you recall it's already easy to do yeah well you feel it there's a so we have an unmodified bolt i've incorrectly assembled one to test the theory you have to kind of force it so there's a little willful stupidity there however we are talking about infantry true and in the heat of battle maybe he's a battle because you'd be doing hopefully you're not doing that in the heated battle oh god yeah so it's tricky right we should this gun should be nowhere near a list with this much controversy right right um there's some vulnerabilities throughout the gun the problem is as far as we know they were all fixed you they put a pin in so you can only assemble it the right way they re-ream the chambers they redid the bolt stops there's larger bull stops they really did everything they could to try to tick away at each issue that came up and then further came up as a result of them trying to fix previous ones yes and so that's the issue though by the time you fix the fourth thing the public and the soldiers they've lost trust they don't have trust there's no trust built up if if the only thing that's been happening is consistent failure they believe that there would be yet another problem right in the long run a hundred years later it doesn't appear that there were any more it looks like they stopped right when they fixed the problem yeah that's the unfortunate part and i could understand ross's anger at that point and things not going his way unfortunately because the ross actually it was a fun it was an easy fun shooter the straight pull was smooth and granted while heavy as since that's the big one not my favorite to have to toad around if i had to you can get deadly accurate with those guys i get the marksman read that circles around them so here's what was you take out all the negatives in terms of the repairs that were eventually made because the thing is the ross mark 3 did not get its test period that other guns did all the things that we just said would have been true of some of the best rifles we're going to list in the first couple of years but that got shaken out there was time to shake them out the mark iii came in real late to the game and it didn't get a full shakedown so uh with a shakedown assumed what are the big problems with the roster you said one was weight yeah the other one is it's a fairly flat open top receiver and it kind of can take in a lot of mud and muck yeah it's going to happen it also sheds it very easily though and that's important taking if you have a mechanism that can bring in a lot of muck but doesn't let it back out like a monlicker magazine port you know it gets in there it gets in there it makes a right-hand turn and it's in there it's stuck like having to get the hose under your fenders or your car you know right but if it just it's a let's say it's a perfect square and it gets in there and just falls back out then that's an almost that's like right below an actual design that would protect it like it's just barely below that though because it can take it the flat top of that ross it goes all the way to the rear it has a bridge but realistically almost everything that gets in there is gonna get shed back out very easy to clean out other than you know chasing the locking lugs a little bit yep and then that straight pull doesn't drop you too far away from the trigger it's got the semi pistol grip to bring you in like it's a nice you can get pretty rapid with those guys the big problem again muzzle heavy yeah that's the biggest issue due to a heavy barrel that provides a lot of accuracy though oh yeah so if i were laying prone with it or something like that or had it had it benched or something that would be fantastic i could see myself handling that all day but the problem is is that doing this all standing having to carry it around with me marching everywhere i can't really see that being something that i would want to take for exceptionally long distances and of course the number one feature of the ross rifle the sights the rear aperture site the long barrel that gives you an excellent sight radius can't turn that down it's fantastic it's perfect for hitting your shots and hitting a really tight grouping with it yeah the ross was a very good marksman's rifle and it was highly favored in that very specific role and then loathed in almost every other way yeah which is why unfortunately it hangs at the bottom end of our top 10. and it did make it into the top ten yes for your opinion mine highly speculative opinion before anybody starts screaming what's next number eight the ottoman empire would adopt one of the many gewehr 98 derived export pattern mausers in this case becoming the model 1903 which was chambered for the same 7.65 rifle cartridge adopted in belgium and sporting a uniquely tall stripper clip guide if it looks plain to you that's because the 98 family became a marshall standard and for good reason now i want to point out that this gun is representative of a lot of guns this is true so that's not going to be the first time this is going to happen either i would say right uh so the ottoman 1903 is probably the biggest example of what we would know as an export pattern mauser 98 right which means uh the big receiver mauser 98 front locking full extractor long cartridge control all the gas mitigation we covered a lot of this in our regular series yes the mauser 98 is considered by many to be the ultimate in bolt action rifles and we're probably gonna see more of them in this list if i'm giving anything away yeah but wait what we're on now is the long pattern which was becoming standard by the way this time i can't think of any country that did a direct mauser 98 mauser 98 short rifle as their primary rifle you know what i mean yeah so the long rifles were everywhere they came with various bayonet logs and things like that minor variations in sights but mostly tangent rear sights you know adjustable for 50 to 100 meters depending yeah um that's right oh full handguard yeah yeah well um full handguard half the barrel is exposed but wraps around the site right in the case of the ottoman the only thing that's truly unique about it is the chambering in 765 what is commonly called argentine in the us because we're used to that cartridge coming from south america but was actually first adopted in belgium with their 1889 rifle right uh and then the other thing is it has a very tall clip bridge and the bolt stop acts on the left side like earlier mausers the reason for that is because the 1903 in the ottoman empire was designed to use the newer stripper clips that had the little bibbles on the side yeah yeah stripper clips were originally flat sided and so they had to be retained in some way which is why you see the belgian um mausers with the sort of clip guide spring that rests up against them to retain them right mauser later added these round nodules on the side and cut a groove into the clip bridge so that when you've centered the clip the more you push down the more it bites in on the clips there's less waggle there's absolutely it retains it so well it's crazy you don't feel much wackle at all right the problem is you needed to be able to use the old style flat side eclipse because you also had the bowser 1890 and uh 1893 in ottoman service right and so it had to be able to do both so it does both which is awesome yeah you don't have to sweat it you literally just got to pull whatever you got in your pocket out i noticed that one side advantage of that is that big old uh clip bridge makes it easier to find where to put the clip oh yeah you can find it quickly it's almost as fast it's not as fast as in block loading but it's like somewhere in between a regular stripper clip load and an in-block feed yeah my only downside to that is specifically to the ottoman you kind of push that thing out of your way when you come in you have to come in from right to left and you get used to it but it's a little weird i think that's going to be a muscle memory thing and i think if you had to do it enough times you would get used to it very quickly okay so what are the high marks for the mauser 1898 as an export pattern so let's start with the gewehr 98 that gun should have made our list because it is rugged it's got redundant safeties in it it really is a fantastic rifle if it wasn't for those long of his ear sights yeah and it's kind of got a short hand guard the that sort of just in front of the chamber is really exposed to heat when you want to get maneuvering yeah there's a number of little tiny ergonomic issues and sighting issues that make the gewehr 98 a little troublesome to use and to be honest it should still be above say like the carcano i know a lot of people are gonna get that yeah i get it which is why i'm not kidding when i say we're using the ottoman 1903 to represent a class of rifles with the 1903 being the best version of the gewehr 98 long rifle right and it all comes down to ditching along of his ear and going over to nice flat tangent leaf sites yes beautifully done and also because let's be honest you and i are kind of picky about our cartridges true this particular gun an export mauser was also available in seven millimeter yeah numerous cartridges in the form of the uh 1912 export guns although those are usually converted over to eight millimeter when used by various armies so although in serbia you can find there's 98s in any chambering that you could want from that period let's be honest yeah however we're just going to go ahead and call this the the mouse or the ottoman the representation yeah as the export mousers which we find to be superior to the actual german-issued gewehr 98. yep and a lot of that had to do with the fact that long of the zero was pushed through not by mauser paul mauser didn't want the long of his ear he wanted the superior tangent rear leaf site that was pushed through by other officials in the german government which tells you never trust the government all right so what's going to be our next gun number seven having experienced the mauser 1893 rifle first hand the us would produce its own heavily modified variation in the form of the springfield model 1903 adopted as a standard issue short rifle this 30 caliber would actually get a new cartridge in not six light and handy the 1903 was still fitted with a fair few bells and whistles which i think actually hold it back now being a us rifle this of course is number one and you got mixed up when you wrote the seven because seven looks like one and you have a little line through it unfortunately no this is in fact my number seven on the list show over everybody to leave uh there are some good reasons for why but there are some good pros to it as well give me the good what's the good on the springfield 1903 well we do have the mauser action which is nice and reliable and in fact this one has actually been adopted to be [ __ ] on open which i do prefer that so that works out great uh it has red to avoid confusion the 98s were [ __ ] and open like the one we just talked about yes the 93s were not but the springfield was derived from those so theoretically you would think it'd be [ __ ] uncle it's not they went ahead and changed the [ __ ] on open sorry i should have clarified that yes yes thank you and then on top of that it's got a bunch of redundant safeties in it which is kind of nice um and while the cartridge is is a heavy guy at least is going to put the guy down so there is let's talk about this cartridge for a second because there's something very unique about the 1903 okay in our series it's the first standard issue across the board short rifle it's extremely short because it's true we're talking about you're going to because your bias is towards the shortened guns you're going to talk a lot of shortened guns but realistically as we'll see at the end of this episode everybody was fielding long infantry rifles and in 1903 the us is like no we're going short it's going to be universal short because we can still get the ballistic performance we want and our guys got to march shorter is lighter so that's that's going to work right okay so they carry this thing around and uh it's designed not the way it is and we have a whole episode on this but the short answer is there's an original 1903 which has a push rod bayonet that stunk the president himself hated it and a weird front sight with two holes in it you you can see them it also had the 30 ought 3 cartridge 30 caliber of 1903 yep they added a little more oomph to that so in 1905 the gun gets an update uh in terms of mechanics and in 1906 they come out with a new cartridge so realistically uh if this were sort of the european concept this would be the 1903 ought 5 6 rifle yeah if this were sort of the british military we would be the 1903 star and then star again oh yeah just wait would it be two or three stars two stars okay because you'd have the mechanical update then you'd have the re-chambering for the new car right okay so we didn't either so it confuses the crap out of everybody because you have the 1903 and then you have the ninth like we call it the 1903 that's the one from 1906. right you have the 1903 from 1905 which we tend to call the o305 yep and then you have the 1903 which we then just call like rod bayonet because we just overwrote every time we did it that's about anyone trying to pick this up from other countries to be fair we do it again and again because then you have the m1 yep everything is an m1 until it's not so good old us we're going to pretend we never did that other thing yeah forget about that this is the new that it doesn't help that they also have we had like the 30 caliber crag with the rim demo and then so that was called 30 us 30 cal it's like we're searching for transformers you gotta search for the specific year out otherwise you're not going to get the right model that's a rehash of everything yeah so and then we have us 30 cal 30.6 which confusing to everybody yeah so the 30 cal from this year now for the 1903 specifically because we need to actually assess this gun okay you said it's a good mauser action yep um and it is there was a lawsuit over that uh in my mind it's uh very well set up as sort of a marksman's friend it definitely is feels very good almost as a hunting rifle in a lot of ways and people like to make this sort of comparison uh i love the fine front blade sight that is a very nice front blade sight but if you pair it with the rear sight which is like this is the buffington rear sight okay this is an american uh tradition it's a very busy site and on top of that that little u-notch in the back like it doesn't really draw your eyes in to that front sight it just does not do the job that it should be doing yeah very finely sighted not necessarily a rapid sight or one that you want to find in the dark right also the buffington is a ladder style site and the us went back and forth on this a lot uh in the crags you would have buffington site tangent leaf site which is a very rugged usable site then you have bufferington site and then there's this fight over and over and over again on the crag and then it came home to roofs on the 1903 because the original gun they were like yeah we're definitely finally going with this tangent site it's perfectly usable it's it's much more serviceable in military and then here comes the buffington and the buffington kept coming back because it was preferred on the shooting range in competition because it's a little battle computer i guess i could see it in competition you know when you've got time right range and windage and everything else it's a it's a it's a very fine sight it's good when you have the time like you said yeah and so you and i tend to look at it and go that's going to snap off yeah there's no way that's gonna last i'm sure plenty of them took damage um although when they work hard for they're fine the problem is it's not a set it and forget it kind of site you you tinker with it and then i feel like where that uh bolt deposits your hand when you bolt forward home it's just slightly forward to the trigger and then i can't pull back to a semi-pistol grip to try to realign myself quickly too right it's a straight wrist stock so you bolt home drop your hand down find your trigger position by feeling the trigger not by resting up say your ring finger into where it needs to be and boom there's the trigger right and so there's a little bit of slowing down there but it was a standard bent bolt handle that does bring you closer to the trigger than say that's true split breach cacano like we complained about earlier that's fair so we're doing pretty well with it like i said it's still i just want to make sure i'm saying guys this is like the top 10 and we're really trying to heavily assess them and that we're we're these were the final cuts like it's they still were up there i suspect a 1903 with a tangent rear leaf sight and get rid of the magazine cut off sweep the bolt back a little bit it doesn't really need the magazine that could get you all the way to the top three you know what i mean yeah but it didn't get there instead we're going to keep digging to get up to the next gun what's going to beat it number six perhaps the most advanced of the gewehr 88 derived schlegel milk guns the monlicker schonauer's key feature is a rotary feed magazine smooth and light with mild recoil thanks to its 6.5 millimeter rimless cartridge this expensive rifle was surprisingly adopted by greece who couldn't really afford it and with that you've signed up to be the only person who checks rpo box because it's going to be full of feces you know i do have my reasons okay okay uh you better be prepared to defend them because this show is burning as we speak you put the greek montlick or schnauer above the springfield 1903. i need a justification for that well this gun i think is handier it doesn't have as many of the bells and whistles that over complicate the 1903 in my opinion so it doesn't have that crazy magazine cut off that isn't really no magazine cut off no uh complicated rear buffington site the uh monolithic scenario as a matter of fact as where's the rotary magazine so i guess that is a bit complicated yeah i was gonna say we go from flat spring to giant seashell with coil spring thing the dang if it wasn't smooth it's very smooth but let's back up for a second let's go to the sights so the versus the big old buffington uh we have this fixed tangent rear leaf side they're clean they're easy to read you can find your front sight way faster with these and then in our case i want to be very honest we shot the 1930 version of this gun yes which has a different front sight protector and that's about it like there's some marking differences there's a front sight protector difference there's no so even just taking out the difference there you can tell it still is a faster read in my opinion the action is of course very smooth like you said and it feeds from a weird clam shell or neckline shell weird conch shell looking rotary conch that part to me is probably why the gun was so dang expensive i mean i still can't believe that greece was still buying those things up because that just does not make sense for them economically no um we talked about this in our episode there's a lot of politics behind their decision but the feed really weird in terms of how incredibly complicated however very reliable so far i've never seen anybody with a broken rotary mag and they still they like to sporterize those guns don't they to take out that's a whole other thing so the monaligo shoe now has a history of being an excellent hunting rifle yeah an incredible hunting rifle and so to this day if you try to buy them on like a shoe now or like a commercial sporting rifle it's very expensive oh yeah more expensive than a mint condition greek surplus military rifle which is super unfortunate because then that means people will just go and buy those minty moniker schonars and then just cut them up to make hunting rifles to this day it is still financially better to just go ahead and cut it up if you want not make sense to me i urge you please don't do that no please don't but the actually there's a heavy attrition on these in the surplus market because of that so they're highly regarded for being accurate smooth lighter recoil than the o3 as well lighter the recoil is excellent they're used against large enough game to be comparable to men uh so there's reasons why this is adopted and in terms of a logical reason for adopting the rotary magazine the rotary magazine will feed a round nose or a spitzer cartridge the exact same way so you could make the uh so okay there there's some things here i still struggle personally with how complex that magazine can be and the fact that it's a fair it's a split bridge receiver gun which means you're even with the turn down bolt handle you're being deposited well ahead of that trigger and you've got to come back and find it but at least i got the semi pistol grip to come back and find it with that's true so between the 1903 and this you do have a back of the hand indicator for where to drop your hand in which i think is nicer yeah okay this is a personal opinion everyone again never served in the war and blame her and hate male 1 that's what the country of may will have oh god i hope we live would you do it as a country it's too expensive to do it no it's too expensive to do as a country that's another that's actually a strong point um we are not arguing these based on you know which would you adopt because in terms of spending government money it's like i guess the carcano because it shoots straight into consoles attrition we can make a bajillion of these you know they will do trying to produce them on like a true number at wartime not happening and it didn't happen uh and that's pretty key so that it turns into a an objective assessment of an infantry long arm or not even longer but you know a standard issue rifle not going to be as high fair okay so what are we going to get into next thing because i'm starting to get scared of this list number five while germany had adopted the gewehr 1898 as their standard rifle they did develop several carbines for specialty roles with the development of the 7.92 spitzer bullet however they needed something of a universal short rifle and so the carabiner 98az meaning with bayonet and stocking rod was adopted every bit as rugged as the infantry rifle handier in size better balanced and sporting the tangent export sites i feel this deserves a strong spot on the board all right i feel like i got both feet back on the ground but i'm still gonna need some explanation here if only because to me the car 98 980z feels a lot like the springfield 1903 they're both short rifles with very powerful cartridge they're both [ __ ] and open mauser actions they're i mean they're pretty similar and yet you've got them separated by just a little bit even even if you look at just the general uh description of it like in terms of the late the length the weight they're even still comparable with that but there are some key differences okay the carnegie easy ditches all the unnecessary crap that was on the springfield 1903 no magazine yep which is not necessary the buffington site has been replaced with simplified a little tangent rear leaf site it's a cleaner site easier to read the front blade which i tend to prefer is now a beefier corn with front sight protectors which is still not bad i think you can pick up this this site much faster than you can to springfield in emergency yes and probably easier to adapt for night sights yes that's exactly what's happening but at least there's some room there for improvement okay i can see that argument i can see how the semi pistol grip would put you that puts me closer to the trigger in terms of being able to find it quickly yeah but also that turned down bolt with the relief cut puts you probably a little bit closer to your trigger than the 1903 did in general it does okay but we're really getting into some nuance here right yeah what's going on with this fact that we've got the schunaur in between these two because they should be back to back to back to me is this starting to show that maybe there's some more factors at play than just arguing about the nitty gritty because what it's reading to me is short rifle high power cartridge even shorter rifle with a low powered cartridge and some ergonomic problems now we're back to short rifle high power cartridge with almost no ergonomic problems from the previous one so there's almost like a number of factors that are coming into play yeah there's a weird kind of hills and valleys with it and i understand it but this carnegie a z is more rugged and on top of that it doesn't have all the complications that the 1903 has so i'm willing to take the higher power cartridge with less complication for the rifle assuming that the lower powered smart like the friendlier recoiling friendlier shooting gun also has a lot of complications right which is got that rotary magazine right it's not like the montlick hour was a 6.5 millimeter mauser derived with no extra crap on it this thing was a rotary magnet all this stuff so i see what you're saying you're like there's this weird we're looking at you know it's not and we're hovering around on a spiral getting towards the center and so that way it looks like we're leaving categories as we go in is that we're saying yes okay that's my best description um i guess we don't have a lot to say about the carnegie in general though because it really is just another export mauser style actually the funny thing about the car 98az to me is that it's a realization of what paul mauser was trying to tell the germans to do in the first place because i don't know about the rifle length necessarily but it had it it had his full hand guard like in terms of going all the way to the rear behind the sights yeah it had his tangent rear sight instead of that long of azir that was done politically um really simple gun and then it also is the longest of the um carabiners to that point uh so that is also true the old 88 rifles the carabiner for that was very short when they did the mauser 98 with the round ball or with the round nose cartridge um that was a much shorter there was an original carabiner 98 it's not the 980z is not the first carabiner 98 there was a carabiner 98 and then i think like an a there's two versions of that and when they went over to spitzer they found that those little short barrels were just blowing unburnt powder if you were firing in line with your friends it was wrecking them so they're like no this is pre-hearing protection so you really don't want that next to you yeah uh so they're like dude no and they had to find an ideal right uh well this one like the barrel was practically designed for that 7.92 spitzer yeah very specifically that's the shortest barrel they could pull off while keeping muzzle flash and sort of that blast wave to a minute amazing the balance they came to with it and the recoil is pretty on par with the 1903 too i would say yeah i also think that you'd end up if you'd gone any shorter than that gun on that 7.92 you'd end up with some pretty severe recoil yeah it would have been not my favorite right so okay i see where we're at um let's see if there's any more surprises number four one of the most iconic rifles of the great war the british short magazine lee infield mark iii rifle must obviously make our list in this case we've opted for the wartime simplified mark iii star to be specific fans of the smelly are quick to note it's 10 round magazine smooth rear locking bolt and excellent ergonomics they will also frequently argue whether or not its rimmed 303 cartridge was a blessing or a curse oh i have mixed feelings right now because you did not put it in the top three ah i mean we're gonna get hate mail so again okay once we basically reach number eight out of these guns we're having to nitpick them because they're all fantastic rifles but i do have to narrow things down and filter them out and this one just happened to slip through yeah i just haven't flipped through the top three and there are reasons all right before before this blows up let me uh there's a comment there's a comment section below and uh we have a discord that is also linked on our main site um this is again my personal opinion i just want to say this go nuts because i guarantee you i'm going to get tagged by mr bloke on the range who is a good friend of ours and who can tell you everything that you need to know about lee enfield putting it at number four does not mean i don't love it okay let's talk with let's redeem you just my favorite child i want to quit um let's go down the list what are the what are the good things about the lean feel well it has the smooth action the ergonomics are pretty great on it sublime yeah and you can become incredibly fast when you're just cycling the action and going through rounds on that thing okay so it's a turn down bolt handle that drops you right by the trigger and the semi pistol grip is the case you need some extra oh you never lose orientation yeah never once out of all the rotating bolt actions i know of the lee enfield really does do an excellent job of putting you where you need it it's fantastic there's no question uh so much so that they're known for the mad minute which um i know people want me to talk more about this there's other videos we have an episode on lean fields we technically you know but bloke has done it well that's because it's not a what is a tradition is not always something that you do on the battlefield right and there's a lot of talk of just sort of burning rounds but aimed fire is critical rapidity is great but you're still going to have that pause of ensuring your aim yeah and so i i don't want to sell the landfill just on the madmen i think that's a i think that's a bit of a meme understanding of the gun versus the core competencies of this gun yeah you can do it but i don't it isn't something you need to do i mean you could get fast with if you wanted to i suppose now uh the short magazine lee enfield also has some issues okay so fast ergonomic uh battlefield accurate for the battlefield that it was given and this is where it gets tricky right because they're not so great and we didn't actually get to test this but they're not the best known for for long long distances so we our range is like under 100 yards for when we're shooting right so we didn't get to effectively test that and even if we did have the range the gun's 100 years old you never know how they worn you know right and then you can even tell this was something that was going to be an issue um because in world war ii didn't they make improvements with the mark iv adding a heavier the number four the number four yes so the number four they added a heavier barrel to it in the middle of the second world war which tells you that they were having barrel problems and they did by the way if you watch our episode the long leads had accuracy problems then they get into the short leads as a standard by the way the british also do what the americans did they go to a universal short rifle for all troops right in doing so they try to clean up the accuracy issues with the lee enfield because it's a pencil style barrel it's not it's not floated it's not particularly bedded it actually has it's unusual it's the only gun i know of that uses sort of a midpoint spring-loaded dampener to try to eat up some of that barrel vibrate it's very yeah it's different and so they're certainly accurate enough for world war one to work as we knew it but you didn't know that going into it as a matter of fact the british were in the middle of a program to to work on another rifle they were planning to adopt that was going to be a very long range high power flat shooter because the problems they had with the lee series rifles during the boer war so really if world war one hadn't come around to shorten the length of the battlefield they probably would have left the lien field they would have left it behind it's also not a perfect gun because we saw the ross mark iii right yeah rear receiver mounted aperture sight mm-hmm the enfield's got it way up on the barrel and even so it's still it's really far up there on top of that it's really busy there's a lot going on around it that you have to look around the site itself is a pretty legible uh rear leaf like tangent style and front sight's clean enough yeah but you got front sight protectors like you've got extra bits and boots on site it still has a magazine cut off for goodness sake on the earliest version yes not on the mark iii stock well that's true technically the mark iii star could have a magazine cut off it was sold the navy but the army kept it with that that's right um and then the clip bridge you mentioned sticking up there and being busy the reason it looks that way is because of how truly old that action is it comes from the old like remington wave style of action and so the clifford clipper strips stripper clips were this gets weird stripper clips were added later to this action which was always on the mark the mark iii started with it of course but somewhere in the lean field history they throw on this stripper clip guide because they adapted they adopted stripper clips late so the gun's not even designed for them and then well they planned on didn't they expect people to just load the mags and then pop those in the guns were going to be issued with two magazines so there it's going to be the probably the first mag detachable magazine rifle and the idea was you had one that was linked to the gun so you'd fire your rounds drop the mag and it would just hang on your gun and then you'd throw in your second mag and then if that ran out then you'd start single loading they had dominated they abandoned all that yeah and then later had to come around a stripper clips it was kind of it was a good idea to start with but then having to produce whole magazines versus a little stripper clip especially when you have millions of troops stripper clips end up being smarter at that time i feel like i'm gonna get so much hate because everyone loves the fact that it's like the biggest feature on this thing is that it has 10 rounds 10 rounds means it must be king right more rounds is king well okay so if having a magazine capacity of 10 rounds makes it the best rifle of the war then i've got oh snap it's two and a half times better 25 rounds of 30 odd six so this is obviously the number one pick yeah uh the air service 1903 yeah done episode over no the problem is they come in five rounds gripper clips so loading this with one five round stripper clip and then shooting it is about the same as loading it with five swiss proof and yes uh we saw this in let me i gotta put this somewhere up your butt no the uh the swiss had a 12-round straightforward rifle which is not an earliest because it wasn't in the war and then when they got down the road they went this is getting in the way and since the chargers are only six rounds let's do some tests and they found out they're really not getting any advantage except for in very narrow circumstances of having a 12 round magazine instead it's easier just to have a six round magazine and have the extra variability in handling yeah and so the weird thing is a lot of people will be like brought ten rounds and it just has it's almost a non-factor it's not the magazine isn't so awkward that it gets in our way so it's not really a deficit to the gun mm-hmm although it does kind of add to the weight that is a heavy gun to begin with that's the big thing is that heaviness with it really is going to make it difficult to march around with mostly because there's so much weight out the muzzle despite the pencil barrel you have a thin barrel and yet all this barrel weight on a short rifle and the only thing we can really probably mention is the fact that the rim is both a blessing and a curse on that gun yeah the cartridge so rim lock yeah this is behold this is this is fact or fiction uh blog on the range will argue that it's complete fiction because modern commercial cartridges are straight-backed whereas the military ones had a chamfer and so when you bolt forward the first the upper rim would push down on the lower one with a sort of like camming action yeah uh which is why you and we felt you would feel a snag right uh well we didn't even have i don't know that we had chamfered cartridges uh the problem is i just meant in general there's still a hang there there's still i've still seen evidence of there being some occasions for rimlock although you see it in mosins and other ram guns it's just a thing the other issue uh is the rim is really benefiting the rifle in a lot of ways well this one this gun wasn't really set up for for gas mitigation like other rifles well it was always a rim to rifle right there's modern ones out of india that are in 762 nato that are rimless but other than that it's always been a rimmed rifle it was never sold as a rimless rifle and i feel like i'm gonna have to get into a deeper explanation but the short answer is um rimless cartridges headspace off the shoulder and therefore when they have a case failure at the shoulder no behind the shoulder behind the shoulder yeah when they have a case failure that's sort of in the middle of the cartridge well there's your protection right there right you're in the seal zone because it's between the bolt face and the shoulders like a big area like this and so when there's a failure in here it can vent forward or it can vent back right meanwhile if there's a rim odds are it's going to vent four right because the rim is the seal so the rim is this big right in this weird scaled up version of what i'm talking about and the rim almost never fails so the failure would be in front of the rim the rim is the seal almost nothing makes it through the rim if it ever does and so the end fields don't have to have complicated rimless style gas check systems which is great which is why they're very simple very smooth they're they work well with the rim yeah they have like this very supported narrow bolt that then has like got rear locking logs and you can get some compression over time from that just like anything else but again rim cartridge very forgiving of that sort of thing right so so again we're nitpicking this but it's still a very decent rifle yeah i think what ultimately punishes it in our case is the busy sights a little bit dense for howell it is a short rifle great but it's very heavy a very heavy short rifle and maybe a little bit of about that barrel which realistically the ranges of world war ones that shouldn't be a problem but there's some hesitation there if i ever needed it i would like to have it the range option availability oh also these are all maze opinions so blame her not me yeah i'm gonna get some hate number three serbian mausers as a whole are a rare sight today despite being some of the first guns fired in anger during the war even more obscure is the 1908 carbine which i fell in love with thanks to its rugged construction handy size simple layout and excellent seven millimeter cartridge all right i want to point out have you ever had a friend where you get in the car with them and they start driving and you go uh-oh i've never actually ridden in the car with this person so you have no clue how it's going to go uh i'm here for my life okay all right let's uh for those of you who don't know about that well i want to point out maya has already said that she thought that the short rifle length of the car 98az was pretty ideal for being able to deal with the 792 mauser cartridge yeah this 1908 serbian uses the probably less beating you up seven millimeter mauser cartridge so okay i could see getting a shorter barrel out of that maybe not this short there's probably still some recoil issues here let's be honest but we've down to a seven millimeter mauser cartridge yes we are but we are not on a mauser 98 pattern we're on a mountain 93. right what is going on here so the 93 action while comparing it to 98 it's not as bulky it doesn't have that nice gas shield in the rear it's narrower i get it there's less security with it less gas safety with it i understand all of that however that being said i think it paired pretty well with seven millimeter mauser i think i i just don't i don't even recall having any concern or issues with it as i was firing and i've never heard of anybody having any issues with it as far as as as far as gas blow over and things like that coming from the 93 to the 98 you're going to notice that it's [ __ ] on closed not [ __ ] on open where is that no none of that big gas shield at the rear is gone it's a narrow receiver like you said this we are now in the family of the swedish mausers that people love very much i very much love them too family because the swedish managers do have some improvements over them it gets weird wearing the small ring mauser family i guess is how a lot of people say yeah it's actually good um how are still very reliable very robust guns yes that is however by your own words a step down from the 98 in terms of pure functionality and reliability i'm also noticing that this gun unlike some of the others does not have a tangent rear sight but instead has a very dated yeah and it's very short and tiny yeah ladder reflection now these are prone to being banged bent we find them in our show like as collectors and as people who deal with the show i regularly find damaged ladder rear sights because they're just not that strong it's part of our doubt towards the buffington what did it like how did this gun end up so high on the list with all these problems handling seriously that is where it boils down to when i was on range with this guy the action was smooth i was able to find my grip quickly enough the where the bolt deposits you is pretty on par with the springfield 1903 just slightly forward to the trigger but i pull back that semi pistol grip i was able to align my sights quickly enough i really felt like if this was a gun i not only had to shoot all day but also march around with it all day i wasn't really going to take notice of it the recoil was pretty manageable even considering what we talked about before thinking that it wouldn't be that high i would find it to be a little sharper than normal but okay i see where you're going so what you're saying is this is sort of a min max situation the handiness of the gun combined with an otherwise reliable mauser 93 you know not just receiver but system that's enough to get you okay so you're beyond the confident point is here the mauser 93 gets you above that but then the handling comes in and just broke way up it really just skyrocketed it up to the to the well top three effectively right you're not gonna shoot it as fast as leigh enfield though no i'm definitely not um but you also have a red one yeah and seven millimeter both of us tend to be very strong fans of that cartridge we've seen impressive feats done with it and it sits in a nice sort of infantry rifle cartridge range that i i find to be superior like i prefer to the interesting thing about this gun is that it reminds me of a gun that we have not been able to shoot and therefore cannot include in this list which is an ottoman carbine of the same era right we really couldn't unfortunately it looks very similar snub-nosed mauser action but it's a mauser 98 action and it would be chambered in 765 belgian which is fairly comparable yeah theoretically that might be better then yeah because it's got that 98 action but they are so similar also different rear sight but they're so similar at this point who knows right like they could be right on par with each other the kind of differences between those two guns being a 93 style carbine and a 98 and 765 versus seven millimeter the differences between those are going to get very personal uh in terms of feel and it's going to get very nuanced in terms of well we fired you know 50 000 rounds from a hundred of these guns over five years with x amount of salt water or whatever that's what you're gonna have to get into to find the differences right and so i wish we could do that but we literally don't have that kind of time i guess we're almost trying like a classification now we're talking about what about a tiny mouser with a cartridge that doesn't turn it into a complete flamethrower and your answer is yes i like that very much yeah okay we're also now in the top three right yeah we're getting up there so oh shoot we just got two left really the next two will decide the fate of this entire series i hope you know that i know i know all right well the car knows it's all just a good car though gotcha whatever gun we say next is going to infuriate half of the remaining audience just so you know winchester 1911. all right buckle up boys number two a pre-war british design this mauser derived infield rifle was built around a cartridge that never saw adoption rechambered for standard 303 the pattern 14 was sent to the u.s for manufacture in 1917 the americans would adapt the infield to 30.6 and produce enough to dwarf their official 1903 rifle interestingly this emergency used gun was one of the most advanced bolt actions of the war despite a heavy barrel i find the ergonomics and especially the sights make it quite possibly the best rifle of world war one all right so as much as i've been teasing you i want to say this is a good pick and i like where it's at in this list you're finally okay with me again well you know the car ride is a little bit smoother there's only one more place that you can terrify me although it could be really terrifying uh no faith whatsoever i want to point out the entire top five is subject to opinion because now we're getting you notice we didn't create a list of just minor variations of different things like just now we talked about uh the the serbian 1908 that we shot but we didn't really talk about the ottoman model 98 derivative that we didn't shoot we talked about it we just sort of went these things are similar and they occupy this space so it's kind of what we're doing here too we're kind of doing that with the pattern 14. so that's not in my top 10 because it's close enough and i mean there's an extra cartridge different caliber and then the volley site that's not really necessary so we decided to use the infield 1917. so if we were to make sense purely on spec specs we could get even more nuanced but instead we're trying to position guns that you've experienced as part of a zone of these overall features and so anything in the top five again pretty much interchangeable yeah depending on preference it's where you preference and time i suppose yeah if you put handling over anything else right rapidity of shooting handling you're going to say lee enfield yeah of course but if you put security of say the shooter to against faulty ammo you might not pick the lee enfield or you might argue that the rim does give you more pre it goes any which way so um when we're talking about the enfield 1917 though we're starting to see some clear technological advantages oh yeah where do those come from well the aperture the aperture is the king on this guy right which we saw on the ross mark iii way down the list which means that the aperture doesn't automatically make you a perfect gun obviously not so we have a rear receiver mounted aperture uh front sight is actually a blade i believe which is fantastic the blade is so crisp and clear through that aperture side it's perfect combination for sight i want to point out and you have a nice decent sight radius with that too granted not a sexually exceptionally long rifle but you still have a fair bit of length with that to give you a good read hmm a bit of a freudian slip there on how you feel about this gun but we'll keep going the the front sight protectors are very bulky uh in such a way not not in the sense that they're getting your way but they're thick enough that you would never confuse them for the actual front sight there's no way uh so it reads like this and it makes it a very rapid acquisition gun oh yeah fantastic not as slick as the end field how's that bolt doing the bolt is actually pretty decent he is correct and that's not as slick as the infield but it still deposits your finger right there with the trigger you pull back into the semi pistol grip i don't know that dog lug there it's it's a pretty strong bolt yeah this is the only gun i know of that actually goes through with all right we've turned it because it's a mauser it's another one those mauser derived guns um and it's actually [ __ ] on close in this case unlike the others that well like the 93 in a way so uh which the british favorite i guess because they all they already favored it on the lean field and some people will say that allows for more rapidity of fire so you close it up it comes down to preference personally but you turn the bolt handle down and then very uniquely you said it there dog like bolt they actually made every other gun bull handle go down it might have a rake to it a little bit but the bull handle is a pretty straight thing this gun no we're going to make an s and it's going to put you right on that's so different but it damned if it doesn't work and work well right it's perfect for trigger positioning there's also something interesting on this gun that we don't we i don't think we've really even talked about it so far yeah all these guns have manual safeties and almost all of them have manual safeties that are in weird positions although i will say the ross right there on the bolt handle flick it up yeah uh the lee infield has a sort of crossed over on the receiver safety that you flip forward yeah that's right i still think you technically have to release your grip to adjust it the 1917 for me you barely have right there on the side next to your thumb so it's actually perfect positioning right so rapid side acquisition the safety is right it's economically perfect dropping your hand right on the bolts just like the lee enfield maybe not as slick but still very fast sites are amazing right there's got to be a bad side though it's just so damned heavy and then unfortunately all of the weight is right there in the barrel which you know that does help with accuracy but if i'm gonna have to be marching around with this thing all day i mean i can totally see why the u.s boys did not prefer that over the 1903 speaking our doughboys at face value preferred the 1993. they were more familiar with the leaf site it was a lot lighter of a gun and they spent most of their time marching around right however when it comes to actually shooting that heavy barrel makes it highly accurate the gun handles very quickly again like i said with the sights i agree with you like superior to 1993 across the board and interestingly we fielded more of them than we did in 1903 yeah that is actually interesting all the art of the time depicts the 1903 because they'd be like grab this one those infantry rifles and they pull out a 1903. but in terms of number produced and shipped no 1917 all the way it was actually america's primary rifle despite being second standard so see i'm able to i'm able to cobble together some options that make sense so yeah i had the serbian in there which i get was kind of not making sense there for a moment but i i came back around i think i won you back over with this one well the 1917 is a clear leader i mean a very clear leader in the sense that it has all the appropriate nods to ergonomics while also maintaining the excellent reliability of a mauser system and tacking on what is actually a very unusual looking rear receiver mounted side i mean they're very big very unusual looking but they work and they work really well and they're just one of those little things that was a technology you know most of the guns we're talking about the differences are in these sort of ethereal things like number of burst barrels per hundred thousand kind of thing or number of eye injuries per quarter of a million men that's a hard thing to wrap your hand head around as a shooter but as a shooter when you pick up a gun that has clearer sights and completely different sizes right that's something you can put your hands on and say ah superior it just patently looks that way even just without even necessarily holding it right okay well i agree with this let's see what we're about to get into because i'm a little worried now number one topping my personal list is a rifle that may confuse some viewers the japanese type 38 popularly known as the arisaka this rifle was actually designed by kajiro nambu it is a heavily altered adaptation of the mauser action specifically designed to deal with poor ammunition and seal out fouling moisture and muck all the while remaining light and balanced thanks to its somewhat mild 6.5 millimeter cartridge the type 38 makes for an excellent handling carbine while japan was not a major ground power in the great war many type 38s would be fielded by russia where they saw frequent fighting we are on this ride and we can't get off now and i'm loving it because i actually agree with this decision i'm amazed i thought you would disagree no no no i love the uh let's go with adisakka and this is the crime of the centuries that kijito nambu is remembered for his terrible pistol at poor man and not his magnificent bolt action i mean among the best bolt-action rifles ever made but it really is well designed you before anybody gives me crap you said it in the intro to this russia fielded these things yes not as many of the carbines so you're getting really picky in terms of picking the carbine but i think we know this represents put the rifle in the carvings yeah it kind of does but what's going on why is this such an exceptional rifle that people often overlook technically we're looking at an improved mauser here with those well further improved locking lugs that kajira nambu took a hold of and that large extractor on there and then after that it kind of falls apart because he kind of went to town on that bolt simplifying the heck out of it yeah the number of pieces in the uh audit audi suck about the nambu bolt yeah is so many fewer and so simple to manufacture compared to the mauser 98 it's ridiculous yeah he took everything off of the mauseri action off the back of it and just slapped on that cocking knob that very multi-purpose very complicated shape so two-fold essentially it helps with the gas mitigation and that it blows it all back forward for one and two it's nice palm on palm off safety that doesn't require the dexterity of fingers so if you lost your fingers you'll be able to operate here for gloves no problem frostbite no problem you're already in a position ready to aim you pull the trigger in your shape's shapes okay maybe a little bit of a problem and then back onto the gas mitigation he also drilled two holes into that receiver up front so that it further blew the gas away from the shooter's eyes fantastic yeah the entire system is designed to relieve gas pressure and then if it makes it all the way to the shooter then it reflects it just pushes it back and you're calling it a cocking knob but actually it's not uh essentially the the way nambu set this gun up is striker fire the striker's held to the rear it's spring tensioned to go to the front when you pull the sear it releases exactly the firing pin and the firing pin goes forward so there's no cocking piece attached to the back of the fire bend there's no caulking shroud there's none of the lock pin to fit to the caulking shroud there's no safety with its own spring set in the caulking trap all those go away and you just have roundy bit at the back blows gas that way and if you turn it it locks everything up and not only does it lock the you know firing pin back it also locks the bolt shut yeah so you just can't open and there's a little nubbin that comes around and blocks the rear sight somewhat although not completely and it tells you hey man you're you're really unsafe so there's there's not even a chance in which you're going to forget that you're unsafe right so already you know you and i have been favoring mousers this whole time and here we have a simplified and strengthened mouse it goes further than that uh the locking logs have been yeah he's instead of like making them stick out so far he basically made them more shallow and wider same surface area but closer to the body yeah and they're actually stronger yes uh perhaps the strongest rifle of world war one in that regard if i haven't those wide shallow locking locks yeah uh and there's there's a reputation for these to be terrible guns a lot of that is because of um two factors one very late world war two rifles of the type 99 variety combined with the fact that a lot of the guns were actually made out of pig iron with smooth bores for school training and never meant to fire real ammo but the funny thing is americans from 1945 can't read japanese and so they would just pick those guys up and shove live ammo on them yep and they'd blow and so the problem is they thought that was a regular type 38 so extremely strong guns with a reputation for being a horrible which is amazing it's not their fault uh it's only here in japan they knew you know oh yeah so in russia in russia they knew and russia they did in russia they use them yes so you said maos are like what else is going for this gun though because there's more features than just sort of that initial metal so let's attack it externally now okay we're looking at a dust cover that's been added that really seriously protects this gun from mud and mug it tells me that the japanese were so concerned by it that they wanted to put an entire cover that shields the action from the elements outside and the ground itself that's impressive yeah this actually goes back to previous japanese rifles although they tend to be more of a slide adjustable thing this one stays with the bolt it works automatically with the gun mounts or doesn't that one slide back and forth yes but then also the type 35 i believe is where the japanese start doing this but that's one where you have to grab the slide and you have to grab the cover and work it independently on this there's none of that complexity it's not like an on off thing no it's just rotates with the bolt it's always with it right and actually you know if you think that's not very important i want to point out something like this was designed for the bertier but never actually issued but they wanted to issue it uh the germans designed something like this for their own mousers and did issue it uh dust covers were critical in some prototype guns out of austria-hungary that were never adopted that later went on to be produced in china so the dust cover concept was uh very much admired and wanted in europe it just wasn't easy to implement true so dust cover good oh yeah dust cover good they also um looking at the wood itself they cut out a little tiny groove on this right side of it and close to that rear sight so that if you got any uh moisture into the into the rifle itself you'd be able to kind of tip it to the side and help to kind of dump a little bit yeah well the guns are designed to drain moisture back out so and again this goes back to the japan island hoppers right so they're working the pacific they're not in a european land battle they're expecting sand they're expecting wet yeah wet mud sand condensation whatever the guns are designed to not only take on but to shed water and keep working they needed to which becomes a defining feature of especially the western front in the war but let's say you're in the eastern front with the russians right start shooting the snow starts melting you're getting moisture all up in those guns again and even in more mobile positions or in environments where you don't need all those features the weight added to the gun for those features is actually probably none because you're actually removing material to add those oh yeah it's fantastic ingenious thoughts right uh where else are we at so we cover the nest cover we cover that yeah we haven't talked about the stock like the rest of it so the stock as a whole um the wood that japan used it's a much lighter wood and they made the stocks kind of narrow feeling so you think oh this is great it's going to be a lighter gum but the downside of that is it's potentially going to be easier to damage so what they did was they have a two-piece stock that they dovetailed they basically um cut it down the the the rear neck longitudinally yeah and then they dovetail the bottom of the of the butt into it and with the grain going the appropriate way to handle recoil at the different spots that would fall into your shoulders so you're essentially going to have a hard time ever nicking that toe well more so than recoiling the shoulder you may need to put the toe down on something and fire or even just you're doing drill and you drop that toe right it's going to be pretty hard damage the wood available in japan the grain was too loose it would have snapped in hard use so they had to find a solution that because they didn't have old growth hardwood laying around in large numbers right so they designed the gun around being able to use basically poorer quality wood well geez we're in the middle of a great war supplies are short being able to use poorer quality wood would be pretty handy yeah that would get you much further so if you can manage to make it work well dang that's going to work better for you in terms of production time won't it right uh there are shockers as a whole we're designed to be milled out of a tube you know what i mean so we don't get the cool rear aperture site that we get out of the enfield 1917 yeah so that's the thing is we're stuck with that ladder site that you do have to worry about but i will say um we at least end up with a curve in the site rear sight that allows you to find the site quickly deep v-notch heavy front notch or heavy front inverted b yes very legible uh i found it to be fairly quick to pick up not not aperture good no i can't argue that it's not going to beat the infield 1917 but it's still pretty rapid no and on a production argument there is that element of the 1970 is very difficult to mill out of metal it's a casting technically it's not even a mill it's a casting and then you grind it out and it's a lot of work the iron stock is basically a tube gun in a lot of ways and then milled out on the bottom so much easier to manufacture i'm sure oh yeah it's got to be and then also um added a little extra bit they have the sling swivels on the side so it's easier to turn around on your carbine yeah because so far we've everything we've said could be applied to the long rifle or the carbon that is true that is true as a matter of fact they use the same bayonet which was a knife stuff that is really cool japan uh kept the quillian a lot later than others did because they still had a sort of fencing mentality the quillian i know i i could argue that you could probably bob the queen poke some stuff no with the bayonet but i'm talking about just the hook the quillian oh yeah no no that was a fencing idea that you could entangle another bayonet and then also how many times that actually happened the one good thing it was used for was also stacking of arms so you could figure it you could fit your bayonet to your rifle link them all together and then you get your rifle tp keeps them all out of the muck and mud as a unit which is also an advantage although if it's a knife style bayonet you're supposed to be able to use as a knife as a tool if you have to use it to stack your rifle oh you've lost your stacking ability haven't you no you've lost your you've lost your knife when it's stacked oh yeah so and then if you have to use your knife you can't stack yeah it's a little anyway so uh you chose the carbine i think it was particularly well balanced it was the recoil was very manageable with that gun and honestly i it was just one of those guns that i felt like i would be able to tote and shoot all day now it was a 6.5 millimeter cartridge which interestingly japan got rid of they went to a 7-7 later on because of its ability to better penetrate to move through brush and tree and blah blah blah because they did have foliage they had to get through right they're working in general environments curiously when we think about a european war though by the time you're into the first couple months of the great war there are no trees around oh god no no you might want to punch through some sandbags but you can always develop special ammo or rely on other tools for that so 6.5 to me is not a problem round in a european war the only it's very specific environments that you want to have the heavier bullet and it's very interesting that japan went that way but to me i think 6.5 i think it survived the conditions that it was in granted if it had been used more in the jungles and stuff as if if europe had the jungles that they were having to deal with yes okay i could see you'd want to get through the foliage but the fact that it didn't have it yeah i think it survived just fine yeah i i agree it's one of those odd places where i don't know and i haven't even we're not into the 7.7 rifles we haven't done that research i would really like to see some of that justification i suspect a lot of it came from adaptation to machine gun technology too machine guns tend to do better with heavier rounds anyway and maybe that's an argument for why we should stay away from the 6.5 maybe but not something we can visit just yet though right now it's hard to argue against the artisaka because it is a gun designed almost specifically for the environment that it never really ended up in it because it was on the eastern front it it very rarely saw trenches yeah where literally the only downside to that gun was effectively potentially a slightly weaker cartridge and the ladder site that's it i can think of one more are you sure am i forgetting something yes it's [ __ ] on clothes with a fairly stiff because the lack of a caulking piece everything else it's a fairly stiff [ __ ] on clothes it is fairly stiff but there is kind of like an auxiliary safety shoulder that's milled onto the back of it that i think really helps to guide the bolt down yeah it pulls you through the corner yeah it really does so it's actually not terrible and i have to slap you with one other thing to hold you to your own standards no turn down bolt yes it's true no turn down bolt but i do have a nice semi pistol grip that kind of puts me in the right place yeah but i still don't think it can be worked nearly as rapidly as the lee enfield it i probably could not i i wouldn't disagree with that assessment but so how do we get a rear aperture side basically how do we put the dog leg bolt onto an arisaka and then put a rear aperture sight on it that would be the perfect gun right there and i think that plays out the fact that you're trying to compare things that you can't necessarily step you could theoretically stack them but they didn't and so we have to work with what we're given and so the confidences in the art soccer and the 1917 are fairly close but they differ in terms of one of these things is promised to never ever give you trouble in the mud and you're told that you're going in real last yeah and you're told you're going into world war one and it's like but i want the thing that will never yeah it's never gonna mess up like so that's ultimate trust and it's probably an oversimplification because a lot of the war wasn't actually in the mud lots of conflict was elsewhere but i don't want the thing that will never ever ever break oh yeah i want the thing that's gonna give me the utmost confidence in surviving even me well past my time okay so being number one this should be the end of our series if not for the fact that it's not uh we have a problem which is that the entire premise of this thing did not work unless we made one notable exception number zero everything you know is a lie massive heavy straight wristed and using the worst possible version of an m-block clip the rsc 1917 still sports barrel mounted sights and chambers the eight millimeter lebel round oldest of the smokeless cartridges by all rights it should be the very worst gun of the great war given our standard so far but it has easily taken the top slot today by two simple facts one it was in the trenches and two it was semi-automatic tricky trick we fooled you i think we pretty much set it all in there but i want to make sure we expand on this what was the gun that gave you the most sort of instant follow-up rapidity of lethality most confident feel in terms of defending yourself in the great war the winchester model 1907 hands down okay but that's that's an aviation carbine and there's some argument that maybe kind of does it fine 1910. okay again uh there's been a lot of people saying that that might have been fielded by the russians on the ground but i've never been able to come up with a primary sourcing even if it was we're talking about 500 at the moment remington model 8 fn 19 okay the remington model 8 probably didn't actually end up in the war instead like you said the fn 1900 in which fewer than 100 were produced for aviation use you're listing a lot of semi-automatics and i appreciate that about you but these are all guns that were used in the backseat of airplanes and not not on the ground can i can i roll the airplane into the battle before you get to it yes the germans also did field two of their own semi-automatic uh rifles at full powered cartridges that also did not really see ground there's there's rumors and there's i see lots of books saying and then they used it on the ground hearsay but where are the orders where is the data if you know of a memo that proves that a certain gun was on the ground a primary source memo by all means contact me i would love to see it again not a book where someone just says it happened we need actual source material yeah i get a lot of people well this book said it in a sentence on site i sent you an email where it's like later oh yeah i saw it in this book and it's like right they just said it they did it it was just a now i could just say it i mean i could also say that right now i can tell you all the sky is purple the ak-47 was used in world war one it doesn't mean it was it doesn't mean it was well when 47 is in the name yeah but i'm not saying it definitely did not happen ever i'm saying that i have no proof of it and i can't right i can't argue a negative i just need to see proof of the thing please so uh so we're stuck with the let's cut out all the semi-automatics that did not serve the petterson device that was a secret weapon that never launched there's a bunch of french prototypes that did serve there's one semi-automatic that we have not been able to shoot that did see infantry service that's the munet a5 so we can't give a strong opinion on it unfortunately however it was one has one uh i think there's one in canada but the the issue with that gun is it was a proprietary cartridge to that gun because they could not make it work with eight millimeter lebel oh god which tells me it probably was actually a really good gun because it didn't have eight millimeter left belt but um proprietary cartridge would almost keep it off our list in the sense that at some level you couldn't get in if you were in the front line with it you get your 30 rounds and then good luck getting yeah that's your 30. yeah they're gonna take your gun away from me and trade it out for something else next week so the only semi-automatic that saw enough production and used common ammo was the rsc1917 yeah we have a whole episode on this gun but just to summarize they used an inbox clip simply because which the metal on the end block clip you had to make sure you know that it was the feed lips for the gun so if anything happened to that involved clip well there went your feed lips there went feeding your gun yeah but there's a lot of guns that do that so is that what we have particular issues with though my problem with the unblock clip for the rc is that you did not end up with the rapid secure loading that you did in other end block guns because you think of an end block gun you pop it open yeah you feed it straight in you close the action it's done right and this you how did it work you have to pop it open at the bottom so so essentially i guess it is like the magazine it folds forward allowing you to then access the inside from underneath in which case you shove that end block up inside there's no the bottom of the image there's no retention by the way you sort of drop it in the hole you just have to get it to where it feels right and then from there you can close up the magazine it's weird it's bizarre feeling it feels like you did it wrong yes it did the first time and then it worked and i went oh i guess it is the right way to do it however it's still relatively fast i wouldn't say it's as fast as the usual unblock clip but realistically it's up there i just managed to jam at that one time that i accidentally popped in an empty like i opened the mag well and then i somehow managed to accidentally trip it and it closed itself up really fast on me on an empty and block and it wouldn't open back up again oh yeah there was that incident that was fun okay i don't wanna think about that so and then by the way you have to dump the old end block clip out when you open it and blah blah blah so it's like you have to open it vertically from the rear so it's like if you're near any mud or muck yeah make sure you hold that high they had a propensity to break springs and pistons and whatever look at our episode we go into more detail about how unreliably reliable these guns were um but you know gas-powered semi-automatic piston-operated very complicated very heavy unnecessarily long yeah there's no reason for it to be as long as it is i mean just institutional momentum so how does it end up at the top of our list well we just said it it's semi-automatic yeah that's literally it there there's no other surprise to it so it's a semi-automatic that was issued in the war in numbers enough that it was up there and there's no other semi-automatics on the other side period there's sorry first of all uh the email level cartridge is a pretty heavy hitter on recall yeah it's going to stop but no i mean it's on yourself yeah it's going to hit me pretty good but the gas system actually does a lot to mitigate that recoil and it's actually not too terrible the sights are legible and available as night sights the semi semi auto action itself like it didn't really tie up on me at any point no can you the lee enfield fastest bolt action in the war as fast as the rse no i can shoot five rounds on the rsc faster than i can the infield no that but you don't disturb your aim at all nope zero it is wonderful your shooting hand stays where it shoot yeah you never have to change it unless you put the safety on and i believe ian and carl uh on in range talked about this but the semi-automatic rifle skunks the bolt-action rifle yeah there's just no way in the end it does and so in this regard you have the rc which is the first gun to bring up across a concept so fundamentally improved that it doesn't matter that every step its execution was terrible yeah it doesn't matter there's no it's almost comical that the first marshally fielded ground semi-automatic rifle right has the worst possible cartridge for it it had a streetlist stock because it had to share parts with the label no semi-pistol it had the worst possible feed in the end like an open basket it had like it had all the worst features initially i think it didn't even happen it was the worst feat it was the worst execution of the best idea and the worst part is it comes from a country that has spent all the years before the war developing lebel and things like that no not the lebel they were developing semi-automatic rifles in secret that's why they were stuck with the lebel it's because they had been working for decades on semi-automatic rifles and then they because all of them had to run on something other than eight millimeter lebel and so therefore because eight millimeter level is the worst semi-automatic cartridge available because it's this awkward double shoulder big rim because massive it's great it's 11 millime necked down to 8 millimeter that's all it is and it became impossible to feed through an automatic system and so they couldn't introduce a whole new type of ammo so they had to make an entire gun around this one cartridge it doesn't work and that's what you get it's this just and then they also have cartridge made the gun they added that it had to share parts with the labelle which it never ultimately really did really but it just ended up making it look like i'm a bell uh it's like a perfect story it's hilarious and yet superior i mean they did make a carbine that we didn't really get to shoot no but it didn't actually get into the war that's the thing is so there was an improved version of this gun that ended up being able to use bertier eclipse instead of its own proprietorship that's way better it had all the features sorted out most of the repairs sorted out and despite being it was short it was short and despite having to deal with that eight millimeter cartridge it actually started to bring around a lot of features yeah didn't make it in time that's unfortunate uh well i mean i think everybody's called the war ended oh yeah by then i guess uh it's one of those things where we did this whole work up and we realized there's one gun that's just so alien to the others yeah it's on a whole it's like if you're looking at a pyramid that's the top of the pyramid there's nothing else that competes with it now i did promise that at the end of this we would give you an infantry style sure workout so um let's just we've talked about weird esoteric whatever we talked about the rsc which you know however many thousand managed to get to the front line and that's it uh we need to talk about infantry mainline rifles because a lot of people came to this video expecting that and at the beginning i did say we're going to do that yeah we want to make sure we touched on at the end so i'm going to provide a list of the 10 what i consider to be the most common rifles of the war i think in theory some of the larger powers may have produced enough carbines that there's more carbines of this smaller power rifle but you get my idea yeah they're either standard issue rifles for infantry or like i said earlier i don't know if i said it earlier or not but um the exception being there's a couple rifles in here that are second standard however they were produced in greater number than the standard rifle um so like we saw the anfield 1917 yeah yeah so what does that list look like number 10 lebel 1886 m93 this is literally the oldest possible smokeless rifle you could have in the great war because it was the first smokeless rifle the lebel has no rapid loading system instead it has a cropac style magazine which requires a fair bit of shoulder effort to keep in operation and loading and chambering gets to be a bit of a carry the one math equation so the lebel is going to have to sit at the bottom of our list number nine bertier 1907-15 with the same action as the lebel it has to be close to it this time however we use a three shot n block clip which doesn't seem like a lot but uh coming from the eight round single loading lebel being able to put three rounds in for the amount of time that it takes to put one round in the previous rifle you actually do speed up your fire rate by about 3x which means the 1907.15 bertier is technically better than the lebel it also benefited from improved sites specifically designed for rapid acquisition despite still being barrel mounted number eight mosin 1891 being a five shot stripper clip fed rifle the mosin is of course going to eke over the bertier but not any further up our list some people will argue because many americans are familiar with this gun thanks to the surplus market however i find it to be needlessly complicated if you actually get into the bolt design and magazine there are many features that just aren't required to be there a lot of this comes from its unique amalgam design which you can see in our episode on this gun number seven austrian monlicker 1895. this straight pull rifle is best served in its original 8x50 cartridge and not the updated 8x56 which i find to be a bit of a shoulder breaker also these later refurbished guns tend to have mismatched bolts and therefore sticky operation if you get a hold of an original monlicker 1895 they are quite smooth and feed rapidly from an n-block clip however that must be inserted in one correct direction which means that technically it could cause some problems on the battlefield if you have fumble fingers number six cacarno 1891 while much malign the italian kokono as we have said before does work and it does it with a minimum amount of machining and parts it beats out the austrian monolinker simply because its n-block clip can be loaded in either direction and the mild 6.5 millimeter cartridge makes it an easy and accurate shooter number five gewehr 1898 many people consider this german rifle to be the ultimate military bolt action although they are generally talking about the action itself and not the unique features of this gun like the longevity and short hand guard the governor 98 is an excellent base for a number of guns however we did see it improved slightly number four ottoman mouser 1903 case in point this export mouser now has the simplified tangent rear sight and a fuller hand guard the ottoman mauser in particular has a tall clip bridge but we could see this being exchanged for say a mauser model 1912 which was fielded in low numbers by austria-hungary and germany number three u.s springfield 1903 adapted from the mauser 1893 the u.s springfield rifle is among the better of the war especially because of it being a standard issue short rifle the only real problems we have with the gun come from the fact that it's a bit over complicated with unnecessary features like a magazine cut off and that range computer buffington rear sight number two short magazine lee enfield mark iii star easily the most rapid shooter on our list the smelly's ergonomics are superior however it does suffer a number of issues stemming from the fact that it is technically an older design that has been reworked many times over the british were considering abandoning it before the war however it did prove it's worth an actual combat making it a favorite for many viewers of our show number one usm field 1917. eking out the competition is another mauser derived action i'm sorry mousers are apparently very good the us 1917 is a 30 odd 6 with a six round staggered box magazine and it delivers that power out of a short rifle package however still very heavy that's because the barrel provides an extreme amount of precision and the shooter can back it up with accuracy thanks to the rear receiver mounted aperture sight that means a long sight radius and rapid acquisition all right i guess that does it that covers everything doesn't it no not even a little bit uh the problem we're going to have here is people are going to want to comment on this a lot and for good reason there's no right answer here no there really isn't it's very clear that there are design decisions that are superior dropping your hand near the trigger superior right yeah aperture sight superior arguably front locking lugs superior but then you have something like the lee enfield that gets away with it true in favor of other features well then you got the arisaka that has the superior locking lugs at the front oh yeah because there's even better way of doing that right unless it's the ross rifle with its interrupted sort of screw style locking logs which technically might mathematically provide more strength but then are more easily damaged when they're out of the action so there's a lot of this in that and the truth be told the only real thing we learned is semi-automatic crushes bolt action number one hand sound number two rear aperture sights tend to crush everything else it's true done like the those are clear winners in general mouse reactions tend to be preferred just they tend to be very robust yes uh but the reason they're preferred is because of how they handle rimless cartridges the minute you introduced a rim cartridge you see something like the lee enfield which gets to go in a totally different direction and perform very well weather ross rifle yeah but well no because the ross rifle ended up being very complicated despite having a rim cartridge uh and you see that in something like why the mozin never made this list the mozin having a rim cartridge should have been a very simple gun it could have been lee enfield simple but then it decided not to be right so there's design challenges and changes in there now of course maybe the lee enfield is way up here because it gets to be so simple but then you try to adopt a machine gun alongside of it and you start having issues with that and you start cursing like they did with the lebels so there's a way to see this as an individual rifleman there's the way to see this as a country trying to adopt a rifle there's a way to see this as looking forward to the future well as a country trying to adopt a rifle and a machine gun yes there's also a way to look at this as a country trying to adopt a rifle and a machine gun and you have only so much budget yeah i mean or industrial capacity or whatever or you could be like japan and make what's arguably the best rifle have the industrial capacity to produce what you got and then randomly switch to another cartridge before world war ii and started to start adopting cartridges for your machine guns that don't fit in your rifles but they're really close like there's all sorts of weird ways this can split okay um and when we're talking about collecting what we're talking about in review what it really does is it teaches us to appreciate certain features and to sort of compare and contrast them with environments that were encountered in the war and then what also may work with you as a shooter right there theoretically could be a best-case solution but it's going to be a gun that has features from several of these guns and the only way to truly know that it's better is for a lot of people to die and for you to collect a lot of data while they do it uh so um unless you and i are going to get to genocide levels of killing people we're never going to have an actual objective answer that's not possible in this scenario yeah no unfortunately not so we went with the subjective one which is mae's opinion on a bunch of nuanced guns and then that i have at least shot all of right and just to cap it off we gave you what we consider to be the infantry rankings for those long guns that actually saw the most fighting i think we have to leave it at that yeah i think so if you disagree there's comments section do it i mean we'd love to see it other people are going to want to compare and in addition to the comments you can come on by the discord or contact us on other social media platforms that we're on this core link is at the bottom of the cn arsenal website yes it's always there and it's not necessarily in the comments on whatever you're reading or watching this on yes because those links can change so we have to put it in one place and update it when it needs to be updated exactly so look for the little icon at the bottom of the website come by tell us how you feel share in the community because whatever is known out there is literally what people have put into it and if you disagree strongly with this find primary source documents and put them out there for people to read because that's how we learn exactly all right did you have fun i mean i did i think you kind of had a bumpy car ride there for a little bit but i think we got i think we got back on track i've been terrified the entire time well we'll see how much of our empire is left when this episode is over uh country of may living strong the rest of you have a good time and then of course like our usual episodes we're going to put an update at the end of this thing because we film well ahead of schedule yes all right have a good one night everybody [Music] [Music] for those of you who are new viewers this special episode may have glossed over some historical points that you're not entirely familiar with if we've created any additional curiosity please take a note of the episode list in the description to help you explore further for regular viewers i'm happy to report that our new reminder to like subscribe comment or basically press every available button on youtube in a blind panic actually does seem to be having an effect we're seeing the first real uptick in viewer growth in some time so thank you please don't forget that we're also trying to encourage patronage on patreon or subscribe star where all supporters get a behind-the-scenes podcast with each episode and those over five dollars receive a monthly scanned historical magazine or catalog that has a general gun theme if you're not a subscriptions person do not fear we have seen arsenal.com shop where you can get apparel or posters or sometimes patches in order to support the content that you enjoy thanks again everyone for watching and we'll be back to our regular episodes next time

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 275,312

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, worldwar1, documentary

Id: 1gP43fa-ujk

Length: 99min 57sec (5997 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020