[ US World War One Sniper Rifles ] Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on Forgotten Weapons.com. I'm Ian, and I am here today at the James Julia Auction House looking at some of the guns they're going to be selling in their upcoming October of 2016 Firearms Auction. And what we're taking a look at today are some sniping rifles from the US from World War One. Now there are two main versions of US World War One sniping rifles, although they're really the same rifle. These are all the
Model of 1903 Springfield rifles, but they have two different
primary types of optics. One over here is the Warner & Swasey,
originally the Model of 1908, this one, and most of them,
are Models of 1913 ... scope. And then the second option was the Winchester
Model A 5x power scope, or Winchester A5. And that's what we have on both of these two. And ... they're very different scopes, and there's some really cool history
behind some of these. So let's dig into it. [Warner & Swasey M1908 & M1913 Musket Sights] So in the United States Army
early on, the official optical sight (it was called a ... "Telescopic Musket Sight") for the Springfield 1903 rifle
was the Warner & Swasey. And this is ... not a good scope. It's probably the worst optic that
the US military has ever adopted. It's heavy, it's awkward, the thing weighs
2.25 pounds, that's a little more than a kilo. It's a heavy scope. The Model 1908 was a 6x power, which is not bad. But they determined that that was actually
more magnification than necessary, and had a smaller field of
view than they would like. So the Model of 1913 tweaked things a bit,
reduced the magnification to 5.2x power, which allowed them a little bit
larger field of view, that's good. It is a prismatic sight, so you can
still use stripper clips with the rifle. The adjustments to this
scope are all external. ... The elevation here will
take it out to 3,000 yards, and they have a little plaque on top giving you
data on wind and spin holdover and compensation. The idea of spin being the bullet
drifting based on its own revolution, and that's a factor that isn't even
an issue until 1,000 yards really. And boy, ... the chances you'd actually
be able to use something like this to make a 1,000 yard shot
are pretty infinitesimal. Anyway, that was the official Army scope,
they bought about 5,750 of them. And they were used both on the Springfield rifle
and on the Model of 1909 Benét–Mercié machine gun, which was a copy of the Hotchkiss Portative. So as for World War One,
probably about 1,500 of these went onto sniping rifles, 1903s,
that went to World War One. [Winchester A5] So the A5 was one of the best commercial
scopes on the market at that time. You could get it in 3x, 4x
or 5x power magnification, which would have been called
the A3, the A4 or the A5. Winchester did have some other scopes out, there
was a B5 for example, a scope Model B 5x power. The US Army chose the 5x power
magnification version for sniping. It's interesting that in World War One
they really wanted the magnification, they had 5x power here, we
had 5.2x or 6x power over here. That would change in World
War Two but for the time being, despite this being a small tube,
it was a 5x power magnification. The scope is a bit fragile,
it's very precisely made. It's interesting, one of the
features about this A5 is that these tubes were actually made from
solid bar stock that was drilled out and then bored on a lathe, instead
of being a piece of drawn tubing. And that made them much
more precise and concentric, which is a good thing for a telescopic sight. Obviously the Warner & Swasey isn't
built in such a way that that matters. But ... if these are fixed in
place you run the risk of, say, destroying the reticle
with the recoil from a shot. So the way they actually worked was that the
scope is kind of actually floating in its mount. In fact I can ... the mount is spring loaded
pushing up against these adjustment tabs. And when you fired the inertia would
tend to make the scope stay in place while the rifle recoiled backwards. Because it's floating in its mount, when you fire
the scope is going to slide forward like that. So in between shots, in addition to
working the bolt to load a new cartridge, you're also going to pull the scope back
into position so the eye relief is proper and the zero comes back for your next shot. It's interesting that the US Marine Corps has
historically prided itself on its marksmanship, especially comparing itself
to the Army in that regard. And the Marine Corps scopes were much
more set up around precision shooting as opposed to military durability. So we see this, this came out of like an artillery
design bureau meant for serious combat, where ... the primary objective is that the
scope stays there and keeps working. Regardless of maybe
how well it actually shoots. Where these guys are designed for precision. You may break them, but as
long as you take care of them and you're a little gentle with them,
they'll be very precise scopes. So we have these two interesting
different schools of thought there. Now, we're going to take a
close look at all three of these rifles, but I do want to point out
before we get into that, that this one here in the back
is particularly interesting to me. Because this, as far as I can tell, and I can't prove it, but by all accounts it appears to be a
marksman's rifle from well before the war. It's a 1908 barrel. And it seems like this was a rifle that was used by
a service member for National Match competition. And it's the sort of thing that would
have gone into World War One with a really skilled precision shooter. Whether this one went to World War One or not,
I have no idea. I don't have any documentation on it. But it's exactly representative
of the type that would have. So we'll get to this one,
but let's start with these two, which are the standard military issue
sniper rifles for the US from World War One. Alright, we'll start with this guy,
this is a Model of 1903 Springfield with an A5 scope on it.
This is a military contract rifle. If we take a close look at the front of the barrel,
we'll see it's a Springfield Armoury made barrel from February of 1918, so this is a
World War One era barrel and rifle. Now the scope mounts for
this style are interesting because this used what was called a Mann
tapered base type of scope attachment where you've got dovetails for the front and
back rings, but there are no locking screws. What happens is as you push the
scope further forward on these bases, the dovetail widens and
locks the scope in place. So I have this nice and loose right now. You can see I can just slide
the ... scope right off the rifle. This rear base is where we have our
windage and elevation adjustments. In fact, let's take a closer look
at that before we put it back on. One of the main changes that Winchester
made for the military version of this scope was to add this batwing-looking
piece of sheet metal there. That acts as a nice little pointer, and gives
you a little bit of friction in your adjustments. We've got just a little bit of tangible
stop as a result, but nothing audible. And the way this works is this plunger
is threaded in against the scope, and on this side we just have
a spring-loaded plunger. So as I screw this in or out, that plunger is
going to push the scope and keep tension on it. It works the same way for elevation. And then our front ring just
holds this whole thing in place. The front has this stop ring
that you use to set your eye relief because, as I mentioned, between shots you are
going to slide the scope back up to that stop ring. The focus can be adjusted,
you can see both the front and ... the rear caps are threaded in place,
and you can adjust their exact location. You'll notice we have this nice arrow on the
base that tells us which way to install the scope. And one of the modifications that the Marine
Corps made when they built these rifles was to take the front handguard
here and scallop it out, so you have plenty of space for ... the
scope to come off the back of the base. So to put this on I'm just going to line up the
front and rear mounts, it slides on like that. And what will happen is the first time I fire, recoil is actually going
to set those firmly in place. So once you've taken a few shots,
you'll probably need a small punch and a hammer just to tap these off. So the scope doesn't actually fall off,
despite having no actual locking screws. Like German sniper rifles of the same period,
this A5 is centrally located over the bore, ... there, and as a result
it covers the stripper clip guide. So you have access in here,
it's not going to interfere with ejection, but you don't have enough
space to use a stripper clip. So these rifles would have been singly loaded. Open the bolt, load one or as many rounds as
you want in the magazine, and then close the bolt. Because ... this isn't a 1903A4, which
would come later in World War Two, these rifles were not
originally made as snipers, they were converted from standard infantry rifles. So the serial number ... and the manufacturer's mark are both going to end up being
hidden underneath this scope base. Now let's compare that to a Warner & Swasey. Same exact rifle. You'll notice they didn't
have to scallop out the front handguard, because there's no scope mount up there. The mounting on the Warner & Swasey
is a rail fixed to the side of the receiver. We have our elevation knob right here. By the way, this cruciform thumb screw here
tightens the elevation down, locks it in place. And the Model of 1908 did not have this, so that's the easy visual way to distinguish
between the 1908 and the 1913 models. Once that's a little bit loose
then we can adjust this. 500 yards, 1,000 yards, 1,500, 2,500
and go all the way out to 3,000 yards, which is going to be a substantial amount
of elevation, which you'll see in a moment. We also have our windage
adjustment, works the same way. This is minutes of angle. So I can go
out to 38 minutes one direction, left. And 46 minutes the other direction. We'll put that back to zero there. And let's take a look at what
3,000 yards elevation looks like. That scope is positively downward
pointed in order to get you that far. And if we move it back to something reasonable
like 500 yards, that looks a little better. Now you're actually kind of pointing
in the same direction as the rifle. Here's our little instruction plaque on the top. Gives you wind values, wind compensation. Drift up here is for the effect of the bullet
spinning, causing it to drift in windage. Now in order to remove this scope, we
have a little spring-loaded catch here. And what I'm going to do is push that catch
in, and slide the scope forward on its rail. It's going to catch on the bolt. There we go. So there's our rail screwed
into the side of the receiver. You see three screws there on the inside. Pretty simple really,
not much to it. And up here we have our
manufacturing marks and serial number, which were obscured on the A5 rifle. There you go, this is a Telescopic
Musket Sight, Model of 1913. This one is serial number 2,347,
made by Warner & Swasey. And then the Warner & Swasey
scopes were interchangeable. There was no difference between
the scopes and the mounts for the ... Benét–Mercié
machine guns and the rifles. So these scopes were serial numbered
on the inside here when they were issued. And you can see this one is for rifle number
625415, which unfortunately isn't this rifle. Matching scope and rifle combinations
are virtually unheard of with these. They typically got mixed up quite a lot. Of course there is also lastly
this giant rubber eye cup, which has hardened, it's a
little pliable but not much. These are pretty much always hardened
by this time, because they are quite old. And you'll often find these
entirely cracked off or torn off. There's a hole here which was put in, in fact
there's two, I think there's, yeah, three holes. Those are there to prevent
suction on this eye cup. That was apparently a kind of
annoying feature in them originally where they were nice soft rubber and
if you squished your eye up into this, it would actually kind of stick to
your face which was obnoxious. That eye cup is on there because
this scope has a quite short eye relief, and even with that eye cup it was
not uncommon to accidentally whack yourself in the eyebrow with
this scope when actually shooting. Overall ... the Warner & Swasey
was not a really good optics design. In addition to being used by the US
it was also used by the Canadians. You'll find pictures of these mounted
on Ross ... Mark III Model of 1910 rifles. Alright, now let's take a look at this last one, this
is I think kind of my favourite of the batch actually. And it's not quite a military-issue gun. So this is a very early 1903 Springfield. Looking at the barrel, we have an October of
1908 manufacture date, Springfield Armoury. And then we also have some other
very early features of the Springfield. For example, the front handguard
here doesn't have a little cutout. That was added to make the iron-sight
sight picture a little less crowded. They just cut a scallop in the middle
there which isn't present on this one. By 1918 they had added two
reinforcing ... bolts into the stock, and neither of those are present on this rifle. This has a very early style of sight knob, that's a pretty esoteric thing
but an interesting feature. And the front of the stock
is actually marked with an "S", which indicates that the stock itself
was very early production, prior to 1905. That's a story all for itself involved in the
conversion of these rifles from .30-03 to .30-06. However, if we continue to look at
this you'll see that there are elements that just don't quite fit the A5 military-issue
sniper that we just saw a moment ago. For example, this handguard isn't scalloped out. The scope mount is up here,
much further forward. Now it still uses these Mann tapered
bases, but they're not quite as big. The military ones were made
larger to be a little more durable. If we look at the rear mount here,
it's clearly the same style of mount. This is a free-floating scope tube, but it doesn't have that little bat-wing piece
of sheet metal to give you distinct clicks. These are just free travelling screws, which is OK if you're a sporting
competitor and you know where this is. But you don't have that nice tactile feedback
that you would from a military pattern. We can see again here that the serial number
has been covered up by this scope base, which would have been the case on a military
rifle at the time as well, but also done here. If we look at the stock you can see that there's
some very well done repair work to the stock. Two plugs here, there's a pair of plugs right there, and there are a couple here and ... let's see, maybe there, on the stock. And I suspect that those were originally the
mounting points for an adjustable cheek piece. Lastly, if we compare this rifle
side-by-side with the military one, you can see that while the
scopes are the same length, the military scope is actually
mounted further backwards. You see the scope here is kind of
right over the line of the striker, where the scope on this
guy is over the bolt handle. So almost 2 inches of difference there. This rifle, in order to get
a proper sight picture, you have to really crowd your
face up close on the striker. So what is this rifle? This is, by all appearances, and of course I don't
have any documentation so I can't prove this, but everything about it says that this was a
marksman's rifle, a ... competition shooter, who's probably running the National
Match courses prior to World War One. This rifle would have been manufactured, obviously
based on the barrel date, in 1908, or maybe 1909. And whoever had this rifle set it up with
a commercial scope, commercial mounts. ... The same model of scope, but not
quite the military pattern of everything. He mounted it forward because
that was how he tended to shoot. Bringing your nose, for example,
up to the striker on this gives you a really good point of reference,
a repeatable cheek weld on the gun. And in fact you'll find some of
these old marksmanship rifles with leather pads set onto the striker,
probably for that same reason. And this guy would have
competed with this rifle. Now do we know if this went to
World War One? Nope, I have no idea. However, the really skilled Camp Perry
National Match shooters for the military, this was a major ... pastime
around this time period. The 1908 and the 1912 Olympics, the gold medals in the rifle shooting were both taken
by American military personnel. And when World War One broke out, if you were
in the Corps and you were deployed overseas, and you were a National Match shooter, you
would have taken your match rifle with you. Especially given that it's in .30-06,
and it is a 1903 Springfield service rifle. That rifle went with you, it's not like today where personal weapons are
absolutely not used in combat. In World War One this is your rifle, as a National Match shooter you would
know the dope for this rifle inside and out, and be extremely effective with it. And ... this wasn't strictly an American
thing: early in World War One for example, the British Expeditionary Force was
renowned as a fantastically effective group. The marksmanship that those British lifetime
career soldiers had was really impressive. There are accounts of Germans thinking
they were under machine gun fire, which was actually very accurate,
very fast, Lee-Enfield rifle fire. Well by 1918, when the US troops started
showing up, all of those guys were dead. They were very effective soldiers, but they
were all killed by artillery and machine guns in the first couple of years of the war. When the Americans showed
up it was this fresh injection of soldiers who truly were expert riflemen. And they really impressed
French and British commanders and colleague troops
with their shooting ability. That was an impressive element that the
Americans brought into the war at that point. One last thing that I want to point out, scopes which are removable are
militarily always issued with cases. And typically one is supposed to
carry the rifle with a scope detached, and the scope safely stowed away in a carry
case to protect it from damage and the elements. And these two issue rifles, both are
accompanied by matching scope cases. So this is a 1913 Warner & Swasey case. It opens up there, rather large inside to fit the
bulky and squarish Warner & Swasey scope. And then there is an adjustment tool here. Finding that tool with the
scope is a quite rare thing. I'm going to leave it in there, it's quite tight. This is a really nice condition case, in fact
this Warner & Swasey scope is extremely good, I don't know that I've ever seen a better one. Perhaps even scarcer is
this case for the A5 scope. Obviously the A5 is much longer,
so it's got this leather case. Set the scope down in there,
and then interesting, ... then in the top cap of the
scope case is a little data table. We've got our shooters name, this
was private Van Camp, M.H. Van Camp. He's got his rifle's serial number
and scope dope right in there. It looks like he has left it blank, or perhaps his
pencil mark has faded in the last hundred years. But you record all your relevant data
there so that you don't forget your dope. He also inscribed his own
information on the top of the lid. Looks like 13th Regiment,
US Marines, Company M. This is a really cool accessory
that's really hard to find, and it's really neat to have this along
with the rest of the scope and rifle setup. So the reticle for this A5
is a nice fine crosshair. And the mount totally obscures your iron sights, so you're not using the irons with this guy. Now the reticle on this
match rifle is really curious. You can see it there, it kind of looks like a lollipop. And my best guess would
be that that centre blob is either you set your target directly
on top of it, like a six o'clock hold, or it's sized so that it completely
covers the black portion of a competition match course bull's eye. So you would set that over
the black part of the target, make sure that ... there's no black peeking
through, that it doesn't cover any of the white. And that tells you that you're exactly on. That's exactly the sort of thing that a really serious
match shooter might very well do for a reticle. Clearly this was a scope, and reticle, and
mounting system that was custom ordered. And you could get whatever
it was you exactly wanted. Now the reticle in the Warner & Swasey is
really hard for me to get a good focus on because of this big eye cup
and the short eye relief. But you can see it's
a crosshair in the centre. So then over on the left side here, now normally
this would all show up in the same field of view, but I can't quite get the
right position on the camera, you've got those three range-finding stadia,
and those are for an average sized man. You see which one a guy is fitting under,
and you'll notice those are all really small, that'll give you a range estimate. And I suspect that's probably 500, 1,000 and
1,500 yards, but I'm not ... 100% sure on that. Now with the Warner & Swasey you
sort of could still use your iron sights. You'd have to kind of hold the rubber
eye cup out of the way or take it off. But especially if you took it off, you'd
still have those sights available to you. So you can just barely see them
around the side of the eye cup there. Thank you for watching guys,
I hope you enjoyed the video. It's rare to get a chance to see any
actual US World War One sniper rifle, and very cool today to have three different
examples that are all interesting in their own right. If you'd like to own any of these
yourself, they are all very cool, and they are all linked to
in the description text below. Three different links for the catalogue pages
for each rifle at the James Julia website. You can take a look at their pictures,
their descriptions, their provenance. And if you're interested in one or all
you can place bids over the phone, or come up here to Maine and
participate in the auction live. Thanks for watching.
