Posted on 04/10/2015 6:35:03 AM PDT by C19fan
If there’s any weapon that deserves the most credit for beating back Nazi Germany, it might be the legendary bolt-action Mosin-Nagant rifle.
The Soviet Union made them in absolutely huge numbers — and they’re still available and rather cheap compared to their contemporaries. What’s more extraordinary is that the basic design is more than a century old.
Even now, rebels carry Mosin-Nagants alongside more modern weapons as in conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
I have two he’d receivers made at the Tusla armory. Love them.
A snipers rifle is 7.62X51 to a 1000 meters, .300 Win Mag to 1200 meters, .338 Lapua to 2000 meters. And if you want to just get silly, the crowd pleasing .50 BMG on a 34in. barreled Barrett. If your looking for a old military rifle to a 1000 meters go find a British Enfield .303 in good shape.
Your chamber is probably full of cosmoline. Get some Simple Green and scrub the hell out of it. Follow with hot soapy water. Then a light coat of oil.
That should take care of it.
L
for those that feel the M44 kicks a bit much (it does) try to find some Light Ball also called Training (its hard to find). Same bullet as the M43 round (123grain) and is very pleasant compared to heavy ball.
Even lighter was the metal /plastic training rounds.
I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.
Spoken by George C. Scott in the film Patton.
Do you need me to provide a comparison of how many divisions were committed on which fronts?
Seriously? The casualty numbers are pretty easy to look up, so I did that. I’ll recommend you read some actual war history if you want more data than that. Anyone who actually studies the war seriously, understands my point. The Soviets are the ones that ground down the German army. They paid dearly for it (to a good extent because Stalin was an idiot, and had gutted his officer corps right before the war, and then he refused to pay attention to any warnings about the invasion).
The didn’t hold off the whole German army, just the vast majority between 1940 and 1944, and then ground most of the rest into dust after that.
Once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they were fully committed other than the rather minor front in North Africa, and that was mostly Italians under German command.
History and the numbers speak for themselves. The U.S. can pride themselves on their logistical support for what the Russians did, but the Russians actually did it. Normandy invasion and the following Battle of France was all well and good, but even had that not happened, the Russians would have still made it to Berlin.
The Western Front sped things up, but were in no way a tipping point of the war. The main thing they accomplished was keeping some countries out of the Soviet Sphere which is an undeniably good thing.
America’s worst day in WWII Europe was a food processor compared to the industrial meat grinder the Soviets endured for a couple of years.
The Russians had crap leadership until Zhukov was put in charge, and honestly I think even he is very overrated. Stalin had purged the leadership of the Red Army in the 1930s and it was very evident when the Germans invaded. That’s why they got plowed early on and lost so many men. Then even with Zhukov in charge, they didn’t really follow a tactical style which cared much about casualties. Zhukov was pretty happy to trade blood for victory, which was unlike either the Allies or the Germans.
The Mosin Nagant is really nothing special as rifles go. It’s another bolt action firing a powerful cartridge (quite comparable to the Mauser K-98 or the Springfield 03). Honestly I don’t see that it can be either credited or discredited all that much. It worked for the job at hand. It wasn’t revolutionary like the Garand or STG-43.
If you can reload,then 7.65 ammo is easy.Cases are easily formed from .30-06 brass,and any bullet intended for .303 British will work fine.
Da!
And, for the record:
Worth a read, IMHO.
The Soviet Union did not value the lives of their soldiers and Stalin murdered much of the experienced and competent officer corps prior to WW II. Germans also new that surrendering to the Soviets was a death sentence.
That it handles it's rimmed cartridge with a very high level of reliability is a good trick.
It worked for the job at hand. It wasn’t revolutionary like the Garand or STG-43.
Not in this century, nor the last one. But in the year 1891, when it began replacing the Russian single shot Krnka roughly equivalent to the U.S. 45-70 Trapdoor Springfield? Oh yes; revolutionary enough.
That’s fair. Pulling off what they did with a rimmed cartridge was good work.
I conceded it was revolutionary for the Russians, though the French and Germans had already pioneered the technology.
I cite the Garant and STG-43 as revolutionary because they were the pioneers (yes, there were semi-auto rifles before the Garand, but none were reliable enough for widespread deployment). The STG-43, of course, was the first assault rifle.
I guess I am a bit sensitive over the issue due to my Father and Uncle which fought in WWII. The traitor John Kerry calling Viet Nam Vets baby killers and war criminals and getting my neighbors calling me a baby killer really was insulting.
Excellent! Would like to know the details on that one.
I absolutely agree with that! Scum like Kerry really need to be kicked to the curb.
Depends an awful lot on how you define that term *assault rifle.*
Initially Fedorov wanted to call the class of weapons to which his new gun belonged ручное ружьё-пулемет (lit. "handheld light-machine-gun", i.e. a lighter class than ружьё-пулемет which denoted light machine guns like the Madsen), which reflected his tactical thinking behind the development of the weapon. This designation appeared in a September 1916 article in the journal of the Artillery Commission. Fedorov's superior, General N.M. Filatov (Н.М. Филатов), is credited for introducing the much shorter term "avtomat" for the gun—a neologism derived from the Greek word 'automaton' and synonymous with the English word "automatic", this is the one that stuck. Written records of this new term being applied to the gun date to 1919.
In contemporary Russian terminology, the word "avtomat" denotes assault rifle, although historically the term has had a broader meaning.
Our fellow FReeper Chainmail is still active here, and is a former Marine. Ask him!
Interesting. Had never heard of those. The article doesn’t indicate they were deployed a whole lot, but it would seem the classic assault rifle definition of lower powered cartridge firing with select fire option.
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