rifle 43

rifle 43
general information
Military designation:	Gewehr 43 / G43, carbine 43 / K43
Developer / Manufacturer:	Walther / Carl Walther Waffenfabrik Zella Mehlis (manufacturer code : ac) Gustloffwerke, Buchenwald (manufacturer code: bcd) Berlin-Lübecker Maschinenfabrik, Lübeck (manufacturer code: duv, from '45: qve)
Manufacturer country:	Germany
Production time:	1943 to 1945
Weapon Category:	Self-loading rifle
Furnishing
Overall length:	1117 mm
Weight: (unloaded)	4.3 kg
Barrel length :	550 mm
Technical specifications
Caliber :	7.92 x 57 mm
Possible magazine fillings :	10 cartridges
Ammunition supply :	Box magazine / loading strip
Cadence :	30 rounds / min
Fire types:	Single fire
Number of trains :	4th
Twist :	right
Visor :	Rear sight and front sight / rifle scope
Closure :	Support flap closure
Charging principle:	Gas pressure charger
Lists on the subject

Gewehr 43 with and without a telescopic sight

The Gewehr 43 , later Karabiner 43 (G43 / K43), was a self-loading rifle of the German Wehrmacht in World War II . It was developed as a fundamentally improved version of the less successful Gewehr 41 , which in turn was supposed to replace the Karabiner 98k as the standard infantry weapon, as the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front was confronted with the Tokarew SWT-40 and Simonow AWS-36 self-loading rifles . From 1943 until the end of the war, around 450,000 units were produced; about 50,000 of these weapons were telescoped and assigned to sniper squads. The targeted number of 100,000 weapons per month was never reached. Despite the low production numbers, the weapon enjoyed great popularity because of its robustness. In addition to the telescopic sight, other accessories could be attached to the rifle.

description

The Gewehr 43 is a shooting gas pressure loader with a support flap lock in caliber 7.92 × 57 mm . The design of the short stroke gas piston was adopted from the Soviet Tokarev SWT-40. A permanent fire facility was originally planned, but was only implemented for test pieces. The box magazine holds ten rounds, it can be changed or filled with a loading strip when the shutter is open .

When the shot is fired, gases are directed through the gas channel to the gas piston. This slides back a short distance, transmits the impulse via the adapter to the bumper, which in turn acts on the bolt carrier. The bumper has its own return spring, which pushes it, the intermediate piece and the gas piston back into their original position.

The forged bolt carrier slides back on the milled bolt frame and takes the lock with it via a pin. After about 5 mm of travel, it runs onto the support flaps and pulls them back into the lock. This unlocks the lock and can slide back with the lock carrier. In doing so, it compresses the recoil spring, the empty cartridge case is ejected and the hammer is cocked. When the bolt carrier has reached its end position, it is pushed forward again by the closing spring. A new cartridge is inserted from the magazine into the chamber and the weapon is ready to fire.

Like its predecessor, the rifle 43 has a slide catch which holds the slide in its rear position after the last cartridge has been ejected.

Compared to the Gewehr 41 (W), the gas system was completely changed, since the gas take-off at the muzzle with the tubular gas piston that slid back and forth on the barrel had not proven itself. As a result, the front sight could now be attached firmly to the barrel, which resulted in an improvement in hit accuracy. As a further change, the magazine was designed to be exchangeable. The bolt, bolt carrier and fire equipment remained almost unchanged.

In December 1944 the name was changed from "Gewehr 43" to "Karabiner 43"; However, this measure did not involve any changes to the weapon. In some examples, the barrel was shortened or lengthened a bit, but this only affected prototypes.

The weapon has a higher rate of fire than the carbine 98k , but not its precision. The sniper versions of the rifle 43 and the carbine 43 were not as popular with the snipers of the Wehrmacht as the versions of the 98k carbine with telescopic sight. This was due on the one hand to insufficiently developed telescopic sights and on the other hand to the mass production of weapons, which Hitler personally demanded, which inevitably had to lower the quality standards of the components. High-quality barrels that could be used in sniper rifles were very rare, which was due to the lack of high-quality raw materials (chrome, nickel, tungsten) required for the special alloys, from which precision barrels with high durability were made. In a secret report from July 1944, it was estimated that only about five percent of the barrels from production were of a quality that made them suitable for use in sniper rifles.

The Gewehr 43 was designed as a serial sniper rifle . As standard, all weapons had a prism rail on the right side of the housing to accommodate a telescopic sight mount . An exception were mounted weapons towards the end of the war, in which defective prism rails were milled off in order to be able to use the otherwise usable housing. The riflescope ZF 43 or ZF 43/1 (both also referred to as ZF 4) had four times the magnification and could be adjusted in 50 m steps from 100 to 800 m.

The rifles of the type G43 and K43 no longer had any holder for a bayonet. In 1944, as part of the simplification of production, the thread on the muzzle was omitted, so that grenade devices or silencers could no longer be used. The latter would have been very important, especially for snipers. Finally, the use of plastic for the rifle stock made the last of the weapons of this type even lighter; their weight when unloaded has been reduced to 3.6 kilograms.

Advantages and disadvantages

The main advantage of the weapon over the Karabiner 98k was its higher rate of fire. Another advantage was that the ammunition no longer had to be imported exclusively through loading strips ; now the magazine could simply be exchanged from below. The Gewehr 41 did not offer this option either.

The disadvantages of the weapon were, on the one hand, the poor production quality of the barrels in recent years due to the increasing simplification of production. The resulting accuracy of the weapon at close range was still sufficient to effectively fight targets up to a distance of 300 meters; however, the capacity of the cartridges used would have allowed much longer firing ranges. The short barrel with 550 mm was another problem, with barrels less than about 600 mm in length the 7.92 × 57 mm cartridge often caused a highly visible and therefore telltale muzzle flash .

Comparable weapons

• Tokarev SWT-40 ( Soviet Union )
• M1 Garand ( USA )

literature

• Vladimír Dolínek, Vladimír Francev, Jan Šach, German edition by Harald Fritsch: Illustrated lexicon of weapons in the 1st and 2nd World War . Edition Dörfler im Nebel-Verlag, Utting 2000, ISBN 3-89555-223-2 (Czech: Zbraně I. a II. Světové války . Translated by Günter Brehmer, photos by Jaroslav Guth and Martin Tůma).
• Chris Mc Nab, GERMAN AUTOMATIC RIFLES 1941–45 . Osprey Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-1-78096-385-3 . 83 pages (online PDF)
• Chris Bishop: The Encyclopedia of Weapons of WWII . Sterling publishing, 2002, ISBN 1-58663-762-2 , pp. 216, 217 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• Günter Wollert, Reiner Lidschun: Infantry weapons yesterday . (1918-1945). In: Illustrated encyclopedia of infantry weapons from around the world . 3. Edition. tape 1 + 2 . Brandenburgisches Verlagshaus, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89488-036-8 , weapons, p. 161-163 .

Web links

Commons : Gewehr 43  - Collection of images

• Maxim Popenker: G.43 / K.43. In: Modern Firearms. modernfirearms.net, accessed on November 17, 2017 . 
• Ian McCollum: Gewehr 43. In: Forgotten Weapons. Retrieved November 18, 2017 .