#K98

In today’s Photos Of The Day we are taking a look at a WWII German Mauser K98 sniper rifle. The Mauser K98 became the standard service rifle of the German Army in 1935. Chambered in 7.92×57mm Mauser they seem to have a possible effective range of over 1,000 meters if equipped with a telescopic sight, and about half of that with iron sights.

Welcome to the Military Surplus Arms installment of the First Firearm series. For those not familiar with the series, we cover a different aspect of firearms and give you things to consider if it’s to be your very first firearm ever or the first of the type of firearm we’re discussing. For those that might not be sure what I mean by “Surplus” guns, a surplus gun is typically a government-issued firearm no longer in service. It is in surplus due to it’s being stored away after being replaced by something else. In these latter times, surplus guns came in waves by various countries selling off old hoards of rifles or handguns they no longer felt a need to hold onto. A few examples of military surplus rifles are  British Lee Enfield, Japanese Arisaka, German K98, and the Swiss K31. A few examples of surplus handguns are  Webley Mk VI, U.S. M1911, Browning Hi-Power and the U.S. M1917.

What would it be like to try and attempt to shoot historical small arms in some of the ways that they were actually used in the past? We try and do that in this episode with German small arms in a small team setting, assaulting an objective across open terrain using a base of fire complimented by fire and maneuver. We were able to get access to fully automatic machine guns such as the MG42 and MG34, in addition to the MP40 submachine gun and landmark STG44 rifle. Of course we also had on hand Mauser K98s that complimented the historical firepower. There was a G43 that was on hand but the rifle suffered some malfunctions that didn’t allow us to use it in the live fire.

The Mauser 98 stands in history as Paul Mauser’s masterpiece; Every little thing, every improvement that he could think of came together in the Model 1898, and the K98k is a carbine version of his famous rifle. The K98k rifle is notorious for being used and implemented by Nazi Germany, but countless other nations have used the rifle to suit their needs. Today the gun is still in production, and most bolt action rifles being produced today use a modified Mauser action of some sort (with most changes being present for cost cutting reasons). In this episode of TFBTV we take apart a 1944 dated K98k.

Some firearms just are more fun to shoot than others, and in this list Alex runs through his five favorite guns to shoot (at this time). Guns don’t have to be expensive to be fun. This list includes some unusual stuff: A single shot breechloader, a centerfire bolt action, a shotgun, a rimfire bolt gun, and one submachine gun for good measure!

The German K98k served Nazi Germany from the mid 1930s until the end of World War II, and was by far the most prolific German small arm during the conflict. The rifle is essentially a shorter, lighter, and handier version of the old Gewehr 98 rifles with some tweaks and modifications to make it more suitable for use by the German war machine. In this video, we take out one of these old workhorses and do a bit of shooting.

Mike, a reader of TFB, bought a K98 Mauser from Mitchell’s Mausers and emailed me some photos.