Best Battle Rifle of the First World War

[mekender]

gotta go with the Mosin... 100 years later and they are still dirt cheap, accurate, hard hitting and ugly as hell.

[Mud_Dog]

The 1903 is my favorite, being that it is the best of both worlds: Mauser and Krag-Jorgenson.

[FelixEstrella]

M1917. Took the best of all.

Mauser action.
Cock on close bolt (from SMLE)
Peep sights.

[Wrenchbender1]

M1917 Enfield. Immensely strong, very reliable, hard-hitting...and with the best battle sights of the war.

Ditto. I love mine.

[Whirlibird]

Had to go with the Mauser.
Everybody used it, except those Colonial types, in some form or fashion.
A hundred + years later, those same rifles are still performing their duties quite adequately.
The 7mm and 8mm (okay, 7.92mm) Mausers were the standard which all others were compared too.
Every Mauser had to shoot into 2 MOA before it left the factory, and that's with iron sights.

It's true that the Germans went to war with a hunting rifle.
The British went to war with a pike that fired bullets.
The Americans took a hunting rifle and made a target rifle out of it, adding some really stupid features. Two-piece firing pin, what were they smoking?
And what is war but hunting on a very large scale.

[DwightG]

adding some really stupid features. Two-piece firing pin, what were they smoking?

Actually, at the time, they had a perfectly good reason to do it. Metallurgy wasn't what it is now. Either in the firing pin or in the cartridge/primer itself. Pierced primers weren't uncommon with the attendent erosion of the firing pin tip. And, of course, when a firing pin breaks it's usually just the tip. Hence the replaceable firing pin tip. The replaceable part of a Mauser firing pin is also pretty simple and they often put a metal ferrule into the stock to aid in removal of it. The difference where the junction was made was probably mostly a function of the U.S. wanting a cocking piece that could be manually re-cocked in recognition of the shaky reliability of the ammunition of the day.

I think the magazine cut-off switch is a much better example of "what were they thinking" when they retained it past the era of the Krag. Especially in the WWII vintage 03A3. I think the only reason it lasted so long had something to do with assuring a snappy manual of arms in a parade formation by eliminating the possibility of having the bolt stop on the magazine follower. Priorities...;^P

[skb12172]

Springfield.

Love the balance and weight.

That action is as smooth as silk.

Manly cartridge

Accurate

It just looks deadly

[Bob K]

SMLE. Smellies forever.

[GroundPounder]

As much as I looooove the '03, I'm gonna have to vote for the Enfield. Magazine capacity and rate-of-fire gave it a firepower advantage that the other weapons would be hard-pressed to match. I hear stories about how the Germans on occasion thought they were getting lit up by a machine gun when in actuality they were taking volley-fire from Lee-Enfields.

The Lee-Enfield was, I think, a force-multiplier in the same way the Garand was in relation to the '03-A3. While there were better rifles in service at the time, there wasn't a better weapon, for the express purpose of killing ohter human beings rapidly and efficiently, than the Enfield.

IMHO, of course!

[TmjUtah]

SMLE. Ten fast rounds, plus the drill and discipline of the Royal Army types doing the shooting, make the SMLE my choice.

In trench assaults the ability to hit a target at 600 yards meant less than zero. After marching twenty thousand men into their graves in the first half hour of the Somme offensive, the Brits later learned to advance by rushes and employ base of fire techniques. The inherent firepower advantage of the Enfield was recognized as useful for suppressing enemy machine gunners and riflemen who survived the prep fires. I believe there were even "trench magazines" with higher capacities, too.

And a .303 in good shape will reach out there. I've never liked the sights, though.