French 1878 Marine Kropatschek
Bolt Action Rifles
•
11m
The French Navy chose not to adopt the Gras rifle, and continued to use the paper-cartridge, needlefire Chassepot into the late 1870s. When they finally decided to adopt a new metallic-cartridge rifle, they decided to jump right to a repeater. Testing was done in 1877 of the Winchester-Hotchkiss, Krag-Petersen, and Kropatschek, and the Kropatschek was the winner. As the Navy did not need very many rifles, it opted to buy them directly from the Werndl factory in Steyr (Austria), which owned the rights to the system. An order for 25,000 was placed in 1878 and deliveries were completed in 1881.
This rifle was designated the Model 1878 Marine (ie, Navy), and it was chambered for 11mm Gras with a 7-round tube magazine. They were delivered polished in the white, as naval small arms often were at the time. While limited in number, these rifles would see widespread service in French colonies, and would also form the basis for development of the French-build model 1884 rifles - which we will cover in the next video.
Up Next in Bolt Action Rifles
-
1884 Kropatschek: Groundwork for the ...
After the adoption of the single-shot Gras rifle in 1874, attitudes towards repeating rifles began to shift in the French military. The Battle of Plevna had shown that regardless of their hypothetic detriments, repeating rifles could substantially magnify a force's firepower and allow a smaller f...
-
Steyr M30S Prototype: A Repurposed WW...
This rifle, as best I can tell, is a prototype model made by Steyr in Switzerland in the early 1930s for use in Hungarian military trials. The Hungarians were looking to replace their old 1895 straight-pull Mannlicher rifles with something more modern. They wanted to keep their Mannlicher en bloc...
-
American Mosin Nagant Rifles
Everyone is aware of the Mosin Nagant rifle, but not everyone realizes that about 2 million of them were actually manufactured in the United States. Russia had been producing M91 Mosin Nagant rifles in their three major arsenals (Tula, Izhevsk, and Sestroyesk) since the mid 1890s, but when World ...
