Tag Archives: P14 Enfield

107 Years Ago Today: Winchester Goes ‘Over There’

Posted on by Leave a comment

24 November 1914: the draft document between Winchester and the British government is knocked out for 200,000 “Cal. 303 Enfield rifles with sword bayonet and scabbard” at a cost of $32.50 each, FOB to the docks in New York.

The P14 Enfield contract draft document, via Winchester

Winchester ultimately produced 250,000 Enfield Pattern Number 14 (P14) bolt-action rifles for the British Army in caliber .303 at roughly the same time its factories cranked out 300,000 Model 1895 Muskets in 7.62x54R for the Tsarist Imperial Russian Army.

By April 1917, Winchester was cranking out over 2,000 P14s a day without breaking a sweat, although the contract for the Brits was winding down. Keep in mind that at the same time, the entire U.S. production capacity of the M1903 model .30-06 rifle was just a maximum of 1,400 per day (1,000 at Springfield Armory and 400 at Rock Island Armory).

It was a no-brainer that Winchester was soon building the modified U.S. Rifle, caliber .30 M1917, essentially a P14 chambered in .30-06, dubbed by factory workers (incorrectly) as the P17. The first Winchester M1917 came off the assembly line in August 1917. Winchester finally ceased production in April of 1919, at which point they had produced 580,000 rifles for Uncle Sam. Even a century later, some of these rifles remain in the U.S. Army’s inventory, loaned out  to assorted Veterans groups such as the VFW and American Legion where they are used for honor guard services.

Added together between the British and Russian contracts, without even mentioning the assorted contracts with Britian, France, Russia, and the U.S, for 3,400~ Winchester Model 1907 semi-autos in .351SL, and Winny produced an easy 1 million rifles for the push against the Kaiser.

The British kept the P-14 Rifles in their inventory until the end of WWII, although re-designated as the Rifle No. 3 Mark I* in 1926. The asterisk indicates a 1916 modification to the P-14s slightly lengthening the left locking lug.

P14 was renamed the ‘Rifle, No.3’ in 1926, via the Royal Armouries

The British utilized several models as sniper weapons throughout their service life due to their extreme accuracy compared to their SMLE Rifles.

Pte. John Michaud sniper from Quebec P14 target sights coveralls for training 1945. LAC MIKAN 4232750, original Kodachrome

Sabotage! 41 Rem Mag edition

Posted on by Leave a comment

Bloke On The Range is a great gun channel run by a British expat in Switzerland and he posted a few shots of this bad boy last week.

Meet Präzisionsgewehr (Precision-rifle) G 150:

This integrally suppressed “sabotage rifle” with a folding stock is chambered in the squat .41 Remington Magnum (10.4x33mmR) which fired a 409-grain bullet “at subsonic velocity for quietly messing with communications equipment, power transmission and so on in case of Soviet occupation of Switzerland.”

As the round was developed in the 1960s by accomplished red-blooded shootists Elmer Keith and Bill Jordan, they would probably have liked that concept.

Used by Projekt-26, Switzerland’s formerly top-secret (and still very hard to nail down even today) Cold War-era “stay behind” force, the G 150 is very interesting in an of itself. Built on a German-made Sauer rifle action, the rotary bolt action weapon had a three-round magazine and an unmarked 4-6X scope made by Schmidt & Bender, according to Maxim Popenker.

A Präzisionsgewehr G150 inside one such cache

The concept reminds me of the British Auxiliary Units or GHQ Auxiliary Units, “stay behind” cells consisting of some 500 independent patrols of 5-10 volunteers attached to Home Guard battalions 201 (Scotland), 202 (northern England), or 203 (southern England) during WWII. While most were equipped with Tommy Guns, P14/17 Enfields, and others, they also stockpiled a number of Winchester Model 74 rifles with a Parker Hale No.42 optic and a silencer (suppressor) to muffle its gentle .22LR report.

The more things change…

A close-up of a British/Irish P14 sniper

Posted on by Leave a comment

Ian with Forgotten Weapons looks at the classic Pattern 14 sniper rifle made for the British Army in WWI in the above.

The rifle, a P14 MK I*W(T) with a semi-adjustable 3x BSA Model 1918 telescopic sight, was an American-made sniper model chambered in .303. Used late in the war and, as McCollum notes, it was one of the most mature designs of the conflict.

These guns proved accurate and reliable enough that they went on to a long life, being used by British and Commonwealth forces in WWII and others.

Among the “others” was a stockpile of 75 guns sent to the Irish Free State by Britain in the 1930s and, after service in that country, were sold as surplus in the U.S. in the 1950s. One of these Irish P14s, a Winchester-produced variant seen in the above video with McCollum, is up for auction this month with Rock Island.

The humble plinker vs. invading Germans

Posted on by One comment

With most of the heavy equipment of the British Army left on the beaches of Dunkirk in June 1940 and a German invasion of the Home Islands likely, the Home Guard was set up and creatively armed with all sorts of terrible ideas such as the Smith Gun and others to help keep the Jerries at bay.

LDV ( Local Defence Volunteers – forerunner of the Home Guard) in instructed on how to fire a rifle at the National Shooting Centre in Bisley, Surrey, 22 June 1940. Note the P14 Enfield. jpg

LDV ( Local Defense Volunteers – forerunner of the Home Guard) in instructed on how to fire a rifle at the National Shooting Centre in Bisley, Surrey, 22 June 1940. Note the P14 Enfield.

The Home Guard was even extensively armed with donated guns shipped to the country by the NRA from the U.S. and other drives.

More background from Lost Glasgow:

By late 1940, the Home Guard had amassed 847,000 rifles, 47,000 shotguns and 49,000 machine guns of various kinds. However, as there were more than 1,682,000 volunteers at the time, this meant that 739,000 men were without a weapon. There was little improvement in June 1941 when Prime Minster Winston Churchill wrote to the War Office saying that “every man must have a weapon of some sort, be it only a mace or a pike.”

The civil servants took Churchill at his word and ordered 250,000 pikes from the Ministry of Aircraft Production, each consisting of a long steel tube with an obsolete bayonet welded to the end. When the first of these reached the Home Guard, there was uproar and it is thought that none were actually issued to Home Guardsmen.

Then were the Auxiliary Units or GHQ Auxiliary Units, “stay behind” cells consisting of some 500 independent patrols of 5-10 volunteers attached to Home Guard battalions 201 (Scotland), 202 (northern England), or 203 (southern England).

A replica of an operational base British auxiliary service unit

A replica of an operational base for a British auxiliary service unit

They used hidden underground bases known only to them, which cached their arms and equipment for “the day” and expected to fight as a uniformed partisan force until eliminated.

“Not only were Auxiliary Units given a life expectancy of 12 days, but they were also under orders not to be captured. If surrounded, they would need to shoot each other or blow themselves up with their own explosives.”

Here is a photo of one such patrol, from Leiston in Suffolk, shows a rough looking bunch of scoundrels armed with STENs, a P14 or M1917 Enfield rifle, and…something else.

wwii-home-guard-ww2-auxiliarys-stay-behind-sten-p14-p17-enfield-winchester-mod-74-22-semi-auto-with-parker-hale-silencer-fed-from-a-20-round-tube-magazine-located-in-the-stock

That “something else” is a Winchester Model 74 with a Parker Hale No.42 optic and a silencer (suppressor) to muffle its gentle .22LR report.

An interesting little semi-auto that was introduced in 1939, Winchester made something like 406,574 of these popguns by 1955 and their long barrels made them extremely accurate. The U.S. sent several thousand to the UK for use as a trainer, and 660 were converted to their more covert use, envisioned to be used to take out German sentries and guard dogs as needed.

winchester-mod-74-22-semi-auto-with-parker-hale-silencer-fed-from-a-20-round-tube-magazine-located-in-the-stock

From Rifleman.org who has a lot of information on these guns.

winchester-mod-74-22-semi-auto-with-parker-hale-silencer-fed-from-a-20-round-tube-magazine-located-in-the-stock

More on the Model 74 in the video from The Gun Guy below.