Romanian Marshal Antonescu officially requested development of a sniper’s rifle on January 22, 1942. The Romanian military at that point was using the vz24 Mauser rifle, and the Romanian optics company IOR developed a pair of optics to mount on that rifle – one 4.25x and on 6x. The design used many parts already in production at IOR, and was largely influenced by the Soviet PEM. On March 5th 1942 they were presented tot he government, which chose the lower magnification model and placed an order for 2,000 of them.
Production began in June 1942 at IOR, and the main Romanian Army arsenal build mounts and bases to fit them onto rifles. The project took a while to actually complete, as 1,810 were finished as of May 1944. Once the first order was complete, a second order for 7,000 more was placed. That second batch also used a different, stronger scope base. That second order was not finished by the end of the war, but production continued after the war, and the rifles were used as the primary Romanian Army marksman’s rifle until he adoption of the PSL in the 1970s.
Thanks to Pera Baity and the ANCA for help with the data in this video!
https://www.anca.com.ro
I had one of these from when Century was bringing them in, and really wished they’d been able to snag some optics. The bore in mine was garbage and it was still a decent shooter. I couldn’t tell that they actually did anything to the rifles to make them more than a scoped Vz-24.
Theoretically, most armies were supposed to follow the practice of the Wehrmacht in choosing rifles that showed better-than-average accuracy in factory tests to build sharpshooters’ rifles on. (Note that the commenting system here does not like commenters using the word “s****r”.)
In fact, even the Wehrmacht (or more exactly DWM, Brno, etc.) didn’t even follow that procedure. They just marked out tranches of rifles as being diverted to modification for telescopic sights without bothering to check whether or not the rifles could meet the minimum standards in The Book, which were supposedly 1/2 MOA out to 250 meters (or yards in the English-speaking countries) no matter which army you were talking about. In reality, very few such “ready-made-up” scoped rifles in any army ever shot that well.
In his book Shots Fired In Anger (Samworth 1947), Lt. Col. John B. George describes the problems he had convincing his superiors to let him use his own rifle instead of the M1903A4 during the Pacific, Philippine, and CBI campaigns. His rifle? A commercial Winchester Model 70, .30-06, with a 10X Unertl telescopic sight.(Of which more below.)
You do not want to get me started on how bad the U.S. issue M1903A4 with the Weaver M73/73B1 was. My father’s old Savage 340 .22 Hornet with a 4X Weaver K-4 would consistently outperform one of those out to 150 meters, as I proved on a NG range several times in my misspent adolescence. And I finally traded that one off for a Mauser M1934 .32 ACP due to its wandering zero.
During WW2, most SS sharpshooters used prewar commercial hunting rifles with commercial scopes. As depicted (with historical accuracy) in Stephen Hunter’s novel The Master S****r, their favorites were Mannlichers in 6.5 x 53mm, due to their inherent accuracy and light recoil allowing quick second shots if needed.
Ironically, the vaunted German Herrlitz and Voightlander telescopic sights were considered “second-rate” by those sharpshooters. Their preference was the American-made Unertl fixed 10X scope, the “ancestor” of the later USMC-issue MST-100. It was imported from the U.S. in considerable numbers before the war, and for a time was available from Mannlicher and DWM as a “package deal” on top of their sporting bolt-action rifles.
Military sharpshooting is one of those things that armies forget about entirely between wars. And generally end up having to relearn all over again while all the noise is being made.
clear ether
eon
Gonna say something here that’s going to piss a lot of people off:
Snipers are utterly irrelevant to military operations. The entire premise is based on people doing stupid things, getting desperate, and throwing out high-profile futile efforts that wind up being totally irrelevant to whatever campaign they’re in. The appearance of snipers and sniper usage is a sign that the military coming up with it has lost its ‘effing mind.
Retail-level killing is a pointless exercise. You resort to it when your wholesale efforts aren’t working, and the fact that you’re forced into that realm means you’re losing the overall war, and have to do something dramatic, and ultimately, meaningless.
Not a damn campaign or war has ever been won by snipers. They’ve mostly just served as a morale boost for the forces deploying them, an attempt at emulating the “Ace Phenomenon” from aerial combat.
In the end, they’re an operationally useless and distracting phenomenon. In terms of impact on overall operations against a reasonably proficient enemy? You’re just throwing away the assigned men, the same way that the Japanese did in WWII. Your enemy, who has superiority of tactical/operational power, will simply identify where your annoyances are, and then apply copious amounts of firepower. Operationally? Your efforts only serve to kill off your best soldiers.
It’s always been thus: The fantasy is that the “lone rifleman” will somehow overcome all the deficiencies you have allowed to develop between you and your enemy. This fantasy leads to the idea that precision will overcome mass, and we know how that works out on the actual battlefield. This may well have changed, with the advent of the drone, but the underlying principle remains the same.
You ain’t winning any wars with snipers, and the desperation of your sudden epiphany that you “need” them only covers up the fact that you’ve lost the plot across the board. Everywhere we see the “sniper”, we see a military force that has no idea how to conduct itself towards victory on the battlefield. They’re a symptom of an overall incapacity to conduct combat operations, an answer to a question that should never have to be asked.
Give you a clue as to how I know this… Spent more than a few hours around a dedicated sniper guy while I was at the National Training Center. He was a “true believer” former enlisted junior officer who’d been through the sniper program in the Army and Marine Corps, commanded a platoon with the snipers for one of the premier US Army infantry units, and was constantly bitching about how “Nobody knows how to use snipers…”
I ran into him after he returned from Iraq, where he’d been a battalion-level S3 Operations Officer. I was like “So, how well were you able to effectuate use of the snipers…?”
His reaction spoke volumes, and is where I started developing the attitude I enumerate above: He could not come up with any way of effectively using his snipers. At. All. There were always too many real-world issues that meant he could not deploy or effectively use them to any tactical advantage. The best use he could find, the one that demoralized them the worst, was manning security points in the towers. Putting them out on the ground was useless, because if he put them out without overwatch, they got killed. If he put out sufficient security, they were too obvious, and nothing appeared in the zone as targets.
Snipers are useless, their development/deployment is a sign that your military has lost its damn mind, and is unable to actually cope with the real tactical/operational situation you have at hand.
I await my crucifixion.
I’d rather give you a canonization. That was always my considered amateur opinion after seeing the actual effectiveness of sniping vs. the amount of effort some armies devoted to it.
Armies may “rediscover” sniping in every war. That doesn’t mean it’s cost-effective. The numbers just aren’t there.
It’s easy to say that snipers kill more efficiently than infantry, expending an average 1.66 rounds per enemy KIA or whatever compared to 11,000 rounds per by infantry. (No, that isn’t a misprint, it’s from the 1947 Project SALVO study).
But it misses the point, which is killing enemy soldiers one at a time is a very practical way to lose battles.
While your snipers are industriously potting individual targets, the rest of the other guy’s army is rolling over you.
Use snipers to take out officers? You can build a weak case for that. (See “Revolutionary France, <francs-tireurs“, etc.)
But even the Directory knew that it was the mass of men behind those “free shooters” that would win the fight for them.
It still took Bonaparte’ to bring back the idea of proper tactics with the smoothbore musket, i.e. volley fire by the numbers aka the “organic machine gun”.
Numbers. Ultimately it’s all about numbers.
As for “countersniping”, one of my HS teachers did that a lot vs Chinese Communist “volunteers” in Korea. They tended to “snipe” with Mauser rifles and iron sights. He “countersniped” them with a Browning M2HB .50 heavy machine gun. He said it didn’t make much difference what they used for cover or concealment when 250 .50 slugs arrived.
Sniping may be a morale booster. Although as Tom Clancy observed, you can’t really call your own snipers “Comrade” or “buddy”, because while they’re hunting enemy soldiers, there’s probably a similar man wearing the other uniform who is hunting you.
Probably the least-worst use of sniping is officer removal. But in an army that’s run the correct way (i.e. by the noncoms), even that is dubious in terms of overall combat effectiveness.
I’m thinking more and more we may be looking at a battlefield with a lot fewer actual people on it. Maybe something like the original Outer Limits episode, “Soldier”. (Just no cats.)
If that or anything like it happens, “sniping” will be as obsolete as an arquebus.
clear ether
eon
As always reading your and Kirk’s stuff is an education in itself. An informative interlude this from the ‘snipers is cool’ genre of firearms writing.
@Martin,
I appreciate your appreciation.
One of the things that really gets me going on these issues is the sheer amount of “Ain’t it cool…” that distorts everything. There all all these fantastical views and fantasies distorting weapons and combat issues that I once subscribed to, myself, and the thing that drives me to post the way I do is because I feel like there’s a ton of stuff I learned or figured out the hard way that I should probably at least point out to anyone coming after me, so they have exposure to other points of views on all of these issues.
From a practical standpoint, people are not doing what they should and asking questions like “Is this useful? Is this right? Am I being effective?
And, when you get down to it, things like the sniper programs really… Aren’t. Any of that. Not when you step back and examine it all.
And, there is so much BS that’s just like the sniper situation that it’s not even funny, most of which results from people refusing to look at issues from any systemic standpoint and think about them with open minds and rational consideration.
It’s like the whole NGSW program, which began with a fallacy, that we were somehow “overmatched” by enemy fires in Afghanistan. What it really amounted to was that we weren’t “overmatched” so much as we didn’t know how to use small arms to answer that threat.
Nobody considered the fact that if you’re taking fire from an MG position that’s over 800m away, and it doesn’t matter whether or not said fire is effective, you have to be able to answer it and suppress it. You’re not doing that with a bunch of individual weapons firing at point targets, even if they’ve somehow managed to clearly identify them. You’re not doing it with a belt-fed fired off someone’s shoulder and a bipod, because that platform is steady enough or capable of doing the fine adjustments you’d have to do in order walk effective fire on the target, should you have managed to work out where it is.
What you need is something that your infantry can actually carry, use within the idiotic ROE you laid on them, and manage the feat. Nothing in the NGSW program that’s materialized is going to do that any better than what we had, and even the “armor piercing” BS is pointless, because nobody has encountered this magic body armor anywhere in the real world, and we don’t even issue it ourselves. Guys take a hit, even from an AK47 or AK74, they’re rendered hors de combat enough that it’s immaterial if they live; they’re out of the fight.
So, the NGSW was conceived in this haze of ludicrously inept thinking, progressed through to actually reaching issue, and I’m pretty sure that because we’re witnessing those magic sights and the high pressure ammo not materializing to really create all the theoretical benefits, that the whole sorry edifice is going to crash and burn. Eventually.
If it doesn’t, I’ll eat my damn hat.
There are issues after issues along these lines in the small arms world we’re creating. Lessons not learned… As I pointed out about that sweet new FN ARKA the other day, the designers very obviously have never spent time around an infantry private, if they’re going to stick Torx screws all over their damn weapon for said private to screw with, so as to “make cleaning easier”. That’s basic “junior enlisted psychology”, and if that rifle were someone’s pool that they have in their backyard without a fence…? You’d sue them when someone drowns for creating a damned attractive nuisance. Those screws will, inevitably, be undone. If only because they’re there, and privates are privates.
So far as I can tell, there’s zero recognition of that fact, and nothing is being done to ameliorate it, either.
As well? Look at that rifle, note where they put the serial number. On the side of the upper receiver, where you’re going to have to either have a periscope to see it while racked, or you’re going to have to take it out in order to verify said serial number for all sorts of reasons.
I mean, I really like the idea that they left room in the receiver for round counters and such, but… Dear God, do you have the slightest idea how many military man hours are wasted on crap like pulling the weapons out of their racks for inventories, when you could just walk along and read them off the back of the receiver like we used to do with the M1 or M14?
Why in the hell did that little design feature get abandoned? Why are things like that not paid attention to, by designers and the arseholes in the military who do procurement of small arms? Have any of them ever said “Y’know… We spend a hell of a lot of time doing admin BS, maybe we ought to look at design features that minimize this issue?”
All of this is why I get so frustrated and wind up venting. I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness, the kid saying that “…the Emperor has no clothes!!!”, and it’s intensely irritating.
Thanks for posting this info, appreciate the clear and concise summary. I have an OR-series Romanian Vz24 with the 2nd variant scope mount, but the scope is a German ZF39 “Zielvier” scope in good condition. No idea when the scope was mounted or who did it. I am planning to get it out to the range shortly to get it zeroed and see how it performs.