USMC sniper

[cplnorton]

I am familiar with this seller. I suspect there is some spurious bidding. Not too long ago he “sold” a Rock Island 1903 for over $7000, way more than it’s true value,

A quick question- I thought the Marine Corp built these rifles , no?

Yes they did. They built them at the Philly Depot.

They really are basically a NM rifle with a cut handguard, blued polished bolt, and the blocks added. There are minor tweaks and on some the Marines replaced the barrel at the end of a shooting season.

But they are not the custom builds that snipers are today.

[Kragrifle]

One other question-everyone seems to think that every Marine Corp rifle has had a Hatcher hole added. I have heard this is not true so that some rifles missed this modification.

[cplnorton]

One other question-everyone seems to think that every Marine Corp rifle has had a Hatcher hole added. I have heard this is not true so that some rifles missed this modification.

There is a lot of incorrect information floating around about these rifles out there.

Now I should preface this with, a normal Marine rebuild M1903, rebuilt prior to the fall of 1938, will not show the additional gas escape hole. Everyone calls that the Hatcher hole, but I call it the Borden hole. Because when you see the actual testing, approval, and implementation on that hole, Hatcher had absolutely nothing to do with it. So I call it the Borden hole to honor the correct man.

But on a WWII built Marine Sniper rifle, I have never seen one that didn't have the Borden hole. So I do not agree with those who say some rifles missed it.

Now let me explain. All Unertl Snipers were built on NM rifles. This is repeated over and over in the docs. The last two shipments of NM rifles to the Marines were in 1937 and 1940. These serials make up the vast majority of all Unertl snipers found. These rifles also had the Borden hole drilled into them by SA before they even shipped to the Marines. So just by the fact of this alone, almost all found will have a factory drilled additional gas escape hole.

The Marines NM rifles wore thru barrels very quickly. They were sent to the teams first and they kept track of every round fired out of them. I've seen several mentions that by the time they were almost to a 1000 rounds, they wanted to replace them.

The rifles were returned at the end of each NM season and rebarreled if needed.

I have never seen a Marine team rifle made in 1936 and previous that has had it's original barrel. All I have seen have been rebarreled with a 1938 or newer barrel on them and have the additional gas escape hole.

Otherwise every team rifle I have ever seen was rebarreled at the time when the Marines were also drilling the Borden hole in the receiver.

I always say there is a chance for anything to happen. But I have never seen any WWII Marine snipers that didn't have that hole, that is both the Unertl and the Mann Niedner's built during WWII. The Marines were building Mann Niedners in WWII as well, the books have missed that point. They built for sure 150 for the Marines and the Navy.

But I am of the belief that any WWII Marine sniper rifle should have that hole. I think it would take some compelling evidence to make me think otherwise.

[lyman]

interesting about the NM needing rebarreling,


in your studies, have you found any documentation on the rifles as converted, and used (like round counts etc) for each year ?

as in NM for 1932 , shot at Fort This (xxx rounds), Fort That (xxx rounds) , used in the Nationals at Perry, shot xxx rounds, ?

[cplnorton]

interesting about the NM needing rebarreling,


in your studies, have you found any documentation on the rifles as converted, and used (like round counts etc) for each year ?

as in NM for 1932 , shot at Fort This (xxx rounds), Fort That (xxx rounds) , used in the Nationals at Perry, shot xxx rounds, ?

Yeah I found some of the personal journals of some of the famous Marine team captains. They wrote on topics such as that and how they trained for the teams in their journals.

I have seen some of the round counts for competitions but off the top of my head I don't remember really many. I know for the most part once the season started they didn't shoot much outside of competition. So round count was only the rounds fired in actual competition. I've seen quite a few mentions of the round counts and such before the season started. Such as those that got the team ready for competition.

It was sort of neat as they actually came up with a happy medium over the years. In the beginning they used to train for months before the seasons stated, but they found that training that long made the Marines tired of shooting before the season was done and the scores suffered. Then they tried a shorter training schedule, but then the shooters weren't prepared.

I can't remember what they determined was the best in the end for sure, but I want to say they ended up at somewhere about 4-6 weeks of training before the shooting season started. I sort of remember they stating something along the lines they liked about the 300ish round count on the rifle barrel as the season started.

Team shooters actually traveled with two rifles each, in case one started to shoot erratically or something on the rifle broke. Of course they traveled with armorers, but they tried not to do anything major to the rifles past minor part swaps and tweaks.

At the end of each season every team rifle was returned to the Marine Depot and was reworked if needed. That is when they would swap the barrel if it warranted it. Once the barrel was swapped on the NM rifle, it no longer served on the Marine teams, but actually became a Marine Special Target. The Marines kept Special targets for all Marine Competitions like the Elliot Cup.

It was sort of funny that too that the Marines had to outlaw guys working on their own rifles. Some would actually break down their rifle on the firing line and do tweaks to the rifle in the middle of a competition. That was later outlawed by the Marines because of obvious reasons.