In something of an ode to its enemy designers, the original Soviet gas system of the production Gew 43 remained largely intact. With the foreign technology in hand, Walther set to work on an improved form of the Gew 41(W) and ultimately delivered the Gew 43 in 1943. Conversely, the Gew 41(W) was designed with a complicated muzzle-based gas actuated system of operation which made the gun "muzzle-heavy" and unnecessarily temperamental.
However, the Gew 41(W) proved too expensive for wartime mass production, relied on a complex gas system prone to fouling, and was difficult to reload due to its fixed magazine approach (fed by a pair of clips).Įventually finding themselves against the Soviet Army and their Tokarev automatic rifles, the Germans evaluated and dissected the gas-operation system (that tapped gasses from the barrel) to feed an automatic action.
The British, Americans, and Soviets were already issuing such weapons to their troops leaving the Germans with little choice. In 1940, the Germans enacted a program to deliver a standard semi-automatic rifle to their infantry ranks to help improve their outmoded bolt-action rifle units. The Gewehr 43 (Gew 43) became the next evolution of the Walther Gew 41(W) of 1941 - a self-loading, semi-automatic rifle that failed to see require production numbers to make a proper wartime impression.
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