1918-2018 – 100 years of the Mauser 13 mm anti-tank and anti-aircraft rifle
 

Dear All,
This year we commemorate the 100 years of the Mauser 13 mm anti-tank and anti-aircraft rifle.

A lecture will be held in the Waffen Museum in Oberndorf the 22nd of July at 19h.

To commemorate this event, I would like to present here the original prototype manual of the TUF – Gewehr (Tank und Flugzeug – Abwehrgewehr), still available in the Mauser Archive.

It is a 6-page document describing the rifle and his technical specification.

Here the cover and the two first pages are shown.

Good read!

In addition to Mauro's presentation of the manual, we were informed that Mauser still had plenty of tank rifle parts following WW2. The receivers were used to construct gas pressure test devices for large caliber ammunition and these were sold to companies and test facilities world wide.

Browning's famous .50 caliber was based on the tank rifle round and at least one arsenal in the US had a Mauser tank rifle action in use for testing ammo.

Interesting to note is that the tank rifle action consists of 3 parts: the receiver connects to a separate chamber part, in which the barrel is screwed. Barrel and chamber are 2 separate parts.

Vlim,

I have been told for years that the 50 BMG round was based on the 30-06 cartridge. John Browning just upscaled the design to .50 caliber. Perhaps this complements rather than conflicts with the story of the Mauser tank round.

G2

It's actually both. Winchester worked on a .50 based on the French 11mm and an upscaled 30-06. When they had access to Mauser tank rifles they noted the superior velocity and penetration and then tweaked their design to match the 13mm Mauser tank round, thus creating the .50 cal.