German Soldier Accuracy

Does anyone know or give an estimate what the percent a German soldier would hit a target at 100M, 200m? Armed with K98 bolt action.

Sparked from an argument on another forum where someone gave what I consider a high impractical accuracy rate.

 

It depends greatly on target size and shooter skill.

Most K98k's were made pretty well. I have a 1944 Gustloff Werke made Mauser that is quite accurate for a military rifle of it's period.

I would consider 50% to 75% hit rate on man size targets to 200M a believible estimate. Beyond that the rate would drop rather quickly.

 

Are we talking about on a firing range or in battle?
75% is rather generous, even for on a shooting range; I'd guess considerably less... It's all very well to say that with a stationary target standing straight at 2 metres tall... But I imagine that during most battles the 'taget' was either running very fast, ducking and firing from a trench or lobbing grenades at you from behind some rubble. then add in the factor of shellshock, firing accurately while bullets are whizzing by your ears and I'd say that easily less than 10% of bullets actually hit... most likely less than 5%... I suppose it's a stupid question asking how many bullets were manufactured in ww2?

 

Yes battlefield conditions it was a longer post that explained details but stupid xfire uses the window that was already opened.

 

well since most landsers were armed with 98ks and they killed about a zillion russian soldiers i guess they were shooting pretty good ...in fact given the numbers of german infantry vs. the numbers of russian kia ,prolly the 98k was killingest combat rifle of all time.....tony?

 

Oh for goodness sake... How can you even attempt to say that? Without an accurate breakdown of Soviet dead (Generally accepted to be around 25 million military and civilian for the entire war IIRC as oppose to "Zillions" :roll: ) and wounded specifically by the K98 as opposed to other weapon against K98 ammunition expenditure which does not and will not ever exist the accuracy of German soldiers is utterly impossible to assess.

I would doubt your claim: "prolly (sic) the 98k was killingest combat rifle of all time.....", since I believe that distinction is held by the Soviet AK series, but as far as accuracy goes I don't believe the AK was ever regarded as that remarkable.

 

Combat conditions would generate varying results as conditions change. My estimate was for range conditions. I doubt if anyone can realistically say how accurate German rifle fire was during battle as there are so many other things to take into consideration.

 

calm down , simon ..i knew it was a very high number ...and since the ak has been killing for 50 years and the 98k for mabey 5 years ..i think we have to look at ...kills per sortie.winks at simon....of the 10 million ?russian military war dead ,i would bet a faily high number were killed by small arms ..of which i think its safe to figure the 98k with a good portion of that figure...third worlders murdering hapless civillians with aks from 20 feet aint in the same catagory either,imo......i would guess many a tommy and gi joe were dropped by a 98k as well...come to think of it ..i am fairly certain the 98 was the killingest combat rifle of all time ...what could be close?..the enfeild did serve through two wars ....but still, im bettin 98k...wonder if mr king has any thoughts on this...

 

oops sry i ment mr williams ..as in our resident gun sage....tony

 

Didn't the K98 see service through both world wars also?

IIRC in WW1 artillery and not small arms fire was the biggest cause of casualties, and disease was a close second... I'm not sure how much that changed in WW2 but i think its safe to say that the three main causes of military casualties would have been small arms, artillery and starvation/disease... Millions of Red Army soldiers starved in POW camps, it may have even superceded the number killed in combat...

 

changed very little.

Most combat casulties were and still are from shrapnel and flying debris. Direct bullet strikes were a much smaller percentage of wounding

Artillary is always the biggest killer on the field

FNG

 

keegen said the mistaken notion that most casualties stem from shrapnel is because most wounded soldiers brought into ww1 surgerys were artillery wounds,hence if you check with army doctors they would say it was all shrapnel ...however , bullet strike cases are most often not carried to the hospital by the streatcher men ...why because bullet struck soldiers are most often not among the wounded ...they are quite dead..and are left to graves regitration people ,who do not examine them ,they just plant them in the sod...

 

The main rifle was the G98 (think of Kar98K with a straight bolt handle and much longer with different type of ramp sights) but they also had a K98 but it wasn't the same as the variant used in World War 2, though mechinically the same the size and looks are different. The Karbiner 98 Kurz wasn't introduced till 1935 i believe.

 

Woody, the point I was objecting to is that you simply cannot draw any kind of conclusions regarding the accuracy of German infantrymen by looking at the numbers of Soviet dead. To come to any kind of realistic conclusion you need to know how many Soviet soldiers were hit by fire from a K98K and how many rounds were fired in order to achieve that.

Those statistics simply do not exist since on a very basic level even the most meticulous record keeping (Unlikely in any field hospital or mortuary) will be unlikely to determine to weapon that fired one rifle calibre bullet wound from another and on the other side, even the famously thorough Germans are unlikely to have recorded accurately the number of rounds expended per hit even if they knew.

Now, even taking all this into account, the "Killingest" combat rifle of all time is the AK, whether you think that murdering hapless third worlders counts or not is irrelevant, the AK is responsible for more deaths than the K98K so whilst not perhaps the most accurate nor technically the best Mr Kalashnikov's assault rifle holds the title for the most deaths IIRC and I stand ready to be corrected, so that makes it the "Killingest" (As far as can be determined possible, I'm not about to look that one up in a dictionary for a definition...). Regarding the "Kills per sortie" comment, the world has not seen combat of the intensity and scale of WWII since that time, so this too must be taken in context.

In a way you've sort of made one of my points for me, you touted the numbers of Soviet war dead as evidence of the accuracy of the German infantryman, yet refuse to acknowledge to numbers of dead killed by the AK as proof of the accuracy of Kalashnikov riflemen.

 

i wasnt thinking so much about accuracy as about highest number of dead enemy soldiers ...most landsers were armed with 98ks ,the germans killed millions of russian troops in combat ,also a number of brit ,yank ,poles ,czechs,ect ...in soldier vs soldier combat ,i think the 98k is prolly top gun.....the ak has been arround a while ,but iirc , first was used in nam about 66,67....mabey 10000 us troops by ak ,tops ...so where else would the ak have yeilded the combat kills to come remotely close to the ost front ?...cambodia ,mostly murder,liberia ditto,sudan, rawanda ....small numbers of soldier vs soldier deaths combared to ww2...if the ak leads as the grim reaper ,,, where could this have happed..iran ,iraq would count ,but not even a million war kills on boths sides together , i dont belive....it is of course impossible to know for sure ,but i think we can extrapolate a little though ,,again im not trying to figure bullets per kill ,only combat kills by rifle type...if we add in ww1 98 mausers , then i think its a clean sweep for sure...and remember, to army surgeons it might appear that shrapnel leads the way in battlefeild wounds , but of course , their view would be based on wounded liveing men carried to the hospitale tents ...those felled by bullets will not be carried to the surgery most of the time , because they are beyond the help of doctors anyway...

 

Yes, but the Germans fought dirty... It is generally accepted that the Germans gassed starved or executed between 3 to 4 million soviet POW's after they had surrendered; that is almost half of Russia's military war dead right there... A Red Army POW could expect a 60% chance that he would die in a Nazi camp, often they were forced to turn to cannibalism of their dead comrades to survive :angry: Old uncle Joe doesn't even begin to infringe upon that number, total Axis POW's killed in captivity by the soviets (including those sent to the Gulag) is about 400,000... and as far as we know, the Soviets didnt perform medical experiments on any of their 'victims'... If the K-98 is the killingest rifle of all time, it is only beacuse it wased used to blugeon to death millions of Soviet boys who hadnt starved quickly enough to satisfy Hitlers 'inferior race' complex

 

Your response to the original question which concerned the accuracy of German soldiers was:

Without wishing to repeat myself entirely, the number of Russian dead alone demonstrates precisely nothing about the marksmanship of the average German rifleman.

 

Yes Simon is exactly correct.

But lets make it more viable what would you expect a German soldier to hit a target at 100/200M on a firing range.

 

That would depend on the stance of the soldier, his personal level of skill and expirence and the rifle he uses. It is something that cannot be measured because in the end it all boils down to the individual.

 

See my post, second from top.