12-year old stealing a rifle from a german camp

Yep, thats exactly what my grandfather says he did.
I live in Finland, which was Germanys co-belligerent against the Soviet Union.
My grandfather lived in the city of Pori and still does today. He had managed to find some Mauser cartridges and badly wanted to fire them.
He knew that there was a german camp nearby so he decided that he is going to steal a rifle from there.
So he went there and slowly crawled towards the camp and at the camp he found a rifle rack, quickly took one when no one was looking and crawled away. He was never caught.
Unfortunately when he finally tried inserting the cartridges, he found out that the rifle was actually an italian Carcano rifle, which the germans had for unknown reasons. So naturally, the cartridges wouldn't fit.
Since it was already risky enough to crawl there once, he didn't try another time.

 

Interesting story. The Carcanos were confiscated after August 1943 , so this would mean the story happened around that period (or 1944)

 

Interesting indeed!

 

That's a really cool story. But I am still confused as to why the Germans in Finland would have a Italian rifle. But other than that you grandpa was one brave guy.

 

Your grandfather is an absolute champion!

 

The Finns were short of weapons and would issue whatever they could get their hands on. ~80,000 Swedish M96 long rifles and a small number of M94 carbines were issued. Use of captured Soviet weapons including SVT40s and M91/30 Mosins was commonplace throughout both the Winter and Continuation Wars. Pertaining to the topic at hand; the Finns acquired 94500 Carcano M38s chambered in 7.35mm during 1940. As an aside, the M38s were unpopular due to the poor fixed sight and generally relegated to rear-echelon troops. The use of the oddball 7.35mm cartridge certainly did not endear the carbines to most troops, either. Today it is an uncommon but by no means rare carbine on the surplus market in North America.

 

I don't think he was questioning why the Finns would want the rifle but why the Germans would. I can see a number of possibilities, knowing what unit the rifle came from might help. For instance if it had previously served in Africa ....

 

Without knowing the year, it is difficlt to say why a Carcano would be on a German base. I don't like to speculate but FWIW I do not think a veteran unit bringing it from Africa is the most likely explanation. A safer bet would be that, (assuming c.1942/43) the base also included Finnish troops, and the rifle stolen was in fact from a Finnish rifle rack. Pori was the base of JG5 (Luftwaffe) and although I haven't researched it, it's likely that some Finnish troops were also present. Given that as per my previous post the Carcanos were re-issued to rear echelon troops it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine some Carcanos being on this German base.

Another option would simply be that it was issued to the Germans by the Finns for airfield security. The Germans too often used "substitute" weapons but I'm less inclined to believe this as I haven't seen any literature referencing Finnish-German Carcanos.

 

Added little tidbit that might be of interest. Some were converted to 7.92 Mauser for use by Volksstrum. They were single shot with a magazine plug.

http://candrsenal.com/rifle-italian-carcano-m41/

 

An interesting conversion, indeed. I believe these were made by Kreighoff and these were intended only for rear echelon troops. I've only seen a handful of photos of these and have not seen one in person. As a cautionary note to anyone who may come across a 7.92mm Carcano: Post-war a large number of then-surplus and obsoleted Carcanos were converted to 7.92mm to make the guns more appealing to foreign buyers. It is suspected that Egypt was the intended customer but I haven't seen firm evidence to back this up. These are often confused with the rare and more valuable WW2 conversions. Exercise caution if you are looking for a WW2 model!

 

This story made my day. Your grandpa was a badass.

 

Your grandpa had some big cajones dude

10/10 story

 

That was Brave and lucky that he did grow up to become a grandfather