G3 Rifle

Origins

The G3 descends from work done at Mauser in the last months of the Second World War, when engineers tried to give the StG 44 concept a cheaper action. Their answer was roller-delayed blowback, in which two rollers on the bolt head slow the opening of the breech without any gas system. After 1945 the designer Ludwig Vorgrimler took the idea to France and then to Spain, where the state arsenal CETME turned it into a 7.62 mm rifle. West Germany re-armed in 1955 and first bought the FN FAL as the G1. When Belgium would not grant a production license, the Bundeswehr turned to the CETME design. Heckler & Koch of Oberndorf, a company founded by former Mauser staff, refined it, and the rifle was adopted as the Gewehr 3 in 1959.

Design & Construction

The G3 fires the 7.62x51 mm NATO cartridge from a 20-round magazine. The receiver is a stamped and welded steel pressing, cheap to make in large numbers. When the rifle fires, the bolt head is held by its rollers while the heavier bolt carrier moves back; only after the carrier has traveled a short distance do the rollers ride inward and let the bolt open. A fluted chamber floats the case on gas so that it extracts cleanly. There is no gas piston to clean. The rifle is select-fire, with a cyclic rate of about 500 to 600 rounds a minute, though it is normally fired in semi-automatic. The G3A3 has a fixed plastic stock and a rotary rear sight; the G3A4 has a collapsing stock. The action was later scaled down to 5.56 mm as the HK33 and to 9 mm as the HK MP5, and belt-fed and magazine-fed versions became the HK21 and HK11, filling a squad role the MG 42 family had held earlier. Accurized G3s became the PSG1 and MSG90 sniper rifles.

Combat Use

The Bundeswehr never took the G3 to war, but its licensees did. Portugal built the rifle as the m/961 and m/963 and carried it through thirteen years of fighting in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea from 1961 to 1974. Rhodesia bought G3s to supplement its FALs during the Rhodesian Bush War. Norway's AG-3 and Sweden's Ak 4 armed those armies for four decades, and Norwegian AG-3s went to Afghanistan. Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Greece, Mexico and Saudi Arabia all made the rifle under license, and Pakistani and Iranian G3s fought in the 1971 war with India and in the Iran-Iraq War. Soldiers found the rifle reliable and hard-hitting but heavy in recoil, with a stiff charging handle and a straight stock that sent the kick directly into the shoulder. The full-power cartridge gave it reach that the M14 Rifle shared and that 5.56 mm rifles could not match.

Legacy

Around seven million G3s were made in more than a dozen countries, making it one of the most widely built military rifles of the Cold War. Germany began replacing it with the 5.56 mm G36 Rifle in 1997, but the G3 remains in service in Turkey, Pakistan, Iran and much of Africa and the Middle East, and Bundeswehr reserve and rear-area units kept it for years. Semi-automatic versions were sold to civilians as the HK91, and clones are still made by PTR Industries in the United States. The roller-delayed action built Heckler & Koch's reputation and remained the company's signature until it moved to gas operation with the G36.