Jäger Rifle

Origins

Rifled barrels were being made in the German-speaking lands by the sixteenth century, and by the 1700s the short flintlock rifle was the usual weapon of the central European hunter. It was built for boar and deer in thick forest, where a handy gun and one well-placed heavy ball mattered more than quick reloading. German princes saw that the men who used such rifles for a living, the foresters and gamekeepers of their estates, made natural scouts and marksmen. Hesse-Kassel is usually credited with raising the first Jäger companies during the Thirty Years' War, and Frederick the Great formed a Prussian Jäger corps in the 1740s. Many early Jäger brought their own rifles, so the weapon was never a single pattern. It was a type, made by many gunsmiths to broadly similar lines.

Design & Construction

A typical Jäger rifle had a thick octagonal barrel of roughly 28 to 30 inches, much shorter than a musket barrel, with deep rifling of seven or eight grooves. The bore was large, commonly between .54 and .65 inch. The stock ran to the muzzle and had a raised cheekpiece and a patch box in the butt closed by a sliding wooden lid. Mounts were of brass or iron. Many rifles had double set triggers, in which the rear trigger "set" the front one so that a very light touch fired the shot. Sights were a blade at the front and an open notch at the rear, sometimes with folding leaves for longer ranges.

The rifle was loaded with a ball wrapped in a greased patch, which had to be forced down the grooves, sometimes with a mallet and a short starter. This gave much better accuracy than a smoothbore musket such as the Brown Bess Musket, but loading took perhaps a minute, and fouling made it slower as a fight went on. Most Jäger rifles had no fitting for a Socket Bayonet. The rifleman carried a short hunting sword, the Hirschfänger, instead, and he was at a serious disadvantage if infantry or cavalry closed with him before he could reload.

Combat Use

When Britain / United Kingdom hired German troops for the war in America, the treaties included Jäger. Hesse-Kassel sent the largest contingent, which grew into a Feldjäger Corps of several companies, one of them mounted, under Lieutenant Colonel Ludwig von Wurmb. Ansbach-Bayreuth, Hesse-Hanau and other states also supplied Jäger. They wore green coats and served as the army's advance guard, pickets and skirmishers, usually working with British light infantry who could protect them with the bayonet. Captain Johann Ewald, who led a Hessian Jäger company from 1776 to the surrender at Yorktown, left a detailed diary of this kind of service around New York, in the Philadelphia campaign and in the South.

The Jäger were respected by both sides, and they were among the few troops in British service able to answer American riflemen in kind. A Jäger company marched with Cornwallis through the Carolinas and fought on the British left at the Battle of Guilford Court House in March 1781, where it skirmished in the woods against Virginia riflemen. Their numbers were always small, however, and a few hundred rifles could not change the character of a war fought mainly with musket and bayonet.

Legacy

The Jäger rifle's most important descendant was American. German and Swiss gunsmiths who settled in Pennsylvania in the early eighteenth century at first built rifles in the style they knew. Over a few decades they lengthened the barrel, reduced the bore to save powder and lead, and slimmed the stock, and the result was the Kentucky Long Rifle. The British Army also learned from the German rifle. In 1776 it ordered about 1,000 muzzle-loading rifles of German style for the war in America, some of them made in Hanover, alongside the small number of breech-loading rifles designed by Patrick Ferguson and described under Ferguson Rifle. A generation later the Baker Rifle of 1800 followed the same short, large-bored German form. The word Jäger itself survived as the name for light infantry and rifle units in German, Austrian and Scandinavian armies, and some units still carry it today. The rifle's part in the fighting in America is covered in the overview of the American Revolution.