WW Service Rifles: Length of Service

[David Dunlop]

I was going through yet another filing cabinet drawer this evening, sorting wheat from chaff, and stumbled across a collection of Canadian Army documents, all sequentially dated through 1984, dealing with the RIFLE, CALIBRE .303, No. 4, ALL MARKS. W/E (1005-21-107-2101).

In truth, the bulk of this documentation focused on the No. 4 Mk I *, but what intrigued me was this rifle was still in service at all at that time, and the receipt date on the front cover of the first document was 08 November 1987.

The last previous publications these documents superseded were all dated in June 1955.

The final document in this group was also interesting as it was the process to follow to convert one of these rifles to Competition Match level in performance, and from the outside, one of these rifles looked no different than any of the standard issue ones, once the work was done.

That seems like a pretty long service life for a World War Two rifle, still in its original calibre, and I started wondering what the service lives might have been for other World War Two rifles, in original issue calibre?


David