While outwardly similar to the Gew 41, the Gew 43 fielded a number of improvements over its predecessor. In something of an ode to its enemy designers, the original Soviet gas system of the production Gew 43 remained largely intact. With the foreign technology in hand, Walther set to work on an improved form of the Gew 41(W) and ultimately delivered the Gew 43 in 1943. Conversely, the Gew 41(W) was designed with a complicated muzzle-based gas actuated system of operation which made the gun "muzzle-heavy" and unnecessarily temperamental. However, the Gew 41(W) proved too expensive for wartime mass production, relied on a complex gas system prone to fouling, and was difficult to reload due to its fixed magazine approach (fed by a pair of clips).Įventually finding themselves against the Soviet Army and their Tokarev automatic rifles, the Germans evaluated and dissected the gas-operation system (that tapped gasses from the barrel) to feed an automatic action. The British, Americans, and Soviets were already issuing such weapons to their troops leaving the Germans with little choice. In 1940, the Germans enacted a program to deliver a standard semi-automatic rifle to their infantry ranks to help improve their outmoded bolt-action rifle units. The G43 was very quickly recognized as a significant improvement over the G41(W), and was very quickly put into production, with approximately 400,000 being manufactured by the end of the war.The Gewehr 43 (Gew 43) became the next evolution of the Walther Gew 41(W) of 1941 - a self-loading, semi-automatic rifle that failed to see require production numbers to make a proper wartime impression. The Walther company responded with a new version of their design which used a much more modern short stroke gas piston, basically copied from the Soviet SVT-40 rifle. Thousands of examples of both designs were put into field testing, mostly in the East, and it because clear that the gas trap system was not suitable for combat. When it came to locking systems, the two designs differed greatly, with the Walther being the more successful of the two. These both shared a gas-trap operating system to comply with an HWa requirement that no gas ports be drilled into the barrels.
By 1941, though, two competing designs from the Walther and Mauser companies had been developed to the point of mass production, as the Gewehr 41(W) and Gewehr 41(M) rifles. German ordnance began looking for a military selfloading rifle to augment the K98k as early as the 1930s, although the pressures of war initially made that development a second priority.
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