The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

Visited the excellent barracks museum in Bastogne recently. For those of you not familiar, its where the famous NUTS message was written during the battle of the bulge. The guide showed us a large amount of battlefield pickup, stuff that has come out of the ground since the war. There were the Garands, Thompsons, StGs etc but i spotted what i thought was a Mosin Nagant magazine well in there. The guide said that he thought that it was from a 'British Styer' but I was convinced that it was off a Mosin. It had the magazine floor plate release mechanism which is what convinced me. What I cant understand is who was correct, and if it was a Mosin then which side was using it? Thoughts?

isn't the Mosin Nagant mag fixed and part of the trgger guard assembly?

It is indeed. What I saw was a typical Mosin mag with trigger guard. It had the floor plate release which is why I thought it was definitely a Mosin Nagant.

kennyc wrote:isn't the Mosin Nagant mag fixed and part of the trgger guard assembly?

The floor plate can be released, it folds down on a hinge.

The floor plate can be removed by compressing the magazine spring against the floor plate. Does the below look similar to what you saw (magazine floor plate it top picture, mag well and trigger guard on right side of bottom picture)?

Also, since Bastogne took place towards the back end of the war it may be possible that some of the Wehrmacht were using Mosina's picked up from defeated Russian's?

But what is a "British Styer"???

Perhaps the guide was thinking of the Sten?

It was definitely a Mosin mag and trigger guard, I have no idea what a British Steyr is so I can only guess what the guy was mistaken. I was wondering if the Americans used the sniper version as they did have a load after the Soviets refused to pay for their Remington and Westinghouse order. Plus the sniper has one in Kelly's Heroes, that well known accurate Ww2 documentary..

Lever357 wrote:But what is a "British Styer"???

Google Gibbs of Bristol etc

Many British gunmakers built stalking rifles on dutch mannlicher actions.

I have one myself.

Following WW1 the markets were flooded with cheap surplus rifles and Belgium ended up buying loads of cheap Mosins (many were converted to 8x57 and sold to South American countries and China) and 7.62x54r ammunition.Many of these rifles remained in military storage and it is highly probable that the occupying German forces would have made use of them, especially towards the end of the war.It is possible that the Mosin mag you saw came from one of the Belgian Mosins that was issued by the Germans......possibly to a conscript from one of the Eastern European countries that were sent to the Western European theatre early in the war that freed up regular German troops sent East.I'm sure I heard somewhere that many of the troops guarding the "Atlantic Wall" were Romanian etc.