#Advance No. A115

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[historicalfirearms]

Walther A115 Prototype Semi-Auto Rifle

Developed in the mid-1930s, the Walther A115 made use of advanced stamping techniques and extensive machining. The A115 was gas operated and had a rotating bolt. It fed from a fixed 10-round double stack, single feed magazine which was loaded with stripper clips. The A115 chambered the standard German 7.92x57mm round. Designed as a military rifle it has a K98k-style rear tangent sight and bayonet bar beneath the barrel. Unlike later Walther semi-automatic rifle designs the A115 had a gas port in the barrel, something which the Wehrmacht were later wary off and ordered designers to avoid.

The rifle’s receiver was impressively stamped with the bolt and barrel finely machined. German manufacturers would later make extensive use of sheet metal stamping, Walther, Haenel and Mauser all used it in their assualt rifle prototypes. An annular gas piston assembly surrounded the barrel with a small gas chamber at the fore end. Much like the later FN FAL the A115 had its recoil spring housed in its butt with a bar linking it to the bolt. When the bolt and bolt carrier were forward the weapon’s action was closed preventing the ingress of dirt. When open a pair of stripper clip guides on the carrier allowed the fixed magazine to easily loaded.

Disassembled Walther A115 (source)

While its unknown why Walther abandoned the A115 project, Ian at Forgotten Weapons theorised that the close tolerances of the gas piston may have suffered issues with carbon fouling. Ian also noted that the thin stamped receiver was prone to becoming loose which caused issues with accuracy. Sadly, Peter Senich doesn’t mention the A115 in his book The German Assault Rifle 1935-45. With more development and experimentation the problems with the design could certainly have been addressed. It seems lessons learnt from the A115 rifles fed into Walther’s later designs. The A115 program was dropped and German interest in semi-automatic rifles wasn’t revived until the early 1940s with the 7.92x57mm semi-automatic rifles developed by Walther and Mauser and the later intermediate calibre rifles developed from 1942 onwards. The A115 is a contemporary of the Vollmer M35 developed by Heinrich Vollmer in the early 1930s.

In April 1945, US forces captured Walther’s plant at Zella-Mehlis and sent an example of the A115 to the Aberdeen proving ground for testing and evaluation. Walther are believed to have made fewer than five prototype A115s, with at least two surviving. The example shown above (see images #1-4) is now in private hands, however, another, possibly earlier prototype (see image #4), is in the collection of the Wehrtechnische Studiensammlung (Armed Forces Research Collection) at Koblenz.  

Sources:

Images: 1 2 3 4

Walther A115 Prototype Rifle, Forgotten Weapons, (source)

The World’s Assault Rifles, G.P Johnston & T.B. Nelson (1967)

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