The rifle used by Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President Kennedy in Dallas had a long history.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
For several centuries, the military firearm had changed very little, being a single-shot muzzle-loader which used a flintlock, and later a percussion cap, mechanism to fire the gun when the trigger was pulled. What the military really wanted was a rifle that could be quickly loaded through the breech and which could store extra cartridges in a magazine, allowing the gun to be fired several times before reloading. This in turn led to several new designs by the 1800s which used a heavy bolt to fire a cartridge, extract the empty shell casing when pulled back, and reload a fresh round when pushed forward. By far the most successful of these bolt action designs was that made by Paul and Wilhelm Mauser, who began manufacturing bolt-action rifles for the Prussian military in the 1870s. By the First World War, every combatant was armed with a bolt-action rifle, usually some variant of the Mauser.
In 1888 the Italian government issued instructions to develop a new military rifle cartridge using smokeless powder which would become the standard ammunition for a new bolt-action rifle. In response, engineers at the Royal Pyrotechnical Laboratory in Bologna came up with a rifle cartridge in 6.5mm (roughly .268 caliber). Previous to this, most military rifles had been produced in larger 8mm or 7.92mm, but most nations had already begun to switch to the smaller and lighter cartridge. At the same time, Salvatore Carcano, working at the Turin Army Arsenal, designed a new bolt-action rifle to fire the 6.5mm cartridge. Adopted in 1891, the rifle incorporated a modified version of the feed system invented by Austrian designer Ferdinand von Mannlicher that used a “stripper clip” to push a series of six cartridges into an attached magazine. Since then, the Italian weapon has been known as the “Mannlicher-Carcano”, though this is technically incorrect and its only official designation is “Model 1891 Infantry Rifle”. It became the standard-issue Italian rifle in the First World War and was produced both in a full-length 51-inch and a shortened carbine version.
The Carcano continued to be used by the Italian Army after the war. In 1937, the Japanese, facing an extended war in China, found themselves unable to produce enough bolt-action Arisaka rifles for themselves, and contracted with the Italian Government to purchase a number of Model 91 rifles that would be modified to use the Japanese ammunition in a five-round magazine.
By this time Italy was also involved in its own wars in northern Africa, where it was found that the 6.5mm bullet was not giving the performance that they needed. So in 1938 Mussolini ordered the rifle to be shortened by several inches and for the ammunition to be switched to a larger 7.35mm caliber. This new version became the Model 91/38. Although some Italian units were equipped with the new 7.35mm version and a large supply was sent to Finland for use against the Russians, Mussolini found that he did not have the industrial capacity to make the new ammunition in the required amounts, so in 1940 he ordered the new shortened Model 91/38 to switch back to the old readily-available 6.5mm cartridge. This version, however, was only produced for two years—in 1941 Mussolini ordered that the 6.5mm rifle be made longer by a few inches, and this was dubbed the Model 98/41.
In all, the Italians produced almost 3 million Mannlicher-Carcanos of various models and variations during their lifetime. One of these, a 6.5mm Model 91/38, bore the serial number C2766. It was manufactured at the Royal Arms Factory in the town of Terni, Italy, in 1940.
At the end of World War Two, the newly-reconstituted Italian Army adopted the American-made M1 Garand as its standard service rifle, and all of the remaining Mannlicher-Carcanos were declared “surplus”. Many of them were destroyed, but some were refurbished at the Riva Plant in Storo, Italy, which was run by the Beretta company, and placed up for sale as hunting and sporting rifles. Rifle C2766 was part of a consignment that was shipped to New York City in September 1960, sat in a warehouse for a long while, and was then sold to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago in 1962.
In October of that year, Lee Harvey Oswald opened a Post Office Box in Dallas using forged identification cards under the fake name of “Alek James Hidell”. Three months later, using the same fake name, he ordered a .38-caliber revolver by mail and had it shipped to Dallas. Then in March 1963, using a mail-in form from an advertisement in the National Rifle Association magazine American Rifleman, Oswald ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano through the mail from Klein’s Sporting Goods and had it shipped to his PO Box. The advertisement was for a Model 98/TS carbine variant, but the C2766 he actually received was a slightly-longer Model 91/38. It cost him $19.95 (roughly $200 in today’s money).
After the assassination, the Dallas Police found the rifle in the Texas School Book Depository and did some examinations of it as evidence before the FBI took possession. When Oswald was himself killed by Jack Ruby and it was clear there would be no trial, his wife Marina assumed that she was now the legal owner of the rifle, and in early 1964 she sold Oswald’s pistol and the assassination rifle to a Denver oil millionaire named John King, for his private collection. The price was $45,000—roughly $500,000 today.
The FBI, however, refused to release the weapons, and in May 1965 King sued the Federal Government to try to obtain possession. The court ruled that Oswald had violated Federal law by using a fake name to purchase the guns, and therefore both the pistol and the assassination rifle could legally be confiscated by the authorities. Then in 1966 an appeals court concluded that there was no specific provision at the time in federal laws requiring the purchaser of a firearm to use their real name, opening the door for King to claim possession. However in November Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach declared that the weapons were of historical importance as well as legal evidentiary value, and that the Federal Government could exercise its rights to confiscate them. King sued once again, this time seeking $5 million in compensation, but the courts eventually ruled that Oswald had abandoned the rifle when he had left it at the crime scene, and that therefore it no longer belonged to him or his heirs, but had become the property of the Federal government as evidence in a criminal case. (King did receive $350 in compensation for the pistol, which Oswald had been carrying when he was arrested, but King did not obtain possession of that weapon either.)
Once the legal issues were settled, the FBI turned the two weapons over to the National Archives, which still holds them. Neither is available for public view. Today the site of the assassination in Dealey Plaza is the Sixth Floor Museum. There, a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle of the same model and year as Oswald’s is on display.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)