Watch: Woman Fires a Shoulder-Mounted Anti-Tank Rifle

Wow.

This short video was posted as a teaser to a much longer and very detailed video about the German T-Gewehr bolt action WW1 anti-tank rifle. This massive shootin’ iron is fired from the shoulder and uses a cartridge that seems to be somewhat on par with the 50 BMG.

A bolt-action single-shot, this big honking rifle was classified as 13mm, which is about .52 caliber. Weighing in at about 40 pounds and more than five and a half feet long, it’s a hefty popper when it comes to shoulder-fired guns.

Relatively scrawny by today’s “anti-tank” standards, it’s a testament to the beginnings of armored combat, when the tank was invented to break the stalemate of trench warfare and this was brought to bear against them.

Although the Tankgewehr M1918 offers no muzzle brake nor even a recoil pad, the woman firing it in the video below seems to love it. In the picture above, she’s gleefully loading a second round into the beast, after clearly savoring the experience of firing the first shot.

I’m jealous.

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.