Butcher Bayonet (Sawback)

[Jim McDougall]

Hi Brian,
Thank you for posting this! and for the great questions. I spent some time reviewing some notes etc. and learned a bit on these, although I've known about them for a long time (one of these was one of my first pieces!

This is a German M1898/05 bayonet used for the Gewehr 98 rifle. Great markings on this one. These were issued to the German 'pioneer' troops who were of course engineer styled troops. The sawteeth were for cutting down posts holding barbed wire and other field functions involving such type use.

The tale of these being 'outlawed' is commonly told, but I have never found any substantiation of this officially, and the idea is very similar to the stories of lancers in the Napoleonic wars being given no quarter, and outlawing of crossbows during medieval times etc. The truth seems that while this may have been a well known perception, there was never anything official in protocol. The fact that the bayonets were well known is noted in a 1918 account, "...bayonets are hard to remove once they have been caught between the ribs, especially the sawtooth bayonets many of the Germans carried". (" The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness WWI" Jon. E.Lewis 2003, p.408).
Another reference noted one of these imbedded in a body, forcing the German to leave both the gun and bayonet behind, emphasizing the rather impractical side effect to the soldier using this weapon. There are in fact notes suggesting that the earlier forms of the German M1898/05 bayonet had the sawteeth, while later ones did not. Whether this was due to the tales from the front of the allied reaction to these, or whether the problem of them becoming imbedded as these it would be hard to say. It does appear that Schmidt Rubin kept making them with sawteeth, and the idea of actively grinding the teeth off seems far fetched.

Though the idea of the allies being abhorred at these frightening looking weapons, the British surely must have known of the earlier bayonet they had with these sawteeth, and certainly the pioneer swords of a number of nations were known as well.

It seems that as weapons, the truth was these these were terribly impractical, as noted by Sir Richard Burton much earlier in his 1884 "Book of the Sword" (p.137) regarding the saw teeth, "...this apparantly silly contrivance is found on a large scale on Indian sabres; its latter appearance farther west is on the precious saw bayonet, a theoretical multum in parvo equally useless for flesh and fuel".

The tooth shaped edge was known as early as the middle ages, as Burton also notes (p.51) and "...that it is not yet extinct the absurd saw bayonet proves".

Apparantly Burton saw the drawbacks pragmatically as a weapon, and apparantly may have been referring to the earliest regulation pattern sawtooth bayonet I am aware of, which was the British M1870 'elcho' bayonet with a blade shaped like a kukri and sawtooth back.
These, the German M1898's and the Schmidt Rubin Swiss bayonets of 1878, 1887, and 1914 (1911) are as far as I know the only forms. I am not aware of an American bayonet with sawtooth (though I know of one that had a shovel!!).

This is what I could find.

All the best,
Jim