Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Military 720

My gunsmith has a Savage 720 on consignment in his shop. Both the barrel and receiver have Ordnance Dept. stamps. This is not a trench gun, it has a full length barrel. I would guess it was used for AA gunery instruction.

I have no interest, financial or otherwise in the gun. I thought I would post it here in case anyone in the group collects matrial marked Savages. If you have any interest PM me and I'll give you the shop's contact info.

Yep, bought up at the beginning of WW2 and used to train pilots/gunners on how to properly lead targets.

Is it an engraved 720, or plain sided? They had both. This is a plain sided one:

Could also be a gun held at military installations for loaning to guys who wanted to shoot recreationally. They were stamped with government property markings too. A BIL who treated the guys in his crew to a day of jungle hunting outside of Subic Bay went to the rec center and signed out a mixed bag of shotguns and rifles. As I recall him telling it, a couple of monkeys bit the dust.

An uncle who was a gunnery instructor in Texas for a while before getting a gig in a B-29 said they had Brownings, Savages, Remingtons, and Winchesters for initial instruction on the skeet fields. After getting somewhat proficient with shotguns they moved on to .30 machine guns. He used to laugh about how piss-poor shots most of those guys were, and would yell at them about knuckling down or the Germans/Japanese would have their hash. (There was the coyote who scampered away in a cloud of machine gun dust when several of his guys tried to nail it when it ventured onto the target range.)

It is a plain receiver. It appears very much as the one pictured, markings may be slightly different.

Going to gently disagree, gnoahh.. it's known that they bought a bunch of 720's for training purposes, and some "riot" versions with shorter barrels for security personnel.

While some of these very possibly later became "loaners", I doubt the Army would have acquired any number of 720's after the war - especially since the plain receivers weren't being made after the war.

Army even has a TM for the 720. They definitely didn't do that for loaners.

http://www.cgsc.edu/carl/wwiitms/TM9_285_1942.pdf


If the markings are much different, a guy needs to be careful. There have been a number of 720's that are counterfeit military rifles - stamped faked or parts switched.

If the price is right, this would make a great "working collectible"!

I had an LC Smith 16 guage "Featherweight Field" grade with their special high rib that had purchase papers from Smith to Syracuse Army Depot in 1942. Hard to imagine this gun being used for training and easy to imagine that it got into the inventory of some O-Club and was used for recreation.

I've also seen Savage 220s, Win 37s, etc that were unlikely to have been used for training. More likely recreation and/or rat control.... (These were guns I saw MANY years ago before anybody thought a "martially marked" single shot would have collector value. Very unlikely to have been fakes).

Uncle Sugar just bought up about all the bigger guage shotguns available in 1942 and then tried to figure out what to use them for. Some were used for "military" purposes. Some not.

I saw a Savage 720 short barreled with the ordinance bomb stamps about 12 years ago. Only one I have ever seen.