Winchester’s Inimitable .270

Mysterious Choice

Winchester’s choice of a .277-diameter bullet still mystifies. In 1925 a more logical sub-.30 pick for hunting would have been .284 (7mm). Paul Mauser’s 7x57, in 1892 one of the world’s first smokeless cartridges, had legions of fans. It had impressed Americans who had faced its fire in Cuba in the Spanish-American War. Brits dubbed it the .275 Rigby. Germany’s 7x64 Brenneke, unveiled in 1917, had more oomph, as did Holland and Holland’s .275 Magnum.

Various 6.5mm (.264) cartridges had big followings, too. Before the Great War, 6.5s had armed many infantries. The 6.5x54 Mannlicher-Schoenauer, initially a Greek military round, appealed to veteran and discriminating hunters such as Africa’s W.D.M Bell and F.C. Selous. In trim M-S carbines it excelled on mountain hunts. The similar 6.5x55 Swedish earned its celebrity killing moose and in 300-meter matches.

Winchester may have wished a distinctive new number, one with no link to the carnage of WWI. Whatever the thinking in New Haven, the .270 was a brilliant blend of tradition and innovation. Essentially a necked-down .30-06, the case had the same 17½-degree shoulder. Its .473 head fit the bolt heads of the day’s most popular repeating rifles. Actions that fed .30-06 cartridges fed .270s. Designed for sturdy turn-bolts, the .270 was loaded to slightly stiffer pressures than the ‘06. Its 130-grain “pointed soft-point expanding” bullet left the muzzle at a claimed 3,160 fps—scorching speed for the day.

That bullet was later hailed as the first to satisfactorily and reliably upset after high-speed impact on game. A tin cone shielded its lead tip from battering in the magazine. It differed from similar 150- and 180-grain .30-06 bullets in that its gilding metal (90 percent copper, 10 percent zinc) jacket was thick at the base, to prevent fragmentation and ensure deep penetration. Early jackets were coated with a tin wash, which added a silver hue, per the cupro-nickel jackets of early military bullets. That coating, to nix  metal fouling, had gone away when the Army found some .30-06 bullets “cold-soldered” to the cases.  

As jobbers and dealers liked to order all types of cartridges from one source, it wasn’t long before Remington announced .270 ammunition, first with a blunt 130-grain “mushroom” bullet. Western, not yet a Winchester partner, developed a 130-grain open-point bullet with a “Lubaloy” jacket.

Slow Start

Despite its ballistic moxie, the .270 wasn’t an immediate hit. Many hunters teethed on 19^th-century lever rifles and their cartridges thought the .270’s bullets small. Oddly enough, the shooting press gave the .270 little support. Not until its third year did American Rifleman run a .270 feature. Jack O’Connor, legendary Shooting Editor of Outdoor Life, claimed his predecessor at the magazine never wrote about the cartridge.

Also working against the .270 were surplus 1903 Springfields peddled for a pittance to members of the National Rifle Association. For awhile almost anyone could buy a spanking new Springfield with a star-gauged barrel, the fine N.R.A. sporter stock, and a Lyman 48 receiver sight for $40.

Some hunters who took the .270 hunting whined that its bullets landed too violently, ruining too much meat. But when Winchester responded with a 150-grain round-nose throttled to 2,770 fps, nobody bought it. Improved bullet designs, the killing effect of high velocity, and the imperative of flat flight for long-range hits soon buried complaints of pulped venison.

In essence you could say the .270 appeared a decade too early. The Great Depression certainly didn’t help, as it destroyed the buying power of hunters everywhere. Also a factor—lever-action rifles with metallic sights were still esteemed by woodland deer hunters. Optical sights had yet to become practical. Barrel-mounted scopes in adjustable mounts were fragile, cumbersome, and unreliable. All fogged. In 1925 Bill Weaver’s affordable (but still primitive) 330 was five years away. The rifle that made the the .270’s reputation, Winchester’s classic Model 70, wouldn’t arrive until 1937.

The .270 has prospered in Winchester’s flagship bolt gun. Of 581,471 Model 70s built before the rifle’s lamented 1963 overhaul, 122,323 were .270s. Remington picked up the .270 for its new Model 721 in 1948, and as a charter offering for the 700 in 1962. Savage has offered the .270 in its Model 110 since it appeared in 1958. Myriad foreign-built bolt-actions have been barreled to .270. Remington has listed slide-actions and autoloaders, Browning its BLR lever rifle and BAR auto. Ruger and Browning have produced dropping-block single-shots.

Hunters throughout the west have found the .270 deadly on elk as well as on mule deer—though evidently not right away. A 1939 survey of 2,225 elk hunters in Washington state failed to turn up a single .270 in the responses, 60 percent of which named the .30-30, .30-40 Krag, and .30-06. No doubt the Depression weighed heavily on hunters who might otherwise have sprung for a new Model 70 in .270.

Times change. In my surveys of thousands of elk hunters in the 1990s, the .30-06 and the 7mm Remington Magnum (introduced in 1962) topped popularity charts. The .270 vied with Winchester’s .300 Magnum for third place.

Fred Mercer carried a .270 on a late 1958 hunt in Montana’s Gravelly range. By lantern’s light he ate breakfast, then tossed a hatchet, rope, matches, candles, and a flashlight into an old Army rucksack with lunch and a Thermos of coffee. Climbing, he soon cut elk tracks in new snow. One set was very big. He stayed on the prints after a twist of wind sent the animals off. They led ever higher. Hours later, Fred concluded the herd was bound for a saddle. Betting his efforts on that hunch, he pushed himself faster on a direct route toward it. Wet with sweat now cooling, and wearied by the climb, he paused before cresting to throttle his pulse. When he peeked over, Winchester to cheek, his breath caught. The most magnificent elk Fred had ever seen was grazing 50 yards away. Two shots brought it down. By Boone and Crockett measure, the bull’s antlers were a Montana record.

Dale Leonard was easing through Colorado timber on a snowy day in 1961 when he spied an elk peering from under conifer limbs 50 yards away. He fired. Huge antlers came clear as the bull fell. Fifteen years later, hunting deer, Dale bumped a buck with an eye-popping rack. When it paused, his shot was on the mark. The antlers spanned 32 inches. Dale remains one of few Colorado hunters to put both mule deer and elk on the all-time B&C records. He did it with his .270.

A hunting client and I once followed the bellows of a rutting elk through Douglas firs to an aspen draw too steep and thick to probe effectively. With less than an hour until dusk, we posted a short rifle shot from the draw’s base. Light ebbed. I was about to call the contest when the elk stepped out. At the impact of my hunter’s Hornady, the great animal reared up, then toppled backward, planting its enormous antlers in the earth, dead instantly.

Punching Above Its Weight

The .270 punches above its weight on elk, moose, and other big creatures partly because it’s easy to fire without flinching. Well-placed hits result. A Colorado wildlife agent charged with culling elk used a .270 for the task. He was able to shoot repeatedly without discomfort, ensuring accuracy and clean kills. In an 8-pound rifle, 140-grain loads clocking 3,000 fps bump you with about 17 foot-pounds of recoil—same as 150s at 2,900 fps from the .30-06 and 180s at 2,600 fps from a .308. The standard 180-grain .30-06 load has more bite: 20 foot-pounds.

Bullets for the .270 have ranged in weight from 100 to 180 grains, though most hunters use 130- to 150-grain bullets, the 130 most popular by a wide margin. There were no 140-grain .270 bullets in my youth, but now that weight has gained a following. Remington still offers a 100-grain Pointed Core-Lokt load at 3,320 fps. Low sectional density (ratio of a bullet’s weight in pounds to the square of its diameter in inches), handicaps it on big game. Nosler makes an excellent semi-spitzer 160-grain Partition bullet for  use on tough animals. From the mid-1950s well into the 1970s, Speer listed a 170-grain round-nose. A 180-grain Barnes Original round-nose was dropped in 1979. By the way, the sectional density of this jacketed softpoint was .335, essentially equal to the .331 SD of the 220-grain round-nose once popular in the .30-06. At iron-sight ranges, such bullets were deadly on the biggest North American beasts.

Heavy bullets for shooting far—say, with Winchester’s 6.8 Western (.270-caliber) cartridge—beg steeper rifling because these sleek, pointed missiles are longer than the blunt bullets of yesteryear.

The .270 gradually gained international acclaim, and not just in bolt rifles. In August 1967, Jack O’Connor, along with his with wife Eleanor and son Bradford, chartered an airplane into a lake in the Telegraph Creek district of British Columbia to hunt Stone’s sheep. There they met two hunters awaiting a flight out. One, from Austria, had been after a ram with an over/under rifle in .270. His back-up was a combination gun of like design, a 20-gauge shotgun barrel atop a .270 rifle barrel. His friend, an Italian, carried a side-by-side double in .270. Both rifles wore 4X scopes. This battery “was about as offbeat as any I have seen,” wrote O’Connor, “but it [showed] the .270 has become an international mountain cartridge.”

Late in life, the famous gun scribe claimed to have shot “36 species of what passes for big game” with a .270. These included a dozen moose and two grizzlies. “I cannot imagine a better sheep rifle than a light .270 and with it I have shot around 30 rams, of four North American and four Old World species….”

But while privileged to hunt in all the world’s great game fields, Jack never lost his fondness for chasing the delicate, wary, quick-footed whitetails of the desert southwest. His sons started deer hunting there as well. He once wrote of a Sonoran buck that, taking a bullet from Jerry’s .270, “turned clear over in the air and hit like a bag of potatoes.”

“Whoopee!” yelped their guide. “One shot and the buck doesn’t move! How do you call it?”

“The .270,” said Jack.