Timing is everything on a caliber. The 11.2 was essentially a .458 WM - .44 caliber in a standard length magazine, and a potentially adequate thumper of DG in an affordable package. Unfortunately, it was created and became available to German colonists in German East and Southwest Africa only a decade before WWI and the collapse of Germany’s overseas colonial empire. The British who supplanted them naturally brought their preferences for dangerous game rifles and calibers with them. I should note that they adopted (or at least Jeffrey did) the larger 12.7x70 Schuler, renaming it the 500 Jeffrey.
The .458 on the other hand arrived just in time for a post WWII generation of newly wealthy, bolt action centric American hunters going afield in the twilight of the British African Empire. It filled, just adequately most of the time (that problematic standard length action), the void left by a similarly contracting British rifle and ammunition industry.
Ah , from the words of one of the few who actually handled an 11.2 × 72. If l was a member of these forums 10 years ago , Red Leg , l would have bought that 11.2 × 72 August Schuler Model 34 from you for sure.
It's seems to me that the case capacity issues caused by the deeply seated bullets in the factory 11.2mm ammo is what caused it to die out ( but as l mentioned earlier , this was a necessity in order to make the cartridges fit the standard length cheap issued Mauser 98 actions on which these Model 34 Schulers were built.
About the .458 Win Mag , l was actually doing some recreational reading lately. A beautiful book called " white hunters " by Brian Here. From my observations , it seems as if the .458 Win Mag was never really popular among the PHs in Africa , but rather with the wealthy American client hunters of the 1950s.
It came at a time when Kynoch had just discontinued all the British centre fire Cartridges and when game laws had just started declaring the .375 H&H Magnum as the legal minimum for DG . So aside from the .375 Magnum ( which only survived because it was a non proprietary cartridge and American companies like Winchester and Remington had started loading it ) , the .458 Win Mag was the only other big game caliber available. Even so , most PHs that l read about actually didn't use these rifles , but client hunters used them A lot in that era.
The standard DG rifle of a PH in that era was a Double barrel .470 NE rifle ( source : Guns Magazine 1964 ) . Only two recorded PHs ( Harry Manners and Wally Johnson ) used the .375 H&H as their backup rifle . In Harry's case , he always had another hunter with a second .375 HH Magnum Winchester Model 70 back him up . In Wally's case , he often needed as many as 8 shots from his. 375 HH Magnum to put down elephant or buffalo.
Lots of other hunters owned a .375 HH Magnum , but these two are the only guys who used them as their primary/ only backup rifle . Lots of client hunters preferred a .375 HH Magnum and PHs actually recommended it for a one gun Safari ( as a .375 HH Magnum owner , l must say l 100 % agree with them ) .
Regarding the .458 Win Mag, l can't really find that many references to PHs exclusively using one for back up .
The only ones l can think of are Finn Aagaard who owned a push feed Model 70 ( which he admitted would sometimes jam if it wasn't kept super clean , and he generally preferred his .375 ) Ian Gibson ( one of my favorite hunters who unfortunately died when a first shot from his .458 Win Mag Model 70 failed to stop an elephant and the second shot misfired ). We do have guys like Harry Selby and Brian Marsh who used a .458 Win Mag for some time . But in Harry's 'case , he was only using the .458 Model 70 for two years while his .416 Rigby Magnum rifle was being rebarrelled by Rigby in London and that .458 was his Safari Outfit 's spare big bore rifle and rent out big bore . Brian used the same rifle when he worked in Selby's outfitters only because at that time a non citizen living on a work permit couldn't import rifles into Botswana .
Then you have guys like Richard Harland , Barry Ducksworth , John Kingsley Heath and Peter Grobler who used the .458 win mag , but actually preferred the .505 Gibbs , .500 Nitro Express and .470 Nitro Express respectively .
Mike Cameron had a .458 Winchester Model 70 early in his career but quickly adapted English Mauser rifles .
Then , there are game rangers like Donnie Jan Bredenkamp and W Middleton Lofty Stokes who would use .458 Mannlichers , but that's mainly because they were issued .458s instead of choosing them .
A lot of PHs however did have a .458 lying around camp for a client hunter to use , while they didn't prefer it themselves . They did this primarily because back in those days it was customary for the client hunter to leave his surplus Ammunition with his ph after the Safari was over , so Many PHs racked up quite a store of .458 Win Mag ammunition.
But the .458 Winchester Magnum was EXTREMELY popular among American Client hunters . Almost universal , you could say. Here is a small snippet about the popularity of the. 458 , 470 and .375 in Africa in 1964.
But Tony Sanchez Arino used this caliber to kill 9 Bull Elephant using two side brain shots and 7 heart shots. He was using an Old , but well maintained rifle owned by his friend , Otto Krohnert. The ammunition which Tony was using was old pre 1939 RWS German Cupro Nickel Jacketed solids which Otto had in stock with the gun for many years already.
