Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the James Julia Auction House taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming fall of 2017 firearms auction. Specifically today we're looking at a bunch of Sturmgewehrs. They have a nice selection here in this upcoming auction, and I thought this would give us a really good chance to talk about the evolution of this design. Because there are actually four different designations (plus the MKbs), there's the MP 43/1, there's the MP 43, there's the MP 44, there's the StG 44 and, well, what's the difference? What are all of these different things? So
today we're going to actually address that, as well as how these guns actually were
adopted into service with the German military. Now, the beginning of this story is the MKb-42.
I have a separate video on one of those, which you should go check
out if you haven't seen it yet. Basically that set the stage, that was the initial major
development for what ... became known as the assault rifle. The idea of a selective fire, intermediate
cartridge infantry shoulder rifle. It was intended to be able to deliver a high volume of
full-auto fire at very close range, like a submachine gun, while also being able to deliver accurate
precise fire out to about 400 meters like a rifle. And this was developed by the Germans
basically out of a sense of desperation in the failing campaign against Russia in the east.
And they were hugely outnumbered and they really just needed some way to
increase the firepower of the infantry unit. And this was the way to do it. So, the first major adaptation that
happened was to change the MKb-42 from an open bolt gun into a closed bolt gun. That
closed bolt operation was really necessary to get the accurate precision fire that was
half of the purpose of these rifles. And, it was really kind of a no brainer of a change to
make. And the first closed bolt version was the MP 43/1. Now with this rifle they were still using ... a couple
of components off the MKb-42, primarily barrels. And along with the barrels, the muzzle nuts, and the front
sight blocks, and the stuff that clamps onto the barrel there. And that turned out to be a bit of an
issue because the MKb-42 barrel is a little bit larger in diameter than the ... Kar98k barrel. Which meant that muzzle accessories
for the K98k wouldn't fit onto this. Things like blank firing adaptors (although you don't
need a blank firing adapter for a K98k I suppose). Grenade launchers were a big one. There were
plans to make a suppressor for these rifles. And they ... decided that they wanted to make
the MP series interchangeable with the K98k. So the MP 43/1 began using MKb-42 barrels, ... it was basically a transitional model that
slowly moved over to new stepped barrels. What would eventually become the MP 43. And really the only mechanical change there
was reducing the diameter of the end of the barrel. This sounds like a very obvious,
quick and easy change to make but at the same time they were also desperately
trying to make as many of the guns as possible. And shutting down the tooling to
change things like lathe settings and change the dimensions of the casting for the
front sight block to fit a smaller diameter barrel. They didn't want to shut down production
and have no guns coming out for a period in order to make that change. So instead what
they did was kind of run two lines simultaneously, and they phased out one and phased in the other. So, MKb-42 production and MP 43/1 production
actually overlapped for a couple of months. The MP 43 went into production in July of '43,
the MKb-42 production ended in September of '43. Now, through this whole period Hitler was actually
pretty adamantly opposed to the adoption of these rifles. He was really focused on long-range
firepower and telescopic sights. And what he was really pushing was basically the
Gewehr 43, a self-loading, 8mm Mauser full power cartridge. The idea that you could give every
soldier a semi-automatic sniper rifle. Which by the way is not that different than what the
Russians were trying to do in 1939-1940 with the SVT-40. And without the sniper rifle part, it's exactly
what the Americans did with the M1 Garand. However a number of the people in German army
command had experience fighting on the Russian front by 1943. And they understood the absolute necessity, if Germany
was going to win in its outnumbered and undersupplied state, the ... absolute necessity of
having, basically, an assault rifle. Something where the full-auto firepower was actually
controllable by using a reduced length cartridge, like the 8x33mm cartridge that these rifles used. So, despite Hitler, like, on three separate occasions ordering that these rifles not be
developed, not be used, not be issued... Despite that, Army command continued
to pursue their development and use. And they did it through some kind of sneaky tricks and
subterfuge and sometimes just flat-out ignoring orders, and in the end it was a good
thing for them that they did. But ... we'll see some elements
as we go through this history of things they had to do to kind of
skirt Hitler's orders on this subject. So the first big hurdle for the new Sturmgewehr
was a serious large-scale combat trial, and this was done in October and November of 1943. And interestingly, the big hurdle for it was not
actually the guns, it was actually the ammunition. German production of 8mm Kurz
ammunition was really slow to pick up. Obviously at this point Germany is having production
and materiel supply issues with pretty much everything, But, if you think about it, ... you don't think ,well, how much
ammunition do you really need? It's not that big a deal is it? Well, they estimated that every rifle in front-line service
needed 1,000 rounds a month as a basic firing load. That's what you would expect guys to be shooting,
and when you start to multiply that out by thousands of guns that quickly
becomes a lot of ammunition. And it was this ammunition supply that dictated how
many guns could actually be put in this late 1943 combat trial. The answer was 6,800. So they were able to supply ammunition for 6,800
MP 43s in combat trials on the Eastern Front in October and November of '43. They
got an update at the end of the first month, and then there was supposed to be a full major report
submitted by every unit at the end of the second month. Well, by the end of the first month things were obviously
going so well with the guns that they went ahead with further development and adoption and production without
even bothering to wait for the end of the combat trial. Times were very tough for the German army on the
Eastern Front, and they needed every advantage they could get. And this was going to be a substantial
advantage for the infantryman. One of the first ways that the Army was able to get
around Hitler's decrees on prohibiting the MP 44 was in October of 1943 they were able to get him to
agree to formally replace the MP 40 with the MP 43. Now Hitler was commander-in-chief of the German military,
but he was really much more interested in strategic and operational level elements more than, you know, the tactical level of how many
grenades are the guys carrying and what rifle does everyone have and what's the squad organization?
And so at a brief glance the idea that, "Hey, we have this cool new 1943 pattern machine pistol and we want to replace the old machine pistol
with it. This new one is great, here, just sign here." And they were able to get that past. Probably had actually some support
from Heinrich Himmler on that one. Himmler was in charge of the Waffen SS and
there was probably ... a bunch of Waffen SS guys who were really trying to get
their hands on these guns as well. By November of '43 things were going
so well with this combat trial that before the formal reports were even in, the Army
had made the decision that it wanted to replace a hundred divisions' infantry rifles
with MP 44s. Now that obviously was a ludicrously optimistic plan that
would never actually come to fruition. But that is how desperate the combat was at that point
in Russia and how effective the rifle was actually being. Now, the first of our major name changes comes
(we don't have the actual document), but it's somewhere between
December of '43 and January of '44. And that is when the MP 43/1
becomes ... just the standard MP 43. At that point it has the stepped barrel, it has the threaded
muzzle, same dimensions, interchangeable with Kar98k accessories. And that's basically the pattern of rifle ... that was the
definitive pattern of the rifle for the rest of the war. By February of 1944, just to put things in perspective, the German army on the Eastern Front
had about 9,300 of these MP 43 rifles (or of all the previous types: MKbs were still around,
MP 43/1s, and then they're starting to get MP 43s). But they only had like 9,300 of them
at the beginning of 1944 so the idea ... It's important to keep in perspective just how many of
these guns were actually around at any given time, because they never came anywhere
close to replacing all of the German rifles. Now we get to the easy part because the next question is well, what's the change from the MP 43 to the
MP 44, and from the MP 44 to the StG 44? And the answer is: literally nothing except the name. So in April of 1944 the name was
formally changed from MP 43 to MP 44, and this was basically just I think
someone got bored in the bureaucracy. This was the exact same time that they changed
the Gewehr 43 to be the Karabiner 43, G43 to K43. It was literally nothing but a bureaucratic name change. And then ... kind of the same
thing happened in October of '44. At that point Hitler had finally been fully convinced of the importance of using the StG 44 (the
MP 44, the MP 43, all the same gun). He'd finally been convinced of the importance of having
this as the standard rifle and the concept of the assault rifle. And so in October '44 he issued an order that
they were now to be renamed Sturmgewehr 44, because machine pistol didn't
properly reflect the actual role of the gun. Which ... was deliberate, it was the machine pistol designation
that had allowed the Army to basically develop this gun under Hitler's nose without ... it being
recognised what the thing really was. Well when ... Hitler finally did recognise it,
then the name's gonna change and it's gonna get a name that
truly reflects what the gun is. It really is kind of surprising just
how few changes that were made to the Sturmgewehr series of
rifles over the course of the war. If you look at something like the Kar98k,
there was really a lot more variation from start to finish in that than you'll find in this. Now that said, there are ... two different
areas that we're going to take a look at. One is ... the transitional changes in the MP 43/1. And then there were also a number of late
production changes for efficiency that were made, and we'll take a look at some of those as well. Now here we have the 43/1 and this ... is
using an MKb-42 (H) barrel and front assembly. And then this is an StG 44, now ignore the
fact that it doesn't have a front sight hood, it should have, it's just come
off on this particular gun. What we can see for the
details that changed here are: the barrel diameter, you can see that
the ... StG 44 barrel here is stepped. The 43/1 barrel here is not. And then the
visually identifiable change is this muzzle nut. So the ... MKb-42 and then MP 43/1 muzzle
nut is longer, and it has two sets of notches in it. The later standard Sturmgewehr muzzle nut is much
shorter and just has this little narrow cut in the centre. There were a couple other
associated changes. If you look at the profile of the front sight block you can
see that it's a little bit different on the two. That's really kind of incidental
to the change in barrel diameter. Now what's really kind of ironic is they
went to all this work to change from this to this, and change the model designation,
and they spent several months adjusting tooling progressively to do
it without losing production capacity, and in the end they never ended up actually fielding
a grenade launcher for the Sturmgewehr series. They had to do some experimentation
with the gas nuts up here to come up with ... a gas cut-off
system so that you could launch grenades. That's always an issue with
semi-automatic rifles, you don't want the extra recoil impulse to throw the bolt carrier
back with enough force that you might damage it. So you come up with some sort of gas cut-off.
Well, by the time they got done with that, and then coming up with grenade
firing cartridges for the 8x33, they ultimately decided that,
"You know what? We still have a bunch of Mauser rifles in the field and
those work just fine for grenades, and we'll just keep using them".
So this all ended up being for naught. Even the other elements that they used this
threaded muzzle for ended up not being adopted. The suppressors that were discussed and
planned were never put into production, the blank firing adapters were
never put into production. So they really could have just had a
simple flat muzzle from the very beginning. They did ultimately at the very end
of the war have a few guns at the end that came out with a smooth
muzzle and no muzzle nut. But it could have been done years
earlier with literally no loss of capability. Just so you get a closer look at it here, this is the MP 43/1.
You can see that designation right up here on the side. And then ... , as is standard on Sturmgewehrs, we
have a serial number and a production date down here. So this is a 1943 production gun, ... the
43/1s were pretty much all 1943 production. There's that model designation up a little bit closer. There is one other feature you will
sometimes see in these transitional 43/1s, (this one is a late enough gun that it doesn't have it), and
that is a pair of stamped rails in the rear sight block here that were meant to potentially
fit a ZF-41 1.5x power optical sight. That was something that was used on the MKb-42s
and it was slowly transitioned out in the 43/1s. It turned out that this style of sight attachment up
here for a scope was simply not stable and effective. They would later experiment with a ZF-4 mounted
on the right side of the receiver of the MP 44, but those would prove to be ineffective as well. Now, there are a number of other changes that
we can look at, changes that occurred ... basically at the end of production to simplify the guns. We'll start with the most obvious one.
This is this two-tone sort of finish. And the reason for this is that MP 44 production
involved a whole lot of subcontractors. There were a couple of main assembly firms,
... some of the major companies only made parts. For example, this one has a receiver that was made by Mauser,
but it was actually assembled and proofed and finished by Haenel. And then the small parts, little pieces like magazine
buttons, and sights, all these things were made by a ton of subcontracting small
companies and so conditions would vary. And in this case what we have is a style
of finish here, it's this smooth grey finish, that existed only for a very short time.
This was like January to March of 1945. After that they would go to what we would think
of as a Parkerized finish, basically a rough grey phosphating. But for a short time there was this
smooth grey finish. And then there was also the nice blue. And there was a period of rifles where they ran out of
blued receivers before they ran out of blued fire control ... grip units and so they assembled guns that
were a mix-and-match of different colours. Kind of cool to see that,
it's an interesting historical quirk. One of the other more substantial changes made
was in March of 1944, a change to the buttstock style. If you look closely, you'll notice that
this one is a bit taller than that one. What someone realised is that this, which
is the buttstock profile from the MKb-42, didn't fit in the vehicular clamps, the
brackets for mounting Kar98k rifles. So they decided that if they just made a fairly
small change, they made this about an inch shorter, then these stocks would now fit in
all of the existing vehicle brackets. And so they made the change, they decided
it didn't make any difference for shootability, and it did give them this nice new ability to
continue using some existing equipment. If I overlay the stocks like that
you can really see that difference. Now we're going to get down to
some really pretty minor details. Things like where the guns had used wood
grips for the vast majority of production, by very late in the war they started
adding a bakelite or plastic type grip. This was actually a material called Kunststoff [?? tr:
plastic]. And ... actually it's a nice-looking grip really. But that was added at the very end of
the war because of material shortages. Wood was an issue for the buttstock
of course, as well as the grip panels, so one other adjustment was made there. If you
look on the early gun here, and on most of the guns, ... the stock actually gets a little bit wider where it goes
into this receiver end cap. You can clearly see that right there. At the very end of the war they stopped doing that, and ...
these very late stocks are just cut from a completely flat piece. So this allowed them to get just a little bit more more width and a couple more stocks out of every chunk of wood. There was a little bit of a change just in the magazine well. You can see this is ... our MP 44, and it's
it's pretty well covered up back there. By 1945 they they were willing to accept a little less,
so there was a filler piece that was left out. But that's really about the extent of the
simplifications that were made to the gun. The closest thing to a real mechanical change was
simply the addition of one extra cut in the bolt carrier here. ... This is our 1945, the StG 44 bolt, and this is
the MP 44 bolt. And you can see that this is solid. They added this cut, it made production more efficient. That's it. That's like the biggest
mechanical change that was in there. The MP 44, or MP 43, or Sturmgewehr 44, it really is kind of a question of what's the
best way to refer to this thing because they kept changing the names on them without
actually making any substantive changes. At any rate, it really was I believe a
pivotal change in small-arms technology. While the idea of short cartridge, select fire
rifles had certainly existed decades before, it was this, the German Sturmgewehr, that was the first
time anyone really actually put that into practice in combat. And it had huge fundamental effects on
... military firearms design for ever afterwards. This led directly to the AK-47, and then basically all military rifles that
are in use today owe their ... existence fundamentally and philosophically
to ... these rifles right here. ... If you would like to have one of these, we
have several cool options here on the table. All three of these are coming up for sale at Julia.
So you've got the 43/1 early transitional model, you've got this nice standard example of a 44, and
then this really cool two-tone, late pattern StG 44. If you take a look at the description text below, you will
find links to Julia's catalogue pages for all three of these guns. You can see their pictures and
provenance and everything there. And if you decide you'd like to have one, two,
or all of them if you're really froggy about it, you can place bids on-line, or over the phone, or you
can come here to the auction and participate live. Thanks for watching. [ cc by sk cn2 ]
