History of WWI Primer 024: German Lange Pistole 08 "Luger" Documentary

Germany had adopted the Luger po8 as a personal handgun but neither pistol nor carbine was really appropriate for the ever more important field artillery troops what they needed was something in between hi I'm Matthias and this is the longer pistol o8 a Luger but not on artillery Luger now let's take a look at it in the light box without its stock this pistol weighs in at only 2.3 pounds and 13 inches long that makes it a little unwieldy but not terrible of with that stock it gets up to a good 26 inches now just like the previous Luger short recoil toggle walk original magazine would have been 8 rounds we're going to talk about a 32 round magazine as well all chambering nine millimetre parabellum now last time we covered Germany's po8 this time we're going to go into this sweet little carbine although first I don't want to tear up this leather anymore so I'm just gonna set this holster a bit aside these things don't age as well as the wooden metal by the way anybody curious about this sticker I don't know it was on the thing the owner doesn't want to take it off because we're not really sure when it was applied it could be nothing it could be something don't worry about it alright this gun was designed for two purposes primarily one and then another one got tacked on but ultimately we most remember it for its third roll the roll invented during the war but rewinding the concept of a stocked pistol carbine was not a new one in fact you'd be hard-pressed to find a manufacturer that had not attached a shoulder stock to at least one of their production pistols or revolvers by the turn of the century while the interest on the production side was high military authorities were not always buying preferring to select either pistols or rifles not something that was not quite either the borchardt cine III itself had incorporated one right away although it seemed to be more of an attempt to mask its deficiencies many times when trialed military officials would praise the stocked version as they damned the pistol alone the early Lugar's would carry on the borchardt stock because why not it's just one extra feature there's no thing you know bad about having it and also it gave them room to compete with things like the c96 on all mark the first government to really show attention to a stocked pistol carbine however was chilly they toyed with a 175 millimeter barrel toggle mounted rear sight adjustable to 600 meters grip safety and push-button release taluk all chambered in that original 765 Parabellum cartridge while developing this military pistol liquid lava and Luger realized that they could go ahead and roll the same tooling and parts into a commercial pistol like there's no reason to waste everything just on military contracts so in late 1903 early 1904 you're going to see a bunch of these sort of prototype features from these small trials they would build up into one commercial carbine pattern these would be produced in small numbers not much more than 2,000 most of them are going to be chambered in 7 6 5 millimetre parabellum some in nine millimeter they're quite rare they're pretty unique little darlings though they were marketed as small game getters but were not a commercial success it is worth noting that the four stock hides a secondary spring that acts on a lug under the barrel to provide more recoil control and allow for hotter ammunition it also might have assisted the old models in closing that breech up tight as we saw that would be fixed in the new malt so once again we are pressed up against that Navy model of 1904 so I don't have one if anybody's got one to loan me great we'd like to leave room for an episode which means we're not covering it we're not going into deep detail what I can say again is that they retain the adjustable toggle mounted rear sight a detachable stock that 175 millimeter long barrel they chamber nine millimetre parabellum as we discussed last episode and obviously were adopted in 1904 however you might not know deliveries didn't really begin until 1906 what the naval model did was finally put a stocked Luger directly into military hands and so louisvil which actually I should stop saying at this point there DWM same company different name we cover that in the you a five-episode DWM is free to go ahead and start marking this thing wildly in the same token remember from our previous episode that the German army is having pistol shortages all over crazy place and they're trying to keep their troops armed while one of those troop types is what's known as field artillery these guys are expected to take artillery pieces into the field I think I can make that pretty simple for you now their primary mission is obviously to shoot big guns at people far away so there's not a lot of concern about their personal small arms except in warfare at that time the number one enemy of artillery was cavalry scouting cavalry these guys would roll up and you know lay down hell so they need to be armed with something at that time however they were equipped with free-pour gear you're talking about Reich's revolver 79 and 83 and nothing else to defend yourself from men on horses so tests were conducted with the issue of Gewehr 91 a shortened form of the 88 that we have not yet covered it's gonna be another episode now you might wonder why not the car 98 a Z well it's extra length and weight were simply too cumbersome for the artillery troops whose primary duties were on while artillery there had been a handier car 98 before as we covered in a previous episode but that wasn't compatible with the new spitzer cartridge so there's no carbine handy enough and there's no pistol powerful enough and there's nothing in between well what are you gonna do well for the German army they decided to stall and then forget about it and then everybody ignored it around 1911 they decided they couldn't ignore it again and they had to try something so they dug out some car 90a daisies and sent them into the field this time the expectation would be that there were certain men on the artillery units that they weren't as busy as the others I guess they would carry the carbines and be considered guards and then everybody else would get pistols this creates a number of problems number one the car 98 easy again is fairly long and cumbersome and it adds a lot of weight to what they're doing number two they can't carry it slung on their backs while working the artillery it's a pain in the butt so they've got to go into special sheaths set on their Tillery pieces the carriages the equipment somewhere that be sheath not on the body so that means three when somebody comes running up to you on a horse you got to go find your gun and then shoot at them that's really not good for military use and then finally you now have two cartridges and two types of firearm that you have to train everybody in the unit on so you're doubling your requirements for you know sorting inventory and you're doubling your requirements for training time that's not handy it's not efficient it's not very German that naval Luger is starting to look pretty good and the gpk notices as well so they go ahead and grab major Fisher same Adolf Fisher as before with a new promotion and they say get to work well he turns to his buddy George Luger of course they've had fun and they start adapting the po8 system the new model into something that will work for the Army's needs for fill artillery Fisher has several ideas that he wants met one he needs that shoulder stock two he wants to see if they can get any more out of the nine millimetre parabellum three he needs a 600 meter adjustable rear sight minimum and for this overall pistol went and detached from the stock cannot be longer or heavier than the Reichswehr Oliver 1879 which is not a terribly hard requirement well obviously they got the stock easy enough but two hundred millimeter barrel beat out the navies and provided just a little bit more build up pressure on that bullet everything obviously weighs less than a rice revolver that was easy as pie plus the now barrel mounted rear sight was graduated to 800 meters 200 meters extra and by the way that was done to avoid denting and distortion and even pinching from the toggle mounted ones which could kind of in the right circumstances catch the webbing of your hand especially wearing a glove it's kind of fun to note that at full extension that rear sight on the barrel leans to the left to account for the yaw of the pistol cartridge at long range no yours isn't bent so with this in hand Fisher had to go back to the gpk the rest of them and explain something that we all take for granted today which is that volume of fire and simplicity of use are going to win out against singular aimed marksmen rain over the course of a war it's not a target competition it's a battlefield and so when you have something like the LPO eight as it will be called we'll get there in a moment well when you give this to artillery men they have a distinct advantage in many many ways number one especially comparing to the car ninety eight AZ it's lighter it's handier and it's always on their hip they can deploy it at a moment's notice without the stock and with just a few seconds they can deploy the stock as well when you issue it to everyone in the unit you have a large volume of fire because now everyone the unit has an eight round magazine and semi-automatic pistol this is beautiful because it allows them to create a wall of lead in short bursts which is perfect for defeating oh I don't know short cavalry attacks from scouting parties which is exactly what field artillery is worried about additionally this pistol requires a lot less training in the car ninety eight AZ and so artillery men who are not supposed to be focused on you know individual combat anyway they don't have to take all this extra time and they can focus on what they're supposed to be doing finally we get into having just one cartridge for the entire team that's also incredibly handy and when you compare this ballistically to the car 98 AZ yes that eight millimeter Mauser cartridge is devastating by comparison on a single-shot basis but under 400 meters the Germans found that the you know hit probability was relatively close I mean it wasn't quite as good but it was still you know within 90 percent of the rifle so not a huge difference the individual cartridges yes is that yes those cartridges lack power but they were made up more than enough in the number of hits you're talking about three four or five hits for every one hit off of that carbine especially under 400 meters like I said which is what they were realistically going to be fighting they're really fighting shorter than that even so what we've done when we look at this for you know field artillery use is we're looking at the birth of the personal defense weapon now this was all wrapping up in 1912 when someone else took notice the flying service while currently armed with the po8 the pilots wisely realized that the gentleman's agreement of not riddling each other with holes in the air wasn't going to hold in the next modern war they had already seen bombing and strafing fire thanks to Italy's campaign against the Ottomans the Flyboys managed to borrow one of the prototypes and took it up for a spin through their studies they found that it was effective at up to 500 meters in 8 m/s winds and on average when firing at targets in the air or from the cockpit they would hit one and eight shots at you know something like that range I'm not sure the details are a little hazy but one in eight apparently is really good when you're trying to fly a biplane at the same time anyway by late 1912 they were head over heels they wanted these now they would go straight to the War Department and ask for them the War Department said oh no no no gpk hasn't decided yet and so they went straight to the gpk and said hurry your butts up we want the dang thing in the meantime they went ahead and did some other tests sort of I guess shooting it at aircraft or aircraft parts at 100 meters while they were popping shots they managed to figure out that they could do major damage with just the 9 millimeter cartridge on radiators carburetors spark plugs and Magneto's and cables plus it could really mess up a crankshaft housing if it hit in weak spots so yeah the fly boys wanted it and the army thought hey this will work for you know field artillery so why the heck wasn't it adopted yet well two things one they were still playing with the sights and we'll find out of course like I said earlier that it needed to sort of move to the left in order to straighten out that yaw and at the same time the army was sort of darling they had spent so much dang money money money money money so this was a non priority thing and it could wait but it couldn't wait forever they still needed to arm those field artillery so in June of 1913 this was officially adopted production is going to lag though we'll get there in a moment but now that we know this thing was adopted oh by the way price of fifty eight point two five marks per pistol and stock the holsters would cost extra anyway now we know you know this was adopted let's go over what was adopted and take a closer look all right first thing first things first patented plastic pokey hand let's take a look at our rear sight so this thing goes up to 800 meters tonton ah and yes I'm not a liar it does bear off kind of awkwardly to the left your guns not broken it's supposed to do that so you get that guy down we're not going to go over all the safety or all the other Luger features because we saw that in the last episode you want to let stuff go back I'm not doing again if we take a look at the sort of specifically longer pistol things we will see our shoulder stock mounts here with this lever there had been a push button before in earlier you know prototypes and carbines and things like that but the push button has one deficiency which is that it could get loose over time the way the lever is designed and walks in as this guy rotates into place and I know I can't really show you down in there it's just a cross pin that cross pin lines up with this notch here it's kind of hard to see you guys I'm sorry I'll take a photo but that little notch in that little pin allow the stock to push against the t-shaped block here and therefore tighten the action keeping it nice and firm that's why when we attach it unlike a lot of other pistol carbines and throw the lock over this is extremely tight with not a lot of wiggle it's a really good system anyway there's really much else to this guy that's specific to him against you know regular po8 so let's go ahead and get in Mays hands and let her show you how to shoot the dang thing we'll load this mag take aim let's slow that toggle down we back up a bit for this one still good Thank You Mae for running that horrible and completely unenjoyable Aaron I'm sure you didn't have one bit of fun anyway where we left off this gun had been officially adopted but I was saying that they were going to be more hangups there were going to be more hangups you see I can't even confess to knowing exactly what the heck was going on with this thing the idea was that Erfurt and DWM were going to split initial production of 150,000 units and then the rest that might be necessary will be made by the government arsenal on Erfurt so this never kicked off it got stuck in bureaucratic heck it looks like the tables of dimensions were just being tossed back and forth nobody could come to an agreement and I'm sure that not spending money was going pretty well in the Army's favor anyway then within six weeks of World War one breaking out we know from little records and things they still weren't in full production they still weren't getting out to troops training was ready manuals were being prepped everything was you know starting to move but they weren't rolling off the assembly line and then we sort of lose track of what the heck happened because war were declared now sometime in those hazy days at the beginning of World War on everybody got their butts in gear we're not really sure at what point these things actually started rolling off the assembly line but it was in 1914 regardless there's not enough time to get these into German hands for the start of the war there's just no way so Germany would march off and it's filled literally especially would march off without the LPO 8 now German officials didn't seem to be too worried about this not as worried as they should be because in their minds you know this was going to be wrapped up by Christmas so these little honey's will be ready just in time for us to come home and play with them yeah whoops while production ramped up to maximum and these things started getting shipped out which is great unfortunately they quickly realized that they were shipping out without manuals without holsters without shoulder boards without all the little things that they needed they were just getting rushed into soldiers hands and it wasn't going so well now the way these things were staged thankfully they weren't sent straight to the front instead they were massed on troops that were being prepared to replace the men on the front so instead of trying to get guns to and from the front in all the confusion and issuing the people that might have been blown up that day they just went ahead and put it with the ready guys and then trucked them in regardless though we're going to see of course initially a bunch of guys with Reich's revolvers from photos of the front but also we're going to start to see people with LPO eighths with no shoulder stalks stuffed into Reich's revolver holsters while that mess was getting sorted one German official had a very very wise idea he said that the manual shouldn't be handed to the units they should be put with the guns so that when you were issued the gun you were issued the manual because they weren't really sure where the heck these things were going to end up anyway everything was getting moved around the utilization was changing is very important by the way these manuals not the first version but a later version have a lovely little piece in them where they actually assure the soldier that 800 meters this gun can still puncture both a horse's skull and a Frenchman's helmet that's a great relief anyway just as you know the air services are getting enough just as the field artillery were getting them in their hands all of a sudden the army starts sort of holding back on these guys what they were doing is conducting a new test they had a new idea you see they had developed a drum magazine these thrombo magazine were developed by Hungarian by the name of Blum and had first come to German attention fitted to the modified Mexican Mondragon rifles as ordered by the Flying Service from cig in late 1915 Blum would shrink his design to fit the parabellum pistol it would eventually appear in two varieties the first being a rod style load assist and the second being a folding arm this model made more use of press steel to speed production with a capacity of 32 rounds these represented extreme firepower advantage in the trenches the exact same magazines would also later be paired with a new invention the MP 18 the Army's big idea was to take ten of these guys and 100 drum magazines and give them to each infantry company that magazine count would fall to 50 so that means five per but still and it's a massive firepower now they'd start conducting tests to this feature and really training it up in you know early 1918 and they even coined the term storm company so this is sort of at the basis of the original notion of the assault weapon which is a loaded term nowadays so nobody write many dirty comments about this assault is in taking a trench people anyway at this point I should probably pause and say that since we don't have another animation for this one you guys are very lucky because since this gun had two technical roles make it's two firings first we'll load up this trommel magazine it's stiff to say the least then we'll use the hand loader to pump some in unlike a little bell we'll skip ahead on this one no one needs 32 rounds of struggle let that pin back off and we'll load her up let's rock and roll also this mag doesn't trigger the lock open good to know honestly I expected worse back to with ice Thank You a for that display all right on to service in production so these guys would be made out of DWM and Erfurt DWM specifically we kind of need to mention because they only wanted to produce one new model frame so that means every single one of the frames coming out of DWM after the introduction this gun had the stock log because the frame is shared between this and the po8 as long as both have the stock log option so that means po8 after the introduction of this pistol all have a stock log that doesn't mean that they were meant to be issued with one it doesn't mean that they should be fitted with one they can take it because of course they're all meld with the same dimensions but you know this gun was never intended to have a stock it was just a time saver or rather a thought saver to just go ahead and produce one frame and then attach it to whatever system okay in addition I should probably mention that Erfurt only produced through 1914 they would assemble apparently in early 1915 but there are no 1915 or beyond frames from efforts for the lpoe there are poh though they put their efforts elsewhere and left these to DWM it's kind of funny because we're going to see an order issued in 1916 that is only picked up by Erfurt and yet doesn't even apply to them you see it was ordered that every receiver in production go ahead and be notched for that Berra mounted rear sight and again Erfurt complied DWM did not which is frankly hilarious because Erfurt wasn't even producing lpos anymore also these pistols received the same seer modification for being able to open the breech as the poh that we cover in the previous episode and around 1917 these fine adjustable screws for the front rear sights they were ditched for simplicity there would be some prototype attempts at luminous night sights they didn't really go anywhere there are also some attempts at a select-fire but because of the light toggle action it was pretty uncontrollable and the rate of fire was awful instead for your automatic fire needs you're mostly going to see these things wrap up in the mp18 honestly it kind of feels like the LPO 8 was just a stepping stone to get to the submachine gun really it did a great job in its assault role because it was the only thing and it's assault role once they realized what they were going for the Germans quickly turned to something that was easier to manufacture and easier to control and honestly just frankly better so while the LPO 8 was successful it really ended up being in between all the things that could have been and so the submachine gun took over now the Navy would also receive some of these guys although I'm not sure why it's not all that different from their model and their model can take the same magazine anyway but so the first the inter-allied Control Commission didn't really say anything about these pistols so when the Germans went for clarification because the rice bar I mean they kept these these were great right the rice floor went to the inter allied Control Commission and said how many these things are we supposed to have and they said what the heck are you doing with those things give them here they're terrifying so these were banned however a good number survived on in the Navy like we said most of them actually got issued to the Navy post-war so there might have been some planning there the Navy got away with it because the British were in charge of keeping their stuff together and the British frankly weren't intimidated by these things some were held on to you know individual citizens a lot of them actually would be rebelled to form police pistols and the rest were surrendered or destroyed most the ones that we have today are kind of war trophies that means that these things existed in such low numbers that they really weren't super present for World War two they weren't not there it's just that you're not going to see significant issue of them and certainly some were retained by the Germans because you'll see sort of repair marks up to like 1928 which is way beyond the time they were told don't have those but you probably won't run into too many that have that 1920 inventory mark alright I did promise you guys a story about Luger and his parent company you see post-war there was a massive and terrible lawsuit that would frankly financially destroy Luger and sort of tarnish his name right at the end even though he was technically right what happened was his former employer sued him post-war because when they fired him post-war as part of their downsizing he walked with well his models and drawings and notes on his then in production self-loading rifle now these rifles were already under the investigation of the gpk so they were considered to be potentially valuable I mean they might very well be adopted but uh Luger said they were his and to be fair he was frankly right because his original contract is that his employer live at the time DWM later and now post-war there's all sorts of name changes I'm not going into it the his in for his former employer because they canned him they had rights to his patents the word patent was involved it didn't say anything about rights to his design notes or anything that he was working on at the time and so over years of trial and lots of arguing with depositions from everybody involved it eventually came out 1922 that was correct and he had the rights to his rifles sadly they were not adopted and did it go anywhere and he was going to die a year later anyway so he lost a lot of cash and then fell over dead though step is Editions however have been extremely valuable because the book that I'm going to strongly recommend at the end of this episode uses them to rebuild a lot of the story of these guns and I highly recommend it I'd name it right now but no you're going to remember anyway I'm going to have a nice clear link for you it's a beautiful piece of work alright on that note let's get Mae in here and talk about this honey we have not changed clothes in two weeks at all oh where we just filmed back-to-back on this one it was Luger day okay so let's go ahead and get Mae's opinion on the LP o8 here you go thank you okay so let's actually talk about this thing as a pistol first very minor differences from the po8 it's got a longer barrel which does help a little bit with the recoil and it has improved size these sights are actually incredibly clean and easy to read much better than the ones that were before but let's move into the carbines section of this now since there really aren't many other differences compared to the POA to get of course I've got to attach the stock because the enemy is coming right at me mmm balls it's not easy to do in a quick situation however once you throw this latch it is tight I don't feel like the stock is going to fall off at any point the stock itself is actually fairly thick it is not thin so doesn't really feel like it's going to cut into my shoulder and where it sits it's it's low enough so that when I rest my cheek on it it aligns perfectly with these sights this feels like an incredibly comfortable single or double handed shooter now I will say that like in terms of actually holding this gun because I've got both hands on here it eliminates the problem we have with the POA in terms of having to readjust my thumb to reach for the mag drop or the mag release or actually operate the safety because I can actually use my left hand so I can do everything with my left hand don't have to adjust it with my right and I can easily do everything with sights still aligned it's perfect this is an incredibly comfortable shooter I thought you were in love with the Luger apparently you're in love with the bigger Luger okay so I got to ask you actually shooting the thing how did you get along actually shooting this thing I thought was very comfortable in my opinion there is still a little bit of a climb when actually shooting it however like I said these sights are much improved so I felt like my reset time was definitely improved the recoil itself was a lot more manageable also because of the stock attachment it felt like having this control of my shoulder my second hand on here I was really able to bring the barrel down quickly again improve reset time overall it was fantastic now when I compare this to something like the seat the c96 when I shot in the carbine version I actually found this one to be a better shooter like I said I was able to operate everything easily with my left hand in terms of the mag release and the safety I felt like this actual carbine version I was able to get down and lower and able to realign myself with the sights fairly quickly and easily every time it just overall I didn't have any problems with this one and also want to point out c96 doesn't have a magazine you have to like load that with the stripper and that's not going to be easy for something like a enemies coming I've got a reload this one is I personally think that this is getting personal because somebody likes the contour of the c96 because if you excuse me he has big fat hands that have a hard time getting squeezed up into that lip of the Luger granted I can't argue that this has much better features and I wouldn't want to go on an assault with a scene a6 trying to load the stripper clip I still like the broom handle grip though okay so we are talking about the LPO 8 as adopted but I think what everybody's really wondering about is the LPO 8 as fitted with the trommel magazine the unhappiest snail on earth so why don't you give us your opinion of trying to use this rapid-fire let's say assault role like how well is this really going to work out for you for me this made me the happiest girl on earth I'm not gonna lie I felt that doing a magged up on this nothing was going to come out alive after that the paper target definitely went down I'm not gonna lie but it just I don't know it felt like the trauma mag helped solve everything I had the rapid fire that I needed if I was going to attack a trench this was great for mid and short range as far as like what I was talking about with the recoil on the climbing this actually bounces the way it brings it down so it felt like there was barely any climb with this thing 32 rounds this was fantastic now it just might be because I'm clairvoyant but I have a feeling how this next question is going to turn out but will still ask it anyway would you take it in to battle oh gee I don't know 32 rounds it was a comfortable shooter I was accurate there was practically no climb with the recoil yeah that's the hardest yes I've ever had so far this is my favorite so far out of everything we have shot to date I would definitely take this into the battle I would request this if I were on the attack and if they didn't give me this I would insist on having a submachine gun that's the only thing I would take basically over this but this is definitely my baby right now for those of you who don't know how far we are into production she has shot through two light machineguns now and also unrelated a series she has handled a submachine gun so for this to get such high praise especially in the assault role I think you know how unloved she may be alright that's going to wrap this one up on a very positive note so yet again stay for the updates after the credits and we're thrilled to have all of you every single episode we really appreciate the support and we've been growing really well thanks to your support thank you everyone okey-dokey time for some updates first I need to be very clear and point out this book it's excellent and a must-have for anyone interested in owning a Luger considering the value of these guns this is still a must despite its large price tag plus if you buy it through Amazon at the link in our description please look for that link we get a little bit of coin towards our own research budget so when Wynn help us with the next episode second I think you should probably have noticed that we were playing with some video now we've been probing around prism archives in our spare time if you know of any preferably foreign language ones I might not have found on my own I am aware of most of the large US ones that hosts video or images from the war please let us know pistols are especially hard for us to find on film some of you have already been sending me individual images through email that's fine too we'll take anything that we can you know get because as much as you guys help gather this data it's a little less time for me to spend walked in front of my computer again I have to thank James Julia auctioneers for letting us use some of their back catalogue it really has helped fill in the gaps for the images blast we made a massive trip to Springfield Armory National Historic Site last week and while I am frankly exhausted beyond all measure we had a great time thanks to our curator Alex McKenzie and the ever capable Ward just a reminder you can keep up to date with us over at patreon where at the $5 level I've started keeping a show journal okay thanks everybody

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 227,661

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, battlefield1, bf1

Id: hRAupWi5IcI

Length: 38min 24sec (2304 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2016