Italian Pistols of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal

i'm indy neidell and this is a great war special episode about italian pistols during the first world war and we're doing this in conjunction with SI and arsenal who is our favorite favorite favorite other channel in the entire history of the world and space and time and their awesome host o daiya daiya say hello hi if you guys haven't seen the last episode just go watch it now because that's got most of the introduction but quick recap i'm again from CN arsenal if there's anything in this that you feel like missing or you want to go into more detail go check our channel before you complain to indy because this is a sort of general overview of one country it doesn't have every gun it doesn't have every variant that's what we do on our channel that's what they do we talk about the war they talk about the gun alright so this time we're doing the pistols so let's get into those I'm going to start with the oldest of that war and honestly one that served through World War two that's going to be the bow day oh now I know you guys can't see much from out there so I'm going to zoom in right away on this guy alright now this is obviously a revolver it's still an old black powder design although the Italians would do a little work to modernize that cartridge to keep it moving as fast as possible it is a gate loader which means that we have to open the side and then load one at a time this uses that good old Abadie system which means the gate disconnects the hammer so I can pull the trigger and then load one pull the trigger load one if we were unloading it's the same thing we've got an ejector rod eject eject eject there we go the other thing you may notice on this one is the dangling trigger this is one of two models of the godai oh I don't have the other unfortunately the other just has a trigger guard this guy doesn't dangle it looks just like a regular revolver so very easy to imagine I like having this one because it shows this unusual safety feature which is that the Italians were worried about people sort of shooting themselves quite literally in their foot there we have this holster to their side the trigger is now flush with the gun and if I draw it I can't accidentally pull the trigger and shoot myself very easily I'd have to try very hard to do that instead as I bring it bear it naturally comes down where I can grab it so until I'm about here at an angle pointing away from myself I can't really work the trigger on the gun which wouldn't be all that helpful if you're being attacked by a very large insect but in terms of fighting other men it's a good idea because you don't end up with that sort of problem where soldiers would yank their gun out of the holster by the trigger thereby shooting themselves right in the leg so good little safety feature all right if we zoom back in this is a single and double action which means I can either manually [ __ ] that hammer back and fire it or I can pull it all the way through and fire it that way so light single action pull heavy double action so we've talked about that before the other good thing about this gun is that it is extremely too easy to dismantle so if we flip her around we'll see that we just have a knob that we can spin to the left it is captive so there's nothing to lose and then all I do is I spin this plate out and we are inside the action so gun piece of wood piece of metal that's it not a lot to lose in a trench very easy to get in there at service and the bow Deo is unique for time because in 1889 it really is sort of anachronistic it's much it's much older pattern of revolver there were better ideas out there they were Swing Out cylinders just coming out the next year it could have been so much more but instead it's very consciously chosen to be a lot less because this has the minimum number of parts that you would need to be a functioning single and double action revolver which means that if you're italy and as we talked about italy had a very weak industrial base this is perfect you can manufacture this with as few parts as possible it works reliably at that time black powder cartridges were on the way out but that's what they knew because the the 10.35 revolver cartridge the ordnance cartridge that went with this had been used on the previous revolvers the earlier shambleau Delvian and gosanke revolvers so they didn't want to change their ammunition type that's why they kept the older style cartridge but so being a weaker powered black powder cartridge they were able to make this frame out of iron so the cylinder and the hammer and some of the other important pieces like the trigger and things like that they're steel but the frame is actually iron so that means that you can make this gun with rudimentary material and rudimentary tools which would come in handy because this revolver was also produced for Italy by Spain remember we talked about the Ruby being produced for the French the Italians also bought a ruby pistol but not in nearly the numbers that the French did and they bought a lot of these guys by three different manufacturers we have a whole video about it but basically it saved Italy a lot of trouble because the the Spanish word it was very easy for the Spanish to replicate this gun it's as simple as possible revolver there is and it works it works well enough um the Italians would nickname it the leg of lamb I think you can tell why but it was a reliable revolver and they had so many of them that they never were able to displace it it was used all the way through World War two so this is one of the things that's you can laugh at it you can say it's crude you can say it's nowhere near as polished as other guns a lot like the car no only this is much cruder than the car no in terms of its contemporaries but you can't argue with the fact that it works it was reliable it went bang every time it was cheap to produce millions of them and honestly it just it works you don't need a handgun to be a lot when you're a major power you're not looking to fight an entire war with just this gun it's a backup gun and it does that job very very well although it is fairly heavy compared to World War 1 contemporaries it was extremely light compared to the previous models that would have been around like the Sham lo delle Vigne in that those were very heavy revolvers so not perfect for World War one but way above where it was when Italy adopted this guy question we mentioned the Rubies when the Rubies were produced and you said you know the Spanish factories different factories the the ammunition you'd have to get ammunition from the right factory because they didn't quite they didn't all fit they have the same problem with these or you're thinking of the magazines so because it's the revolver no it's just hand fit so the only problem with these is that the Italians would later have to refurbish a lot of the Spanish ones and their own so you tend to find these brie blued I actually have a nice dark blue black one right here it looks a heck of a lot nicer than this other one this one's the original World War 1 unfinished like in the white as they call it so it had some foxing on it it looks worn out it looks like somebody's taken all the finish off of it no this is actually original this is one of the Spanish ones that ended up being reblued because they were having problems with rust and where and also some apart to refit because they're a little looser there's a big difference between an Italian made one and Spanish made one but they both work as well it's just that one of them has a little bit more slop to it again though if you're shooting a mild cartridge mild black powder cartridge out of a big frame revolver like this the made out of mild metal I mean you're talking about iron there's not a lot quote-unquote to go wrong because even if it's poorly designed it's a or even if it's poorly done ammo or let's say it's poorly done material it's a large thick walled cylinder it's got a top strap action it's a heavily reinforced revolver it compares well with the old the old Colt Army in terms of just being rugged except for the Colt army was obviously made out of superior material but this is something that you can crank out and it was turned out to be a really good idea because when you get to world war one that nobody was expecting you needed to crank material out it's very interesting that Italy was well poised to actually produce enough arms for itself because it was cautious and what it purchased and will later see countries like Greece and things like that buying more expensive style higher finished rifles and then struggling to stay armed throughout the war because they did not match their you know their service rifle to their production or even available licensing capabilities so Italy at least matched itself to its industrial base in World War 1 World War 2 is where we're going to see Italy far out reach its industrial base all right well moving on we'll leave behind revolvers so I'll put this guy away and we'll start talking about semi-automatic pistols because Italy did get into the semi-automatic pistol market fairly early one thing that they would do is they would buy contracts e96 is for the Italian Navy we do not have an Italian contract one here and we've already covered the c96 there's nothing else to really say about that they purchased 5,000 and they would later try to displace them with another pistol that we will talk about in just a second but first Italian pistol is going to be the good old gloss NT now I'm at the zoom in a rover he's going to think this is a Luger there we go I think we can see that pretty clearly now there's going to be some reflection because she is flat as a board on the side this monstrous looking pistol is a magazine-fed semi-automatic handgun so we have our magazine it uses what is called nine-millimeter glass NT this is a cartridge when this gun was first developed it was chambered in a milder 765 cartridge the Italian military wanted stronger cartridge so they pushed it up they basically kept comparing it to German nine millimetre parabellum so they push the cartridge dimensions up to nine millimetre parabellum it's almost identical to the German nine millimetre parabellum cartridge physically powder wise nowhere near this thing is much milder it will feed and fire German nine millimetre parabellum if you have one please don't put it in there it will damage the gun and it possibly hurt you yep but this is a locking action gun it's just not as strong a loss as Luger so it has a little sort of swing arm down there that locks on the underside of the bolt it's not that easy to get all the way down in there but this guy has a couple of unique features one it has a safety set at the rear that is a twist knob safety two it has a grip safety but the grip safety is set at the front so it's this textured area here so you have to squeeze in order to fire the gun now the glow affinity is kind of interesting because this pistol was developed by Bethel reveille and then the patent was registered in Lucentio named Alfredo's lapentti who is going to produce the but then died and his family did not carry on the production so it ended up being produced tight end bTW so you've got three names involved just to get this thing out the door the Italian army would purchase I believe in the long run they see about 30,000 of these guys so not the most massive pistol when you talk about you know the the large large large large numbers of the Padilla revolver this thing never pushed the revolver out of the way a simpler version of this gun would be adopted in 1913 by the Italian Navy to try to displace the c96 and of course what were one happens they need every pistol 18 yet so there were roughly 5000 of a simplified model that's called the brick sia no parts are interchangeable although they look almost identical all they tried to do was make the action a lot simpler to work so it's just there's fewer parts the parts are simpler shapes it was all designed to make this thing faster to produce and we're off with more Italian firearms from the First World War and Osias from C and Arsenal is going to continue spending us yarns about some of these weapons that the Italian soldiers used take it away sir okay so getting back into pistols we have this is a big one for a lot of you out there the Beretta 1915 so let's zoom in on this guy one caveat here is this one was refinished at some point it's supposed to be more of a reddish color we're looking for a better example but that's okay just ignore the color for a moment and everything will be fine this by the way fairly large Beretta handgun was really their first military endeavor this chambers that same 9-millimeter Glock sandy cartridge and was introduced as a way to simplify from that very very very complex overly heavy overly complicated but early pistol this is a straight blowback it uses a buffer spring to help reduce that because it is still slow centi is weaker than nine millimetre parabellum that does not mean it is a quote unquote weak terrible cartridge it's not as low as say 380 or 32 which are common blowback cartridges so having shot this it's fairly robust recoil because you are shooting something a little bit of lava blowback caliber in a blowback gun but that makes it simple to manufacture you can see that it's heavily influenced by browning and Mauser if I pull this slide back we can see the beginnings of what would be the sort of a tip or the typical beretta front slide layout where it's been cut up in at the front they have not yet attached the front sight to the slide in the US I know there's going to be a lot of beretta fans in Italy I know there's going to be a lot of beretta fans so this is for that beginning of that open top although we still have a separate ejection port to give some rigidity there this is an extremely simple pistol again magazine-fed better capacity is that revolver he'll release very hefty I mean I have large hands and you can see it's it's still fitting well in my grip this is a big-boy gun now if I turn it around we have two safeties I don't know what's up with Italians and redundancy but we have a standard sort of slide lock and disconnect safety there and then on the back and this might be hard for you guys to see let me know if you can make out that little switch back there that is a hammer safety that turns and locks the hammer itself so the hammer can't be dropped so I can pull the trigger all day the hammer can't go anywhere until I release that which to me seems a little confusing because now we've got two safeties and there's two chances to mess up but the Italians must be liked it these would be produced in fairly significant numbers closing on the same thing as the glass in the-- although during wartime it would however be replaced by an even simpler pistol which is again another beretta design now that handgun is very closely related this one this is the 1517 so if we zoom in I'll do a quick comparison this is much handier now this is the same essential pistol - the buffer spring and extra rear safety only has the one safety now this is the correct coloration so we would hope that our 15 would look just like this if we find another one this little handgun is in 32 ATP which is a friendly blowback cartridge so this is a mild easy handling pistol and this is really the birth of what we consider the sort of Golden Age of beretta because this pistol is going to go on until it eventually warps into the beretta 34 which is sort of world-famous and all this stylings going to be brought back across again we have our open top front slide but with a separate ejection port that's going to get changed to a closed front with the front sight and they're going to get rid of the ejection ports and then that's going to be quintessentially beretta for years to come these were made in much more significant numbers in much shorter time they are finally finished finely milled and extremely reliable the beretta handgun is probably the most outstanding weapon of Italy of the first world war and probably the Second World War as well they made a name for themselves for good reason these are very good personal handguns well that's why everybody in the world even people that don't follow your channel or my channel knows what a beretta is yes yes and that all starts with this now to be fair I want to give proper credit these were designed by Giulio Marangoni so not quote-unquote beretta he was their designer he came up with the initial and then it was reformed into this and then over the years this is going to get reworked and reworked until it turns into what we recognize as sort of the 380 and 32 Berettas of the mid century and then from there those Berettas are going to get paired with the p38 locking system and then they're going to go on into what we think of the 92 series which was what everybody recognizes now so the styling at the heart of the 92 started way back in 1915 although it's locking system would come out of World War two Germany yeah it's it's odd to see how things sort of carry on in different lines it's also interesting to see that we have this sort of here frame-mounted safety right at the rear and then later on much later in history we're going to see some popularity for safety D cockers up on the slide almost in the same position but in a slightly more ergonomic space so it's not that it was completely stupid it's just a little ahead of its time and a little awkward in placement but the bread is reserved very very well and leave a lasting impression unfortunately the 19:15 would be the death of the gloss NT cartridge there's no other pistols that come out after this that chambers same cartridge because by then the Italians were more interested in using actual nine millimetre parabellum or going all the way back down to 32 acp and then they sort of meet in the middle with 380 for a number of years to you fellows like nodding his head like oh I had no idea but as far as handguns goes that's sort of where we're at so if we do a quick review here look - assuming we start with a antiquated revolver that is very simple to manufacture then we get tired of the antiquated revolver and we go for a attempt at a very modern locking pistol that is extremely difficult to manufacture to the point that it does not fit the Italian manufacturing system at all this causes so many problems that they decide to try to manufacture another pistol using that same cartridge a cartridge that was a compromise to begin with and really is sort of I'm afraid it's kind of a bastard cartridge it just doesn't fit anywhere in the spectrum because it tries to emulate a much bigger cartridge but the action it was designed around couldn't handle it so weak that they ended up going with a straight blowback because this is this is not strong at all so you might as well go with something that can blow back because the cartridge is so weak well then this ends up being too much trouble not because it's the most complicated pistol but there's a few redundancies a few extras that we don't want and at this point why do we even need that 9-millimeter go empty cartridge so we come out with this guy there's much easier to manufacture the ammunition we can just get on the street because it's 32 ATP it was everywhere back in the day and that's where we end Italy stays with a very simple pistol from that on okay well that's it for Italian handguns from the first world war again this was one of our fantastic collaborations with si and Arsenal and their host o Tyus and if you have not already subscribed to their channel definitely go and check it out because they go into so much more depth about these things than we are able to go into if I should be like to say goodbye that'd be great yeah thanks for having us and we're always glad to help out and we look forward to seeing you all again absolutely we have several more countries to do we have a lot of rifles we've got a lot of handguns we've got some machine guns to do and do not forget to subscribe for all your dreams to come true see you next time

Channel: The Great War

Views: 105,295

Keywords: History, History channel, Documentary, Footage, Great War, First World War, World War I (Military Conflict), WWI, 20th Century, 1914 to 1918, British Pathé, Indy Neidell, Wilhelm II, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Winston Churchill, Mediakraft, Original, Battlefield 1, Pistol, Shooting, Target Shooting, Weapon History, Gisenti 1910, Beretta M1915, Beretta, Italy, Italian Pistols, Handguns

Id: 98K7kYTujYc

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/wang0822]

Still not enough for the 11th battle of the Isonzo river