Krieghoff 8mm Mauser Carcano for the Volkssturm

for all the ambitious wunderwaffen programs that hitler had it turned out the most common weapon of the volksgerm in germany was the carcado hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and we're taking a look at a pretty unique special carcano today that being one that was actually converted to eight millimeter mauser by heinrich kriekhoff in germany in early 1945. but before we talk about this let's cover why there are carcanos being used in the last ditch defense of germany in the first place so our story basically goes back to september of 1943 which is when italy officially surrenders to the allies and italy is chock full of german troops at this point and the germans actually maybe see those coming and have a pretty good plan in place and managed to pretty effectively disarm the italian troops that are within german occupied areas germany still has a really good effective transportation network in italy and and they're thoroughly occupying it and as allied forces push north through italy the germans are able to retreat in a reasonably uh cohesive manner and they're shipping all of these captured italian weapons that they've taken from disarmed troops they're shipping those north ahead of their retreat so by december of 1943 for example the german forces in italy report having a stockpile of nearly 400 000 carcano rifles and this would increase this would be combined with other batches of carcanos that they had access to and some of these rifles were in fact reissued at the time and used by loyal italian units or various other groups but the majority of them simply got warehoused especially up in northern italy and we can then move forward to basically late 1944 when germany is really in severe deep risk and the german government starts looking at ways to come up with basically emergency arms programs even more so than they had been before and it's here that the carcanos basically get a sign well we've got these warehouses full of italian guns under german control let's ship those essentially to berlin well to germany uh and use them to arm this newly created volksterm group well you can you can create the volkswarm all you like from an administrative standpoint but that doesn't mean that they have guns well here's a supply of guns so the volksterm gets all sorts of captured foreign gear but they have more carcanos than they have anything else that's fine and all but there are some problems that come along with this widespread issue of carcanos first off they're a bit confusing the italians had a massive number of different variations but more significantly they had two different calibers the italians made these in six five and then seven point three five millimeter and then back to six five and so uh german logisticians have to keep track of not just carcanos and carcano ammo but there's two different calibers of the guns and the ammo and that's going to cause some problems well someone gets the bright idea of why don't we convert them to use german ammunition because even if we do keep track of all the ammo that's floating around well the germans aren't making carcano ammunition all they've got to work with is what they have captured and stockpiled from italy and that's going to run out well if you can convert these things to use eight millimeter mauser that simplifies a lot of things right sounds good so early in basically january of 1945 they put together a program to actually test out this idea and the way they do this is they bore out the barrels so they don't put in new barrels they take the existing six and a half millimeter barrels and these experiments are predominantly done with 6.5 millimeter carcanos and they just drill them out and drill in new rifling uh in eight millimeter there's a lot of talk that these guns aren't safe well everything that i've seen actually appears that they are safe the carcano action will handle eight millimeter mauser probably doesn't have quite the safety factor certainly not the safety factor it originally did in six probably not a safety factor we would be real comfortable with today but i'm not familiar with any actually exploding from this process and to be honest the germans wouldn't have gone through with the conversion process if it actually was risky there's a level of crudity to a lot of last-ditch guns but it's actually counterproductive to spend time and money converting a firearm to something else if it's then actually going to pose a danger to your own soldiers so countries didn't generally actually do that sort of thing anyway they board out the barrels they made a few other changes which we'll talk uh take a look at in just a moment here the biggest single thing that stands out on the carcano is they were looking at how to deal with the magazine the carcano uses its own standards like proprietary six round end block clip that just isn't compatible with eight millimeter mauser so there were some experiments with converting italian clips there was a plan to do a magazine fed eight millimeter version but they didn't even at the time they didn't expect that to like samples to be available until may of 45. may have 45 things aren't they're not really making much more new stuff at that point so what they go ahead with in january and february of 45 is just a single shot conversion so let's take a look at it because that is what we have here here we go one german converted carcano in eight millimeter now if you're looking at this from a distance or from a profile the easiest way to distinguish one of these german conversions is this guy right here one of the elements of the german conversion program was to add a recoil lug into the stock this is not here on a typical italian carcano it's not necessary the additional recoil of eight millimeter mauser makes it necessary now i also want to point out and we'll touch on this a little bit at the end there's another batch of carcanos converted to eight millimeter that have two that also have a recoil lug in the wrist if it's got one in the wrist it's a post-war gun and it's different we'll cover those in a different video so you've got one recoil lug that was added if we take a look at the top of the action here you will see a little hk stamp that's heinrich kriekoff this is one of the german military firearms manufacturers and it's the one german company that got a contract to do some of these conversions now the other markings on here are largely going to be the original markings on the gun so this was originally made by tyranny for the italian army the royal army the germans added a 7.9 here to the barrel when they converted it they also it's a little hard to read there but they crossed out the original cal 6.5 and replaced it with cal 7.9 the sights are set for a fixed 200 meter zero now that's easy to do on an m38 short rifle like this one because it already had a 200 meter zero so they didn't have to do anything to the rear sight block however it's worth pointing out that the germans did this conversion to everything from including these m38 short rifles but also m38 carbines and m41 long rifles and some of those other guns have more complicated adjustable rear sights and on those the german standard practice was to fix them at a 200 meter zero if the gun had a movable elevator that often meant taking that out in order to set these to shoot properly at 200 meters the german conversion involved putting on a new front sight blade so that's the new one that is what the original carcano m38 short rifle front sight would have looked like so you'll notice this is the full length of the front sight band the german one is a little bit shorter being germans even though this is you know the desperate last months of world war ii they're still going to go ahead and put their own serial numbers on these guns so the original serial number was up here and it's been fairly crudely stamped out with a bunch of zeros and a replacement serial number has been marked both on the barrel and on the receiver and this is an h block serial number all of the krieghof conversions were at least as far as we can tell in this case the h stamp is only about half applied but you can see it it would have been a capital letter h there and the best information i have and this isn't 100 but this is best speculation at this point as far as i know it um m38 short rifles like this one were in the 6000 to 7000 serial number range h six to seven thousand m41 long rifles were numbered between seven thousand and seventy eight hundred and change and then the carbines both the folding bayonet and the special troops carbines were numbered from 8 000 to about 9 500. so um you should if you see one of these it should have an h block serial number and it should fit into that scheme one last marking here and that is a little eagle with a swastika there under the original production date of the rifle that is a german firing proof and that indicates that this thing was in fact test fired with a proof load of eight millimeter mauser and survived the experience which contrary to what a lot of people will say about the carcano action it was strong enough to survive that i should also point out the bolt was also re-serialized but that was done by electro pencil and you can see it right here 6864 which is the serial number that's on the barrel and the receiver of this rifle now here's one of the original carcano clips and if we take a round of eight millimeter mauser you can see that this just it ain't gonna fit it's spreading this clip open six of them are not going to fit top to bottom really even five of them five of them will fit vertically but the case head of eight millimeter mauser is bigger than the back end of the clip and you can't just force that in so in lieu of trying to figure out a brand new clip to manufacture which is something that was in the works what they did instead was put in a wooden loading platform which this rifle does not have it should be a solid wood block that's kind of has a round indentation all the way down its length now the purpose of having this loading block which isn't in this rifle for reasons that i cannot explain 100 was that you had a way to load this the problem is the carcano is a controlled feed rifle which means as you push the bolt forward the cartridge is supposed to basically click into the breech into the bolt as as it comes out of the clip well if you don't have a clip you can't really do that and so instead of that wooden tray gives you a place to drop the cartridge and have it actually load and chamber reliably and conveniently note here that there is no cutout made in the front of the opening here on the other eight millimeter carcano conversions that you will see there is a notch cut to make sure that this is long enough for all eight millimeter ammunition one last mechanical element of the conversion was to open up the bolt face a little bit so that it would conveniently and properly fit an eight millimeter mauser cartridge like that the six five and seven three five carcano cartridges which have the exact same diameter case head are a bit smaller and an eight millimeter cartridge won't fit easily into a an unmodified carcano bolt head the original uh typically ambitious german plan was to convert 200 000 carcanos per month and to in total do something like a million and a quarter of them obviously that was complete fantasy uh the first month of actual conversion was january 1945 where they did about 3000 of them february of 1945 they were actually able to convert another 12 000 or so between creekhoff and the brescia plant and that's pretty remarkable actually but that's where the program ended uh production ended in at the end of february 1945. in total it appears that about 15 000 of these conversions were actually produced some of them by heinrich krieghoff in germany and some of them by the fna brescia plant in italy which was still under german control for a while very few of them seem to survive and unfortunately there are quite a lot of fakes of these out there because a standard italian carcano m38 short rifle or carbine or lung rifle is not a particularly valuable or historically desirable rifle but thanks to the general interest in german militaria a german converted carcano is a quite valuable and quite desirable rifle and this has led to a profusion of fakes so i am about 98 sure that this is a legitimate real one uh but to be totally honest the conversion's not that complicated and it is possible that uh that this could be actually a fake but i don't think so i'm pretty confident in this one um why exactly it doesn't have the magazine block i can't explain the most likely answer is someone replaced took it out or actually just replaced the whole magazine unit to make it appear like a proper correct gun they may have thought that that was a sporterization at some point and they were actually fixing it when they weren't actually now it is also worth pointing out that there is another batch of eight millimeter carcano carbines in particular that is available and that is actually a lot more common on the collectors market at least here in the united states and that is a batch of guns that were converted by italy after world war ii for use in the middle east and we'll talk about those in a separate video because they are they're different guns they have a number of distinctive features and they don't have the historical impact that the german carcanos do so i should point out these weren't really actually it doesn't appear that these were actually issued to front-line combat volkswagen units they seem to have gone more to police and some other kind of secondary troops the german infantry board thought these things were awful the recoil was made them totally useless they were thoroughly inaccurate probably because of the recoil and the infantry board really didn't think it was a good idea to even bother with these conversions but it was done anyway and so they did get out there and they did get used at least to some extent by some folks in the very waning couple of months of 1945. so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video a big thanks to the viewer who loaned me this particular rifle to be able to show you thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 324,668

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, hk, Carcano, 8mm, 7.92, mauser, Heinrich Krieghoff, Krieghoff, conversion, bolt action, m38, short rifle, rifle, m41, carbine, moschetto, fucile corto, volksturm, volkssturm, German, germany, last ditch, terni, Brescia

Id: 7_tCAbHlKJs

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 10 2022