Maschinengewehr des Standschützen Hellriegel: A WW1 Phantom

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm in column and today we're gonna take a look at another gun that no longer exists and first off I'd like to give a big thank you to Matthew Moss of historical firearms info he has done the best job by far of putting together all of what little information there is on this gun and he is the source that I'm referencing throughout this video so thank you very much Matthew I appreciate it now the gun we're going to discuss I almost said take a look at but there isn't one to the best of my knowledge none of these guns actually exist today there probably was only one ever in existence and that is the machining Gewehr dastan shoots a-- held regal or the machine gun from reservists hal regal the only information about these consists of a couple of photographs that came out of an Austrian military archives they're dated October of 1915 and this gun was just kind of the occasional internet curiosity until battlefield one came out the world war one based computer game and the guys behind battlefield one decided to integrate this weapon into their game and as a result it is now a name widely known among gamers and that's something that comes up quite often I get a lot of people asking about it so I figured since I'm never actually going to encounter one of these for real since there are none there's no reason not to talk about it right here in the comfort of my own office without having one so like I said these the photographs that exist which are the sum total of what we know about this thing basically all of the information that we have is extrapolated from these photographs they were dated October of 1915 and they show what appears to be the gun in testing it I should say it obviously did not work well because if this gun had worked well it would have gone on to further development and we would know something more about it the fact that there are only these three or four pictures doesn't mean that it just didn't work and that's not that uncommon now the basic arrangement of this thing was it was pistol caliber probably nine by twenty-three Steyr that's what the austro-hungarian Empire was using as their standard pistol cartridge at the time although it is hypothetically possible that it could have been in nine millimetre parabellum it could have been in nine-millimeter hell regal or 8.3 two millimeter hell regal or really anything else we just don't know it was it appears to have been a fully automatic weapon because it does have a rather a very large magazine capacity and a lot of people describe it as like an early submachine gun which kind of makes sense however it was a water-cooled gun you can clearly see a fill point on the water jacket it has this kind of interesting sort of curved tubular almost reminiscent of guns like the FN f2000 the tactical tuna grip on the bottom of the water jacket that you can see that the shooter holding in one of the pictures and it had so I should say almost certainly a blowback operated firearm assuming it was in something like nine steyr that would make it relatively easy to manufacture a water cooling system because the the tricky part of a water-cooled barrel is sealing where the barrel goes through the jacket because the barrel typically has to move on a gun like a maximum or a Vickers gun that barrel is recoiling back and forth with each shot and so you had to go to some lengths to get a properly fitted seal at the front and back of the barrel where it's moving if you have a blowback pistol caliber weapon like this the barrel can be fixed and then it's really easy to seal the the water jacket around the barrel so that's almost certainly what they did there and then it was fed in to different potential ways one was a stick magazine and you can see a couple of those in the flow and photo the other is a drum magazine which you can see in several of the photos the drum does not appear to have had a way to attach to the gun at that point it sits off to the side and it has this flexible feed chute that does connect into the gun just based on counting and estimating from the size of the drum it's about a hundred and sixty round capacity so a lot but that makes sense given the belt fed machine guns of the time which are typically fed by two hundred and fifty round belts so if reserve tell regal was trying to design a new weapon and one would presume that he came up what he wanted to come up with was probably taking a heavy machine-gun and making it man portable so he reduced the caliber so that the recoil was handleable so that the weight of the gun was much much reduced and then presumably came up with a gun that would be either fired from a fixed position like a standard heavy machine gun or could be picked up and carried on the move and fired from the shoulder with a stick magazine like like you see in the pictures it's a cool idea and it is actually very reminiscent of like what the Germans would do with the MgO 815 same sort of idea take the heavy machine gun and make it man portable make it something that troops can actually carry in a dynamic manner and use in an assault on a trench or other position rather than the having a bolt-action rifle and the machine guns all on the back where they can't really do you any good so it seems like a cool concept that in fact the concept checks out the idea is pretty cool clearly it did not work as I said at the beginning if this thing had run reliably we would have seen it developed further or at least had had more record of it a couple other things to point out you'll see there is an assistant gunner in one of the pictures with a backpack that has a couple of nice little slots for drums that's something very typical of World War one you would see that with French show show Gunners where the both the gunner and the assistant Gunners carried backpacks of magazines with the MgO 815 there were crates to carry those drums because they were a little bit weird and pokey for backpacks but that backpack concept certainly makes sense and for a gun like this you would absolutely have a crew this isn't an individual sort of thing and that may be something that a lot of people don't recognize about the tactics that developed by the end of World War one there were all teams four five six or larger teams of soldiers each with a different role so for example with the MP 18s you would have one guy carrying an MP 18 submachine gun and you'd have a couple guys carrying drums for him because you weren't reloading in combat and they were depleted fairly quickly and so you had ammunition carriers basically who would have usually a basic weapon a bolt-action rifle and their primary job was to carry ammunition to supply the guy with the machine gun so that backpack with the hell Riegel that's the sort of thing you would expect to see it really is unfortunate that none of these things survive to this day I mean it's it's cool that they put it into the videogame so people become aware of it it's just a shame that there's no chance of actually ever finding out more so we are lucky that these few photographs did survive out of Austrian archives and that's all we will ever know about these thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 777,989

Rating: 4.9629512 out of 5

Keywords: hellriegel, standshutze, m1915, bf1, battlefield one, battlefield 1, smg, submachine gun, machine gun, water cooled, experiment, prototype, experimental, dice, belt, drum, pistol caliber, 9x23, 9mm steyr, blowback, history, photos, mystery gun, gun, mg, austria, austrian, trial, trials, development, mag backpack, forgotten weapons, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, weapon, computer game, world war, ww1, great war, fictional gun, chauchat, bar, 0815, maxim, mg08/15, walking fire

Id: YkOdwF1_E1A

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Cumpilation]

We don't deserve this guy

[u/ZeroRequiem47]

I could listen to this guy explain dirt and it would still be interesting

[u/-kaLu-]

Gun Jesus delivers yet again.

[u/Construct_Master]

I wonder what the original designer of the Hellriegel would think knowing his gun has become famous to the point of being hated for its effectiveness. I hope he would consider it an honor.

[u/Battle-ranch]

"They only made one cause it probably didn't work"

THAT'S RIGHT ASSAULT MAINS; YOU"RE A PHONY!

Signed

Hill humping sniper about to be bottled.

[u/Slopijoe_]

famous because of BF1.

Well... it is the gun that everyone seems to hate due to being killed by it every match.

[u/JDEZ09]

The Burton LMR video he did was legendary.

[u/soapkiller1415]

What if the factory had the stick mag and defensive a drum

[u/RedShocktrooper]

What really gets me is, the fact that it's basically belt-fed, the fact that it's water cooled, and the fact that it seems like it would be extremely heavy for a "submachine gun" makes me think its intended usage would've been more in line with a light machine gun (suppressive fire) than as submachine gun (trench broom).

Translation: Hellriegel should've been a Support class weapon, or should at least function as a quasi-LMG (i.e. horrible hipfire accuracy, but gets more accurate the longer you fire)