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

[Music] i'm indy neidell and this is another great war livestream weapon special today featuring russian weapons from the first world war and my expert guest today who is always my expert for these things is Elias from C and Arsenal if you're not familiar with that channel it's a fantastic channel that of course covers weapons and there's also a series about small arms from the first world war which goes into the most minut detail you literally could ever hope to want to know about weapons from the first world war so iist of all happy new year and it's great to have you here today happy new year india we're off to 2018 now and i assume that you guys are heading towards a dramatic end to your series at some point well at some point you know i like to think that i don't know what's going to happen in the future episodes so you know it looks like germany's poised to win at this point you know with the americans not there and russia pulling out of the war i I really think the Germans can crack this one now alright so like Indy covered on from CN Arsenal we do a very in-depth series on World War one firearms most people find it through boring so that's why we come over here to show you snippets of what was going on the war with the great war team so today we've managed to gather enough resources to have Russia now the reason these are few and far between is a lot of this stuff can be rare and getting to very rare pieces in the same room at the same time requires a lot of begging and borrowing so we managed to do that today we've got everything appropriate so whenever India and the team are ready we can get into this thing we already I'm just gonna say a couple of background words because I know there's there's plenty of information out there about Russia in the first world war we've certainly covered it enough but there's some misinformation as well that has to do with the certainly with the economy and production of the first world war and wall Russia certainly had a lot of economic woes and production woes from particularly 1916 going into the Revolution at the beginning of the war it was the world's fourth largest economy and even though it was still relatively backwards in many areas and had no coherent economic strategy because every minister reported individually to the Tsar instead of talking to each other about the whole economic plan it was growing so much to the point of production-wise that the German High Command would rather have war now in 1914 with Russia because they thought it was unwinnable in 1917 which is of course one of the underlying many causes of the war so you can look more of that up for yourself later on but we'll obviously have to talk a little bit about production but why don't we just dive in and you can start us off with something really fascinating and groovy and weapony like you always do right sure now as we usually do I'll go ahead and start with the smaller handguns and just as Indy was saying Russia did have a foot into the modern era in terms of production capacity but design wise they were a little behind the curve and not for terrible reasons they just hadn't done their update homework just yet now again despite the ability to produce a good a good bit of equipment they are not by any means short compared to say Italy or others in terms of their ability to produce the problem is that they also were capable of fielding a lot of manpower very very quickly and in doing so they sort of washed out their own production now it's not that they didn't yeah it's not that they couldn't produce a lot it's just that they couldn't produce enough to keep up with the sheer numbers of men that they could put into the field so in a lot of ways they would have to reach for older technology now in this case I happen to have one of their first metallic cartridge guns and one that would remain all the way through the war so if we take a closer look we're gonna see ooh the Smith & Wesson number three Russian this particular one is the third model and probably one of the more common ones available by time of the Great War now interesting thing about this gun is that it was adopted by the Russians right when they were considering going to a single-shot Remington rolling block style pistol and their whole emphasis for buying this back in the 1870s is that they wanted to be able to load a gun quickly on horseback so the good thing here compared to a lot of solid frames of the day is that you could break it open simultaneously eject all your cartridges and then stick some fresh ones down in there now this is a single action only revolver which means that you have to manually [ __ ] the hammer for every shot by the time of the Great War most people are the very least dealing with a double-action as a matter of fact the only other single action I know of merit is that Reich's revolver that we talked about with Germany so every time [ __ ] every time pull this means very slow if you're trying to use it in extremely close quarters although it does make it a very crisp accurate gun with this long barrel long sight radius very good for long range work for a handgun but realistically that's not what handguns are for by the time of the Great War they're for trench clearing and personal defence now a lot of people might comment about this trigger spur it's very interesting shape very almost fantastical like it doesn't seem like you see a lot of military hand guns with some projection like this that would be so prone to damage but the good thing is that this gun was built around our economics so we have our knuckle back here that fits our webbing of our hand and then we can place our middle finger and as I know it's hard to see but we placed our middle finger over that and that gives us very good control of this single action gun this is before two-handed shooting was really popular so if you wanted to control the gun with one hand this is the way to go it gives you the most leverage all right so if we back out we can see it is a very big hand gun very heavy and it should be very muzzle down but again we've put our middle finger way out in the middle point of the gun and it gives us a little bit more steering control this is actually probably the best of the single action pistols you could hope for if you're going to have a single action homemade gun unfortunately it's single action only so it's not terrifically useful by the time of the war like I said and so they're not going to produce any more of them they're not going to you know reignite production but they're going to field as many as they can because it eats up rear line and maybe artillery troops or anybody else that's not expected to really be in a forward combat role this gives them something that they can hang on their belt now what were the what would the production years of this end I mean when did they you said the eight since 1870s but do you know when specifically they began production and when they left off officially this gun would emerge around 1871 we actually have a whole special on if you want to get into the details but realistically they were done with production when they came out with the next revolver that I'm going to talk about today now I've seen sources that say that these were produced or at least assembled from parts until late nineteen hundred or a little after I've also seen sources that say that they stopped two three years before they started the next gun so vaguely this gun is done with production easily before 1900 and anything that might have been assembled after 1900 was probably for police use or repair Depot work or something like that I've just seen a few disagreements regardless this gun is done way before the First World War it's just that it's still sitting in inventory and still available for use so why not now when still sitting in inventory are we talking in the in the tens of thousands the hundreds of thousands the millions I mean it was this still I mean as you said of course issuing it to artillery and to the rear lines and stuff that's great but what kind of numbers would we expect to see this in that one's been hard for me to pin down because this gun will also show up in service with Montenegro and Bulgaria during the war because the Russians would surplus a lot of these out during the Balkan wars to their allies and so reasonably somewhere around oh good lord I had the production numbers in my books for the previous episode and now I'm confusing with other production numbers but you've got hundreds of thousands of these available but Russia has gifted away at a minimum sixty thousand and probably more so the question of how many Russia still had an air inventory hard to say but that does mean that it will turn up in other places throughout the Great War all right now these are the leftovers so let's look at Russia's top of the line number one primary handgun for the war this is what they consider to be their best it's the nagas 1895 and I know a lot of you that are familiar with this gun are currently scoffing and maybe not for the wrong reasons but let's take a closer look so if we zoom in this is a gun that comes out in 1895 now it's actually based off of a very strong historic line the negau family revolvers this one happens to be Belgian and this one is much much earlier this is an 1870s model and then into the 1880s they simplified this design and then beyond that they started marketing you know to places like Norway and things like that a lot of European countries adopted a gun that was descended from this particular model this is very smooth single and double action revolver it's a gate loader which was common at the time so it's not you know archaic by any means for when it came out the problem is by 1895 we're gonna see more advanced designs in the market we remember from some of our earlier episodes with the Great War in from our primary series that Swing Out cylinders are catching on in the 1890s and even beyond that we have Abadie systems for rapid loading of gate loaders there's a lot of ideas to improve the revolver at that point in history because that is sort of the tail end of the revolvers lifespan and it's the beginning of semi-automatic handguns so what that means is a lot of countries are looking in 1895 through 1900 at the very earliest semi-automatic handguns and they are not running well the number one reason for this is because of ammunition ammunition technology also had to sort of catch up when you're dealing with a semi-automatic handgun you are absolutely dependent on the cartridge to run reliably and consistently within a certain standard deviation or else your gun won't run with a revolver whether the cartridge goes bang or not the cylinder still rotates the mechanism still works now today not as much people really know that semi-automatic handguns are the more reliable system because the ammo is dialed in but on into the 50s and 60s you would see people in America especially commenting that the revolver is more reliable than semi-auto night handgun and a lot of that was the holdover attitude because you're dealing with a gun that was at the absolute end of its development cycle it had been around for over a century and it was getting improved constantly and so you finally have Swing Out cylinders and fast loading and easy use and improved bore axis and all these handling characteristics going into the best-possible revolver and you just started making some out a night handgun so they need decades to catch up well that's why by 1895 Russia should have been able to pick a very advanced handgun and they did not they actually chose something that was very safe choice along with one sort of gimmick so again let's take a closer look this gun is single and double action although that in World War one would have been an officer's model many of the very basic models were produced in single action only because Russians felt that they couldn't trust their troops to actually use a well actually without shooting themselves in the foot somehow that's despite the fact that this has one of the heaviest trigger poles of any handgun in World War one now the big reason for that heavy trigger pull for most of you who have shot these in the commercial market is that they were actually refurbished after world war ii and the tolerances were sort of eaten up and they become extremely heavy and they tend to snag right here before dropping very uncomfortable gun this particular one has not been refurbished you can tell by the fact that it's still got its original bluing that fades fairly easily fairly easily worn off they did not have the best bluing process these guns are not the deep painted black with the very fresh-looking wood grips of the refurbs after World War 2 this gun right here is extremely smooth it's just heavy so when I pull this through don't get me wrong it's one of the heaviest triggers that we've shot in our show but you can tell I'm not struggling with it and it's going very smoothly so they weren't as bad as people make them out to be just not great now the reason why it's so heavy again is because watch the cylinder very carefully it's going to index forward see it go forward there now the Russians had become obsessed with a problem with revolvers which is that when you fire a revolver inherently you lose some pressure muzzle velocity power it's all coming out right here because you have a scaping gas in that gap between the cylinder and the barrel so they wanted to index the cylinder forward to seal against the barrel as part of that it uses a very interesting cartridge this is modern production the original would have been a bit more tapered instead of funnelled but it has a seal and the bullet is down in there this is not an empty case this is a loaded case so what happens is this gets forced up against the cone and that way it seals in the gas beautiful little system to get the most velocity out of your revolver but honestly completely unnecessary because this is still a very mild cartridge and that's a lot of sort of hump to get over for your trigger for very little payoff for extra velocity with such a small white cartridge it's very odd decision that they made otherwise this is just a gate loader it's a seven shot so you at least get an extra shot for how small you went on your diameter and how low your power is again you can get a higher power cartridge and a bigger bullet if you were to go ahead and do six shots and give wider walls between so the unit risk damaging a cylinder they opted for more rounds smaller cartridges lighter damage again that would also benefit in the lack of recoil but if you're looking to sort of control the recoil and handling of a gun like this I don't know why you want a twenty pound trigger it's a very odd decision by the Russians and one that we're going to do some more research on and get into more development on in our own show now why then did this does this have such a bad rep I mean what were what were the real drawbacks that would make people for the last hundred and twelve hundred and twenty years say yeah can't believe they picked this one as their standard it absolutely is a very mild cartridge it absolutely does have a very heavy trigger the refurbs in the American market have really driven the bad reputation because they have a heavy trigger that has also been social act over with new finish that when you try to pull back a refurb right about here where it should release the hammer very smoothly there's just this huge wall of pressure and you have to really muscle up to thirty pounds to get it to drop this one is a smooth but very heavy pull all the way through it's still not a great design the reason why a heavy trigger on the double action is such a problem for people is that when you extend your arm especially one-handed shooting like these were for World War one if I start really flexing on that my muscles in here in my arm are going to tighten up and so it's going to make it want to wander off target and it depends on by the way even that if you have weak hands you start shaking just trying to get the pressure through so any extra pressure on double action means that you're likely to throw your shot off now this didn't bother them so much at the time because the feeling was that single action where you [ __ ] manually point and then pull the trigger which is very light and crisp and actually works very well in this kind of it hasn't been referred single action is for actually aiming double action is when somebody's three feet away in your panicking so in their minds if you're off by 6 inches nobody cares for double action of course we've moved away from that in the modern era okay and you said again that this entered service with them in 1895 was that right yeah the model number is 1895 now of course I have not gone fully into my research on this gun I like to be very careful about what I say but it would have emerged 1895 1896 sometimes the model names precede the actual production this gun was the standard all the way up until the Tokarev and I 1830s and then even beyond that they kept producing through World War two this was a very long live gun despite being the fact there was a bit archaic the day it was adopted now a defense of Russia being adopted 1895 this is right on the cusp of the quote/unquote modern swing out revolvers so if they waited five years they might have had a better perspective on what was going on we see this with austria-hungary where we talked about the gasser double and single action revolver which a very odd adoption in 1898 because by then just those three short years they should have very clearly seen that something like this which the gasser is very much like this something like this really isn't gonna work the unusual feature of this gun though is we've talked about the Abbott II system before where you open the gate and then you can pull the trigger to get it to cycle the cylinder and not move the hammer therefore not risking shooting anybody this does not have that you have to manually index that cylinder every time you want to use the attached ejecting rod so you have to line it up manually eyeball it then pop your cartridge out with a little puck and then line it up manually pop it up there's no automatic indexing which was very common even by 1880s technology so a bit of an odd choice now awliyas you said before before we were filming we were setting up that you actually had a special well treat for us in terms of handguns and since we've seen the two Russians now I'm very curious what actually that would be all right I'm gonna have to delay the special treat for one second because I know you're gonna get a lot of comments on this Russia also used things like the FN 1903 and very small numbers a fair number of FN 1900s and the mauser c96 particularly fond of the bolo model those are all covered in individual episodes over at our site but we've also already sort of talked about all of those guns in previous specials here so don't just sort of say well you didn't say this that or the other we've covered those guns where they were more appropriately tied to their original countries well I think a lot of our a lot of our fans that people watching and probably seeing most of our weapons specials I would imagine it's a lot of the same people so let's hope that people actually remember and have learned something you know yep that was just my cya so we will just set this down and I'll show you something kind of special because while we were talking about that number three we happen to be loaned this again by our friend Michael Kerr thank you so much for the rare and wonderful things that he manages to turn up to loan us this right here is a number three new model which isn't the most exceptional firearm you will ever see except for the fact that still has this trigger spur which most new models do not and the other odd thing about this gun is that it's adapted to a rimfire cartridge instead of a centerfire cartridge which tells us that this gun is an ottoman handgun now we are not going to be doing an ottoman handgun special we will talk about rifles but realistically the Ottomans did a lot like some of these other countries like Bulgaria where they just adopted out from other manufacturers so they were Ottoman contract c96 s they're just like other c96 s and there ought on the contract FN 1903 s they're just like FN 1903 s and so things like that well this particular gun is uniquely Ottoman and it was probably still around for the war it's very hard to track internal Ottoman documents not a lot of things remain I'm going to tell you what the numbers produced this is still on hand and rimfire was still being used by the Ottomans all the way through World War one so let's take a look at this unique little mix of technology so zooming in we have a single action only again so we must work the hammer every time top break with a modified sort of prettier looking top break and then simultaneous eject load everything at once the big killer here and I'm sure it's gonna be difficult for you guys to see on the live show but it'll show up on the others show a little bit better is right in here we just have a split through the top of that breech and our hammer rests right on top that split is a rimfire cartridge now the reason for this is the Ottomans had adopted 4440 Henry and they adopted the rifles with them all the way back in the day and they just kept staying with that same cartridge because everything was already in it and they never wanted to make the jump to switching over their ammo system so they had a lot of unusual guns still chambered in rimfire as a matter of fact when we get around to it at some point I have a gasser that is also in this same rimfire cartridge so they were really taking anything they could get and modifying it or ordering it pre modified for this particular rimfire cartridge which is just really interesting by the time you get to 1914 because that is very dated technology single action only with a rimfire cartridge it's gonna be a lot of potential issues there if they still manage to defend themselves pretty well from the British so that'll tell you that while the handgun is useful and can be very good in trench warfare it's not the primary weapon for most nations and it's really more of an afterthought now would this be something that you'd see with more the stand standard for the men or would this be something you'd see more among officers this would be a regular issue and what kind of numbers are we talking to my understanding and again Ottoman history of sort of ordnance is very opaque very very opaque if you want to get through the history of it you have to go through Turkish sources and a lot of Turkish museums are guided so you really don't get clear data and I really don't have a clear partner in a lot of this development but reasonably with the numbers ordered this is not just restricted to purely officer use when it came out and by the time later on to World War one I imagine most officers had private purchases that were more significant than this so again this is probably something that you'd see issued to NCOs or artillery that is a best guess based on the way this would sort of stack and the numbers produced that is also sort of going off what limited photo evidence I have I tend to look at holsters in scale and sort of the last little bit of the gun that I can see and get a little impression that's about as good as I've got right now for Ottoman it's been a very hard nut to crack well Elias thank you very much for showing us the hand guns it's always a pleasure having you here now can you maybe send people over to one of your videos about one of the weapons we've talked about today so they can see a more depth a more in-depth look absolutely indeed now as the time we're recording this and I know that's gonna be a delay before it's released but at the time we're recording this I only have one really good Russian video up and that's on the Smith & Wesson number three revolver the reason for that is I've been waiting on some very strong material to actually be freshly written and now I have to translate it from Cyrillic so I am working my way through the best histories I can for the Maga and for the rifles that we're going to talk about in a little while but go ahead and check out our Smith & Wesson for now and by the time this releases maybe there'll be some more material for you to look at and otherwise don't forget that you can tune back into the Great War because they have specials on Russia and the empire as well and we'll put all kinds of links below for everybody to see all of this great stuff okay well thank you very much and everybody out there do not forget to click subscribe so you never miss any of these more fantastic weapon specials in addition to our regular episodes see you next time

Channel: The Great War

Views: 130,500

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, Smith & Western No. 3, Pistols, Handguns, Revolver, Russian Army, Russia, Eastern Front, Mosin-Nagant, M1895

Id: AovQOIrooL8

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2018