History of WWI Primer 023: German Pistole 08 "Luger" Documentary

as a military-industrial Powerhouse Germany had attempted to stay at the Forefront of small arms technology they had however been overlooking one thing the reich's revolver was obsolete the day it was created and then lingered for over 20 more years they needed a new handgun and this time only the most advanced would do [Music] hi I'm OAS and this little guy is the German pistol 08 Luger uh let's get it over to the light box as issued by Germany which is our Focus today this pistol is 8 and 3/4 in Long weighs in it just shy of 2 lb and it Chambers the 9mm Parabellum cartridge now it carries eight in a detachable box magazine and the whole thing is a short recoil lock breach toggle action pistol those are a lot of words that we'll get to one at a time now as usual I'm going to set this aside and we're going to talk about a little prehistory uh we're not get to even talk about Luger yet we're going to talk about Hugo borchart now this man was an avid inventor and engineer he was a Prussian born American naturalized in 1875 um he would go to work for for let's see some some big names here Pioneer breach loading company Singer sewing machine Winchester repeating arms he would go on to Sharps and then beyond that he's actually going to go over to oh good lord Hungarian okay let's see fivar gepar FEG and I'm gonna get notes on that I know I'm so sorry uh after FEG he would even go on to keep good company with lugwig low and Company so uh as you can tell he's probably worked for just about everybody in the arms industry and by 1893 he had his own opinion on what would be the Breakthrough semi-automatic pistol the thing that everybody was seeking at that moment and it would be the c93 now sadly we are not covering this gun in detail here today hopefully we can borrow one once we're done with World War I instead just note that it is a locked breach short recoil toggle action it has a box magazine in the grip and it use a very important smokeless cartridge that we'll get to in a moment the toggle action was likely inspired by both the maximum gun and his time at Winchester with the models 66 and 76 lever actions although to our knowledge Bart never did clarify exactly which really put him down the path now to us the c93 seems large cumbersome and awkward but at that time it embodied a lot of Firsts the best two features being its reliable operation and again that unique ammunition the 765 bhart cartridge combined a rimless bottlenecked case with a 10 mm base and jacketed round-nosed bullet propelled by smokeless powder while the bore shart would not last long this cartridge would be the base for just about every early lock breach autoloading pistol it was the high- powerered cartridge of that day granted not so much now it was modified repeatedly and even frankly stolen by Mouser for the development of the c96 on the topic of 765 borar supposedly and this is through you know personal claims not any real paper trail supposedly borhart hadn't developed that cartridge instead it was developed by another lug employee by the name of George Luger and if you can't tell he's going to be important to this story now he was born in 1849 in the Austrian Alps he would go on to military service through the austr Hungarian army and eventually be sort of pushed into the austr Hungarian landware where he would eventually rise to the rank of Lieutenant now over his military service and the immediate years afterwards his roles were all clerks Accounting sort of Bank Telly positions uh he was a money and numbers man at some point though he made the transition to gun designer and it's not really clear when because he kind of goes off the radar during this period there's stories of him working for oewg sty and mon licker and things like that but we haven't seen firm evidence of any of his invest ments in those areas but we do know that he turns up at the door under the employ of Ludwig Loa in 1891 and they hire him to be a weapons demonstrator so his job is to travel the world with Maximus and mousers and show them to foreign governments and other potential buyers now that you know okay door-to-door salesman doesn't sound you know all that Regal but you have to imagine you must give the guns to someone who is charismatic conversational convincing other words that don't start with CZ and most importantly they have to understand how the mechanisms work they need to know guns they can't just get out there and be like oh look okay so um he was you know he had strong engineering background he definitely had some experience that lug wova thought was you know Meritus for this position anyway uh in that role he also started doing his own designs and patents because of an arrangement that was available through the company where they would provide resources for development and then they would get a piece of the action on the patents so he went to work he would put a lot of attention on bolt action rifles particularly trying to improve the gav 88 which was then in German service he would even successfully sue Paul Mouser over patent infringement on a bolt action rifle design later on as exciting as all that is his primary role again was a demonstrator and so uh when the Swiss decided that they were going to get into trials for a possible possible semi-automatic handgun well he was sent over with the borhart c93 you see the Swiss had realized that revolvers with their natural Gap were not always getting the most out of smokeless powder and they wanted to see and by the way this is before the gasal Nal before anybody says anything about that they wanted to see if pistols could give them a little more oomph for their money so they sort of submitted out a trial in 1894 and it involved the biggest names in autoloading hand guns at that date early names mind you these included the Bergman 1894 and 1897 the mon licker 1894 blow forward as produced by Sig the Mouser c96 Nemesis of the Luger and of course our borhart c93 the locked breaches and high powerered ammunition of those last two the Mouser and the borhart would most interest the commission but they had reservations for each of them while overall the Swiss found the borar cartridge number one the cartridge they loved that was terrific for them number two they lik that the gun ran and ran well in good ideal conditions uh they also like the you know pistol grip magazine and things like that uh just general features great however they did not enjoy it as a military pistol they found it to be unnecessarily complicated unnecessarily sensitive to dirt and especially rust they did not like the sort of externalized trigger and Sear components overall the whole thing was sort of heavy back towards the butt I mean you could take one glance at that thing and you've got almost as much over the back of your hand as you do on the front the balance was off it was no good for one-handed shooting it was better with its stock but that's not what they were looking for just summ it all together and it's not a military handgun it's more of a proof of concept and so uh George lurer would take these notes back to liquid Loa and Loa would look over at borhart and they would say hey man will you sort this stuff out we'll simplify it we'll get it ready for the Swiss and see what can be done with it and borchart barely acknowledged them because he had his head buried into something completely different at that time you see good old Hugo had been distracted by the race between electricity and gas for the Home Market he was designing patent after patent for gas systems in the home we know how this race ends up so he thought that was going to make him his millions and we know now that it didn't but regardless he wasn't paying attention to Firearms nearly as much and so when the push back came from the Swiss he decided nuts to them the things perfect like it is uh you know he had his ego in it he doesn't want to do refinements he doesn't understand the military mindset he didn't want to touch it well that's not good enough for louiso so they took a look at Luger and Luger took a look at them and they Shrugged their shoulders and went back to work because Luger while he had been with the Swiss had realized that there were several ways that he could tidy up and tighten up the action and he wanted to get them down on paper and he wanted to get some credit for it so why not well it took him about a year to do the major changes and two years to do the minor and this is where I should probably explain something about luker's mentality about patents because it's confused a lot of historians you see Luger had a habit of only patting patenting his things as they were being shown publicly or issued publicly in other words he would keep them deeply secret and then right when he has to make them public like right when the first dollar is being spent where people can see what's going on and could possibly be stolen that's when he patents it and the reason he's doing that is to maximize the number of years that he can collect on his patents it's actually quite wise because if there's a six-month delay in actually producing then he loses six months of potential income so he wants to get every little bit especially when if you think about it when we get to World War I and things like that monthly production on some of these things is in the tens of thousands of units you could be missing out on tens of thousands of dollarss anyway uh for that reason alone we're going to see some confusing things with Luger patents just know that as we get through it um anyway uh back to what he came up with in those three years that he had to play with the action he managed to get it all together into something roughly like this we'll get there in a moment and submit it to the Swiss Trials of 1898 this time around it would be the Bergman model 1896 with a new extractor plus the 1897 the mon licker m96 Mouser was back again with well it's the c96 Roth submitted their 1898 and 1899 pistols and of course our new gun the Bor Shard Luger at this point I should probably say that we are going to refer to that gun and this one from here on out as the Luger uh this would happen in various countries at various times throughout this process but we're going to start it early because I don't want to say borchart Luger the whole time I think it's confusing uh the reason for the change over isn't just because Luger is now involved and we don't care about borhart the reason for the change is because Luger and borchart are entirely different people borchart was stubborn and unmovable and he did not want to refine his system whatsoever so it almost served more as a proof of concept than anything else whereas Luger a military man was absolutely humble he was always willing to talk to anybody about it he implemented any ideas that he could get his hands on he was absolutely attuned to making the gun work rather than making everybody believe in the gun working every possible criticism leveled at his gun was addressed in some way or form by him he would take it to the Limit whether it worked or not he would try and so he earned a strong reputation in foreign militaries and at home for being a reliable trustworthy and honest hardworking man who wanted to give them the best possible product he is the ideal man to buy a completely new concept from remember nobody else is issuing hand loader or autoloaders at this point okay it's all revolvers or worse so if you're going into Uncharted Territory this is the man you want all right so what exactly at you know 1898 style had he come up with well from this early patent we can see the bulky bore shart is now an elegant short pistol with a steep grip perfect for target shooting one-handed that extra bit at the end with the roller that's a ruse remember I said Luger likes to hide his ideas and patents until the last minute the c93 had unlocked thanks to the downwards pressure on the rear roller raising the toggle's knee and breaking the lock the Luger Pistol simply had the sloped frame direct the toggle's knee straight up right on the joint saving both parts and space and removing more of the rear weight most importantly it allows Luger to eliminate the complicated clock-like spring of the c93 and replace it with an under hanging hanger style leaf spring yanking it back down into the grip area we'll see this further refined in another moment also in order to shrink the bore shart Luger had taken the time to work up a shorter case 30 caliber cartridge this freed up more space to shrink the grip in order to provide the Steep angle and allowed a shorter stroke of of the toggle lock reducing it in size as well there were other small changes but we're going to get to them all in a moment because there's sort of a final model coming up uh anyway in the 1898 trials the Luger was preferred overall and in 1899 it was simply pitted up against the mon licker which had a locked breach and another mon licker that was submitted last minute that was an unlocked breach we're actually going to get to this pistol later on again the Luger one in the end the Swiss only wanted three more concessions they wanted the weight reduced just even more just a little bit and he took it out of the frame that happened they wanted to get a loaded magazine indicator uh a way of telling that the gun positively was loaded with a magazine that's kind of a weird one because just like this later model the magazine had that wood Tab and I believe George Luger just went look right there it's got the wood tab because that got left alone as a matter of fact early ones they started fitting some little pieces of metal to make them kind of shiny so you could really see it I have no idea with like why that was an obsession of theirs uh the last concession was kind of interesting it was for a manual safety in addition to the grip safety uh it needed to be clear readable and usable one-handed that was easily accomplished as well and so all this would be wrapped up and adopted in the pistol ordinance 1900 go we've got military adoption that's super important but it is not the limit of the gun you can't make an entire livelihood off of just selling to the Swiss they don't need a lot of pistols but uh it's time to leverage that and start applying it to other nations um in the meantime let me clarify one thing because right around 1900 there's something else going on at luga which is that they have trademarked the name Parabellum from the Latin phrase cpum Parabellum if you seek peace prepare for war uh this would get applied to ammo pistols I mean other guns they they used it in all directions it was their Big Marketing thing uh kind of a new Coke I don't know but uh it only really stuck to George Luger's pistols and George Luger's ammo so we tend to regard the Luger the 765 cartridge and the 9mm cartridge that we'll talk about in a moment as Parabellum cartridges oh and I should point out that somewhere in all that lva changed over to dwm if you need to know the reason why don't forget we have a g 88 episode that covers it anyway uh Luger would go running to show his pistol to Germany and in 1901 they would take an example and give it a good hard look they liked a lot of things about it they found that it had a natural point of aim that it was very easy and simple to use very simple to take apart they felt that it was an appropriate military pistol except for a few minor problems number one especially because they were comparing to c96 they thought there were just too dang many parts in the thing number two they really weren't big fans of the 765 cartridge and this actually comes up a lot in other countries as well they found it kind of weak and they didn't like its wounding characteristics uh number three they wanted some sort of indicator for cocking like they wanted to know that the system was armed because it had an internal Striker that they couldn't see and they were obsessed with their old you Hammers and things like that uh at the same time that these concerns came up uh George Luger would actually make a new good friend now this is going to be at that time uh over liutenant Adolf fiser now Adolf fiser had tried his hand at designing pistols before and frankly failed but he was now attached to the German G proofing commission I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong we're going to go with gpk these are the guys in charge of will we accept this gun or not um at the gpk for this project the self-loading pistol project he was at that time an agitant so he was not really a big man in charge of any decisions but he was the one moving the information around and he had a real love for the Luger itself and thought that along with George that they could get this thing sorted out for proper German service in 1902 a more proper trial began this featured the Mouser c96 mon licker pistol and the Luger Pistol pistol these guns were issued to infantry Cavalry mg detachments and some were retained by the school of musketry for 15 months in the end the gpk was satisfied with the Luger Pistol with manual safety only they didn't like the grip one uh after this all additional pistols submitted for trial would be tested singularly and all in hindsight now that we know this were rejected essentially they locked on to the Luger but the Army still wanted more they were waiting on that clocking indicator George Luger would plate them instead with a loaded chamber indicator using the extractor you know that 765 Parabellum cartridge was becoming a problem it had been a real hot ticket or you know 1898 but now at the turn of the century the Germans aren't biting the Americans aren't biting and the British aren't biting whatsoever everybody's become obsessed with stopping power they want to be able to have you know fatal hits instant hits instant kills they don't want to find their officers dead at the end of Spears you could debate the merits of this by the way on your own time guys have it out in the comments all you want that's what their focus was I'm not making argument about stopping power they're making argument about stopping power anyway uh as a matter of fact the prits refused to see any handgun that wasn't chambering a cartridge at least 40 caliber so that is where their Obsession was well George Luger saw that he was losing out on potential money by being limited only to a 30 caliber cartridge but he also didn't want to overhaul the entire gun they had produced 45 ACP pistols for the us to try out and that had been a screaming nightmare they had to redo the whole dang gun and you know those are single assemblies they don't want to create an entire separate assembly line just for the US and by the way as much as you're proud of the us we were not a huge military power at that time we did not represent a huge military contract not only that but we tend to make our own stuff anyway um so uh they go really focusing hard on how to get the most out of the current forgings they want to keep the overall dimensions of the pistol the same they don't want to do a lot of adjustments but what's the biggest possible thing we can get and still be able to use this same frame and receiver setup and just change the barrel and just change the toggle lock and the Bree face to go between multiple cartridges so where's our little one where's our big one uh some of you might realize that this sounds kind of amiliar from more modern history in the creation of the 40 Smith and Wesson now Luger was very concerned with getting a good gasal alteration from the case itself uh the secret and rifle ammunition had been really in the neck and so his first attempt at a 9mm cartridge had a slight neck and shoulder uh this would be dropped for a straight walled cartridge shortly after but he still initially opted for a 0.1 MIM groove cut into the chamber to create a step in the chamber to Aid an operation this was ultimately as we know now unnecessary but still carried on until right at the last year of production for lugers what finally appeared as a cartridge still popular today the 9mm Parabellum the first version features a truncated cone bullet designed by the gpk own over liutenant Fisher uh this would later give way to a standard round bullet over fears of being accused of using and expanding dum dum this happened a lot in World War I uh this would be a major arguing point on both sides the original cone wasn't a dumb Dum it wasn't a hollow point but they wanted to cover their butts with the adoption of 9mm Parabellum they had the German Navy in the bag you see these guys already liked the Luger and they were ready to adopt and they weren't hung up like the Army was so uh I should probably mention the 1904 Navy model I don't want to get into too much detail though because we frankly would like to be able to do a separate episode on specifically these pistols so let's just take a quick look these long barrel lugers were paired with a detachable stock magazine they have a rear mounted site on the toggle itself they're lovely I want to talk about them so desperately there's no time instead just know that this is the last of the old model lugers in trying to sell the Luger all over the world I mean the Americans the British the Dutch and more and more and more uh the Luger had been evolving rapidly all these little changes are appearing in individual transitional models models we are not going to go through today there's a lot of them but what happens is all the features get summed up bottled up and they are generally put into What's called the new model which is very recognizable to anybody that seen or handled a p8 because a p8 exemplifies a lot of things about the new model enough so that I can finally go ahead and zoom in on this little guy and give you a good look at just what's going on all right so there's basically two things that I've got to talk about one is the Luger itself and two is the new model so let's talk about the Luger itself for just a moment we have a toggle operated pistol with a detachable box magazine and it has a nice handy thumb release so we can pop pull and she's out of the way um the toggle itself we grip directly on the side and lift in order to get that breach all the way open on the later model p8s and we'll talk about this in a moment this will lock open if the magazine is in place so let me put that magazine in there and boom we're up okay follow me so far now if we release the magazine she stays up until we give her a nice whip she's down and ready to go uh the important thing about this gun over the bore shart like we said is the direct action of this camway right here this shape is not cosmetic it's part of the unlocking action so and again we've shown that this is unloaded if I give her a mighty shove you will see that these round pieces here these lugs head over and hit this guy and with enough force will start to rise Now with an actual fired cartridge what this does is that little rise right there is enough to break the lock the knee is no longer locked open there's a slight bent and The Recoil pressure cartridge pressure they can hook unlock it that's all it takes that's the magic now uh specific to this over the old model the old model had sort of a shaped tapered front where you would grab uh kind of like this and yanker open these guys are flat and checkered because it's perfectly usable this way and it's a lot simpler the other thing is on the old model there would be a toggle lock uh let's get the patented plastic Pokey hand in here right here uh there would be a little clip that would latch onto a little rail on the receiver that was designed so that when the action closed it would snap over the lip so that it did not bounce back up that problem is actually going to be solved on the inside of this gun so let's get her apart and show you why we no longer need that lock um if I flip her around oh before I take her apart there's our safety um let me flicker down for you you'll see right here that this guy's going to rise and block the sear now just like that horrible nambo type 94 this has a semi externalized sear uh the thing is though unlike it instead of pushing it into fire we pull it out to fire so you can't really get anything on there and yank it out to fire the gun and if we block it with this safety uh sorry guys it's hard to do one-handed in the camera B There we go uh that little guy Rises the uh sear can no longer move laterally out of the action to fire uh anyway safety off guns unloaded uh we are going to put a little rearward pressure on this guy and flick down that lever so pressure flick all right we need to lift out our side plate this just contains like a little transfer lever all that's doing is taking our trigger pull and pressing it up against that sear um it's also why the Luger triggers are just a little bit soggy compared to other pistols of that era all right now and I'm holding the spring pressure don't not do that uh I'm going to let this guy forward and she's away you'll see a hanger that's going to hook our spring we'll be there in just a moment um I really don't need to assemble just assemble this any further you guys get the idea toggle lock yada yada all right getting into the frame itself I need to undo one of these panels so I'm going to reach for a screwdriver and I'm going to loosen it so this is exciting television I'm sure you all turned in for exactly this so lift this grip out carefully you don't want to accidentally chip this guy right here it's a very sensitive little piece of wood believe me most loose scrips are because this thing's given out uh when we look inside the biggest advantage over the old model is here this is a coil spring uh the previous one had just been that simple leaf this provides a lot of nice pulling power and so as you'll see in a little while yes there's still a little bounce but it's negligible has almost no effect so that lock to keep the toggle down was no longer necessary o quick edit sorry guys I'm just going to Splash this one in on you because I wrapped it up without pointing out one clear thing uh the loaded chamber indicator I completely forgot to mention that uh this extractor right here when she is forward and a cartridge is in the chamber it will pop up and it'll have a nice little marking on the side we'll get you a photo of that now the change over to uh the new model was a a fair bit of importance so the switch over would take up most of 1905 and you're going to see very little coming out of that company new instead they're going to be selling a lot of Old Stock um they went to show it to the German Army but at the same time several things are going on uh one there's a lot of new autoloading pistols in the market all of a sudden two Mouser is still pushing the c96 and calling in every military favor he's got and three uh the Army's not sitting on a lot of money uh you see around the same time we have the adoption of the Spitzer cartridge and if you saw our episode on the g98 the Carabiner 98az was being developed as well because the kar98 original carbin weren't working out um that's a separate episode we've already covered and then third you have the conversion programs for the G 88 starting up as well we are spending money in all directions just sorting out our rifles pistols are really a secondary concern but they wouldn't remain that way because with the expanding Army in Germany there were shortages I mean you haven't produced anything since the reich's revolver 1883 so what are you going for here as a matter of fact they'd start lowering the quotas necessary for certain pistols and certain units and they'd stretch it by reissuing uh carabin 88s and G 91s as widely as possible just sort of you know okay you can't have a handun but here here's here's a carban um even doing that as annoying as it is was not enough and eventually they had to concede that it was time for a new handgun and so in 1907 a more serious trial kicked off in which they ordered 220 of these lugers well assembled versions uh for trials with experimental infantry machine gun units these were bog standard new models like ours here except that they retained the grip safety feature that was present on the new model actually uh we're not sure why they were given to the Germans that way because they requested to keep keep the parts at a minimum and the hold open device was eliminated as a matter of fact so now you have a grip safety and no hold open somewhere around 1913 many of these were converted to the later po8 standard by removing their grip safeties and soldering in a back plate everything with this trial went really well and finally adoption was finalized in August of 1908 now they would place in order for 50,000 pistols from dwm at which point uh this is kind of surprising uh they would then have the patent rights to produce on their own at the state arsenals without any sort of fees Associated 50,000 is a big number but it doesn't seem that big there'd actually be some argument about this later on in court depositions postwar about whether or not the then director General was currying political favor it's a separate issue we'll get to in the next episode but uh these pistols were sold at 45 marks a piece and they finally started flowing into German hands so at that point I can wrap up this Dev history and actually show you an animation and get this thing into May's hands I'm going to be honest and say there are a lot of better animations out there for the Luger because it is a popular gun but this is what I know how to do and since I spent forever doing it now you got to watch it anyway as the gun Cycles through let's pay attention to a couple of things though first the direct contact of the outer frame to the toggle looking closely you'll be able to see that finger on the toggle pressing back on the firing pin to [ __ ] it now like I said before that safety just blocks the sear from teetering outward [Music] of course we have our loaded chamber indicator once out of ammo the gun will lock open all right let's get this over to May let's load up a magazine work that toggle the safety is easily used one-handed [Music] [Applause] let's slow this [Music] down and and take a look at how we did I'll take it back to o thank you may for that enlightening demonstration all right so uh I need to cover something right now we are way into this episode and I am not going to talk about this gun for 4 hours I need to sleep so uh we are only covering World War I production I know some of you are sad but if you think about it that means we're leaving ourselves room after we get out of World War I to talk about well War I lugers so don't cry too hard uh again I am not talking about the World War I navies yet we're hoping for a separate episode on that and we are not talking about the longa pistol because that is next episode so you do get a double dose of Luger uh anyway uh let's get into exactly what was going on for production in World War I for the war production was undertaken by dwm beginning in 1908 and airort in 1910 this government Arsenal would halt production in 1918 airort models are generally considered to be slightly lower quality and poorer finish while there would be several minor changes to the Luger there'd only be two big ones uh one major and the other medium uh anyway the first one that I want to talk about though is the change to the hold open device as a matter of fact this one is dated 1915 and I can do this remember the Germans didn't want the me head out way the Germans didn't want the open device they thought it was unnecessarily complicated they wanted Parts reduced but once they got out there and started firing these things they found it was a pain in the butto ox to figure out whether or not they were out of ammo it's just click click click so many times I mean you don't have an indicator on this gun other than that little loaded chamber indicator the lock open is frankly terrific so they went ahead and said you know what let's go back and fix that all future production will feature a lock open and all old production will be refurbished to have the lock open now this process actually started uh Prussia would send in all of their guns in 1913 and get them all back uh we don't have any figures for Saxony but also they didn't have a lot of guns um wartenberg sent theirs in and they were in the middle of having them refurbished when well War were declared so they had to rush to get theirs back out um Bavaria was due to have sent theirs in before War actually broke out but because of the assassination of France FD and they said nuts to that we're keeping ours now for the second change there we go for the second change um we're actually going to look at our ability to flick this safety on and pull this toggle lock uh let me show it to you just a little bit closer so if you can see there we've got our you know what this is silly I got big fingers and little fingers so this safety um who when we flick on oh that's beyond the limits the Pokey hand okay when we flick him on again this guy pops up but another thing that's happened is because of his interaction with the sear we can no longer open the Bree so I can get her that far which is nice enough to be able to see whether or not I've got something going on but I cannot extract a live cartridge there was a fear that people would set safe drop mag and then not be able to get Al alive one on the chamber and therefore have to go back to fire before extraction I don't know why that became such a concern but it became one enough so that they actually modified the pistols I have sort of a later junker from World War II this is a mixmas it doesn't matter all that much because it has the modified sear that we want to see so again uh we will look at the position of that sort of cleft in our Seer well Luger George himself would go ahead and push that further forward lower down which means that when we flick our safety on there's a gap now that Gap allows us to open the breach all the way up and get out any spent casings um theoretically it's not supposed to feed the next round from the notes I saw but uh every example I have seems to be able to feed the next round just fine so I don't know why this was all that necessary now ever since I started talking about the Luger online especially with the Great War everybody seemed to want me to Trash Talk its reliability um I'm sure there's a lot of literature especially comparing it to the 1911 other Slide Fire guns that says you know this thing is unreliable in dirt and mud uh there's other problems apparently with it look whenever I go over my notes whenever I go over my books the Germans aren't complaining about this handgun and they retain it all the way into World War II practically right before the war they officially changed it to the P38 but the reason they did that was because of how complicated it is to manufacturer and in that regard it's true it's overly complicated compared to other designs that appear to around the same time um at its initial adoption though I don't think it's all that far off the Mark um again you got three more years before you see the 1911 uh anyway all the things about the fact that you have a semi- external ier you have the know rails set up here where they can be interacted with dirt you know there's some truth to it there really is and if we look closer here let's take a look uh yeah okay something can get in here something can cause a problem did it happen realistically it doesn't seem so was mud or rust enough to stop it it doesn't seem so um we could probably go out and do some field testing but I'll leave that to another Channel again historically Germany didn't care uh there are some real complaints about the Luger overall though which is that it's sort of medium to rear heavy there's not a lot of weight out on that Barrel when you fire it you get a little extra flip off the toggle coming up outside the you know the recoil line of the arm um there's also sort of some softness in the trigger just like we said before a lot of that's going to come from this sort of lever in the side plate thing it's just sort of a mushy trigger compared to other guns they did as much as they could to bring it back up to Chris though not perfect I will confess they are a little sensitive to different types of ammo and powder load although the Germans didn't complain so it looks like German ammunition did the trick uh anyway these guys were going to be issued primarily first and foremost to machine gun detachments that was who got these guns first second was Cavalry then on Down the Line uh that priority shows just how highly the Germans held the importance of their machine gun detachments that's very intelligent because we know the role of the machine gun in World War I uh also I should say that production ran up pretty high they were putting out a lot of these guys but they never quite met all of the demand so uh we're going to see a lot of secondary pistols we're going to see you know emergency use pistols and while that's not great because this thing couldn't be produced fast enough for the Germans uh as collectors and as people watching the show it means that there's so many more 32s I can show you tons and tons of 32s the all 32 channel oh also the c96 after doing their best in World War I the lugers would be allowed to serve on in the Rew because they were granted by the inter Allied Commission of control 50,000 pistols pistols weren't something that the inter Allied Commission of control was worried about uh I guess they had an eye for tank AAR now um these guys would be part of the 1920 inventory that we've talked about before but since more of you are probably paying attention to this episode I should get into a little bit more detail the way it worked is that Germany wanted to do a buyback to get these guys and other weapons off the street that had been left over and taken home from the War uh in order to do that they offered a no questions asked Bounty that was dependent on what kind of equipment was being turned in now in order to receive your pay you just brought the gun got your payment they they want to make people as non-paranoid as possible about this well uh the problem for that is with no questions asked they were afraid that you know the now frankly impoverished German people were going to get kind of tricky and find ways to liberate these from you know un unattended arsenals and things like that basically feed the Army its own pistols over and over again or rifles or whatever so they went through before the buyback and stamped everything 1920 bing bing bing bing bing bing that's why it's on the all these pistols all these rifles all these things that were retained by the German military it's part of their inventory yes but it was also part of a preventative measure so uh then they could do their buyback and then those things could either be inventoried with everything else or destroyed or moved on whatever the rules were with the inter-allied commission of control does that make sense good again this is just going to be an episode on the World War I era German po8 but to keep you lot happy I'm just going to say the names of some contracts Switzerland the Netherlands Russia sort of Portugal Bulgaria Brazil Bolivia Finland Iran Thailand and turkey now some of you might be wondering what borhart thought of Luger and there's a few hints to that out there um remember he had wandered off in order to investigate gas over electricity that proved not to be a money maker and then he turns around and and what he views is his original idea his original design has been co-opted by some slick son of a gun and is very very popular around the world uh he feels like he's had his life's work stolen well uh he can't do much about it the patents are locked in the ideas are original It's all under L's control anyway he's done for in terms of any sort of lawsuit but his pride is on the line and so when in 1901 there was a whole public in the American machinist by Graham pow the article not the whole American machinist uh that was going over the details of a Luger that had been sent over to the Americans for review and going off the notes of the Swiss trials um he described the whole mechanism grandp goes through and say toggle lock Springs yada y y well he says Luger the whole time Luger Luger Luger no mention of borar and this obviously infuriates him so that he has his patent agent write a letter straight to Powell and pow would ultimately end up being apologetic about it but in that letter he was sort of mad I mean he really thought that the Luger had no single Merit of its own and that it was entirely a derivative work of his and while yes the lock action is roughly the same and some other components like the layout and Trigger are roughly the same there's a lot of change here anyway uh borchart would pass away in 1924 and he really didn't get much else done in terms of global attention although he did have fun striking back at Luger in competing with him in the gpk trials for self-loading rifle he and Luger both putting forward toggle loock designs all right with that wrapped up let's go ahead and get May in here and get her opinion on this pistol I know there's a few things left undone there will be a second episode all right you can tell by the way that we now have two chairs and two people it's time to talk to May so uh let's go ahead and get her opinion on the German po8 Luger thank you so take a look at this Luger now I mean really take a look at it try to forget what one looks like I know it's hard we all know this is an iconic gun so when we spot it in a pawn shop or anywhere we know what it is but just try to wipe it from your mind for a second think of everything we've shot so far and then take a look at this this is like nothing we have seen so far it's weird looking it's got a bunch of lines on it part showing it's got this deep swoop here in the grip it looks like a space gun it looks out of this world and it is insanely comfortable all of the weight is here right here in the center in the back it feels like it's a natural point and aim kind of shoot gun it almost like a fencer style kind of gun you really want to single-hand this thing and bear in mind with World War I a lot of the shooters are single-handed things they're not two-handing it and this feels like the best single-handed pistol we have shot so far for the series the grip is nice and comfortable really fits into the palm of your hand it's steep um now I will say two things about the ergonomics were a little bit uncomfortable but I still felt they were some of the best features we've have with this gun it's got this push button mag release that is easy to use and the mag itself has two little notches here for you to grip um the safety itself you have to reach back with it and it's a little difficult sorry to one hand on camera but you are still able to one-and it however again with those two things you have to reach back and forward in order to grip them so it's a little uncomfortable but still some of the best we've seen so far as far as ergonomics go for this gun it has it all so we get it you love the Luger at least at first you know touch um I will say though a lot of people sort of fall out of love with the Luger when they try to work that action some people not big fans of the toggle did you find it particularly hard to use you know from the very first time you're handling it it is a little bit awkward because you're just not quite sure where to put your fingers however saying that after you use it a few times it's not bad honestly I could do this all day yeah for me do you mind oh sure uh for me it's definitely one of those odd things that if you don't have the muscle group for it figured out like if you don't have the Learned pattern of where to grab and grip and go it's a little awkward but I don't think it's any more Awkward than if you can remember the first time trying to work like a heavy slide operated pistol or the first time you worked a pistol at all uh it's just about knowing where to grip how much pressure to apply kind of where to roll that pressure at instead of just on the flats you got to get to the front that kind of thing and then giving it a yank in the correct direction it's not obvious to people that this thing's going to pop out and away so often times people slip on the first go with the pistol but the spring weight itself isn't all that terrible okay so uh I guess we've gotten through discussing everything but firing the gun how was it actually firing the gun actually firing this gun okay so I want to point out something we mentioned earlier on in the ergonomics yes this is a great point and shoot it feels like it wants to line up the sights just are right there the problem is that's about as good as it gets after you fire the toggle lock assembly and the barrel are forced back with the recoil so now bear in mind remember I mentioned all the weights here in the center and back The Recoil is coming back so everything is coming to the back of the gun causing it to whip back and up it doesn't really play in your favor when you're trying to realign reset the sights basically so it felt like with every single shot I was having to push the barrel down again so that wasn't my favorite I will also mention the trigger on this gun the break is really mushy it's it's not smooth it really wasn't my favorite however it's not bad my finger fits right in there it just actually shooting this gun wasn't my favorite I will say however my grouping was pretty good with this it was fairly accurate the sights them I wish they were a little bit taller just to help me Reign the sights but Beggars can't be choosers I guess even all that aside like I said I still was able to reset my sides it just took me a little bit longer than what I was hoping for so I guess you'd say uh let me try to summarize this you would say that it's an excellent shooter you just feel like it took you a little too long to reset your or reacquire your target would that be the best way to say it yeah that'd be the best way to phrase it because honestly I feel like if this had been a slide operating gun I would have appreciated the weight where it was I would have been able to keep my sights align with the target with this one it just took me an extra Split Second to reset it just wasn't my favorite you know this has nothing to do with World War I but I think she might be describing the LTI which I personally love uh okay I guess we're down to that last question that tacky tacky question um if you were issued this particular handgun and thrust into the fury that was World War I how exactly would you feel about it would you choose this gun amongst other guns okay so I know I mentioned shooting this it had its negative points however yes a hard yes I would take this into battle it's 9mm Parabellum which is a good round I'm given eight rounds I mentioned that um the push button mag release was easy to use um the safety itself was clean and easy um the only issues I had like I said was resetting my sights but you know what it was a split second I still have the eight rounds to use I was very accurate with this gun I feel comfortable taking it into battle all right score one for the Luger I guess well uh looks like we've got another one on the Plus board and thankfully you chose to okay I'm sorry thankfully you chose to uh approve this one cuz if you hadn't I'm sure we would have had a lot of hate mail um anyway this is not our last Luger so don't uh get too sad hopefully like I said we'll borrow Naval but also I'll go ahead and spoil it for you guys next episode is second part of this one just like with the gav 88 and 8805 we will have the p8 and the lp8 so goody um anyway with that I think we wrap things up make sure you stick around for the updates because I have to get out some very special thank yous and other things that are going on things have really been speeding up a lot so uh I know a lot of you just don't always go for those things because you're invested in just this episode but there will be some great great information there I just don't want to bury it right here uh all right with that we thank you very much for tuning in once again uh and stick around for the credits see you guys [Music] I'll try to keep this concise but my brain's a little frazzled from pulling an all nighter trying to get this episode out on time I'm afraid Kentucky took a bigger uh chunk out of my schedule than I realized anyway uh let's cover just a couple quick points one our host shoot logic who has kindly let us use their wonderful facilities uh they are hosting an apple seed event this weekend if you're watching the episode new if you're not I can't really help you with that event but you should still check out their calendar they are consumate professionals and lovely lovely people number two I am going to be at the Springfield National Historic Site uh this week in the next 3 days so hopefully I'll have a nice big Bank of new images for you guys I doubt that I'm going to be shooting anything there though three uh if you want to know more about what's going on with the episodes and where the schedule's at we have I remind you changed the $5 Patron level it is now fit set up with a journal so that you can hear me rambling like a madman about what it takes to produce the show and then last uh I want to make sure that I thank James Julia auction house again they were kind enough to let us use their images and so uh if anybody wants to send them a kind note or tell them that you know you appreciate them taking an interest in historical Firearms education that would be lovely all right uh well I'll see you guys later

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 375,490

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

Id: Exsk6nVc3zQ

Length: 53min 54sec (3234 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2016