STRANGE GERMAN WW2 WEAPONS YOU NEVER HEARD OF, Military History Q\A

[Music] [Applause] [Music] good morning everybody it's time for another military history q a i'm sorry it's been taking me a little while but i'm really busy trying to edit stuff from when i was in europe filming for you guys now you've asked me about strange and interesting world war ii german infantry weapons or weaponry in general that does not involve rockets and flying around strange things remember you only bring that on yourself because now you have given me an excuse to use terms as donkey faust and i will say donkey faust as long as i think it's funny and i still think it's funny it was a real thing i absolutely promise you there was it was a real thing and we'll get to that but let's start with uh balls of steel i'm also not kidding really we're gonna start with the kukupunza which sort of has its origin back to world war one where the germans built the toughest wagon world war one was a time where the tank began its uh its life really we had find an armored way to cross trenches and a whole lot of different designs and ideas were tested and tried and a lot of them ended up sort of on the garbage heap of history the traffic wagon was one of them one was built uh by one of the german firms it was to be equipped with either a small cannon in the center rifle's side several rifles it was had a four man crew it weighed 18 tons and had three meter tall rather cylindric wheels that was also part of the side of the tank it was about eight kilometers of wandering speed it was tested it had a little rear wheel that would account for steering and that design we're going to see again when we get to the google panzer and i feel very cool punches kind of interesting because we don't know a whole lot about it but from looking at it and knowing a little bit you can kind of guess what it was it was a one-man crew it was under two tons it had five millimeters of armor so it was not really very well armored had a little vision port and had a machine gun to be fitted in the center it's a little unclear exactly what it was because there was only one prototype that we know of that was made that still exists today it was even unclear where they found the thing it's sitting at the russian kublinca museum beside moscow where it was hiding for several decades they kind of gave it a strange paint that didn't belong and hid it behind a tiger one which is plausible uh sitting next to a tiger one most things would sort of disappear especially this little fella here rumor was that was a radio cable layer i don't see enough space i don't see cables going deep enough i see a whole other reason why that doesn't work although being a cable layer during world war ii was not exactly a good for your general health and well-being so infantry support that was an option it was built coming up to world war ii it was built by corp we know that much they have two stories of where the russians captured this thing one was in manchuria manchuria by captured from the japanese which would mean that the germans had built this round rather large ball uh during the war well like presumably after they became allied with the japanese and they had tested it and then they sent them their one prototype i i'm not i'm not seeing that i i don't buy it i don't buy it will be there don't buy we manchuria however the other story seems to be a lot more plausible that it was captured at the kumon store proving ground where they also captured the mouse which is sitting in the same museum i find that possible the germans were testing a lot of different interesting things but this four little infantry support vehicle had a two-stroke engine it could go six seven kilometers an hour and was two large rotating wheels would propel it forward at some speed or not no word if it will be clad with uh with rubber to for a little bit of better traction but i think the coupons was interesting and apparently it was interesting enough that a lot of other countries were kind of experimenting was this thing we were and after the war the russians were rumored everything online is a rumor right rumored was and there are i have seen design drawings of a stalin ball of steel 500 ton kugel panzer that they were going to build with cannons and everything i don't think it made off the design table but they were also experimented with smaller uh balls so maybe that's why they hit it because they were working on something similar sort of like when the uh horton wing was sitting in a museum for a long time here in america until the b2 flying wing came out and then it sort of disappeared for a little while gee we don't want to telegraph where we get our ideas now do we the big wheel idea wasn't really new and it didn't really stop at world war ii because the uh the germans they kind of built other things with large enormous wheels they built them in alma again called 1944 it was a huge mine clearing vehicle articulate in the center two independent parts both had engines they were fueled by the hl-90 mybach and it had enormous two meters and seven almost three meter tall wheels with huge armored plates on them to literally just roll over the mines detonate them and remain unscathed and the front wheels and the rear wheel was off center so they could carry a clear more more ground now very very little about the minion hammer has been found i only found a few photos i have no idea what happened with it it was a conference here captured by the americans after the war no idea where it went uh you can find very little data about it but wait there's more than there's this the built by the l cat factory a three wheel monster it was 50 tons i absolutely love this thing it had a panzer one turret on top and it was armed between 20 and 40 millimeters of armor it was just a beast um well mines are pretty crappy to have laying around that tend to you know blow up some of these soft squishy things that we call infantry but in 1942 already this was built by the l cat factory and we like the alkyd factory because they also built the storm gessors and they the vs kfc 617 schwein mining alma means heavy in case you hadn't guessed the 50 tons meant heavy um it had a v12 my back engine that just barely could push it down the road at 50 kilometers an hour and one was built which is also sitting at the russian museum where incidentally they also found it at the kumastov proving grounds and i this thing is just i don't understand why someone have not made this in the movie but big wheels it is and i thought that was interesting because in recent years past decade i seem to have seen a resurgent of articulate vehicles with a v-shaped hull for mine clearing huge wheels and a small cab up front i'm thinking the germans made something like that and i seem to have seen some of the danish mine clearing vehicles around 2000 uh the 2000 the year i've i've seen a few that looked like it were even back then i looked at and go like wow that looked like something the germans built during the war so a good idea is a good idea and mine clearing vehicles let's just face it they're kind of cool mines not so much the vehicles are because they're super heavily armed they're usually configured they're a little off a little different so they kind of come off looking kind of cool a little uh a little ish here and the where the russians built a mine clearing vehicle that i thought was really cool where they had a mig engine sitting on top reversed so the jet exhaust would plow up the ground and detonate the mines in front of it i think it could possibly be done in a better way i don't know how many build of them but it was kind of cool really honestly straight into the ray gun on that one was actually what i thought it was first time i saw it anyway of course then you also have the goliath which most of you have heard about a small tracked remote controlled vehicle with a explosive charge of between 60 and 100 kilograms it would roll up to enemy tanks or bunkers and blow itself up it was guided by a joystick had three cables coming out the back through which two of them were steering in the last one for setting off the explosive problem was it was not really very well armored it was not by any means impervious to infantry fire so if you saw it coming if enough shots you would eventually disable it and if you're a really good shot you could as some snipers or and are you could shoot a shoot up the cable and it would become immobile and it would just sit there after the war some 7564 of them were built after the war the american air force actually used a few of them to tow planes but they really were not built for that so they kind of broke down rather quickly they were a single use weapon so okay all right fine the germans did over engineer just about everything it started with an electrical engine which was really hard to maintain in the field which is why they switched to a gasoline engine which was easier to maintain but for the ones at d-day they actually were counting bunch of goliaths that were sitting in small bunkers housed inside tunnels where they would send them out rolling towards the allies on the beaches and blow themselves up they had to start the engine inside the tunnel where the staff were and then send them off at the right moment which means they would be sitting inside slowly suffocating from the gasoline fumes that was just the particular stories from from normandy and a lot of them had a problem with they were coming to guess what normandy beaches there was a lot of bombs going off yeah right and a lot of holes from those bombs craters different things it would have a problem they get it into a bomb crater it would get stuck it only had a ground clearance of i think 11 centimeters which is funny because i should know because one of my friends actually has one and he's working on making it run it's fully restored and obviously we had in one of our movies uh had the whole unloading from the kevin hart and everything special teams were designed within the infantry to deploy these uh at the different battle stations where they were used they were used quite a lot in italy uh and again also in in normandy they were not the most successful thing they built it was a little overpriced for what it was and what they got out of it but still it became sort of the idea of the remote controlled weapon systems uh of the day and one would think that given that we have radio controlled weaponry the germans made during the war that radio controlled flying bombs it wouldn't be a stretch that they could make a radio guided goliath over time that could at least then the the wires could not be uh shot up and better range maybe a little bit more ground clearance i don't know just a thoughtful thought now i wanted to get the vehicles out of the way first because they're small vehicles and they'll be operated by the infantry but let's get back to what actually started this little step down in german weaponry one of you wonderful people wrote me about how your grandfather was shot in the leg by a student krumlov which is the storm kevia fitted with a curved battle barrel to shoot around corners and much as i really wanted to reach out and reach back to you and get a little bit more information so i could sort of break down just exactly what the odds were uh of any american soldier in that theater being shot by such a thing which is phenomenally small because it's about oh the stg 44 which i'll get back to more details on in a minute they're about 430 000 major in the war and a lot fewer of the curved barrel attachment that came in five different variations so there are some thousands of those made so it was a village i'm glad he survived the war that's the most important thing he made it back and he kept his leg but it's a bit of a story to be shot by something that was relatively rare it all started with the stg 42 actually with the machinica being in 42h obviously 42 denotes the production year and officers working under albert speer was working on a new replace ideally an ideal replacement for the mauser which 12 million was in service for the german army at that time something with more rapid fire lighter cheaper to make problem is they use the 792 by 33 quarts which is shorter and less powerful than the mauser which made it less efficient at ranges however it was pointed out that most combat ranges still took place between two 300 meters or under so you didn't really need 800 meter mauser range all the time especially when you need something lighter smaller for house to house fighting or in the cities anyway that eventually turned into there's a lot of different versions of the sdg that became the sdg-44 there was a version in 442 43 and 44 there was also one at 45 they're roughly the same rifle what makes this different is and believe it or not when you look at it this was a closed bold firing system with it was a gas operated selective fire closed bolt firing system and it was pressed and stamped which made it require less materials than actually making a bolt action k98 which also made it made it cheaper to produce of course the inferiority of the ammunition initially was a bit of a setback it's also said and stayed in a whole bunch of reasons that the reason why this weapon was not brought to bear from 1942 when it was initially developed was that hitler absolutely hated it and he stopped the production which is not entirely true hitler was a very much a hands-on leader and he was inspect all the new weaponry as he could of course during world war one he was carrying the mauser so that's what he knew problem was he was looking at a production of this new weapon to replace the mauser as it was initially suggested the problem with that is you'd have to make 12 million of them real fast in order to replace the mauser the ammunition wasn't as powerful which was a problem initially um the mouse was already out there and we're starting 1942-43 to start building these things they were too short for a bayonet charge so the bayonet mount eventually came off and to change production around at a point where germany was stressed production wise already did not seem like a good idea to him however he did not cancel the research as he could have because they tried to sneak this under him and they did it again because then they revamped it when they realized this could not be a replacement to the mouser so they called it mp instead and they tried to find a sell it as a replacement or research as a replacement to the mp40 upgrade as a machine pistol hitler also care caught onto that one but again he didn't cancel the project or the research and eventually when it was demonstrated to him he was rather impressed because it actually after it's gone through its evolutions became a very viable and well made and cheaply made and well-functioning rifle so he called it the sturmkeve that was his idea it is in effect it was the world's first assault rifle it was a selective fire 450 rounds a minute which is not too fast so you're not going to expend all your ammunition uh in a matter of seconds it was the original father of what became the g3 in the mp5 series the fn if you will and don't even go there with ak-47 don't even start with that because the scga 44 came first and believe me kelesnikov he saw this one before the ig ak-47 came out we can argue that until the sun sets this was still the first assault rifle that was ever made and this was in order to assault forward not as a defensive weaponry interestingly enough a lot of stories was how they malfunctioned initially because when they left some of the factories they were so heavily greased and because the soldiers at the front were very hard pressed they would literally yank them from the crates tear off the wax paper insert magazine and have a problem firing because the barrels were greased up the mechanism would freeze up they would have to be cleaned extensively first that's one of the misnomers of the stg and interestingly enough the u.s army u.s ordinance tested it after the war they had some they they found it slightly inferior which i don't know if that was a sign of the time because or it was just not tested well because it it certainly did the job and it was supposed to be a counter to the pbsh-41 on the russian front where all these nine millimeter bullets seem to be flying of all sorts of different directions they wanted something better with a higher rate of fire for close quarter combat and that's where the std 44 was perfect and it did a good job now what makes this interesting and why this is uh coming on here special crazy german weapons was the komolov which was a angled bore attachment now they didn't build the sdg-44 with a curved barrel it was an insert that you would screw onto the existing barrel you'd also have different optics so you could see around corner and shoot from cover there was a couple of different variations a 30 degree 45 degree 60 degree and a 90 degree angle and at that point you'd have to have little holes built in the curve for the exhaust gases to evaporate because a lot of pressure was put on a bullet when it had to do a curve and the 90 degree curve as also per the us army uh afterwards with the inventor which was incidentally smizer who also did the mp40 the 90 degree curved barrel was just too much it would kick way too hard on more than three rounds the shooter would have even be spun around almost 90 degrees because as the bullet would turn it would exhaust such pressure on on the barrel and once out there it's be very hard to control the 30 degree curved barrel attachment however seemed to be a bit more promising and worthy of more research and ever since we have tried to find a way to shoot around corners this really have a very successful weapon they use now to shoot around corners but it's it it's not a curved barrel it is the whole gun that's curved in that sense no comparison still uh there's also a curved barrel attachment and mount for tanks or armor where you could put it in a mount and you could spray holes off your tank so to speak one problem that was with putting all this pressure on this poor little uh short bullet was that they would almost always come out deformed which means you not have a pointy impact on your target you'll have some probably a little bit of a tumbling going on and a bent bullet already it will still keep people's head down on the other end efficiency [Music] it was worthy of more research let's put it that way but it was it was an interesting concept of the day and it certainly did work about 300 rounds per barrel before the barrel would start deforming inside and pocket and it wouldn't be user friendly anymore although the designer had expected a 6 000 reigned rounds to go through the barrel before he got to the point where it would no longer work [Music] another interesting thing about the stg44 it was the first rifle that was fitted with an infrared uh aiming device or infrared scope whether it was actually light up uh infrared and well for those who carry around infrared scope on your rifle now and weighs a few hundred grams well this thing was rather large and not only that you had to carry a battery in a pouch where the huge cables running to and you only had 15 minutes of operational time before the battery would run out however you were able to light up a complete dark forest no no stars no nothing up to 200 meters of accurate fire also of course you had a flash suppressing cone so you wouldn't blind the uh the shooter for with the with the flash you would find in the middle of the night it was the first infrared scope that was developed put on rifles it was also put on tanks trucks vehicles where it was easier to carry heavy batteries especially the panther tank had had an infrared scope built at that time not really strange weapons certainly not by today but then being able to shoot in the dark without being seen that was something that was rather uh innovative and important since well the world war ii the enemies could run around in the darkness and do their things now you could actually snipe at them but not more than 200 meters away of course and another note on this the stg44 was actually in use by some militaries all the way up until 1980 so not really bad and serbia is still i believe to be the only country that still makes the uh the court the short round for those of you who are lucky enough you bastards to have an original stg44 for those who are not um gsg is making a 22 version of that and of the of the mp40 as well however there's also a replica made i believe it's a company in texas that is now making stg nine millimeter or even the original quartz round there's a couple of friends of mine there were gunsmiths out in louisiana they used to make an stg44 replica that shot 556 ammo and used a hnk 91 lower to base it on they were rather pricey though and i don't think they make them anymore of course the mp40 you still have companies like gsg that's making a nine millimeter that is readily available for five six hundred dollars well worth having just uh for the sake of it and for reenactments they're actually kind of cool anyway speaking of just saying and now that we're speaking about the mp40 well we are now there's also a very special attachment that was made to the mp40 making it the mp40 slash one not two because it was the first alteration what it was was a dual magazine attachment to the mp40 so you would actually have two magazines feeding into the gun you would load two magazines and you would expend one and you just push the other one over rack the bolt and continue fire this was made for special operations special forces ambushes and so on unfortunately it also put the overall weight of the mp40 up to 12 pounds fully loaded and it would however not require a whole lot of work or retooling to the original mp40 because you just take the magazine housing out replace that with one that would fit two magazines side by side so it could be done fairly easy there's very few of them were built and their production was cancelled rather quickly because honestly you save a little time but you gain a lot of weight and it's a little bit more cumbersome and you still have 30 rounds of again i think the mp4 40 or 50 rounds a minute again so you had a decent range of fire without expending your magazine in a few seconds and it had a good weight and feel to it with one so why do two but at least they built one and they tried and it actually did work and it was easy to use um i just thought that was an interesting note on the mp40 which is still very very very cool and i really really can't wait to get my hands on mine which is across the country because i live in california thank you it can't all just be about bullets and guns it has to be something that was bigger and a predominant serious problem to having the german army and soldiers dismembered all over the various fronts was all these nasty planes that kept chasing them down and bombing them which was apparently very unhealthy so research went into anti-aircraft weaponry and of course the germans were cutting edge when it came to rockets so they made several infantry carried anti-aircraft ground-to-air rocket launcher systems one was the fleeker faust one which had four barrels that fired at two centimeter rockets that theoretically should have a spread of 60 meter pattern and about 500 meter range that did not prove to be enough so they added five more barrels so now you had a 150 centimeter long shoulder fired six and a half kilogram total weight when loaded uh ground to air rocket launcher it would fire the rockets in stages at 0.1 second difference first uh four and then five so the rockets wouldn't get caught up in the exhaust from the uh from each other or from 90 gram project with 90 gram projectiles and 19 grams of explosives they would have velocity leaving the barrel at 380 meters a second it would eventually attain the 506 565 to 600 meter active uh more efficient efficient range effective range of five to 600 meters with about a kill zone of 50 40 50 60 meters so you could fire them in the general direction that the plane would be or was going to be and hopefully you would hit it 80 of them actually made it into active duty although 10 000 of them were had been ordered it was a very good idea and there's a very famous picture from the bundenburg gate where one of these are actually lying in the rubble see picture if the war had lasted a little longer a whole whole new host of interesting and rather dangerous german weaponry would have been seen they were also working on a flight shrek which was a rocket ammunition that contained 144 individual incendiary submunitions that could be fired from the from the panzer strike that would definitely have changed the battlefield somewhat if you could have an existing technology fitted with a multi-sub-munition rocket launching munitions something that we're seeing today we see a lot of shoulder launched missiles uh happening in the past 20 30 40 50 years after the war but this is sort of where they started there was also a flight faust that was built with three centimeter munitions that would to be placed underneath the wings of aircrafts so the aircraft could shoot inexpensive dummy munition at other planes that only made it to the testing stage but again it's a technology we've seen past post-war adopted by just about every uh military ever since or air force ever since this but this is sort of where it is and i know you all sit and say well he said donkey faust when are we gonna get to that calm yourself we'll get to it and now that we're talking about rockets and anti-tank and anti-plank weapons we have to talk about something that is really really special and really really interesting because it still exists today in a slightly new reversed form the panzer abver kitten x 7 road cabin caption caption old caption right red writing never mind the panzer version x7 was developed by bmw company 1941 already now this was interesting because what you're looking at is a wire guided anti-tank weapon with a cone-shaped uh detonator 1200 meter range 300 meters an hour uh man portable on the battlefield sitting on a one and a half meter long tripod was visually guided by a tracer in the back this was a tow missile that is exactly what it is the warhead of the tow missile today slightly bigger 1941 that is exactly what bmw uh had designed and offered to the german ordnance bureau for the price of research and construction of 768 000 heist marks which really is not much of course at that time their war was going really well for the germans so they said thank you but not right now and imagine how much grief that cost them later on development eventually was uh put back in place and they started building and constructing these things and testing in 1944 with parts interchangeable from the panzerfaust it really seemed that the germans were actually learning something interchangeable parts whenever you ever heard such nonsense when it comes to the world war ii german army however this was a two-stage solid rocket engine that would first fire one and then after some flight it will fire the second it was a two and a half two and a half kilo shaped uh warhead that would destroy pretty much any tank of that time up to 1200 meters range the rocket engine was the first one had uh 1.3 kilos of propellant solid fuel and the second had six kilogram propellant that would burn for eight seconds not only that it was also finned it was guided by two wires and it was so clever it would rotate twice per second but the steering was accurate enough that of course if you have a missile that is wire guided by the ailerons for like an airplane well it would change its course when it is in that stage of rotation that was taken into account so it would only steer horizontally when the horizontal planes were actually capable of steering horizontally so it was a very very technically sophisticated gyro stabilized system where was that i'm sure a lot of german infantrymen were asking in 1943 when they found out it existed this was for all intents and purposes the very precursor to uh to the tone missile system one that i'm familiar with because in my initial young spry days uh in the military i was an armored reconnaissance unit where we had tall missile systems so i trained on that which incidentally is also sitting on a tripod i seem to vaguely remember it was freezing as cold when i trained on that thing on about a one and a half meter long tube but this was uh this was an interesting weaponry that was uh looked very carefully at by the allies after the war it's just strange it took him so long to make it work but here he is panza abvar keta x7 definitely something uh to keep in mind when you talk about high-tech german technology considering how early in the war they had such a thing and of course you have the pancha shreik which was originally a smaller 88.8 centimeter rocket fired from well literally a mock-up of the american bazooka the germans had acquired pieces of in tunisia one major problem which is why it ended up being referred to as the stove pipe was the american bazooka which is only 60 millimeters its rocket would fire but it would extinguish before it left the tube not so much on the puncher strike the rocket would stop burning two meters outside the tube which means the wearer had to wear heavy gloves and goggles gas masks poncho to not get burned or suffocate in the noxious fumes that was eventually remedied by a shield a shorter more effective barrel of the pancha strike again but it was a problem having huge pieces of smoke illuminate exactly from where the rocket came when you fired that tank it's sort of lighting you up a little bit for the enemy saying here i am i'm the little guy sitting with the stovepipe in the middle of the plume of smoke and firing them in close combat fighting in in cities firing them inside a room would fill the room of uh well toxic smoke also rather bad for your health i'm sure they made a bigger brother version of the panchez height which was a 10.5 centimeter it was originally an 18 kilo monster um that weighed the projectile alone weight 6.1 kilogram shaped hollow charge each round about 300 meter range which was a good idea it will get further and further away from the end user now this projectile weighed 6.1 kilograms and was effective up to 300 meters armor protection was 180 millimeters at a 60 degree impact angle this was rejected and instead they made something better and a little shorter and a little lighter well imagine that a 240 millimeter penetration was requested and the next model had a shorter tube 200 centimeters long it only weighed about 13 kilograms and the new projectile now weighed only 6.3 kilograms about 13 pounds per projectile still bit of weight if you're gonna drag it around all your other kit anyway shape charge as usual this ended up with an armor penetration of 220 millimeters against a 60 degree sloped armor problem is being a shorter barrel it recoil was a little bit of a thing which was a problem considering this was a recoilless weapon so they had to start putting them on smaller lighter mounts which having covered the area in smoke made it less desirable to use and a little harder to move because after firing you would have to change position which of course brings us to the donkey faust that i've been wanting to say for so long which is for all intents and purposes a cruel and evil hoax perpetrated by german soldiers in italy although it's not entirely that funny because throughout most of the wars animals have been used to mount weapons drag weapons or have weapons strapped to them in order to run and detonate themselves amongst the enemy so entirely funny it is really not and i am not talking about the bomb dogs the russians used because i'm not ruining my day by looking at that study this picture was probably taken in italy or where donkeys were extensively used in the mountains by just about everybody who fought in the mountains world war one world war ii to drag heavy equipment with them and it's not uh unthinkable that a whole lot of panzerfaust were carried on the back of donkeys with the german mountain troops and towards the end of the wars they were fighting in italy where the one was fired from the back of a donkey i'm pretty sure the donkey would have been extensively annoyed by such an attempt kicked the user and run the f away just just thinking but still uh it isn't uh hell let's go it's a little funny at least humor among soldiers during war time is what gets everybody through that particular time of their lives and yeah i always said um a deep and dark source of sarcastic humor is what gets us through life so if you don't understand sarcasm now go away now of course in modern warfare one of the key component problems is how does a soldier meet popsicle managed to destroy combat and defend himself against armored tanks that would relatively easily roll over him in 41 the germans had a panzer han kanatan armored hand grenade 2 kilos with the penetration about 130 millimeters about half a million or so was made and further developments continued with different upgrades of course with this meant you had to come up right next to the enemy armor which again might at times prove very unhealthy to your general health and well-being so there's different ways of they they worked on with this one was as a sticky grenade concept with a filth in front of the mine of course we're talking about the regular shaped charge in front of it with a felt dipped in glue the soldier would come up and stick this to the side of the the enemy tank hoping it wouldn't fall off right away or he wouldn't get stuck to his uniform um set the detonator you'd pull the cap in him 7.5 seconds before it exploded uh sticky bomb or not that would eventually in the bigger brother be replaced by magnets that some of you who have suffered through my movies seen i placed on the side of a piece of armor once because we have one sitting here somewhere um of the bigger brother there was another way of trying to attach shaped charges to a tank or detonate them the problem with the shaped charge it has to be right on so the shrapnel would make the little pin of the hole and make a whole lot of cooking inside the tank possible they would also do the panzer wolf mina russians had a version of this that was eventually even used up to decades after world war ii with a little parachute you would throw it over the tank and it would cascade down and land hopefully shape first onto the back of the tank so many things can go wrong including weather with a little parachute that you still have to throw and has to aim and hit precise still 200 000 of these were made and deployed in the field and i have no idea how successful they were plus there are no stories maybe that's an account itself that there are no surviving accounts of how well these things were still little handkerchief after a grenade i'm not liking the idea neither did the ss so they developed what was well a hl han kanatan which became known as the sshl han kanatan just because you need to write more things in manuals it was about 19 centimeter long and weighed about 420 grams and include a shaped charge of 210 grams at a diameter of about 7.2 centimeters eventually developments came into a han mina han means you are still delivering the damn thing by hand back to that again um it had somewhere shaped charged between three and four hundred grams it was not too successful but it led to the first actual usable weapon the panzerhan mean at three which had a sort of a bottle shape and about 27 centimeters long with a diameter of 14 centimeters three strong magnets was on on the side to fix the weapon to the side of the tank again it carried a thousand gram k shaped charge penetrating about 130 millimeters of armor eventually this was succeeded by the panzerhanmina iv which was a little bigger strong magnets and improved penetration up to 150 millimeters eventually that was succeeded by a larger weapon see where this is going but the hovlardon 3 was the one they ended up going with it had a 7.5 second fuse shaped charge and 1.7 kilograms of weight total which was now three and a half kilos of the um of course it was all about how to fight all this motorized armor coming at you so they also tried a hand grenade that was filled with motor stop middle or a fine flaky sand type substance that would be sucked into the engine of a tank or a vehicle causing the engine to stop of course it would have to be deployed right over the the air intake that didn't always really work uh actually it never really worked it didn't the hand grenade with dust over filters that didn't work so they tried another one uh hand grenade with ozone that if it was deployed over the filters of a vehicle it would choke the engine which it didn't but you got to try things otherwise you don't know that they won't work so the whole idea of activating something uh dusty feiny powder to stop the enemy vehicle engines yeah that was that was stopped rather quickly but it was an interesting idea right of course there was various experimentations with different mounts for stick grenades where you would put them in a canister holding seven to multiply the explosion and if done right over the filters of an enemy tank it theoretically should be able to destroy or disable the engine as you may also have seen me doing one of the better movies i've made no comments it was tried they tried it bite me okay uh another thing they did with the stick grenade the potato masher is encase it in cement make a they even made a cement version a concrete stick grenade which could also be labeled as the volks grenade you could also see this as coming towards the end of the war with a significant lack of resources although the stick grenade really was not the most expensive complicated thing to make they also made one that was made of cement again it would send out fragments and explode so it's entirely possible and very few of them still exist for obvious reasons some of the cement was even encased with particles of of metal that you at some point if you're lucky to find one might be rusting through the cement wall of the grenade but they are rare if you're out there doing battlefield excavation and you find this cement stick grenade hang on to it because it's a rarity also they would roll stick grenades and other grenades into what you would call look like a bowling ball all the way up to a 30 kilogram royal cannot rolling grenade that was made metal or they would also be made in cement pretty much most countries made something like this you stick a relatively small charge and you encase it in in cement or steel or shrapnel and you roll it off towards the enemy 30 kilogram explosive bowling ball i'm not that good of a bowler but it seems like something you'd want to be further away from that you can roll there's also smaller and lighter versions of these especially like i said you come to the end of the war more and more improvisation was needed and we'll get to that when we get to uh the weapons issued at the end of the war to the uh civilians of the bulk storm which actually was a rather interesting simple but rather functional weaponry so of course they would have a vault cannot and a wolf voxp store i will say the concrete stick grenade was somewhat interesting because quite a few have been found they would have the regular wooden handle [Music] with the groove running down the length inside the handle where the cord was where you'd pull the fuse you had the regular tnt inside and then it was covered by a small piece of waterproof paper over cardboard square where you would have the explosive inside and then it would be covered by by cement either in a form um or in a concrete mold and we'll have the regular standard bc24 friction pull fuse having a delay of four or five seconds so it was pretty much of all intents and purposes a stick grenade that was just made of cement regular tnt uh demolition charge inside cheap and easy i suppose there was more to the volks han kanakan 45 than just a revised stick grenade out of cement resources were at the end of the war like i said rather scarce and they had to change the parameters but they needed to equip the volkswagen which was basically hastily trained civilians to defend their own areas and they had to be equipped with weaponry and grenades as well so a grenade that was cheaper and yet functional than the stick grenade had to be made quickly cheaply and with a shortage of resources resources so they made them in glass canisters or thinner metal but predominantly the glass volkswagen was made with a um bce39 fuse which was originally designed for the german equine so the fuse was existing technology the layout of of the grenade was similar to this top of the stick grenade but without the stick and it had to be hand thrown hands on the canister and those different fuses of different lengths then the glass canisters to make up for shrapnel which would you have about 150 grams of powder but you would fill it with glass metal off cuts whatever that would be functional as antipersonnel shrapnel would be filled in the canister or as when they were made with cement mixed in with the cement so you'd have that outer core of shrapnel when when thrown and of course transportation was an issue if it was a cement grenade because that would absorb moisture so they had to be packed in watertight crates one factory uh managed to produce 100 or seven hundred and some thirty nine thousand of these and this was again outsourced to different companies and they were all slightly different so having them built to one specification was not always possible so several different variations of these uh volks han khan nothing existed and they were also issued to the regular army and even the ss towards the end of the war just to cover the need of having the anti-personnel grenade and just to show you something that is uh pretty that's not really a weird weapon but i want to show you the 27 millimeter double-barreled flare pistol that the german navy used not that it's really a specific super phenomenal weapon but it is a beautiful flavor filler gun it's a beautiful design it's just this great looking piece of equipment and i just wanted to show it to you because well i don't know any other double barrel flare pistols from ever it had a range about 260 feet and a nine inch barrel loaded like a shotgun internal hammers still just want to show you something pretty before we go on to something else the solo tournament s 18 100 20 millimeter anti-tank cannon or as it's listed anti-material weapon i don't know what else it would really be i don't know why i missed this on some of my previous breakdowns of anti-tank weapons because this was based on a something really really cool it was built by rheinmetall in 1940 for the finnish army paid for out of switzerland and it was using a well an s 18 350 millimeter anti-aircraft cannon munition which was 20 by at a muscle velocity of 765 feet per second which is not well you know it's okay i guess 735 meters a second is the muscle velocity which is okay and the penetration at 100 meters was uh 20 millimeter of sloped armor at 60 degrees which is okay i actually would have thought a little bit more and i think maybe with some improvement it could have done better being an anti-aircraft munition anyway what makes this special is that it was a bullpup design with no fixed sights so you had a binocular site it weighed 45 kilograms and had a vertical magazine of 5 or more commonly 10 sticking out the side of the gun the germans produced it and they had them in four trials but apparently they didn't like it enough to actually put it into use which is a little bit of a shame because it looks rather cool and back in my mind i keep thinking more could have been achieved i mean now i want to say more i don't need more recoil because it had an enormous kick of the mule yeah well back to the needles again i i don't know um [Music] i think with a little more work this could have uh gone somewhere anyway i think i wanted to bring it to you because it's well it was made in germany at the time and they tested it there you go oddly enough it was used by a lot of other militaries a lot of other countries hungary italy uh romania this thing went on 20 30 different countries and have also been produced in estonia right up until the russian invasion but they only managed to make 20 so that well never mind on that one but still now i know we paddled down the river of flare guns but here's an actual flare gun that became an actual weapon that was actually a little special had different munitions and i kind of like it it's called the storm pistol i remember when the germans really were hard up for something you stick storm in front of it and then it's just automatically cool the storm pistol was more assault pistol let's just translate what the heck right it was an early war suggestion of how you would take a a flare gun that could be used by anybody and use it against armor or explosive or smoke or basically doing anything else except popping up flares which it would also do including signal flares haha c multi-purpose weaponry that's always good the stupid stole it was well initially a big breach loading pistol that was set for illumination target marketing uh or concealing with smoke it would fire smoke it really cannot have been a whole lot of smoke but all right fine let's go back to the target marketing because that sounds more interesting um later in the war it developed explosive rounds and they would have a lightweight grenade launcher so you can engage targets at relatively close range and there was even a butt stock that was made kind of a conversion kit for it so you can fire different grenades of it because they apparently kick a little more there was what it was originally made for was a multi-star cartridge which would send up signal flares of reds and greens or different configurations so you could have pre-designated if you see two green and six red you know you're attacking and something else something else something else that was interesting but not as interesting as you could have a wolf cannot in 326 that was a small it was breached fin stabilized explosive grenade with a nose fuse it was designed for short range or low angle direct fire emissions and it was not recommended beyond 200 yards 180 meters it was accurate above that and you really shouldn't use it in less than 46 meters 50 yards because it might endanger yourself to shrapnel now if you have a little grenade like that you fire from a pistol that will send shrapnel up to 50 meters that's not bad it's lightweight it's uh easy to carry munitions are not that heavy not bad at all there's also one an anti-tank weaponry or a heat round with a shaped charge that will be used against enemy armor about 70 meters away so you're still pretty danger close and it would only penetrate 80 millimeters of homogeneous armor um which well you know you know definitely armored vehicles trucks cars would certainly have have had an impact on those now if you take that away and get the really cool thing you have the what's the wolf copper 360 one it was screwing a backlight it wouldn't stem in to the ayahuan kanatan which was the german a grenade it would actually send the acronate flying with remember it had a 4.5 second fuse so you send it at a har and a high arc an egg grenade flying it would detonate in air that would do some damage to all those soft squishy meat popsicle soldiers on the other end again use it more than 50 meters away it was recommended and it was limited to about 76 meters distance but it could shoot grenades tanks armor pistol was light why did we not have more of those i like it i like it a lot now something that is extremely beautiful and very rare and today very expensive was something that was issued to the german luftwaffe the m30 dreiling drylink because it had three barrels two 12 gauge barrels and one rifle barrel underneath between them it's a beautiful rifle it absolutely is the commercial version had 16 gauge shells and the one issue to the lufthaven maiden 41 to 43 had a 12 gauge the rifle was a 9.3 by 74 millimeter rifle a bullet soft nose so not allowed to be fired at people ideally i suppose this would be a good sub-saharan gun the pilots were issued with an aluminum box with a rifle disassembled with 24 slugs and 24 birdshot and a bunch of rifles rifle bullets and a sling now the interesting thing that makes this a little problematic i suppose is that this rifle that was issued to the pilots whereas pilots had a 45 i believe ice cold dead rifle in a box disassembled an aluminum box this box was to be retrieved after the plane had been crashed and it was a survival rifle for the pilot so they could go hunt and eat after crashing and surviving the crash and having the box in the cockpit survive the crash see where i'm going with this maybe they should have given them a pistol on the leg so they could jump out in the parachute because for this you need to not think of your safety you need to think of your rifle and gently touch down the plane that is about to crash having been only partially shot down and i'm sure having this beautifully well designed hunting style rifle might have been inspired just ever so slightly by hammond goering's fondness for hunting being the right huntmaster but it is a beautiful rifle i just thought it's interesting that you issue a rifle to pilots that they can't take with them if they decide to jump out so i guess why give them a parachute when they have a rifle one thing that happened during the invasion of crete where the german airborne troops that landed there did not fare too well against the heavily armed british troops on the ground one of the problems the german airborne had was their parachutes the way they were designed it literally had to land on their on their hands and knees and roll around which meant they could only carry small nine millimeter mps and before these pistols everything else would have to be dropped in canisters like their heavy weapons and sometimes as it is you get separated from your weaponry from the heavy canisters after that the luftwaffe was looking for a heavy select fire weaponry that could be carried by airborne troops fair enough adolf hitler was not impressed at all by how things went in crete and did not really want to see any more airborne assaults and lose that many people however hermann goering himself continued the development and production of what became the fg-42 which really is the grand ad for the m60 this is a great looking rifle side mounted magazine of 10 and 20 rounds it was fielded 792 by 57 about 600 meters efficient range it was specifically made for telescopic sights of the cfg-42 or the cf-4 but it also had metal flip up sights but this was like the combat version of the m60 it had bayonet tripod pistol grip the only problem there really was was that by a full-sized munition rifle munition and a side mounted magazine if you fill it up with 20 rounds the magazine will stick out a bit and that would not do stability a whole lot and on full auto fire control would be somewhat of an issue so the muscle blast deflector had to be the flash compressor had to be rebuilt they designed a specific flash suppressor for this which inevitably also became an issue for the later post-war american rifle designs and solved the problem in a similar manner now these weapons were predominantly issued to the falcamin yeager as they were originally attended and during the battle of karatan and falae's pocket nearly a quarter of all fg-42s were in the hands of the second parachute division and they were seen there specifically it was a select fire cooled one of the first to incorporate the straight line recoil configuration the layout combined with the saved magazine uh well the problem is it placed the center of gravity and the position of the shoulder stock nearly in line with the longitude axle of the bore featuring increasing controllability during burst and automatic fire like i said things that had to be revealed and if you were thought a little further you had made this weapon belt fed it would have been lighter it would have been easier to control better stabilization belt fed this would have been an amazing weapon absolutely but still still today it was incredibly well built well designed they were not they were not produced in the same number as the sgg44 or certainly or the mauser because they were specifically made for the uh for the luftwaffe for the false champion however for those of you who are now watching these pictures of this really really cool world war ii uh rifle our artist automatic rifle a semi-automatic version is being produced today a replica is being made and i'll see if i can find the information for you i do believe they start about twenty five hundred dollars so they are not cheap but uh at least you can get the feel of carrying one around today and in response to the german army call for cheap weapons programs of cheap and efficient weapons to make up for well production shortages and material shortages towards the end of the war again feeding into the valk storm that needed to be supplied with weapons possibly as a knockoff or response to the ppsh-41 or even to the stand with its welted cheap metal parts alma vacker came up with the emp 44 and now not that emp this wasn't gun that fired uh nine millimeter rounds it would actually feed from the dual mp40 magazine well so it would take mp40 magazines and have two of them side by side however it was crudely made the buttstock was of welded pipes it was efficient up to 100 200 meters a standard nine millimeter uh submachine gun uh or seven machine pistol range the german army looked at it i went now too crude too cheap don't like it and it was discontinued but 15 production numbers were actually made or of course prototypes it's not pretty but if it was efficient and cheap to make it would have a time and place back to some of the bulge storm weaponry because most of you haven't heard of them and some of them are actually rather cool like the volkswa v key one which was basically a bolt operated rifle with a 10 round magazine that would fit the automatic gevia 43 so you had a decent round ammunition and you again utilized magazines that were already in production it wasn't an 8 by 57 millimeter round bolt action and it was built in the czech bruno weapons works that was one that was made for the german wolfstorm don't have many much more information about how many were made and what happened to them and of course if we're going to say vg1 we're going to have to say vg2 as well which was another volkswa with the same magazine feed it was a bold axe rifle with a rotary cylinder bridge it was manufactured last part of the world war ii not sure how many it had a steel plate uh for breech and the vice was not adjustable it had is this the same magazine of the 43 with a 10 round magazine roughly pressed and all parts were manufactured and assembled with a high tolerance only it was effective at shorter firing distances which is surprising because it was a seven by nine two millimeter it should have been able to go up to a bit of a distance but again for the very lightly trained volkswam they were going to be pressed against the russians at relatively close ranges it was easy to treat easy to train easy to use accurate enough for the time and then we fast forward to 45 but not really it's the volkswam carbine 45 semi-automatic same ammunition as the storm kevin 44 so the munition was being made and 30 round magazine and it was a little semi-automatic mp really that was supposed to be made a lot of cheaply fast easy to the bulk storm not much to say about it it was pretty roughly assembled made by stamped parts and only a few cast and machine parts were used as few as possible at least it had a 7x92 cartridge like that same as the sdg-44 it was a bit primitive but again it could have done the job and i have no numbers on how many of them were manufactured or even if there is one but it might be one that would be worth looking into doing a reproduction run of uh reenactors those of us would be interested in how those weapons actually function how much they held up some of those little used weaponry at the end of the war that was literally ripped off based on stand guns and whatever else we could have sort of like the winnipeg spc that was supposed to have been designed at the end of the war by reputable firms no existing models are exist no versions exist of of the vmspec except there's a drawing and then there's some interesting mock-ups because it's been adopted for computer games but quick easy and cheap i guess was the catch phrase of the day and if that had actually gone to manufacturing i don't think it had been much cheaper than that as a complete cheap rip-off of the stand which the germans did and speaking of he goes the potsdam the german version of the sten and nine millimeter three kilograms of weight 32 round magazine of regular nine millimeter this is pretty much as close as it gets to uh this den it was a good idea it was cheap and easy and again at the end of the war it could have seen its place of those i don't want one but it existed and there it is that was a few words about some of the german special different or lesser-known infantry weapons of world war ii that i could sort of dig up in between doing everything else i'm trying to do for you guys there's more and more on this will uh come around and daniel i got your requests while the middle of doing this um i think it was called something else and i think i found what it could be and i'm going to expand the german strange weapons a little bit in episodes to come uh there's i'm trying to find out we're just trying to make the decision of what speculation uh should go under a q a single topic or what should go into my last nazi secret series because we are still uh shooting and editing on that and there's still a lot more conclusions to come what i think i'm gonna do is do you guys four or eight episodes uh depending how long they're gonna be you know me i try to put everything in there and i try to show you everything that i see because i think it's important if i walk through a place that gives me conclusions from what i'm seeing i need to show you what it is i'm basing my conclusions on so i'm not just pulling it out by giving you a single clip here and there that's the wonderful thing about what we can do here on youtube is i can take the time and show you everything i'm seeing whereas if we were doing this purely for tv and the tv episodes will be considerably shorter because you know i have very very good conclusion to conclusion here i can take you with me all the way through the journey and if you come and we're talking about german specialty weapons that somehow have morphed into modern weapons of today i think they might be long there i will try to make some sort of a educated guess based on my limited brain capacity anyway you all have a wonderful amazing thanksgiving i'm going to spend most of it either feeding people or i will be sitting from my computer presenting more episodes to you please do me a favor and uh besides liking the videos see if you can't share share what i'm doing here because the more followers i get and the more people who see some of the video documentaries that we are all doing here together i could sit here and answer your questions if you didn't send them to me and the more followers i get the more we get on up in the front page and the more commercial revenue i make that i always flip into my next trip out there that's why i can do this because of the commercials that you are forced to see um because like i'm not there's no donate button here and there's no studio paying so when i go overseas and i film things that's the youtube revenue and the more followers the more of that and the better equipment i can bring some of you have mentioned ground penetrating radar and things like that they all turn into a little bit of money i would love to bring a team with me when i go back to in the spring back to lois alicia and uh i'm not done with kilmost off don't even think it you guys don't know half of what happened there but we're not done yet and it will be it would be better if i brought more people uh both technicians and techs and soldiers and where where we're going mountain goats and you will all see what i'm talking about you

Channel: Lost Battlefields w Tino Struckmann

Views: 199,230

Rating: 4.8182964 out of 5

Keywords: war, military, strange, german, ww2, nazi, guns, stg 44, mp 40, kugelpanzer, volks sturm, rifle, rifles, secret, glassgrenade, hitler, odd, tino, struckmann, lost battlefields, historian, documentary, weird, conspiracy, lesser known, unknown, hidden, forgotten

Id: w3pNdNOZO6I

Length: 76min 53sec (4613 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020