Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at one of the Lugers that is going to be in their upcoming April of 2020 Premier Auction. Now this isn't a standard typical Luger, this is an Artillery Luger. I should point out that that name was never actually formally used by the Germans, This was known as an LP08, Lange Pistole, Long Pistol, Model of 1908. And it originates with a ... desire of the German Artillery Corps to replace their incredibly obsolete Reichsrevolvers, the 1879 and 1883 Reichsrevolvers, for the field artillery. Now there are a couple different forms of artillery
in the German military when this is going down. They have the field artillery, which is basically light
artillery, 75mm guns and things in about that range that are intended to keep up with
the infantry and provide fire support. And then you have the foot artillery,
which is basically the heavy artillery. Heavier guns, siege guns,
siege mortars, that sort of thing. They're a separate branch of the service. You then
also have some stuff like coastal defence artillery. The Artillery Luger here was developed specifically
for the field artillery, the light fast-moving guys. And the Reichsrevolver had been a nice, handy, compact
weapon for them, but it was tremendously obsolete. The heavier artillery guys were using
carbines, they had things like the Gewehr 91 which is basically a carbine
version of the Commission 1888 rifle. And they would keep those until they transitioned
to Mauser 98s and other things later on. But what's really interesting to me is the
creativity and sort of the unorthodox nature of what the German military
came up with for the light artillery. So this question first came up in 1907 when the Artillery
decided that they specifically wanted a pistol calibre carbine. They tested the options that were out there at the
time which were the C96 Mauser, the Broomhandle, the Frommer interestingly, and the Borchardt,
which is of course the predecessor to the Luger. At this point there are no Luger carbines, there are just Luger
pistols, and they have been developed from the larger Borchardt. The Borchardt was available from the
very beginning with a shoulder stock, because it was a kind of big and clumsy pistol
that was much better suited to being a carbine. Well, in 1907 none of these guns really were adequately
suitable for the German Artillery and they didn't adopt any. The question came up again however after in 1908 the standard
Luger was adopted as the Pistole 08, the German military sidearm. So the project gets dropped in the lap of
a guy named Captain Adolf Fischer, and by 1913 he [and his team] finishes ...
developing what would be this, the LP08. In 1913 it's formally approved by Kaiser
Wilhelm II ready to go into production. Like 1912, 1913 they build about 50 of them. Production
doesn't really start until World War One begins. It's approved before World War One begins, but there isn't really
any huge urgency to get things moving until the war kicks off, understandably. Right at the beginning these would be
put into production by two different firms, DWM would build them through the very end
of the war and produce about 155,000 total. And then the Royal Erfurt Arsenal also began production in
1914, but only produced them for about the first year of the war. And they would produce a total of about 23,000. So we're looking at about 180,000 of these
total manufactured during World War One. Now, the more interesting part to me
is what ended up happening to this gun. So first off it's an interesting and
creative solution to an artillery armament. Like you want a very ... handy gun. You want
something that's going to be lightweight and easy to carry around without getting in the
way of these guys whose real job is keeping up with 75mm field guns and supporting the infantry. But because they are supporting the infantry, they're
absolutely going to be in positions from time to time where they are overrun by enemy troops and they
have to actually use small arms in self-defence. So they need something that has
firepower but also a lot of portability. And it's interesting that the Germans were
kind of the only ones to recognise the potential of a semi-automatic pistol with a shoulder
stock and a long barrel to work in this role. You can see that there's a leather holster
strapped onto the shoulder stock here. This whole holster assembly goes right
on your belt, pistol goes in the holster, and it's barely larger than a typical service sidearm. However, you can detach the thing if
you need it, attach the shoulder stock, and that gives you a third point of contact for shooting. As a semi-automatic pistol it offers a
tremendous increase in firepower compared to either a standard pistol that's
harder to shoot accurately at range, or a bolt action rifle which may be much
more powerful but is also much slower to use. And it's this flexibility and this kind of
unprecedented level of firepower for the time that would lead to the Artillery Luger
being thrown into a bunch of other situations that it wasn't originally designed for,
but at which it did pretty well. So these guns would be picked up by aviators ... from the
very beginning of the war because, well, for the same reasons. They offer a lot of firepower without having to
manually work an action which is, of course, difficult to do when you're flying around
in a rickety World War One era aircraft. In that role they would be replaced by
machine guns within a couple years, but where Allied pilots ... you know
had hand guns, or maybe shotguns, German pilots and observers had this which really
kind of blurs the line and gives them a lot of firepower. More distinctively I think is its
adoption by the Sturmtruppen. So a couple years into the war Germany
develops the concept (and they're not the only ones), but they develop the concept they call the
Sturmtruppen, the storm troops, the assault troops, whose job is to basically infiltrate enemy
lines make use of cover, open order tactics. And deliver fast hard-hitting attacks
where they're maybe not anticipated. These troops have to be mobile, they have to be flexible,
and they have to have as much firepower as possible. And they realise that, "Hey, we've got ... these really
long Gewehr 98 Mauser rifles. Those aren't so great. Well, we've also got the shorter Kar98AZ carbines
intended for, say, the heavy artillery troops. Those are better, but you know what, the field
artillery have these little pistol calibre carbines and you don't have to work the action, you've got more
ammunition in them than a bolt action rifle to begin with." And it's at that point in 1916 that the drum
magazine is introduced for the Artillery Luger, specifically for the storm troops.
This is a magazine that holds 32 rounds. They did, by the way, experiment with full-auto versions
of the Artillery Luger. They never went anywhere, the Luger is just not really set up
well to be a fully automatic firearm. ... The reciprocating components are far too light, it has
reliability issues in full-auto. It fires very, very fast. Those experiments never went anywhere, and frankly, for the Sturmtruppen semi-auto is kind of
just the right blend of accuracy and firepower. So with these drums, and they
made a lot of these drums by the way, about 900,000 of them over the course of the war. And they issued them out, initially at least,
at a rate of 10 of these drums for every gun. So you basically have a guy carrying a pile of drums for the guy
in front of him who had an Artillery Luger, to keep the guy supplied. And with these they become this really
interesting and kind of unique firearm. You will see the United States,
well the Allies, the whole Entente, trying to emulate this a little bit with the
Pedersen device which never saw service. And that's probably a good thing
because it was not a reliable system. But the Germans have this combination of compact
assault firepower that's really pretty interesting. So let's go ahead and take a closer
look at some of the features of this, because I've rambled on for
quite some time about it already. Let's start out with just the pistol, which
is fundamentally simply a Luger pistol. 9mm Parabellum calibre. Lugers of
course were also made in 7.65 Parabellum, but all of the German
military contracts were for 9mm. The barrel has been stretched out
to eight inches, or about 200mm. We have a tangent rear sight graduated
out to 800 metres. And it can be zeroed, you can zero it for elevation right there. You see
that little screw with the two holes, that allows you to adjust the rear notch up and down. It is also adjustable for windage via the front sight,
you can see a similar screw adjustment out there. The markings are basically going to be
the same as standard German P08 Lugers. So we have a date stamp
over the chamber, this is 1917, which tells us that it will have been a DWM manufactured
gun, because DWM was the only facility making them after 1914. The serial numbers fit the standard
pattern of German military Lugers. So we've got the full serial number
down here on the front of the frame. They were done in units of 1,000 with letter suffixes
and those serial number ranges reset every year. So 1917 started with 1 A and went up, I have 837 C here,
and then in 1918 they would restart again with 1 A. And we've got our Imperial German proof
marks here on the right side of the gun. So I'm not going to go over all the details of the Luger.
Everything else mechanically is just like a standard P08. The holster that was made for these
is a combination of holster and stock. So we have a flat board stock here that clamps onto
the back of the pistol, and I'll show you that in a moment. It ... has a piece of leather that is screwed
onto the stock here, which loops around and attaches to the same tab
that holds the holster closed. That's to hold the holster onto the stock because
this entire thing goes on your belt as a single unit. At the front we have a little protective
leather cap here, so I can undo that and then (be gentle with this), this is the stock attachment lug. We have a lever on this side that locks the holster
in place, so you can see it doing its thing down there. Flat to slip onto the pistol, and then you
rotate it like that and it locks it in place. And the stocks are numbered to match the
guns. So this is the correct matching stock. To put this on we're just going to
drop that into the lug and rotate it down, (get this out of the way), and then pop that lever up, and it locks on actually nice and tight. It may seem a little bit awkward to have all
this leather paraphernalia hanging off the stock. This could all be detached. You could pretty
easily slip the stock out of the holster assembly. You would do that by lifting up this tab, that is going to allow the holster to lift off like so. Notice we have this attachment here, which allows
you to more ... firmly attach the holster into the stock. Also worth pointing out, inside here we actually have the sling coiled up in there. You have a ... magazine loading tool in here. You have a cleaning rod in here. So all the extra
tools that you would need are built into the holster. This stays on the holster, this is screwed to it as is this flap. ... It's a very thin board stock, but it certainly does the job of giving you an
adequate length of pull, and a nice shoulder rest ... with which to fire the gun nice and accurately. Now when the Sturmtruppen started using these, the limitation
that became readily apparent was the 8 round magazine. So that's when they developed
this 32 round drum magazine. It's got the same stick as a standard magazine,
so it loads in there just as you would expect. This makes for a kind of awkward looking package,
but this just kind of hangs down below the gun. And it's a bit of a compromise, but to have
the extra ammunition capacity is well worth it. These drums were also issued with a loading tool
because the spring tension in here is really quite strong. To wind the thing up you have to actually
extend this handle because it's really tight. You can load the first handful of
rounds into this without a loading tool, but in order to fill it you really have to have that tool.
And it's just a lever that gives you some ... extra strength to push the follower
down. So like I said 32 rounds total. This actually once it's wound up acts as an
indicator for how much ammunition you have left. It's a little hard to see, but we have 32 there, 22 remaining there, 17, I think yeah there's a 27. So every five rounds.
You can indicate down to 12 rounds right here. And then you've got 12 rounds between
there and the top of the magazine. These would go on to be used in the MP-18.
In the MP-18 there was a much shorter magazine well, so there's a
spacer that went on them. These are also issued with a magazine cover to protect the feed lips and to keep gunk out of them, since a bunch of spare magazines were
issued with every stormtrooper's LP08. I mentioned that a lot of these were made, well there
you go. Almost half a million serial number right here. There are a couple different companies that made the
drums, but those sorts of details are a subject for a later video. So you might wonder where this was in World War Two if it was
such a revolutionary and effective design in World War One. And the answer is the pistol calibre carbine
was basically replaced by the submachine gun right at the very end of World War One.
So Germany adopts the MP-18, and by World War Two anyone who is in a position to
... be really well-suited to having something like this, well, they probably got an MP40 instead, or an MP38. These were not in Germany's front-line
small arms inventory in World War Two. So you don't see them produced during the war.
There was a little bit of production after World War One. Of course the Treaty of Versailles put strict limitations
on what Germany could produce in the way of arms, and long-barrelled pistols were recognised as an
effective military thing and they were severely controlled. There was a little bit of production of long barreled Lugers,
mostly for the American commercial market, in the 1920s. There were a couple small orders that were fulfilled by Mauser, which took over from DWM on Luger production in the '30s. ... Well, so those orders are like there was
one for Iran, there was one for Thailand (Siam). And those were largely fulfilled using
leftover existing DWM production barrels that were already kind of a new old stock condition. So that's about all you'll see for production
of the Artillery Luger after World War One, because it was replaced by the submachine gun. So to my mind, these are a really cool element
of World War One small arms development. ... You know, there weren't a whole lot of weapons
in World War One that saw a lot of evolution during the course of the war, and this is one of them. So this, along with a couple other examples of
the type, is coming up for sale at Rock Island in April, the end of April. So you can check out their
pictures and description of this particular one, or check out their catalogue for the other Artillery Lugers
in there, as well as everything else they've got for sale. Thanks for watching. [ cc by sk cn2 ]
1917: "Hey we made this longer Luger for rear echelon troops so they have something better than a pistol, but isn't a rifle"
Sturmtruppen: "yeah imma take that"
2001: "Hey we made this MP7 for rear echelon troops so they have something better than a pistol, but isn't a rifle"
KSK: "yeah imma take that"
buyer: smg or pistol?
manufacturer: yes!