The MG 08/15 Updated Between the Wars

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm Ian McCallum and I am here today at the Moorthy auction house where we are taking a look at in MgO 815 but this isn't a normal 815 of course this is an OE 15 stayed in German service probably until World War 2 see at the end of World War 1 the Treaty of Versailles allowed the German army to maintain only a relatively small number of machine guns right about a thousand although this was later increased to almost 1500 so what the German military did is they took the best guns that they had they sorted through them and they took the best condition examples and they held on to those and updated them as much as possible well the most modern machine gun that the Germans had in quantity was the mg o 815 and so this would see this would continue to be the standard ver Mach machine gun until 1936 when it was actually phased out of service in favour of the new mg 34s however these would remain in use with rear-echelon and reserve type units throughout world war ii you'd find these in places like the Atlantic Wall and and there were perfectly serviceable machine guns and by that point the conditions the Versailles Treaty didn't really matter so why not keep them one of the other cool things well cool for the Germans at the end of World War one the Allied powers confiscated most of the German machine guns most of their ordnance in general however the the terms of the surrender of arms didn't talk about spare parts and when the Germans had manufactured and issued maxim guns like this they were issued out with two spare locks for every gun as well as spare barrels well when the Allies confiscated the guns they didn't say anything about the spare bids they just wanted the guns so the German military was left while it was had a limited number of about a thousand machine guns it had like five times as many locks as it could potentially ever need so that really helped help justify keeping on guns like the O 815 here they had tons of the expensive parts already manufactured and in hand so what do you do if you're limited to a know eight fifteen and you're Germany and you want to try and maintain some sort of military readiness under terms of the Versailles Treaty well you go ahead and you start modernizing those Oh 815 s and so there's six or eight different things that the Germans did to improve and update these guns some of them pretty darn significant and finding a gun like this that has all of those improvements made to it is really quite scarce so let's take a look through and see what they did all right we've got a lot to go through here so let's start at the front of the gun where they added a second bipod mount on the original World War one pattern you had to set the bipod back here and that was kind of really hard to shoot with because that sets it right at this pivot point in the middle of the gun I've done some shooting with these they're really not easy to shoot accurately that way by putting the bipod out here at the muzzle and it's still not great but it is better so these use the exact same bipod go ahead and pull this one off here for a moment also worth pointing out that in addition to mounting the bipod at the front they also added just a little bit of flexibility to it the original rear of my rear bipod mount didn't allow this they also moved the drain valve of the gun up to the very front they substantially simplified the steam vent arrangement so this is where well steam vents out of the gun if you get it hot enough to actually boil water in the jacket and you aren't necessarily always going to do that and of course you don't want to just have water leaking out here if you're just transporting the gun so there's a cap if you're only anticipating very limited shooting or transport you leave the cap on when you want to actually set up your hose this is a modern hose but it's an original connector here what you would do is just flip that on turn it 90 degrees and now you've got your steam vent locked on there for comparison's sake here's the World War one version of that which is this big blocky thing comes off like so really it's this is needlessly complex and that's why they replaced it they also added this bracket to the rear of the water jacket that is for an anti-aircraft site how are you gonna make sure that the anti-aircraft sight is actually there to be used well naturally you'll just strap it to the side of the gun so they added brackets here this spring-loaded plunger allows me to take out the anti-aircraft spider sight this has a little spring-loaded catch right here so you put that on there pull the spring rotate it around lock it in place naturally you also need a rear sight to go with it and that you can't use the standard sights on the gun because that's spider sights so much higher so they retrofitted the top covers to include a rear peep sight for use with the anti-aircraft sights this just has the simple sliding metal block here and when it's back this piece can flip up and down and that block locks it in either position it's actually pretty simple setup now the drum brackets also changed you can see a different configuration here this was actually a change that was made for the larger mg oh wait because on them what they wanted to do was basically be able to hang one of the the same belt drums that the OE 15 used but using this bracket the drum would actually interfere with the sled mount so what they did is design a bracket that holds the drum a little higher up and that prevents it from interfering with the the OE mounting this one has just been dropped onto this gun and it has been serial numbered to match so this clearly became the standard modern part for both guns after the war now while we're looking at this older World War one gun this does actually also have one of the updates done after the war and that is this block on the side of the top cover one of the problems with the Oh 8 15 s was that the top cover had this really annoying habit of slamming shut on your fingers when you were trying to work on it so you would lift the top cover up and then it would just fall back down so this was introduced that's a way to prevent that from happening and you can see right there that little tab is catching on the side of the top plate and if you want to lower it you have to push in that little button and then you can lower the top cover when you open it because it's curved right there it's going to snap into position save your fingers this world war 2 gun has an even better version of that system where it doesn't have the lock hanging out there at all but it does have a spring built-in so that now there's tension on this and it will pop into the upward position there like so and it still won't fall down on your fingers until you pull it all the way back down so that's very much actually kind of like a nineteen nineteen eighty-four top cover I think for me the coolest element that was added to these guns was this newly designed or modified feed block because it's got this latch on you can snap it up or down and this allowed you to use both the all the old original cloth Macs and belts but the problem was those those belts have issues when they get worn they get loose and cartridges don't stay tightly held in them and they cause cross feeds in the feed block and even if they're good belts if they get wet they can tend to shrink and then they'll hold the cartridges too tightly and you can't extract the cartridges out of them in the solution to this really is to have a metal belt and so the Germans developed a metal belt they had a an early developmental one and then really what happened was they adopted the 1933 belt for use with the mg34 machine gun fantastic belt but it doesn't work in a maxim gun so they designed this alteration to the feed block which allows you to snap that thing I should I believe down is four steel belts and up is four cloth belt so you can use either one and these feed blocks are a really cool element for someone today who wants to shoot maximum guns and not have to deal with trying to both find and maintain hundred-year-old cloth ammunition belts so that's really cool and there are two other little things that are on here one is actually a modification to the gun and that is this which is not in a standard World War one pattern Oh 815 this is an oil bottle and ruch for maintaining the gun they added that to the stocks and the other one is just so very German it's not actually a permanent part of the gun but they added a leather very gingerly take this off they added a leather protective cover to the pistol grip because Germany I guess and this gun actually still has that and that is an extremely rare accessory to find you can obviously see how easy these things can be destroyed lost worn out and so on so it is really quite unusual to find a gun like this still intact with all of these modifications and in such great shape as this one is this really is a cool snap shot into the state of the the varimax armaments in like 1935 when this was most of what they were using so if you're interested in having it yourself this is a curio and relic fully transferable legally registered machine gun and it's coming up for sale here at more fees if you take a look at the description text below you'll find a link to there will you find a link to forgotten weapons comm and from there you can take a second link over to the morphe auction catalog page for this thing see all of their pictures which include all of the extra bits that come with the gun most of its up here but I think there are a couple other things that were also included anyway they also have their description their price estimate everything else you would want to know if you decide you want to place a bid on it thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 229,536

Rating: 4.978384 out of 5

Keywords: ww1, ww2, world war, great war, weimar, versailles, wehrmacht, mg0815, 08/15, mg 08/15, mg08, maxim, machine gun, nfa, transferrable update, updated, upgraded, mg34, metal belt, grip cover, bipod, jacket, 8mm, 8x57, german, germany, lock, history, development, comparison, disassembly, top cover, improved, improve, aa sights, antiaircraft, spider sights, spider, mccollum, forgotten weapons, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, full auto

Id: XUr-BOlOelM

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/diarchtct]

TIL what "08/15" stands for.

Probably nobody except Germans will get this.

[u/PsychicTandemWargoat]

I better fucking see this gun as an MMG, I swear to fuck DICE, I'm only here for the guns.

Please.