Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company taking a look at an extremely rare German submachine gun prototype. I would call this a field trialled prototype, because we know these did see combat service, but they were never made in very large quantity. This is an MP40/I, or slash I, Roman numeral one. Not two, despite the fact that it has
two mags, the designation is slash one. And the motivation for doing this
... was based in this kind of human, very basic human thing of the grass
is always greener on the other side. Whatever the other guy's got is probably better than what
you've got. Or at least you have a tendency to think so. Ironically at this point ... at the
Eastern Front during World War Two surveys taken of combat soldiers,
reports from the front reported that the Germans thought that the
Soviets had better submachine guns, and the Soviets thought that the Germans had
better submachine guns. So it kind of cut both ways. However, the very quantifiable complaint that the German
soldiers had was that they were equipped with guns that had 32 round magazines, where the Soviets
had the Papasha-41 with a 71 round magazine. So more than double the capacity. And a lot of German soldiers wanted something
with a larger magazine to make up the difference. We'll ignore for the moment the fact that the
Soviet gun fired about twice as fast and had pretty close to the same actual
time of fire, but that's a separate issue. In late 1942 the Erma company
(we think; probably the Erma company), started experimenting with a way to incorporate two
magazines into a standard MP40 submachine gun. They produced a number of prototypes. This was
formally recognized as the Gerät 3004 in June of 1943, and a limited number of them were manufactured. Now
these weren't produced brand new from the factory, the existing documented serial numbers span far too great
a range of guns, and they come from two different factories. They definitely were not
produced as a single large batch, instead a bunch of guns were brought back to be
refurbished and set up with this magazine system. So let's go ahead and take a closer look at it, and I'll show you
all the various changes that were made, and how this thing works. So if your paltry, obsolete, old-fashioned,
single magazine MP40 just isn't good enough, and will immediately get you killed on the steppe, well, we
can do the classic ... mad scientist maniacally laughing, we have Frankenstein's, or Dr Frankenstein's,
MP40 here with a double magazine capacity. So the core idea here was to
take the original magazine housing (which is a separate component that
slides onto the receiver and is fitted in place), take that off, and replace it with a new magazine
housing that can hold two magazines. However, there is still only
one barrel, there's only one bolt. So, how do you ... align two separate magazines without
having to completely rebuild an entirely new gun? The answer is that you actually build the gun
to have basically this space for three magazines, put two of them in this sliding block so that you can push
this front lever in, and then slide this back and forth. There are two little positions that it snaps into, and this way you have one magazine in
position, you fire that magazine. When it's empty instead of having to remove that magazine
and replace it from a magazine pouch, which is probably rather slow to do, you
instead just slide this to the other position. You now have another loaded
32 round magazine ready to go. Because this fires from an open bolt, worst
case all you have to do is re-cock the bolt handle, and then you're ready to use your second magazine.
Now, once you've fired both then you're stuck. Because these were never formally adopted,
there isn't really any tactical doctrine out there that was written on whether you're
supposed to reload the empty magazine while you have the full one in here,
or what the idea was supposed to be. I will point out that this actually does come out. So long as we lift the button, we can
slide this completely out of the gun. So there is the magazine housing unit. Note that where the original MP40 has a magazine
release button on the side of the mag housing, this contraption moves the
magazine release button to the back. So that is one magazine in place, push the button
and you can pull the magazine out the bottom. We can go ahead and put both magazines
in there, and that is your 64 round capacity. Now I think it's important to point out that on the
original MP40 you have a tubular steel receiver, and you have an ejection port cutout there,
and then there's another ... smaller sort of rectangular cutout in the bottom
of the receiver for the magazine to come in. But you maintain this nice strong chunk of
metal here, and that's not a weak part of the gun. I suppose technically it is weaker than the
solid tube, but this didn't cause problems. In order to fit this new expanded magazine housing a substantially
larger amount of material had to be cut out of the receiver. Notice that now the entire bottom half of the receiver is
cut out and gone. There's very little supporting bulk there. That is definitely a fragile area now. If you look
on this side you have just a few millimetres, that's barely a quarter inch, of material actually
holding the receiver together down in this area. It's largely dependent on this add-on piece. And if you look at the material that was used, if you
look at the thickness of this original mag housing versus the thickness over here of this guy,
you can see that the MP40/I is twice as thick. They knew that they had a fragility problem there, and they used a
much stouter magazine housing to try and compensate for it. We have a couple other subtle changes.
The ejector was shortened just slightly. So that is your standard MP40, and that's the dual magazine one. You can see it's not shortened very much, but it is just a little bit. And the butt plate was actually
reshaped on the double magazine gun. You see the problem is with an original stock
and butt plate, this comes too far forward. It will hit these magazine catches and you
can't properly close the stock on the gun. So the guns that were modified with
these double magazine assemblies the bottom end of the butt plate has been cut off
and shortened. And you can see the difference there. That's so that it will properly close. There are no markings on this
gun that identify it as an MP40/I. However there are serial numbers on both of
the two components of the magazine assembly, and on an original gun they should match the rest of the gun. So we have our serial number out here, 6081i, and we also have that on the back of the receiver
back here. This is actually the lower frame. And then we see that serial
number on both of these parts. There are fake examples of these out there.
Some of the magazine well assemblies came into the country by themselves, and it's not that
difficult to assemble them onto a standard MP40. Although typically when they have been done
that way, you don't see the other changes. So you don't see the difference in the ejector,
and you don't see the difference in the butt plate. So the process for shooting this would be to have
both magazines loaded. You would then fire until the centre magazine, the one that's being
used, is empty. You then grab the front, depress that latch, slide this over to the other side until
it locks into position, that properly aligns the second mag. You would then be able to fire that one until it is empty. You could grab this mag, pull it out and reload it, leaving
you with the one mag in the centre of the gun still usable. Or you could wait until both magazines were empty (this one's a
little stiff), pull them both out and reload them both at the same time. Ultimately, this was not adopted for
a number of pretty good reasons. It gets very heavy, you know carrying
around 64 rounds of ammo out front where it... This is a front heavy gun to begin with, add a second
magazine to that and it gets particularly front heavy. The cutout required in the receiver tube in order
to put this thing on made the guns relatively fragile. It ... became much easier to bend this
gun right there at the magazine tube. Something like two-thirds of the material has been removed
at this point, and that was almost certainly a problem. Now they did see some combat use. The Erma
company would go on to have a system like this in their EMP 44 design, although that was also
ultimately cancelled and didn't go into production. And really the solution to this is ...
kind of just learn to reload the gun. This is arguably not actually that much of a benefit,
cool as it may be. It's a great sort of videogame thing, but perhaps not so much in real life when you have
to lug it around and you run the risk of bending it. And when, you know, you fire two
magazines out of this and then you've got quite a long process to reload the whole thing.
So how much time do you really save overall? Some of you will probably have noticed that
I did a video on one of these a little while back, I am redoing it because this is a
completely authentic original example. The one that I did previously, being the first
one I'd ever managed to get my hands on, was a standard MP40 that had been retrofitted
with this, not by the Germans, but after the fact. And so there were a couple of elements
to it that actually weren't quite correct. So this is how the MP40/I should actually look. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, definitely check out
the Morphy auction catalogue to see some more details on it, as well as all of the other cool stuff that they have.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thank you very much for watching.
too authentic
And a suppressor too why not, it existed and would just be cool to have some more variety, Sten could get one too.
How about extra mag housing. Load out with sets of two mags. Just replace the pair....
Wow now I want this in the damn game ...
even red orchestra 2 has the mp40 with double mags lol
I just want my MP40 to have retractable stock.