Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and I'm here again at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
in the September of 2014 Premier Auction.
And one gun in particular that one of you guys requested I take a look at
is in fact the world's most outlandish, out-of-place firearm I would say,
and that is the M30 Luftwaffe survival rifle.
These are actually gorgeous commercial-grade "Drillings"
(so two shotgun barrels over a rifle barrel), made by Sauer & Sohn.
They are called the M30. It was a 1930 commercial gun
that was then purchased by the Luftwaffe.
This is the emergency weapon if your plane gets shot down, believe it or not.
They come in a case, a big solid aluminium case,
with some nice, very military, stencilled markings on it.
You would not expect this gorgeous rifle to come out of this rather Spartan case, but so they did.
The two shotgun barrels on here are 12 gauge,
and they are over a 9.3x74 rimmed rifle barrel.
And that's a rather large cartridge: roughly equivalent ballistically to like .375 Nitro Express.
That's a full-on, African plains, dangerous game kind of cartridge.
So about 2,500 of these were made in total.
And they were made from April of 1941 through till about September of 1942.
By that point I guess it became obvious to everyone involved that they were spending
way more money on these guns than you needed for a survival rifle.
... I should say these were mostly issued to aircraft crews flying over North Africa,
and I guess someone thought that North Africa was full of lions, and tigers, and elephants.
Which it's not, that's actually central and southern Africa.
But they went and issued these anyway.
That 9.3x74R cartridge will take down pretty much anything.
I'm not sure how practical it really is in the North African Sahara Desert though.
So anyway, the gun ... comes apart like any break action gun,
fits into this case very nicely.
The cases had a bunch of other gear in them. They came with 20 rounds of rifle ammunition,
and 20 rounds of Brenneke slugs for the 12-gauge barrel.
And then another 25 rounds of birdshot for the other 12 gauge barrel.
Cleaning gear, instruction manual, all sorts of stuff in this nice padded case.
So that would fit into the airplane cockpit,
and if you crash you can go pull it out when you needed it.
So there are two triggers and three barrels, so you know there has to be some overlap.
And the way that works is that the front ... trigger will fire the rifle barrel,
and it will also fire the right shotgun barrel. So, this guy.
Now that right shotgun barrel is choked for birdshot,
the left shotgun barrel is choked for slugs.
And the left barrel is actually regulated to hit
at the same point of impact at 100 yards as the rifle barrel.
Now to adjust from firing the right shotgun barrel to the rifle,
we have this button and sliding lever here.
Push that button down and slide it forward, that changes the trigger
from the ... shotgun barrel in the back to the rifle barrel in the front.
The easy way to notice that is this is the rear sight for the rifle,
and when I switch to the shotgun barrel it drops down out of sight.
When I switch back to rifle, it pops up. Pretty cool and handy feature there.
You can see there are sling swivels on the gun.
And there are a few distinguishing Nazi marks, since this was a German military arm.
See there, ... it's not the standard style of eagle, but there is an eagle holding a swastika on the right barrel.
And then the guns are also marked J.P. Sauer & Sohn, Suhl, those are the manufacturers obviously.
Like I said, this was a commercial model gun, ... first put on the market in 1930.
Operation is pretty much like any break action gun.
Pull this over to the side, breaks open, so we have all three of our barrels there.
That breaking open the gun obviously cocks all three of them,
all three ... strikers, and then closes back together.
So here's the case. This is not the case for the gun you just saw, this is a separate case.
It is being auctioned separately.
So the firearm is lot number 755 in the September auction, and the case I believe is lot 754.
You can see this case doesn't have any of the internal pieces.
It would normally store ammunition over here, the gun's in here,
and then it had some documentation and some cleaning gear.
It does still have, engraved in the aluminium, the contents of this: so what you are supposed to have.
We can take a closer look at that.
Even without reading German, you can see down here we've got
a box of 9.3x74R rifle ammo.
Got some Brenneke slugs, 65mm.
We have shot, 3.5mm in diameter shot, so.
So there you go. If you want to put together a joint venture of bombing Allied forces
and then going for a safari,
nothing better to do it with than your [M30] survival rifle.
Obviously it didn't take very long before the Germans realised that this was
really a kind of ludicrous expenditure and they stopped doing this.
... They'd originally ordered 4,000, and only about 2,500 were actually manufactured
and delivered before they cut the program short.
And they are in fact actually today fairly rare, they show up.
They are probably the most gorgeous issue military arm you'll ever see,
but totally impractical.
Now at the entirely opposite end of the spectrum
is what the United States military did for an aircrew survival rifle.
This was after the war, this was in the 1950s.
But rather than go expensive and fancy, they went cheap and simple.
This is an M6 US Air Force property survival rifle.
These have been copied many, many times by many different commercial manufacturers in the US.
But the original military version has a couple of interesting features to it.
To start with it only has a 14.5 inch barrel,
so this one is registered with the NFA as such.
Most of the reproductions have 18.5 inch barrels because they are a rifle over a shotgun.
If you have less than an ... 18 inch barrel you have an NFA item with a shotgun.
So these are, instead of being 12 gauge over 9.3x74R, these are .22 Hornet over .410.
Which kind of makes more sense for a survival gun.
You don't necessarily need an elephant cartridge or a wildebeest cartridge.
And these have a number of neat features to them,
so I think we're going to be better off looking at this up close,
so I can show you all of the cool stuff.
Alright, so this is the M6 survival rifle up close.
It's got this nice black finish, actually really surprising that the finish is all intact on this.
The original US Air Force ones are not actually all that common.
It has a little property stamp here that we can zoom in on.
So you got the little crossed cannons and a "PA".
Now what we're really interested in here is the mechanism.
So let's start with the sights, there all ready. ... There is a two option flip-up sight.
So you can just barely see that sight is marked "410" for the shotgun.
And that one is marked "22" for the rifle barrel, which is of course .22 Hornet.
These were made by the Ithaca Gun Company.
On the other side,
here on the other side we can see the main military markings.
USAF Property, serial number.
And this is the "Rifle/Shotgun, Survival, Calibre .22/.410, M6."
Now to load this we have a break action lever,
very much like an early split-frame revolver.
Open that up and then it folds, like so.
Now it didn't actually have a latch to lock in the folded position, it just opened up like that.
From this position you could then load it,
you've got the .22 barrel on top, and the .410 on the bottom.
And we do have this extractor, no ejector on the gun.
It's not extracted, it comes out slightly.
So you load your two rounds, snap the gun shut.
You have a really big hammer on there.
So this plunger allows you to determine which barrel you're going to fire.
When you bring it up, like it is now, this block hits the firing pin for the top barrel.
When you push it to the bottom, the block now hits the firing pin for the bottom barrel.
The trigger is this big bar, which is really fairly uncomfortable.
Mechanically very simple, so it was cheap and easy to manufacture.
But this is not a sporting gun you'd take out for kicks, like the Sauer M30 is.
Keep this from firing too hard: depress that, and voilà.
This does have a safety, so you can't push the hammer forward and accidentally fire a round
unless you have the trigger depressed.
The other interesting thing that it has,
and this has been copied to some extent by the commercial guns,
is ammunition storage in the buttstock.
So we have this rubber-coated cheek piece, and a button right here.
Push that button in, we can lift up the cheek piece,
and we have storage inside for 9 rounds of .22 Hornet and 4 rounds of .410.
And that's what these were issued with.
These were in use with the US Air Force from the 1950s until about the 1970s.
They were stashed on heavy bombers, Strategic Air Force bombers,
for the same reason that the Germans used it.
In case you crashed and needed to either defend yourself against wildlife,
or a little bit of a perfunctory defence against people, or simply hunt for food.
So thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video,
take a look at a couple different extreme ends of the survival gun idea.
Again, ... all of these are up for auction at Rock Island, the September of 2014 Premier Auction.
The case here is item 754, this particular Drilling is 755.
There are actually a couple of other survival Drillings in the auction as well.
You can check out Rock Island's site to see those.
And of course the US Air Force M6 survival rifle is item 3395.
Good luck with your bidding if you'd like to become the proud new owner of any of these.
And I appreciate you watching, tune in again.