The story begins when the German military was really concerned that its standard issue rifle
was too big and too bulky and required too much practice to shoot well
for it to be an effective personal defence weapon for a lot of soldiers
whose primary role wasn't infantry, men like artillery crews and air crews.
They needed something that was a lot more compact, more portable and easier to use.
Something that wouldn't get in the way of their primary duties than the standard issue rifle.
And so Germany's largest and most famous arms manufacturer
started putting out a much more compact high-capacity - sort of a personal defence weapon
that could still be pushed into use at long range to combat enemy threats.
This could be the MP7, or it could be 100 years earlier with the Lange Pistole 08.
[ LP08: The First German Assault Weapon ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I thought it would be interesting today
to take a look at the origin of the first German assault weapon.
And I don't use that term loosely, because this term comes from the German sturm
as in Sturmgewehr, or Sturmtruppen, or Sturmgeschütz.
And it's a term that was first ... applied in fact to Sturmkompanie of assault troops in World War One
In order to properly understand the origins of the Artillery Luger
you first need to know a couple of details about German artillery,
because they were split into two branches, the field artillery and the foot artillery.
Now, the foot artillery are guys who are marching from A to B on foot.
They typically have heavy guns, and they're the ones who are sort of significantly back behind the lines
launching long range fire support missions or bombardment of long range targets.
On the alternative hand you have the field artillery, these guys are all mounted.
They are essentially cavalry artillery, they are mobile,
they are fast moving, they're dynamic, they have much lighter guns.
They are the ones who are much closer to the front lines
providing direct support for attacking or defending infantry.
Now the armaments required for these two branches are substantially different.
The foot artillery ... from time to time have to be able to sort of backfill the infantry role.
They are given a carbine, they have the Gewehr 91 which is essentially the carbine version
of the Gewehr 88 standard service rifle: bolt action, 8mm Mauser, etc.
That's not really a suitable weapon for the field artillery though these guys are all on horseback.
They want something, or they need something, or they want and need something
that is lighter and less obtrusive than a full carbine.
So even when World War One starts, these guys are still primarily being issued with
Reichsrevolvers, Model 1879 and 1883 black powder single-action revolvers.
Because really they are not supposed to be using sidearms anyway.
Well, it's recognised that they probably ought to give them something a little more modern
in the years leading up to World War One, and so trials begin.
And they test out the Luger, but there's concern that,
"Well, what if we could do something a little bit better than the Luger?
What if we could make essentially a Luger carbine, a detachable shoulder stock on a long-barrel Luger?"
And so that's where the idea for the LP08, Lange Pistole (which I may or may not be pronouncing correctly).
It's the Long Pistol 08, and that was the official designation.
And it wasn't just for the artillery. The designation "Artillery Luger"
is something that has been coined by collectors and historians today
and it doesn't appear anywhere in original German literature.
Now the other troops who were supposed to be receiving and using these guns
included fortress troops, again guys who are going to be stationed inside a defensive fortification.
Their real job is man the guns of that fortification or supply ammunition for them.
Unless things go really terribly wrong you shouldn't have to use your own personal individual weapon.
And air crew: pilots, observers, gunners
(well, gunners would come a little bit later), pilots and observers in aircraft.
Again this ... is before the introduction of machine guns or even self-loading rifles on aircraft.
You want to have some sort of weapon in case you have to crash land in enemy territory.
And ... some guys would get the idea to start shooting at other pilots with these things.
But whatever that weapon is, it's got to be light and it's got to be handy.
Because you're not waving around a ... Gewehr 98 in the confines of a 1912 pilot's cockpit.
And so those three units together are the ones who were supposed to get this.
This pistol is formally adopted in 1913 and it takes this form, albeit with just the standard magazine.
When this is introduced it just uses regular Luger magazines, 8 round capacity.
What's interesting though is the gun never gets to most of those guys.
The Air Service actually gets some of these guns,
but when World War One begins very, very few of them,
only a handful of these have actually trickled into service.
And those usually don't have standard holsters or shoulder stocks on them.
Guys are still going without shoulder stocks, and they're kind of making do
hand making holsters or getting small batches of holsters from local suppliers.
It would take a year or two before the supply of all of those ancillary items
actually caught up to the production of the pistols themselves.
So the pilots are getting some of the guns.
The ... existing artillery units basically never get these pistols.
When World War One starts that's when production really actually starts on these guns.
And it takes a while, many months if not a full year,
for production to really get into any sort of real quantity.
And once it does the pistols are being issued to newly formed units
that are being put together and then sent off to the front.
Guys who are already at the front, well they get to keep their Reichsrevolvers, best of luck to you.
Now in mid-1916 we see a few changes start to happen, and essentially what happens is
soldiers on the ground realise that there's a lot of potential firepower in this thing.
It's very light, it's very handy. By the time we get to 1916 we have real trench warfare that has developed,
and trench raiding is not really well suited to long bolt-action rifles.
There are some carbines around, sure, but the Germans don't have a good light machine gun.
There is no submachine gun basically in existence yet.
And so guys discover that this little stocked pistol is super handy for close-range combat.
And at about this same time a gentleman by the name of Friedrich Blum
out of Budapest has designed a drum magazine.
Now he actually originally designs this drum magazine for use with the
Mondragon semi-auto rifles that were contracted from SIG by Mexico.
Mexico couldn't pay for them all, SIG had a bunch left over.
The German Air Force purchases these semi-automatic rifles from SIG to use as aircrew guns,
because they are going to be a little more effective than just pistols or the shotguns
that you hear about early pilots taking up with them to attack other aircraft.
Well, in order to increase the fire capacity of those guns, Blum designs a drum magazine for them
which the Germans actually use in limited numbers on Mondragon rifles.
This was called the Model of 1915 Fliegerselbstladegewehr, or Flyers Self-loading Rifle.
Blum takes his patent for that drum and adapts it to the Luger.
He points out like, "Here's another place where an increased capacity could really work well.
The pistol already uses a detachable magazine, we can take
... the main body of the magazine and kludge a drum onto the bottom of it.
And we can increase the capacity of this pistol from 8 rounds to 32 rounds."
Which is huge in World War One, there's really nothing on the Allied side anywhere like this.
The Pedersen Device wouldn't come around until 1918, it would never actually be used.
So when you get the magazines combined with
the trench warfare that's developing, this becomes the assault weapon.
And in fact now it would take a while, ... the drums ... are introduced for the rifles in 1915/1916.
You get the idea for the pistol ones in 1916, they are adopted.
They are actually put into the German pistol manuals for the LP08.
... There is a manual that's ... printed at the very beginning of 1917 that has all the details on the drums.
And the Germans were anticipating having drums ready,
and yet as so often ... does happen things were delayed quite a bit.
And they didn't get the drums until summer of 1917, maybe even the fall of 1917.
It takes a long time for these relatively complicated drums to actually get into field service.
... In fact in February of 1918 there is an order published by the German high command
that actually for the first time ever uses the word "sturm" in sort of the assault context.
It describes the issuing of Long Pistol 08s, Artillery Lugers, to Sturmkompanie.
So companies of elite assault troops who are going to be attacking enemy trenches.
And they are being issued these pistols with the Trommel-drum 32 round magazines.
And ... that is the first German assault weapon.
Now ... from the point they were first introduced they were in continuous use until the end of the war.
The Germans would introduce a true submachine gun in the summer/early fall of 1918.
It saw limited use at the front for all the same reasons, it takes a long time to get the stuff
actually from the drawing board, to the factory, to the production line, to actually in the field.
But that MP18, the Maschinen Pistole 18, would use the same Trommel-drum magazine as the Luger.
It was the magazine that they had available, it was the only high-capacity magazine
essentially out there in existence for the German military.
So they adapt that to their new submachine gun.
After the war they would transition those guns, modify them to use
sort of traditional box magazines instead once those are put into production.
But the submachine gun, which we think of as the classic weapon of the Sturmtruppen
is actually the follow-on, the replacement for the first Sturmtruppen weapon, which is the Artillery Luger.
So it's a little bit ironic that we call it the Artillery Luger
when in fact the artillery were probably the least significant users of it.
Yes, it was originally designed for them, but the people, who actually used it were aviators early on
and then the assault troops, primarily the assault troops.
So in total 178,000 of these pistols are made by the end of the war.
Serial numbers on the drums go up to 800,000 which is huge.
Now that number kind of does fit with production of the pistols.
The plans for issuing these guns, and it's not clear
... exactly to what extent they were able to meet these goals, but
the plan was essentially every company would get 10 pistols and 100 magazines.
So they are not anticipating that you are reloading these magazines on the fly.
You are going to get a big ol' pile of ... magazines
which you then load before you go out in the field with them.
And you are not probably going to be reloading these things on the move.
So it's possible that they did make 800,000 of the magazines.
It's also possible there are some holes and gaps in that serial number range.
This one by the way, is in the 450,000 range for that drum.
So after the war it was recognised that these were like serious cutting-edge combat weapons.
The Treaty of Versailles and its supplementary notes essentially prohibit
the military and police use of long-barrel pistols, which is a specifically targeted thing at these guns.
Now some of them survived anyway. They appear to have been particularly popular guns
for disbanded troops and regular civilians to stash away illegally and keep.
And there are some incidents, like the German Navy did also have
issue of long-barrelled Artillery Lugers in addition to the Naval Lugers.
They got some of these for their own Naval Infantry units
to do the exact same thing that the Army was doing with them.
But apparently the British ... Admiral in charge of dealing with weapons restrictions
for the German Navy after the war didn't really pay attention or care to barrel length.
So a lot of the German Naval ones survive.
And overall a higher percentage than one might expect of these pistols survive,
given that they were not supposed to go into official Weimar government or police use or inventory.
Anyway, I think it's a fantastically interesting adaptation of a pistol,
... like it's a story that repeats itself so many different times.
That a weapon is designed to be light and handy and unobtrusive for rear echelon troops,
and it turns into the primary favourite weapon of the elite Special Forces essentially.
We see it with the MP7, we see it with the FN P90, to some extent we see it with the M1 carbine.
Not so much specialised assault troops with M1 carbines,
but it goes from being a weapon for drivers and machine gunners and artillery crew,
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.