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.