[ Portuguese Army Lugers ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with all three patterns of Portuguese Army Luger.
And so we are going to look at each one of these in sequence.
Portugal, like many countries,
was investigating self-loading pistols
in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
They specifically set up in Lisbon a little commission,
5 officers, who were testing and experimenting with automatic pistols
from the late 1890s until 1904.
Now these guys got their hands on a Borchardt-Luger, the early name for the Luger pistols.
In 1901 they did a bunch of testing and evaluation and they decided,
"Yeah, this is definitely the best one of the bunch that we have come across."
And in 1904 they unanimously recommended it to the Portuguese Army.
Which proceed to not buy any, because they didn't have any money to work with.
So that kind of went nowhere.
But another commission was formed in 1907 to do essentially the same thing.
That commission also recommended the Luger pistol to the Portuguese Army,
and this time they went ahead and bought some, they in fact bought 5,000 of them.
So let's take a look at one of those.
The Model 908 was really a gorgeous example of early military Luger production.
So it has a 120mm barrel, or about 4.75 inches.
It is chambered for the 7.65 mm Parabellum cartridge,
which is essentially identical to 9mm Parabellum, just necked down to 7.65.
It's a good cartridge. ... Contemporary military forces
decided that the 7.65 didn't have quite the stopping power of the 9mm.
And so most people ended up transitioning to 9mm eventually.
These Portuguese Army pistols have their own unique serial number range
from 1 up to 5,000 that you'll find on the frame.
As well as having the last couple of digits marked in a whole bunch of other places,
as was typical on the Luger.
These guns are equipped with the grip safeties. They do not have shoulder stock lugs.
But they are New Model Lugers, so coil mainsprings, the full-sized checkered toggles.
For more substantial markings, we have a DWM fancy script logo on the toggle.
And then we have this really cool crest.
This is the crest for Manuel II, who was the King of Portugal when these guns were adopted,
and not for very much longer.
His father was a long-time king, Carlos I.
And Carlos I was actually assassinated in 1908,
the same year that these guns would end up being adopted.
His son, Manuel, was a young man at the time
having just entered the Portuguese Naval Academy in 1907.
That of course changed, he was crowned King after his father's assassination.
And he would end up being overthrown by popular revolution in 1910.
So he was King of Portugal for all of 2 years,
but long enough to get his crest onto one piece of Portuguese military hardware.
I like the fact that they have the Arabic digit 2, numeral 2 there.
When you see something like a king's name written out, it's virtually always
identified in Roman numerals, a Roman numeral II.
But no, this crest has the Arabic 2.
It's worth pointing out briefly, there are two different styles of this crest,
there were two stamps that were used by DWM.
They are essentially identical, if you put them side by side you can notice a few differences.
But if you are a serious collector looking for a Portuguese M908 Luger
and you find one and you think, "That crest doesn't look quite identical to this one."
Well, not all of them were.
Those 5,000 Manuel II pistols would hold the Portuguese Army pretty well for a while.
But in a couple of decades they did find themselves needing some more pistols.
Not the Army specifically, but the Portuguese Republican National Guard.
They are going to need some more guns.
Now this is an organisation, it's a national guard sort of organisation,
staffed by a lot ex-army officers.
And most of these guys ... for sidearms they just have the Luger pistols
that they brought with them from their army billet.
They just kept those guns.
But the Guard does need some more guns,
more than just what it's officers had brought in with them.
And so in 1935 they place an order for 564 new Luger pistols.
And by this time they are not buying them from DWM,
now they are actually buying them from Mauser.
Because Mauser has started producing the Luger pistols after
Versailles and the inter-war period.
Now these guns, despite being made nearly 30 years later, they specifically order
exactly the same pattern of guns that they originally got from DWM.
So these are commonly called the "GNR Pattern" of Portuguese Lugers,
and we have one of those we can take a close look at.
Despite being ordered from Mauser, of course the GNR guns (which is here),
are set up with exactly the same configuration as the original M908 Army Lugers.
So we still have the 120mm 7.65mm barrel.
We still have grip safeties, we still don't have shoulder stock lugs.
Mauser did not put these in a unique new serial number range for the Portuguese,
they are in the "V" prefix series.
So they will run from the low 1,900s through 2,500 V.
And that will be marked obviously on the frame ... as well as the barrel.
Note that we've got a proof mark up there. The "V" only appears on the frame,
on the rest of the parts it's just the number itself.
Serial number on the barrel extension with a German proof mark.
27 here is again the serial number, the last two digits of it.
And these guns, instead of a DWM toggle of course, they were made by Mauser,
they have a small Mauser banner logo on the toggle.
They do have another really cool-looking crest though,
a very fancy GNR, again for Guarda Nacional Republicana, the Portuguese National Guard.
And by this point they have added a fancy feature, we now have a safety marked in Portuguese.
As well as that same loaded chamber indicator marked in Portuguese.
So they actually made this even fancier than the original 908s by adding that safety marking.
The Army itself would end up needing more Luger pistols.
World War Two breaks out and everyone kind of gets a little bit worried
and starts re-arming a bit more.
And Portugal was on good terms with Germany,
and Portugal was actually getting quite a lot of small arms from Germany.
They would get various machine guns, they got K98k rifles from Mauser.
And they decided that they also wanted to get
almost another 5,000, they wanted another 4,578 Luger pistols.
But it's the middle of World War Two, this is 1942.
And they are not really in a position to be able to make all sorts of special requests
like they did with the GNR guns, about,
"Ooh, we want our Portuguese labelled safeties, and we want this
essentially by this point obsolete cartridge
in the long barrel length that you are not making any more."
No, they get to get whatever Mauser is actually producing,
which is essentially German Army P08s.
And so the third and final pattern of Portuguese Luger,
the Model 943, M943, for its date of delivery to the Portuguese,
was identical to the German P08. And I can show you this one.
The spirit of the M943 Lugers is essentially, I would say,
"Fine, we'll sell you some guns.
But look, we are in the middle of attempting to conquer all of Europe,
and so we can't afford to make you that fancy custom stuff you had before.
So, how about a P08 Luger? You want a Luger, you'll get a P08. Here you go, hope you enjoy it."
These guns got assigned serial numbers just straight out of Mauser production.
This is actually a very early one. They run from approximately 150 M
up to approximately 5,330 M.
Not quite all of those guns, but that's the range where you will find the Portuguese M943s.
The toggle marking is now "byf", Mauser's factory code.
And instead of any of those fancy chamber markings, now you get 42, the two digit date.
These guns were made in '42, delivered to Portugal in '43.
And everything else, like the safety marking for example, is totally standard German.
They are marked P08.
They have Waffenamt WaA 135 eagles on them.
The only thing that separates them from German ... accepted army guns
is the lack of a final acceptance proof mark from the German Army
and their serial number range.
So black plastic grip panels, should point out black plastic magazine.
Now originally this gun would have had a finish
typical of Mauser at the time, so it would have been a blued gun.
However, ... in the course of Portuguese service a bunch of these
were given this really heavy sort of matt Parkerisation finish.
The guns were sand blasted prior to this refinishing,
which is why some of the marks, like those German eagles, are pretty faint on this one.
But the Portuguese put these to use in places like their Angolan colonies,
and the guns saw very hard service.
And so a bunch of them got an arsenal-style re-finish like this one.
The Luger really was a tremendously popular pistol word-wide.
Early on it was one of the first truly efficient, effective, reliable, self-loading pistols.
Yeah, the C96 Mauser beat it by about 4 years onto the market,
but the C96 was truly the old style of pistol.
The Luger was a gun that really meets the handling standards of a modern pistol even today.
Yes, its mechanism is obsolete today, it's overly expensive to manufacture,
but in 1900, 1905, the pre-World War One period,
the Luger had very few serious competitors for a military service pistol.
And that's reflected in the fact that so many different countries both bought them
and actually stayed with them for, typically speaking, about 50 years.
Countries that got Lugers tended to keep them until after World War Two, like Portugal did here.
Now I do want to point out, there are a couple of other Portuguese Lugers,
specifically ones that were purchased by the Navy.
Basically every time the Army bought some guns, the Navy also bought some guns.
And they have markings that are a little bit different,
and ... they were purchased in far lower quantities.
We are talking about 10% as many Navy guns.
So, at some point I will get my hands on a couple of Portuguese Naval Lugers,
and we'll show those to you as well.
But for the time being, I think it's pretty cool to be able to put all three of the Army patterns
together in a single video. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it.
Thanks for watching.