You know, the great thing about a mortar is it's just so simple. It's a tube and a base plate, and that's it.
You drop a shell in and it falls down and then it flies out and explodes.
Unless you're German, and you design something like this.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
where we are taking a look at a 5cm Leichte Granatwerfer 36.
This was the German Army's 50mm light infantry mortar
for World War Two, or at least for the beginning of World War Two.
Development of this began in 1934, completed in 1936 when it was adopted.
These were designed and manufactured, or at least designed by Rheinmetall-Borsig.
And the idea was to have a little light mortar that two guys could carry into combat,
it could travel with the infantry and be very responsive and, you know, easy to use. A good support weapon for the infantry.
The problem is this thing is both complicated and heavy. So if you watched yesterday,
you saw the video I did on a 1937 French 50mm mortar.
... If you haven't seen that video I think it's worth looking at, and it's worth comparing that one to this one,
because that French light mortar weighed 8 pounds, 3.7 kilos.
This weighs in at 31 pounds, a little over 14 kilos. This thing is really way too heavy for what it is.
Now it does fire a larger projectile than the French mortar, about twice the size.
So the projectile from this is about 2 pounds, that's about 1 kilo, 0.9 kilos.
The French ... 50mm light mortar fired a 0.4 kilo, or about a 1 pound, ... projectile shell.
So there is a difference in power, but not that much difference.
It's a big step up from something like this to something like the US ... 60mm mortar, which had
a substantially longer barrel, more powerful shell.
Really that's a sort of medium mortar compared to these things.
This is more comparable to something like the Japanese knee mortar.
Except that it's really heavy and complicated, and that would end up being the downfall of this thing.
So before we talk about how it was or wasn't used, let me show you how it's actually supposed to be operated.
So first off there are a couple basic questions, a couple of basic categorisations of mortars.
There are some mortars that are, let's call them the equivalent of open bolt,
where there's a fixed firing pin and you drop a shell down the tube and as soon as it hits the bottom it fires.
There are other mortars that are we could say the equivalent of closed-bolt, where you drop a shell down
but the firing pin is on a separate trigger mechanism, and it doesn't fire until you actually trip some lever.
This, like the French mortar from yesterday, is ... of the I will call it closed bolt variety, where this is actually your trigger.
That click, that's it firing.
So you would drop a shell down, and then it doesn't fire until you actually pull the lanyard or pull the lever.
The next basic categorisation would be how does the mortar account for range?
And this is really just a question with light mortars, because all the big ones do it by angle.
Well if you look at the French light mortar from yesterday that thing is always set at a fixed angle,
and it has a venting system to adjust how far the ... mortar shell is actually going to go.
And the Japanese light knee mortar, the Type 89, is the same way.
This one is set up to always fire at the same velocity, and the range is determined by the angle.
So we have a multi-part system here. (That's the muzzle cover which has shrunk a bit.)
We have a multi-part system here to adjust the range. And we have a range dial on the other side that you'll see in a moment.
So right off the bat, this is going to be a little more complicated to set the range on
than that French mortar, because there are a couple more steps involved.
But before we can even get to that, we have to actually level this thing so that
we know we're actually going to be shooting where we think we're shooting.
So the whole bottom of this large monolithic base plate is set up to grab into the ground like so.
So you would plunk this thing down onto the ground, get it nice and set,
and then you have to level it because there's only one flat plate here.
So unless the ground you put it on is perfectly flat to begin with, it's going to take some adjustment.
We are going to make those adjustments with these two handles, kind of like video game control sticks, sort of.
We're going to use this to help us do it. So this is a bubble level.
And you can see there that we're not centred, we want that bubble right smack in the middle.
So now I have to fiddle with the levers until it is. The way this works is the whole barrel assembly is set on a carriage.
That is ... set here in the centre at one point, and then it is moving on this crossbar right here, and right there.
And then these two dials are both elevation adjustments, so I can lift the two sides of this up and down.
And because we have only three points of contact, this is like a tripod here, that will allow me to perfectly centre the bubble.
Which it's actually pretty close right now, but
let's bring both of these down,
that's a bit too much.
And also it doesn't help that this table is not quite as sturdy as the soft earth.
There we go, now we've got this thing levelled.
And now we can commence to make our range and ... traverse adjustments.
We'll start with the traverse, which is done with this screw right here.
You can see as I do this, this whole barrel carriage assembly is sliding on this bar.
This bar is what I have set our [levelling] on,
so the ... levelling stays good ... the whole time I'm doing this.
So I can adjust traverse there, then we need to set the range.
I have a range dial just on the left side of the barrel here, that will indicate from 0 out to 550 meters.
Which is the range of ranges that I have with this thing.
This does fold down out of the way, which we'll get to in a moment for disassembly of this thing.
But you read off the bottom edge. So this is currently set to 400.
If I want to change that there are two things that I can do.
One is I can adjust which hole this whole assembly is pinned into. So we can go from basically vertical there,
down to almost a 45 degree angle there. That sets it approximately.
And then I fine tune it with this hand screw, which just lengthens and shortens this bar,
thus bringing the barrel up or down.
And you can see that working on the range dial, right there, as I'm threading this thing in.
One last point while we're on the subject of aiming. When these were originally designed in the '30s,
they actually had a pretty complicated, very precise, telescopic optical sight that went along with them.
And that was ditched even before World War Two started, I believe those went out of production in '38.
The idea was just to make this thing as precise as possible, but the reality was within 500 metres,
... 550 metres at the most, that sort of precision just wasn't necessary.
And the extra cost and the extra complication was way more than was actually worth it.
In the end, what they ended up doing was there's a little line right there.
And this would have originally been white painted, you can see just little remnants of the white paint.
Turns out you could get away with just a white stripe on the barrel as an aiming reference,
and get rid of that whole expensive complicated telescope setup. And that's what they did.
Then, once I've got all of that stuff dialled in, I can actually fire a shell.
Now once you've got this thing set up, as long as it doesn't shift much on recoil,
in theory you can fire a barrage pretty quickly.
But, of course, you can do the same thing with that French light mortar too, so I think you're getting a feeling here,
hopefully you've gotten the understanding of why this wasn't so popular with German forces,
and why it was pulled out of front-line field use relatively early in the war.
The Germans were also a bit more liberal with their markings.
So we've got all sorts of stuff on the barrel tube here. I will point out that 1941 date.
We have a couple of Waffenamts there.
And then the handle assembly has some more markings on it, also a 1941 date.
And then we have some markings down on the actual base plate, right there.
Note that the base plate was manufactured in 1942.
And the reason that you can have a mismatched date on the barrel and the base plate like that is
you can actually remove the barrel assembly. So to do that, I'm first going to flip that range dial out of the way.
Then I'm going to pull this handle.
That's what locks the bottom of the barrel assembly into the base plate.
I can then lift that up and out of the way.
And then I can squeeze these two together, and with a little bit of wiggling,
pull that out.
And now we have two pieces more easily transported.
These pack a lot more conveniently than the whole mortar put together.
I just have to point out that if your ... one man portable, super-light, infantry support mortar
has to be able to be taken down in order to be convenient enough to transport,
maybe your design has some issues.
Just for reference sake here is an example of the mortar bomb. This is of course an inert one, empty.
But this is the projectile that would be fired out of these guys.
Perspective makes it look a lot bigger up there than it is down here.
That was approximately a 2 pound, or, well, just under 1 kilo mortar projectile
By the midpoint of the war these things were out of production and they were being pulled out of the front lines,
because they were really obsolete. And I totally understand that.
While there is a handle here to carry the thing, so in theory one guy can carry it.
In reality lugging around this 30 pound thing, plus someone else has to carry the ammunition.
Or you have to carry the ammunition as well at two pounds per firing.
... You know, if you have to crawl into a position, or sprint somewhere,
this is going to be a really easy thing to just decide to leave behind
because it's awkward and bulky and really heavy.
So it comes as no surprise to me that German troops kind of started ditching these things,
and they much preferred the Soviet, or I think especially the French, light mortars.
As I said yesterday with that French mortar video, there is a trade-off with something like this of
how portable it is and how powerful it is.
And where the French kind of erred towards the side of portability, the Germans in this case kind of erred on both sides.
They managed to get something that was really way too heavy and not very portable,
and at the same time wasn't nearly powerful enough to justify its existence.
So for that reason, they're pulled out of front-line service by the middle of the war.
These were used until the very end of the war as long as ammunition was available when they were around,
because of course by the end of the war Germany had a serious deficit of weapons of all sorts.
But in general you would see these move to places like the Atlantic Wall
where the portability is not a big deal. And ... that's kind of where all the obsolete
non-standard weapons go to just get out of the way.
Anyway, this is actually a live and ... NFA registered destructive device
that's being sold here by the Rock Island Auction Company.
If you're interested in checking out their high-res pictures, their description, their value estimate,
(I know a lot of people are curious about that often), go ahead and take a look at their website.
They have a catalogue page specifically for this guy.
You can get there by way of ForgottenWeapons.com, which is linked in the description text below.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]