Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the James Julia auction
house up in Maine taking a look at some of the guns that they're
gonna be selling in their upcoming fall of 2017 firearms auction.
And today we have a late-war model of an MG 15.
Now, earlier in the war this would have looked like a very different gun,
because this was actually an aircraft machine gun.
Didn't have a bipod, didn't have a shoulder stock.
And this was actually the first machine gun formally
adopted by the Luftwaffe for flexible mounting.
So that's going to be things like waist mounts on bombers,
open rear cockpits of two-seat aircraft.
Anywhere where they wanted the gunner to actually be able to physically swing around standing behind the gun and aiming it.
The alternative, the other type of gun were the fixed mounts, which were typically put in cowls or set in turrets or in wings,
places like that, where there is not physically a gunner behind the gun and where the gun is bolted onto the aircraft.
So the biggest obvious difference between the two is a flexible gun is going to have a grip and a trigger on it,
where a fixed-mount gun typically is fired by solenoid remotely.
Now the fixed version of this gun was the MG 17 and mechanically they are very similar.
So, I do actually have a previous video on the MG 17, there will be a link to that at the very end of this
and you can go check that one out if you're curious about it.
But they both basically evolved from a Solothurn design.
Solothurn was a manufacturing and engineering firm, weapons design firm in Switzerland,
and they were largely owned by the Rheinmetall company, which was largely owned by the German government.
So the deal here is that the Versailles Treaty prohibited Germany, or German companies,
from doing machine gun research or manufacturing a lot of machine guns.
And of course that wasn't going to stop the German Army from trying to develop newer and better machine guns
during the interwar period. And so what they did was, the Rheinmetall company, in order to continue its own
development and sales of machine guns to a wide variety of clients, they bought like 90% of
Waffenfabrik Solothurn up in Switzerland. Well that company is in Switzerland, so it's not restricted by the
language of the Versailles Treaty, so Rheinmetall could send things up there,
sell them out of Switzerland, and then take the money home. Which worked well for them.
Well, then the German government acquired a 51% stake in Rheinmetall,
which made them, effectively, a government military contractor.
So, this design allegedly was a Solothurn gun,
but of course this was a design that had originally kind of come from Rheinmetall and was
developed to completion in Solothurn. It was the S2-200,
and mechanically it's a recoil operated gun and it has this interesting locking collar sort of arrangement.
The idea being the bolt and the barrel match up together and the bolt has a couple of locking lugs on it.
But instead of the bolt rotating, this locking collar turns, about a 60 degree rotation,
and that locks the thing in place. When it all recoils backward that locking collar unrotates
and unlocks, and the bolt can travel backwards.
What this allows is a very low profile receiver, so this thing just has a very simple tubular receiver,
which makes it really well suited especially to fixed aircraft mounts.
Now in the MG 17 ... fixed version it was a belt fed gun.
As a flexible mount gun, the MG 15, it fed using these
(there we go),
these 75 round double drum magazines. And the reason for that was
they didn't want to have a belt flopping around while the gunner's trying to swing the gun around
and aim and shoot. And so instead they wanted a fixed capacity magazine, they wanted it a high capacity magazine
because this gun fires at a very high rate of fire, 900 or a 1,000 rounds a minute.
So 75 is kind of about the most you can get in a practical, handy, detachable magazine there. This is 8x57mm Mauser calibre.
And they'd have a stack of these magazines wherever the gunner was located, so he could change magazines fairly quickly.
That worked pretty well, in fact, it was a really good flexible aircraft mount.
The only reason that it fell out of favour was
8mm Mauser just wasn't really an effective enough cartridge by late in the war against aircraft.
The new aircraft that were being used ... they were flying faster, they were manoeuvring more ably,
and they were better armoured, and you just needed something bigger than an 8mm bullet
to do a lot of effective damage to an aircraft. So, the Germans would move to,
well, they eventually would move to 13 and then 15 and then 20 and even 30mm aircraft machine cannons
by the end of the war.
So, what do we do with MG 15s towards the end of the war? They're not really all that useful in aircraft
and oh, by the way, there is a tremendous shortage of machine guns for the infantry.
So they came up with an infantry adaptation kit, which is what you see here.
Basically adding new sights that allow it to be used against ... infantry ground targets,
and a shoulder stock, and a bipod and a bipod mounting bracket.
So, why don't I actually just show you all the various bits as they're supposed to go on.
Alright, so this is the gun in its standard flexible aircraft mount mode.
You'll notice it does have a barrel shroud on it.
It is an air-cooled gun, despite the fact that it fires extremely quickly.
It was meant to be on aircraft so it's gonna be out in the slipstream around the airplane
at high altitude and there's gonna be a ton of cold air going over the barrel, and it will cool it just fine.
They didn't have to do anything for cooling on these.
It has mounting brackets front and rear for sights,
because, again, you have a gunner behind this gun aiming it, so it does have to have sights.
We'll take a look at those in just a moment. And then we have a pistol grip here, but there's no need for a buttstock
because the gun is going to be mounted on this fully rotating trunnion.
So that gets bolted into the airplane and then you can swing it around as necessary to aim at whatever you need to.
Actually firing the gun is pretty easy. It does fire from an open bolt and you've got this nice big charging handle here.
We can lock that to the back. This is a reciprocating charging handle on this model.
And you can see that this is where the bolt is going to go back and forth, like so.
And it does eject downward out the bottom.
There are brackets here for a brass caching bag, which I don't have on it at the moment.
That can be important in an aircraft, because you don't necessarily want brass
falling all over the place on the inside of the plane where you might trip and fall on it.
We have firing controls right here. All you do is press this lever down and then you can alternate between safe,
where this arrow is lined up with that arrow right there, or fire
(there we go), where of course it's lined up with the "F", for fire.
The magazine catch is right here, just pull back to release.
And you can flip it over to the side, and that's actually going to lock the magazine release in place.
(See that little cutout that it drops into.)
That prevents you from unintentionally dropping the magazine when you don't want to.
And you do have a really big trigger guard. This works fine with one finger if you want,
but it's also big enough for two if you have a set of gloves that have two finger, kind of like half mittens,
because it can be very cold up in aircraft where this gun might be mounted. So a nice big trigger guard to accommodate that.
This is a 75 round drouble drum, or Doppeltrommel, magazine.
You'll notice that it does have feed markings on it here.
And unlike most drums, this is actually a double feed magazine.
Because what we have here is basically two entirely independent magazines.
You've got a drum on the right, and a drum on the left.
And so what you're getting here is alternating feed from the left and the right drums.
These, by the way, are just dummy cartridges that allow the whole system to work.
In order to load this thing you actually need a whole separate loading jig, basically,
that clamps onto these two spindles and allows you to compress the springs in here one at a time.
Without that it's basically impossible to load more than just a few rounds into one of these magazines.
It's got a carry handle on the top for transporting the thing.
One other thing to point out is that the very early versions of the MG 34 also used a double drum magazine
that was almost identical to this, but not actually identical.
There are a couple very subtle differences. Probably the easiest one to point out
is this semi-circular little lip on the front of the magazine,
that is there on the MG 15 drum, and it is not there on the MG 34 drum.
So that's a good way to keep track of those two.
Here are your front and rear sights. Now these have been modified for ground use by adding this and this.
Originally on these guns you had this spiderweb sort of front sight and then just a V for a rear sight.
What they did to make this compatible for ground use was add this as a front sight post,
and this drum for a rear sight. You'll notice, while it's round, it is mounted eccentric.
And if I put my finger back there you can see that that notch in the drum is a V shape.
And that actually lines up with your front post. It actually fits when these are far enough apart, like they would be on the gun.
Then in order to set range you rotate this drum up or down.
Because it's on an eccentric post that effectively raises and lowers your rear sight.
So it's a clever and interesting style of sight. They did also use this on the MG 81 as
adapted to ground use, so not just this gun.
Alright, now the add ons. This is your very complex buttstock assembly. It's got the sling swivel on it.
The rear actually folds down like this, I guess for sort of compactness. It does at least make the gun
narrower this way, but I don't know that that really helps you with a whole lot.
It does have some nice padding on it, that's helpful.
And then back here, we just have a thumb screw that tightens down
this brass cap.
So what you do is you slide the buttstock in there, and then just clamp it down tight and it won't go anywhere.
There's a cutout for the pistol grip. That also prevents it from rotating on you.
And then on the front of the gun they had this assembly, this is just there to basically to mount a bipod on.
So interestingly this looks like steel, but this is actually made of aluminium and it's very lightweight.
I honestly didn't realise that before I actually got my hands on this one.
So, at the front it just slides over the muzzle of the gun, and then at the rear you have this thumb screw clamp that locks on.
And then you have two positions here and here. So you can actually mount a standard MG 34 style bipod
either on the back, in which case it folds to the front and locks on this pin,
or you can mount it at the front and it will fold this way and mount on that pin.
In fact, here is an example of said bipod.
You can put it on top like that, rotate it down,
and there's our bipod mounted on the rear of the gun.
Or, (there we go),
mounted on the front of the gun.
Alright, let's go ahead and mount this thing. I'm just going to slide the muzzle through there.
There we go, that's going to come back until it sits against the front sight bracket.
Then the rear bracket here folds over.
I'll go ahead and tighten down this thumb screw.
There we go. I've got the rear sight attachment right there so I'm going to take my rear sight,
drop that in,
and then I have this keeper pin, that's going to go through,
lock that in place. So there's the rear sight.
Now do the same thing with our spiderweb front sight. That drops in, and then
this keeper pin is going to go through
right there. That locks in our front sight.
I'll go ahead and drop the bipod on.
Rotate that around, there we go.
And then we can move to the back of the gun. Slide this on,
clamp down that screw, and there we go.
We now have a complete ground set up MG 15.
Thank you guys for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video, I know I certainly did.
It's not very common to find an original, unmolested, registered, transferable MG 15 out there.
And to have all of the ground mount kit is just that much cooler.
So, if you decided that this looks like so much fun that you want to have it yourself,
well, take a look at the description text below because this is coming up for sale at the Julia auction house.
And there's a link down in that description text that will take you to Julia's catalogue page on the gun.
You can see all of their pictures and description. There are a couple more
accessories with this gun that I don't have pictured here, like a brass catcher and some other things.
And you can see all of those, and place a bid on the web or over the phone or you can come and participate live in the auction.
Thanks for watching.