Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and courtesy of Morphy's
we are out here today with a very cool, very exciting gun.
This is a German MP18,I and this is actually a US doughboy souvenir bringback gun.
This was German issue to the Sturmtruppen at the very end of World War One.
And it was, probably, the very first submachine gun to see actual active military service.
I'm going to ignore the Italian stuff for the moment.
Now after the war the vast majority of these were converted over in a couple of different ways.
... The ones that were kept by the German government
were marked '1920' to indicate Weimar government ownership,
and they were converted to a straight 20 round System Schmeisser magazine.
However, those were not in use during the war.
During the war what they had was the drum magazines from Artillery Lugers.
And that's why this thing has a very sharply angled magazine well,
is because the Luger magazine here is intended to go into a Luger grip.
Or that thing, that's what you've got.
These are really complex, overly expensive,
and generally not nearly as reliable as the magazines that replaced them.
So I've got, I think, about 20 rounds in it.
This is actually a reproduction drum. This gun has a legit original drum and original loader with it,
as well as a reproduction drum and reproduction loader.
And I'm using the reproduction drum here today.
So, you'll notice there is a spacer on here.
That's to make sure that it fits just at the right length inside the magazine well.
This should be an interesting gun to shoot, so let's find out.
Open bolt only, full-auto only, there is no semi-auto position on it.
Huh. That is a really gentle shooting gun.
It just pop pop pop pop ... pop pop pop pop, it's really nice.
And I am now out of ammo. So let's take a look at how we actually reload this magazine,
because it's about the most complicated magazine reload you will ever see.
Alright, so got my ammunition, we've got our drum.
By the way, there is the little sheet metal sleeve that spaces it properly.
Put that back on.
Now we have a loading tool here. This is actually an original loading tool, there are reproductions out there.
And this has its own magazine catch,
and a lever for giving you spring tension to depress the follower.
Because this is the equivalent of a 32 round straight Luger magazine,
it just comes down the tower and then curls around here.
The Luger magazine requires a loading tool to put 8 rounds in it, much less 32.
So the first thing we're going to do is open this lever,
and I'm going to hand crank the spring.
There are actually two springs in here, there's one inside the drum,
and then there's a second spring that's just for the feed tower.
The feed tower spring we're going to leave alone, ...
that's the equivalent of a normal Luger spring, more or less.
This one I'm going to pre-wind, and then use this button,
there we go, to lock the spring in its fully compressed position.
Now, with that tension reduced, now I can actually load the thing.
So we're going to go ahead and lock this onto the magazine.
All of this is a little finicky, and you just want to be careful because these are all old and very complex parts.
So I'm not going to load this to capacity, you may have seen the tag here.
The previous owner of this gun suggests 25 rounds maximum,
and I'm going to do probably 20 to 25, something like that.
So, because we have removed most of the tension the first round goes in easy.
Then we'll pull the lever down and then I can put a round in,
I let the lever up and push the round the rest of the way into the feed lips.
Down, round goes in, push it in.
And we're just going to repeat this process, in theory, 32 times.
But for our purposes today more like 20.
Now a team actually using one of these guns in combat
had a chest with a whole bunch of pre-loaded magazines,
because this is not something that you want to try and do in the dark in the enemy trench.
And they actually had ammo bearers for the guy with the submachine gun.
Kind of like light machine guns were considered crew-served weapons,
in some ways the MP18 was also a crew-served weapon
because of the complexity of these magazines.
What I'm going to do now is open up the lever, I'm going to pop this back and unlock it.
If you forget to do this, you have no spring tension on your magazine, and the gun just won't fire.
So pop that, and then this lever is going to unwind to however many rounds I've loaded.
In this case, I thought I had 22, but it looks like I've got about 20 in there.
This lever will ... rotate the rest of the way back to 12
as you shoot the gun. So if it's all the way loaded it stays up here,
and it just rotates around as you empty it.
It's a finicky process,
but at least from that first magazine full, I would say it is totally worth the time.
Alright.
Time consuming and complicated to load this thing, but like I said, it's worth it.
The one safety on this gun is the safety notch on the receiver.
There is no fire selector, there is no manual safety catch, it's full-auto or nothing.
It really is just remarkably smooth to shoot.
It's too bad that this overhanging drum is so ... off balance on the gun.
I have done a little bit of shooting with one of the Schmeisser magazine conversions,
and I want to say this is actually a little more pleasant, because it has a little bit of a slower rate of fire
that comes from the tension in the magazine.
The issue is because there's so much tension in here,
when the bolt goes to strip a round off of the top of the magazine
it takes a lot of force to push that round forward,
and that actually slows down the rate of fire.
And I think I am, yep, (wow, that is awesome!) I am out.
Went through, I mean it wasn't fully loaded, but it went through the whole mag without a single malfunction.
It's almost like the Germans know how to build submachine guns or something.
I can totally understand why some doughboy chose to bring this back.
In fact, I'm a little surprised a lot more of them didn't, because these things are fantastic.
Alright, I've got one more drum worth of ammunition.
You can see my target now, my various unsuspecting bowling pins
which I may or may not be able to hit.
I have no idea how well zeroed this particular gun is.
But, you know what? I'm just going to empty the drum, so I'll say it right now.
A big thanks to Morphy's for giving me access to shoot this for you guys.
These are extremely rare guns to find in their original World War One configuration.
They are over 100 years old now, which is kind of crazy.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
I hit a couple of them.