Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, I currently have a backpack full of 24mm Swiss Tankbüchse 41 magazines
because we have a Tankbüchse 41.
So I'm here at the Morphy Auction House today
because they are going to be selling this
in their upcoming fall of 2018 Firearms Auction.
These things are really scarce in the US.
I think there's only one other one extant in the US.
And this one's in great condition.
But the question is, what the heck is a Tankbüchse 41?
Well, the development of this actually started when the Swiss government
bought a batch of 1939 pattern tanks from Czechoslovakia.
And the problem was these tanks were nominally armed with 20mm cannons,
and the Swiss figured, "That's cool and all, but we want a gun in our tanks
that's better than the guns that everyone else has in their tanks."
So they sent a request down to the factory at Waffenfabrik Bern
to say, "We want a bigger, better gun."
And the director of the factory was one Adolf Furrer,
whose name you will recognise if you've been watching Forgotten Weapons
because we have videos on a bunch of his other stuff.
And if you do recognise his name you already know how this thing works,
because Adolf Furrer never met a toggle lock he didn't like.
At any rate, what he designed is a toggle-locked action,
based on the Swiss Lmg 25 light machine gun,
except this one is chambered for the 24x139mm cartridge.
So here is the actual breech action of this thing, it is a gigantic toggle lock.
We have a charging handle that slides off the side here and pivots around.
That's cool, because that gives you a bunch of leverage
which you're going to need to cycle this thing manually.
That's a big problem when you get to a gun this big.
If you remember, guns like the Lahti in paltry 20mm have things like crank handles and chains
to help you get some mechanical advantage to pull the bolt back.
Well, this is a short recoil operated, toggle-locked gun, which means in addition
to pulling the toggle open, you also have to pull the barrel back against its recoil spring.
That's hefty. So Furrer ... was a clever designer, he was no idiot.
He may have been a little obsessed with toggle locking,
but what he did on this gun is design this cool system where
you have a 6 round box magazine here by the way,
and this is our dummy cartridge.
Ouch.
That's [24x139mm].
And the way this thing worked is when you fired the sixth round,
it would come back, lock open, and actually automatically eject the magazine
and stay locked open.
So that all you had to do was put a new loaded magazine in the gun,
you didn't have to manipulate this charging handle
every time you ran a 6 round magazine empty. That's good thinking.
At the beginning I mentioned that this was designed for use in a Swiss light tank,
and you might have noticed that this is not a light tank.
Well, in addition to mounting it in the tanks
(which, by the way, are slightly different configuration than this,
in order to make them fit well, they basically rotated the gun
90 degrees in the tank, and the magazine came in the top),
but in addition to that, they realised
this would make a pretty nice anti-tank gun for the infantry.
So they set them up with these wheeled mounts, and also with
... tripod legs here on both sides.
And they transported these things around behind bicycles, which is a very Swiss sort of thing to do.
They ended up actually also mounting these on patrol boats for lake patrol duty.
And of course they used them in fortresses, because Switzerland
has nothing if not a lot of fortresses.
They went into production, they were adopted in 1941.
A grand total of 3,600, or just under 3,600, of these were manufactured by 1945.
And they really were a significant part of the Swiss armament during World War Two.
However, being part of the Swiss armament during World War Two,
they were never actually used in combat.
So they were there to provide a deterrent and a defence.
And I suppose they did that successfully, along with the rest of Switzerland's defences.
There you have the actual receiver markings, right on the side.
Waffenfabrik Bern, this particular one is serial number 2943,
and it's numbered all over the place, like you might expect.
There is a safety switch on it, right there.
To actually aim and fire this, it was equipped with a 2.2x power optical telescopic sight,
which unfortunately we don't have on this particular one.
So there was a backup, there were also iron sights.
And if you've ever fired a Swiss K31 rifle or any of the Schmidt–Rubins,
you'll recognise that sight right away, because that is basically
the sight off of a 7.5 Swiss bolt-action rifle.
And the front sight there off the rifle to go with it.
The trigger is located right in front of the right hand grasping handle.
So, currently we don't have a magazine in, so the trigger is locked.
But pull that, pushes the bar forward, which runs a mechanical linkage and fires the gun.
However, you wouldn't fire it from this position where it's locked into the tripod.
To properly set this up for use requires more than one or two guys to do it right.
This thing originally ... had a seven-man crew,
and all of those guys, by the way, were carrying backpacks full of magazines.
... The gun itself weighs just under 80 kilos, I think it's 73 kilos,
(which is going to be something like 160 pounds) for just the gun, not counting the carriage.
So I'll show you what you would normally do, but I can't really set this thing up by myself.
So let's get started though, because we can make it look pretty cool anyway.
First of all you need to rotate this thing off its wheels.
While it can be fired from the wheeled mount,
we want it to be sitting on these feet, not on these rolling bits.
So basically, what I need to do is depress this lever.
That allows this whole wheel and leg assembly to slide out this way,
which then allows me to rotate it.
And I want to get this indicator notch to line up with one of these four numbers,
which indicate various heights for this thing to sit on its tripod assembly.
This indicator latch of course is for the wheels.
Now, once I've rotated that around, the wheels are actually quick detach.
We've got these handles which you can pull up, and allow the wheel to come off.
But that takes like two guys holding the gun and two guys pulling the wheels off,
and I'm one guy, so that's not happening.
However, I can give you a bit of an idea how this thing works.
If I depress this lever, then - there we go, you can see how this comes out.
At this point the gear teeth are still engaged, so it doesn't rotate.
And I'm not going to pull it out any further or else the whole thing will flop down
because again I'm one guy, and I don't have someone else holding the gun up.
Once you get it in the right position then - come on, ah, there we go,
then it goes right back into place.
Alright, but I can still show you the really cool part,
which is this thing is all locked in place on its transit assembly, it's not supposed to move.
Well, if I want to be shooting German tanks with this thing, I need it to be flexible and move.
It's not an artillery piece that you zero in and then fire with a lanyard.
So in order to do that, we're going to put on the shoulder stock.
We have a lever back here, it allows me to,
oh yes, now we have a free traversing gun, isn't that cool?
We can take the shoulder stock, and open it up right there, slide it in, snap that on.
This is a little bit muzzle heavy, unless you have a magazine in it,
in which case it balances out just beautifully.
So this is going to rest over my right shoulder.
And then I'm looking right down the sights,
hand on the trigger here, and 6 rounds semi-automatic fire.
... And it's got a pretty beastly muzzle brake on it.
And this is actually a pretty darn effective piece, this fires a 225 gram projectile
at between 860 and 900 metres per second.
That's basically a 3,500 grain projectile at 2,800 - 2,950 feet per second.
And they had two different loadings of this, they actually had a high-explosive round,
and they also had an armour-piercing round.
What they did, because this was primarily supposed to be an anti-tank gun,
they had 6 round magazines of armour-piercing.
Your high explosive ammunition that the gun crew was carrying
(which by the way was about 25% of the total load out,
they carry like 40 rounds of HE, and 120 rounds of armour piercing),
the HE stuff was actually carried in a different magazine that only held 5 rounds.
And that was to help distinguish between the two,
so that you didn't accidentally mix them up
and fire the wrong type of ammo at whatever your target was.
So that's a lot of boom from this thing.
This would ... go through 36mm of perpendicular armour at 500 metres.
That's pretty substantial.
And just take a look at the muzzle brake on that sucker.
That's a big muzzle brake.
So these were scrapped by the Swiss fairly shortly after World War Two.
Apparently there was an attempt to sell a bunch of them to, I think, Ethiopia.
That didn't really go anywhere, and they ended up pulling them out of service.
They remained in the fortress mounts longest.
But here in the United States they are, as I said at the beginning of this video, ridiculously rare.
And they are a really cool piece of legally registered, NFA destructive device, military history.
... For the shooter this thing is a live gun.
24mm is small enough that it's not outlandish to make ammunition for it,
if you're active in that sort of thing.
It's certainly not a 75mm howitzer, this is the sort of thing that, while big, is actually shootable.
So if you'd like to get into that yourself, and invite me to come shoot it with you, perhaps,
take a look at the description text below the video.
You'll find a link there to Morphy's catalogue page ... actually I'm sorry, you won't
because YouTube doesn't allow links to any place that sells firearms.
So instead you'll find a link to ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from that link you will find another link where you can get to Murphy's catalogue page on this.
That's got their pictures, which includes like the whole list of
all the accoutrements that come with this, there's a bunch of stuff.
You may have seen the muzzle cover that was on the gun at the beginning of the video.
And many backpacks, you can equip all of your friends with a backpack
full of magazines for this to help you carry the gear.
Anyway, ... their price estimate, their description and all that sort of good stuff.
If you do decide to try and make it yours, best of luck.
And thanks for watching.