Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at some of the cool,
and huge guns, that they have for sale coming up in their April 2015 Premier auction.
This one, of course, is huge. This is a German Panzerbüchse 39. It's a light anti-tank rifle.
This was the German version of the anti-tank rifle in the beginning of World War Two.
Almost every country out there had something in this sort of class.
... At the end of World War One it was actually feasible for a large single-shot high-velocity rifle
to perforate the armour of a tank and disable it. And those rifles remained just barely
practical and usable right at the very beginning of World War Two,
but frankly by the end of the Battle of France these things were obsolete.
Tanks started evolving very quickly, and they took almost no time at all to become immune to
the capabilities of something like this.
So, of course, the British had the Boys anti-tank rifle,
the Finns had the Lahti 20mm, the ... Swiss had a Solothurn S-18/1000 20mm,
the Japanese had a 20mm anti-tank gun, the Russians had the PTRS and the PTRD.
Everyone kind of had ... something like this.
Now what they ended up generally being used for was more of an anti-materiel rifle because, as I said,
very quickly these couldn't perforate tank armour, but they'd still be great for shooting at trucks,
shooting at small buildings, maybe shooting at fortified positions or pill boxes.
A lot of stuff like that, so they did get used.
Now at the beginning, you know, during the late 1930s, the German company Rheinmetall
actually took an existing Polish anti-tank rifle design and cartridge, and they started tweaking it
and improving it. And what they came up with was the PzB 318 cartridge.
It's a huge, almost an inch in diameter, brass case that necks all the way down to an 8mm projectile.
It fires approximately a 224 grain armour-piercing projectile at about 3,800 feet per second.
So really, really fast. At 100 metres that allowed it to penetrate about 30mm of armour.
So a solid inch of hardened armour plate, that's not too bad.
But again, it didn't take long before that was woefully inadequate for disabling a tank.
At the same time, it could penetrate 20mm of that armour
(this is 90 degree vertical armour), at 300 metres. So that's roughly its capability.
At the the beginning of the invasion of Poland, the German army had a
little over 550 of these guns, but they really ramped up production.
And by the time they invaded the Soviet Union they had more than 25,000 of them.
I should back up a moment and say this is a model of 39, a PzB 39.
There was also a PzB 38, which was a very similar gun, used the same cartridge,
but it had an auto-ejecting system. And it actually had a recoil mechanism, so that
the ejection mechanism would eat up some of the recoil of firing,
and it would spit the empty case out for you. Kind of like a small artillery piece.
That was expensive and complex, and actually the Gustloff company took that design from Rheinmetall
and they simplified it into this design, which is the one that really saw mass production.
It's a falling block action. We'll take a look at exactly how that looks when we can get up close a little bit.
It has a folding stock to make it a little bit more portable. It's about five foot three inches long
in its firing configuration, when you fold the stock you can drop it to about four feet long.
The thing weighs about 27 pounds, so it's more or less portable. But yeah, it's heavy.
We have a 10 round ammunition box on the side, which is kind of a clever idea.
We'll take a close-up look at that as well.
So why don't we... Frankly, let's go ahead right now and bring the camera back here
and get a closer look at some of these interesting elements.
Alright, so this is a falling block action. You have your breech right here, and the way this operates is rather clever.
We just take the pistol grip, rotate it forward, and drop it down.
There's a big old latch right here that locks this into the receiver.
Once the pistol grip has been dropped down you see you have a nice clear opening into the chamber here.
There is an automatic extractor there that will pop the round out after you fire and open the breech.
You put a new one in, and then you lock the pistol grip back up.
This does also have a dust cover on it. There's a little bit of exposed area right here that ...
Clearly this is something that was added after the fact, and it would appear that people realised
they were getting gunk and well, frankly, probably Russian mud, stuck in there and causing problems.
So they added these little dust covers.
We do also have a selector switch down here. That is simply fire and safe, not much else to that.
On the right side of the gun and in fact, there's one of these on each side of the gun, right and left,
we have an ammunition magazine, or box.
Because this is a single-shot rifle, there's no way to have a, you know, feed of multiple cartridges.
So what they did instead was they provided these with a couple of storage boxes.
This one holds 10 rounds, one in each of these little spring clips, and then has a spring-loaded
cover on it. And then it's got this lug on the side which fits into this spring-loaded
rail on the side of the gun. So this allows me to keep ten rounds
at the ready to use as I'm shooting.
To use this, we just pop the door open, pull a round out,
drop it into the breech of the gun,
close the breech, fire and repeat.
There's a second lug on this side of the gun that would fit a matching, but mirror imaged, ammunition box.
So you could carry 20 rounds on the gun, kind of cool and convenient.
I mentioned the stock collapsed to make this a little bit easier to transport. That is done with this button right here,
push that in and then also...
push that in,
the stock folds underneath the gun,
this bottom part of the buttstock folds down, and then we have a little spring catch here
that snaps up into the bottom of the receiver.
The bipod
... does a similar thing with this catch. This is basically just an MG42 bipod.
Properly goes together,
and there we have the bipod stored.
Thankfully, they included a carry handle with this thing. Because it is rather bulky and heavy to carry.
The whole thing weighs about 27 pounds.
No-one would object carrying that if it would actually defeat a tank,
but when it doesn't, this thing gets to be a lot of weight without a whole lot of purpose.
So, of course, at the invasion of Russia there are 25,000 of these guns ready, and ready to go.
The Germans anticipated that the Russians would have really pretty poor armoured vehicles.
Well, the Russians turned out to have some really good armoured vehicles and developed some really good ones.
This became obsolete. What they ended up doing was actually rather clever.
The Gustloff company did some experimenting, and they figured out
a way to convert this into a grenade launching rifle. So they cut the barrel way down,
put an end of barrel grenade launcher on, very similar in style to the grenade launchers
that the Germans used on Mauser rifles, and they used blank cartridges of the same type as
as this normal AP, same cartridge case. They used blank firing cartridges
as propellant for armour-piercing anti-tank grenades.
In that guise the guns got a lot of their practical use back.
They were of course shorter, lighter, handier,
and they were actually once again able to defeat armour, much better than an armour-piercing bullet could.
So in that configuration the gun saw use clear to the very end of the war.
One side effect of that was they were taking these existing PzB 39s and
converting them into grenade launchers, or GrB, Granatbüchse Model 39 guns.
So it's fairly uncommon to be able to find one of these guns in its actual bullet firing configuration any more,
because most of them were converted, ... this couldn't be used for very much,
the grenade launching ones were useful, so off to the conversions they went.
At any rate, it's very cool to be able to find this one for sale. I should point out
it is not a destructive device despite being an anti- tank rifle, because the bullet is only 8mm in diameter.
So it falls well under the .50 calibre threshold, and this is just a plain old curio and relic firearm.
If you'd like to buy it, add it to your own collection, maybe
start on an epic quest to find yourself some PzB 318 ammunition to try out in it,
you can buy it here at Rock Island in the April of 2015 auction.
If you click the link below in the description text, that'll take you to Rock Island's catalogue page.
You can take a look at their high res pictures and their description, and
create an account, place a bid on-line and do your best to add this to your own collection.
Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video.