hey guys thanks for coming in another
video on forgotten weapons comm I'm in
McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock
Island auction company taking a look at
a couple of very cool rather exotic
lucre pistols we have a po8
regular Luger and we have an LPO a lung
a pistol artillery lucre and these were
both made for Persia or Iran quick
little bit of a historical aside the
country was typically called Persia by
those of us not in Persia right up until
1934 or 1935 when the government of
Persia formally requested that people
actually start calling it Iran which
then was exceeded by most of the foreign
diplomatic services and so 1935 and
onward it became formally known outside
on the Western Hemisphere as Iran so I'm
gonna call these Persian because they
were actually ordered in 1934 before
that edict was issued and I think
Persian sounds cooler than Iranian
anyway the backstory to this is that the
Shah of Iran ordered four thousand Luger
pistols for not his army but for his
bodyguard core from Mauser in 1934
Mauser had taken over production of the
Luger from DWM and this order was split
into three thousand standard short
pistols and one thousand along imperiled
artillery models so they have a whole
bunch of very unique markings on them
which we can take a look at right now
there is a whole mess of leather
attached to the shoulder stock for the
artillery pistol so I've gone ahead and
taken that off for the moment what we
see here are basically all of the
markings have been redone in Farsi I'll
show you these on the artillery Luger
because artillery Lugar's are by their
very nature cooler than regular Leuchars
here on the right side we have I don't
know the exact translation of this but
in effect it says model of 1314
parabellum pistol and it's 1314 because
in the Islamic calendar which starts at
the equivalent of the Christian year 622
the year 1314 is equivalent to 1935 and
is when these pistols actually started
chipping so batches were sent there are
three batches total the first two in
1935 and the final batch in 1936
so guns are ordered in 34 but it took a
year or two to get them all delivered on
the top of the chamber we have the Royal
Seal of Iran the site markings are in
Farsi the toggle marking which I really
hope I'm holding right site up says Arms
Factory Mauser that is in place of the
traditional Mauser logo kind of
interesting that even that gets
translated here we have a safety
selector marking in Farsi and all of the
serial numbers are in farsi numerals so
in this case we have this crown you
which is a german proof mark followed by
an iranian inspectors proof mark
followed by a four digit serial number
and as in the tradition of Luger
production you'll find the last two
digits of the serial number repeated on
all the small parts we have the full
serial number on the front of the frame
here and interestingly on the Persian
guns iranian guns the barrels the
artillery barrels were not numbered
although the magazines were so this is a
matching gun but it unfortunately has a
mismatched magazine we've got all the
same markings on the standard po8 there
there's our serial number this one
hasn't been filled in with that the
white marker paint but this one actually
does have a matching magazine on it
Mauser ended up taking possession of a
lot of old DWM stockpiles of parts in
1930 and that included a whole bunch of
unused spare artillery Luger barrels and
they used those to fulfill this contract
for Iran or Persia they also had old
unmarked wood stocks that were shipped
to fulfill this contract so typically on
a German artillery Luger stock you'll
have a serial number on the metal for
these instead the serial number was
stamped into the stock this one
unfortunately does not match
with the pistol but that's actually
pretty common the screwdriver in there
and the cleaning rod were both basically
surplus German examples and those were
shipped with the guns
however the leather was not the leather
was fabricated locally in Iran after the
guns arrived it's in general patterned
after the German Navy po4 style but
there are a couple of elements here that
make it a bit distinctive from German
production for one thing on the cleaning
rod flap here we have a solid piece of
leather all the way across for these two
little flaps Germans tended to use two
separate pieces stitched on for the
little side elements there the boot down
here that protects the stock lug is
stitched on instead of riveted and it's
just a single thickness of leather the
German ones have a second piece as a
liner in there and in general the
stitching isn't quite as clean and
perfect as it would have been on
original German Imperial examples but I
mean the leather is a very close very
close copy of German leather just they
didn't include it in the original pistol
contract these guns came on to the
surplus market in the 1970s and
unfortunately a lot of them are
mismatched apparently when they were
shipped out of Iran they were shipped in
multiple batches
it sounds like they actually had
disassembled the pistols for easier
shipping and they'd certainly separated
all the stocks so the stocks are very
often mismatched the pistols are often
as well especially the short pistols
it's very cool that both of these are in
fact matching guns in pretty darn nice
condition and a very cool example of one
of the later production commercial Luger
purchases one of the very last purchases
and production runs of artillery Lugar's
so hopefully you guys enjoyed the video
if you would like to know more about
either of these you can find them both
in a rock island's most recent auction
catalog you can also check the
description text below to find links to
rock island's Instagram page and their
YouTube channel where they have a bunch
of other cool stuff you can check out
thanks for watching