Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at a Swedish test Luger.
Now Sweden tested the Luger in, like, 1904, along with
pretty much every other interesting and potentially viable
semi-auto pistol that was out there on the market.
They were looking to replace their revolvers with one of these hot, fancy, new, semi-automatic pistols.
And the Luger they tested at that point was the old model, the new model Luger wasn't developed until 1906.
And what they found in those tests was that the Luger was actually the most accurate of all the pistols that they tested,
but it was not the most reliable, especially in very cold conditions (which you do get in Sweden every once in a while).
And so as a result of that test they actually ended up adopting the Browning Model of 1903 as their Model of
1907 pistol. And it was chambered for the Browning 9x20mm ... semi-rimmed cartridge, which is
kind of an oddball. It existed in that period but didn't take off very well.
So, they built a whole bunch of those pistols under license at Husqvarna, and they're good guns.
But when World War Two started approaching in the late 1930s, Sweden started buying batches of submachine guns
and these were, as one might expect, in 9mm Luger calibre.
And so they decided we really need to kind of standardise, we need to replace these old simple blowback
Browning 9mm pistols with other pistols that are actually in the same cartridge as our submachine guns.
So in 1938/1939 the Swedish military held another pistol trial,
and in this one, one of the guns that they tested was this guy.
In fact, specifically this pistol. So let's take a look at it.
This is pretty much a standard commercial pattern Luger, but there are a few little subtle differences.
So first off, let's look at the top.
These were purchased from the Mauser company, so they have a Mauser banner on the toggle.
And they are all dated 1938.
Sweden bought 300 of these pistols, and the serial numbers go from 5,700 V to 6,000 V.
So this one's right at the tail end of that.
Of those 300, 275 of them were this pattern. Which is to say a longer, a 4.75 inch barrel,
as opposed to the 4 inch barrel that the German military used, and chambered for 9mm Parabellum.
They did also purchase 25 of them with the shorter 100mm or 4 inch barrel in .30 Luger calibre,
but most of them were 9mm guns like this.
One other subtle difference with these is that they have
rust blued parts overall, which is normal, except they then have a salt blued barrel.
And if you look at this, you can tell the difference in the finish between the barrel and the frame here.
The barrel is much shinier, the frame has a more matt finish to it.
And then, of course, the small parts, as you would expect from a commercial Luger,
are strawed, so you can see they kind of have this golden colour to them.
Unfortunately, the magazine on this one is mismatched.
It should actually be marked 9mm, the Swedish contract ones were.
It's not actually necessary because the magazines are interchangeable for the two calibres, 9mm and .30 Luger,
but the original Swedish mags did have that marking.
Everything else is standard for what you would get from a commercial Mauser-made Luger.
So we have a commercial proof up here.
Serial numbers are repeated on a whole bunch of the parts, typically the last two digits.
The safety is standard, and marked in German there.
So despite their Swedish military trials use, they don't actually have any Swedish markings on them,
and they can be identified only by serial number and the other somewhat unique features that we just went over.
Now in this later trial the Swedes were also looking at the P38 (or rather the Walther HP,
the army pistol, Heerespistole, that preceded the P38), and they were also looking at the Finnish Lahti M35.
And what they ended up finding was that the Luger was the most accurate of the guns that they were testing,
but once again it was too expensive, and they ended up buying about 1,500 Walther HPs or P38s.
Well, the problem is they couldn't buy more than that afterwards because World War Two broke out,
Germany kind of isn't so interested in selling guns commercially they kind of want to keep them for themselves,
keep building more, and so Sweden ended up adopting the Lahti as the model M40
and producing that under licence at Husqvarna.
So kind of interesting, Luger got two chances with the Swedish military, and both times it was a good pistol.
It was just not quite good enough and, in general, it was too expensive every time.
That was pretty much the one biggest failing of the Luger was that it was a very expensive pistol to manufacture.
So they didn't end up adopting it in any greater quantity, and were left with just the 300 of them that they purchased.
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