I am Indy Neidell. And I am Flo.
And this is a special Great War episode about German pistols used in WW1
And association with one the greatest Youtube channel in the entire history of the world and space and time
Our friend Othais' channel, C&Rsenal.
I guess let's start with the pistols. Alright!
Take it away!
This massive thing is the Reichsrevolver and this is the 79 model.
There would also be an 83 model, which is a little more compact, but still the same general action.
So we zoom in on it.
This is a real throwback to the early cowboy days.
This gun is single action only. Which means if I pull this trigger, nothing happens.
Because you have to manually cock that hammer back for every single shot.
The gun also has, weirdly enough, a safety,
even though you still have to cock the hammer for every shot. So this safety prevents you from cocking that hammer.
The other thing with this gun is we load from an ejection... from a gate.
And we had to load one at a time.
And lord help you, if you accidentally go too far on that. Every time you hear that click.
That click is " I've gone too far and now I need to spin it slightly slower to get the next one line up properly."
Because it doesn't even stop in such a way to be friendly for loading.
There is no ejection system on this, so you have to take a metal stick rod that came with this on your holster.
Pull it out and pop you casings out one by one, while indexing.
So...not a speed loader either.
This gun comes about, because the Germans are obsessed with having a reliable rugged piece.
And believe me, it weights like a brick.
You can beat somebody to death with it before you can shoot them.
It does chamber good cartridges though. Because It's a clone of a .44 Smith & Wilson Russian,
which at that time was a very good cartridge.
They just made a very small adjustment to the size of the bullet, but that's about it.
It's really kept as an accessory after the sword, because it's designed for cavalrymen .
So you would use your sword before you would use this thing.
But the reason we are mentioning it, even though looking as 1879 that's before anything else we've talked about so far.
The reason mentioning is it wasn't replaced in service officially
until the Luger 1908 comes out.
It's just worth mentioning that something this old was still being carried around, because they just needed...
they need guns. I mean all directions, they needed guns.
Many of you are going to recognize this on sight.
I've got my nice wooden holster here.
And... with a push of the button...I have my C96.
Yeah sort of! Yap!
This is iconic. I think every Bond villain carried one of it at this point.
There are not a lot of semi-automatic pistols, especially the reliable ones of that time.
And locking action semi-automatic pistols are almost unheard of.
So if we zoom in...
This gun has short recoil system, so that this whole upper assembly kinda comes back enough
to let the locking block drop down, and free up the bolt.
Whoorp! That will then kick back the hammer. I am sorry. I am trying to stay out of the way.
All the way back. I'll leave her open for a second, cause this is a good time to mention that this thing...
despite looking like it would have a removable magazine, you would load from stripper clip.
So this bolt stays locked to the rear, unless the follower is depressed.
So we'll just strip these rounds in and it takes a couple of pushes.
And once we are all the way in the clip comes out.
And that bolt snaps home. So we are closed and we've gotten a bunch of very fake rounds in there.
How many was that. I didn't see.
Here you got a 10 rounder.
At that time that is very good for a pistol. All the stuff I've shown you before, none of them got above 8 shots.
So...you know, 10 rounds of 9mm is very potent for handgun of that time.
The big thing about this is, even though this is design to be a pistol pistol.
As in just sorta one-handing it, it has a lot of flip to it.
And this what's called bore axis. So the top of my hand is here.
I'm sorry. I am trying to line up for the video here.
Top of my hand is here...gotten backwards. The barrel is all the way up here.
So that means that when we fire it, our recoil comes from here
very high above my hand, which creates some flip.
Hope that makes sense. That's where that reset time gets real slow.
They wisely chose to pair it with a stock.
So I might have to back out, because this gets pretty big.
But now we have much better control over the handgun, because we can shoulder it.
We have 3 points of contact, 2 hands and our shoulder.
So...these are equipped with an adjustable rear sight.
We can use it like carbine, which is terrific. If you want to be able to carry a sort of
one thing fits all weapon system. Let me get all my arms and everything out of the way.
So...yeah! That's where we are at.
Another movie reference: this is also the gun that was the basis for blaster from Han Solo.
Oh! Right! Okay, Cool! Oh yeah! Sure! Hm!
I like Han Solo's gun. Cool! I didn't know that.
So...the should also be familiar to a lot people.
We'll zoom in.
This is the very unique hand gun, that uses toggle lock.
It's believed to be derived somewhat from the earlier Maxims (machine gun).
The way it works is just like you think of your knee.
If you lock you leg straight, and somebody tries to push on it. It's nice and rigid.
But if you bend your knee, and somebody tries to push up it. It will collapse real easy.
Same idea here.
When she is in this state and we detonate a round in there.
It stays nice and firm in locked until it gets pushed rearwards.
So I might have to use my Heracles strength to ram it.
See how we are pushing back on that. As we push back even further,
it starts riding on that rise. See that the round bit run on the slop at the top of the screen?
That guy will eventually with the force of a cartridge going off be popped upwards.
OK, so it's going up. Once he is up,
then all that pressure in there is free to push him all the way up
through this position. And this happens in a fraction of a second. I am just sort of trying to show everybody.
And then there is a spring back here in the grip,
that is pulling down on the toggle. It wants to bring the toggle joint back
to the base of the pistol.
And so, when it's free to go and I can do that by...when the magazine is out of the way, just let her go.
It gets yanked back down flat. Now that all happens like a set in a millisecond. I mean that's instant.
You can't even really see this thing rise in front of your vision. A lot of people say: Oh! It gets in the way of the vision.
You can't see that fast. Trust me, It's not bothering you one bit.
Very accurate, very easy to use, terrific reliable pistol.
They feed from a detachable box magazine.
And this has a nice little loading helper right here. As this get a little stiffer, they get to be a pain to work with.
But...simple simple safety on the left side.
So that we can just sort of one hand on and off.
And not really change our grip too too much.
Also, by the way, we finally get our handy dandy push button on where people want it. So we push up there.
There is also some spring tension that keeps this guy seated, so that we still have to positively grab it,
which is why we have these dimples.
But at least we have it up here where we can one-hand it like people expect.
How did these handguns handle..say mud.
As a pistol, the Luger probably didn't have the worst time.
Again, your pistol is sealed action, so it's not firing in mud.
And it's in a holster, too. It's fairly well protected. So...not a lot of problem with this one.
However, it's not realistically gotta be wrong at the pistol. You are not using this in the mud.
You are carrying it around in a holster in the mud, and then popping it out and shooting it.
So... as far as I know, there were never any real big concerns about reliability for the Luger.
So now we have massive barrel. We have an adjustable rear sight, and we have sort of a flat board stock.
There is another holster that goes over this, but I left it off. Because it's kind of hard to see and sort of whompy.
This would be clipped onto your belt with a holster.
And then you would pop it off your belt and throw the gun on it, and then boom!
You got yourself a very nice carbine. I mean look at that barrel.
So...this is also 9mm, it takes standard Luger mag.
The thing is...8 rounds ain't cutting it.
We need a better magazine system.
In comes the infamous trommel(drum) magazine. Right. Oh! Right!
So that's the snail drum people talked about.
When we get into the trenches, and we need to move and shoot, and take a trench.
32 rounds of 9mm in a compact package, rapid fire
is extremely useful compared to 5 shot bolt action rifle.
Because 9mm is doing the same job as that over powered rifle cartridge, when you are that close.
You should be able to see some numbers. I don't know if you can make them out. Here let me
check there is sort of...they are not light up. But right here we have 32. All the way over here we have 12.
The reason for those is as this armature comes around, it shows us where we are in the magazine.
So that we will have an idea of how many rounds we have left.
This whole thing works on a crank, so I flip this guy out.
We need to partially compress the spring in order to even load this thing, because it's so strong of a spring system.
So, we have to pull that crank all the way around.
Believe me, it's stiff. Once we are at here,
we push in our button and let her forward to catch that little keyhole.
And she is locked in.
Now, we can turn our attention to another end.
We grab up our handy loading tool, which are also hard to come by, so we are lucky to borrow this.
It has a push button on the other side, that I am going to hit, in order to mount it.
Just if I were to attaching it to a gun realistically. It's that same position that we are hitting.
And so now, we have a nice little water pump.
So, what we can do is we can take single rounds of 9mm, and put them in, lock them down.
Put them in, lock them down. Put them in, lock them down. We do that 32 times.
And then we can release this guy.
We load them up, and we have a beautiful WW1 trench storming system.
If you like to find out more about the C96. And let's face it, who wouldn't.
You can click right here to see Othais tell you all about it.
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See you next time.