What the Sturmgewehr brought to the table was an incredibly soft shooting and controllable full-auto rifle.
They did that of course by sacrificing the ... long-range potential of a full 8x57 cartridge for an 8x33.
It's good out to maybe 300 metres but, as people discovered, 300 metres is really the maximum range
that you're almost ever going to be shooting in combat anyway with a rifle like this.
So, if you can get rid of the excess range that you don't really need
and replace it with controllability at short range, why not?
The rate of fire is low enough that you can easily fire single shots
on the full-auto setting with any halfway decent trigger control.
And safety is fairly ergonomic, as long as you're shooting it right-handed.
These are really phenomenal guns.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here at the James Julia Auction House today taking another look at this Sturmgewehr.
We talked about this recently, we looked at the mechanics before,
today we're going to talk about something a little bit different,
and that is kind of the how and why of implementation, and where this was actually used,
and maybe why it wasn't used as much as it could have been.
So, the Germans had actually been working on ... an intermediate calibre
self-loading carbine since 1935 or so.
They had a series of ongoing experiments, a guy named Vollmer
(who would have a lot of other firearms developments later in the war)
developed a couple of different versions of carbine. They had a couple of different short cartridges
that they were developing, a 7.75mm cartridge and a few others.
None of those really amounted to anything, this was pre-war peacetime experimentation,
which a lot of countries did and which usually didn't result in anything.
People are always experimenting with different ideas.
The equivalent of throwing it all up on a wall and seeing what sticks.
So when World War Two broke out, the German military was still interested in a self-loading rifle,
but that interest kind of moved from an intermediate cartridge,
which was still experimental and hadn't really gone very far,
interest moved to a self-loading rifle and a full-power rifle cartridge, the standard 8x57.
And that program developed into the Gewehr 41, and the Gewehr 43, and the Fallschirmjägergewehr 42.
Successful rifles, well made rifles, good rifles (maybe not so much the 41, but the 43 was a good service rifle).
And this was in line with what Hitler was dictating.
He ... wasn't a military genius, but he had some ideas and not necessarily all of them were bad ideas,
but some of them were misplaced, and one of his notions was throughout
(until really towards the end of the war), he had this vision of the standard German infantryman,
increasing that man's firepower by making him a sniper.
... Hitler's idea for for arms development was ... to equip every infantryman with a self-loading rifle,
in 8x57 Mauser with a telescopic sight. The idea is this would give them
the firepower of a self-loading rifle but it would also give them a much greater extended range.
And it's actually kind of interesting, if you look, that's where militaries have gone today,
is a self-loading rifle with an optical sight that extends the effective range of infantry.
Now, we don't use 30-06 and 8 Mauser any more, and that kind of ties in to what much of the
German Ordnance staff saw as a better solution.
Now, as the invasion of Russia started to get worse and worse for the German military,
what they were coming to have to work with
became these under-strength units that had taken a lot of casualties.
They hadn't been able to fully reinforce units because they just didn't have the
manpower resources that the Russians did. And a lot of German technical officers came to this
hope, this assumption, or realisation or optimistic last opportunity kind of hope,
that what they could do to salvage the combat on the Eastern Front was to somehow
substantially increase the firepower available to the German squad.
So that a small group of men could have the firepower potential
far in excess of what their numbers would normally suggest.
And the way to do this would be to give them a rifle like the Sturmgewehr.
The idea being you have a reduced power cartridge that limits their range,
but that's okay because you're normally not using rifles more than about 300 yards
because you can't see targets farther than that anyway, especially not with iron sights,
and you give them a much greater magazine capacity, a controllable full-auto firearm.
And what they wanted to do was allow this gun to replace
(depending on what exact time period and what German officers you're looking at),
potentially replace virtually everything in the German arsenal with these.
Replacing the MP40, the Kar98k and all the other ... secondary standard bolt-action rifles,
and even the MG42 and MG34 with these guns.
The idea was the Germans used the MG34 and 42 in two different modes:
They kind of designated it a light machine gun when it was equipped with a bipod and was used for the attack,
they designated it a heavy machine gun when it was put on a Lafette tripod
mount in a static position and used on the defensive.
The idea was you could replace ... the offensive nature of the MG42 with Sturmgewehrs.
You are effectively turning every man into a pseudo light machine gunner
because every man would have full-auto capability.
Now, it's a reduced power cartridge, but that's not really that important in this type of tactical usage.
So that's what the Germans were going for with this.
And it's interesting that ... they presented this idea to Hitler several times,
and ... several times in a row he rejected it or allowed it only for very limited testing, things like that,
because he had this vision of full power rifles with scopes. It's what he wanted.
And German ordinance was ..., they believed in this rifle enough to, in many cases, just flat out ignore
those decrees by Hitler that this rifle was not to be developed. They renamed it,
that's why it's called an MP44, ... early on he was more receptive to the idea
of this being an upgrade and replacement for the MP40, and only the MP40.
So, OK, well we'll call it the MP43, we'll say we're just replacing the MP40.
That allows it to get into production and development,
and once it's on the field and people realise how effective it is, then we'll be able to ...
consider replacing other rifles with it. And actually, that's pretty much what worked for them.
Later on, they'd talk about replacing all sorts of things with these.
It's interesting in actual deployment, when they were sending these rifles to the front,
they were wise enough to not spread them evenly across all of the combat units.
Instead these rifles were specifically delivered in batches to equip complete companies,
so that you could really exploit their firepower.
The idea is you could have a couple companies armed entirely with assault rifles
that ... would, you could say, punch above their weight class.
Whereas, if you had issued these in ones and twos to a lot of ...
get a platoon and one or two of the guys get these instead of Mauser 98s,
you're not doing enough to increase that units firepower to make any effective difference.
And for a long time ...
It's interesting, the availability of Sturmgewehrs was limited not by the production of the rifles,
but by the production of the ammunition.
This is an entirely new cartridge that they have to start manufacturing.
And of course this was one of the arguments against this rifle was
now we're going to have three different cartridges, 9mm, 8x57, and now this new 8x33 short cartridge.
For example, by 1943 average production of 8mm Kurz ammunition was 2 million rounds per month,
and that sounds like quite a lot. However, break that down.
If you consider ... let's say we give each rifle ... 1,000 rounds per month,
which is one of the numbers that was used by the Germans often,
that comes down to about 35 rounds per day.
So everyone with one of these rifles gets to shoot approximately one magazine per day on average.
That's 1,000 rounds a month per gun, that only allows you to have 2,000 guns
before you've used up all of your 2 million rounds of ammunition for that month.
2,000 guns on the Eastern Front isn't that substantial of a number.
Now, they would eventually get ammunition production up, but it was always,
it was never ... enough, never as much as they would have wanted.
Now, the gun production was also a bit limited, especially early on.
Gun production peaked in November of 1944 with just over 50,000 guns made in one month.
In February of '45 they had I think at that point the largest number actually in inventory,
and that was 243,000 of the guns in inventory.
To put this in perspective, at that point MP44s (or StG44s)
comprised about 16% of German ... small arms production.
So when you totalled up the machine guns, and the rifles, and the submachine guns,
and the pistols, and the assault rifles, these guys were about one in six of the guns being made.
So they were never a huge proportion of the armaments,
but they really were far more effective than those numbers would indicate,
because this really was a revolutionary weapon on the battlefield.
That effectiveness was finally, ultimately recognised.
After many attempts at getting Hitler to approve this program, finally in October of 1944
this was formally declared the new standard weapon going forward, that would eventually,
(in crazy theory) eventually replace the Mauser 98k, as well as the Gewehr 43,
and ... all the other rifles in inventory. Of course that never happened, that never came close to happening.
As I said, the ammunition was a problem, gun production was never super-high,
magazine production became a problem by the end of the war.
In theory, this rifle gets issued with a set of six spare magazines.
By the end of the war you are lucky if you got four, most people got two.
A lot of ... these guns were sent out to the front with only one magazine.
And none of this was helped by the fact that the Germans were losing these guns in combat
as fast as they could produce them in some cases.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
These are really interesting guns, there really is a lot going on with these things.
They truly were revolutionary firearms developments.
They may not have been technically the first, but they were the first to actually be used.
And they are the first to truly get all of the elements of this style of rifle correct.
And were fantastically effective. Would they have changed the war if there had been more of them?
Probably not. I don't think World War Two was won or lost by small arms.
But for the individual German soldier having one of these would have given
you a distinct advantage, a survival advantage if nothing else.
If you're interested in owning one of these, they are a fantastic
addition to any World War Two or machine gun collection.
And this one, of course, is coming up for sale here at the Julia auction house.
Take a look at the description text below. You'll find a link to the catalogue page on it.
You can take a look at their pictures of it and description and
place a bid over the phone or come up here and participate live in the auction.
Thanks for watching.