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 some of the guns
that they're going to be selling in their upcoming
September of 2017 Premier auction.
And today we're going to take a look at a really cool submachine gun.
This is a German MP18,1. This was basically the first
submachine gun to see actual combat use in the world. There's some argument about
Italian submachine guns but the Germans are really the ones who came up with the
proper design first and put it into practice with the right tactics.
So, this story begins in late 1915, when the German military decided that it needed
something ... it wanted a weapon that was ideal for, as it put it, the last 200 yards
(or 200 metres they would have said), of the attack. So the idea was you want
something that can deliver a high volume of fire at close range. Doesn't need to
be a long-range weapon, we don't care about that, we want something to put in
the hands of the Sturmtruppen, so that ... when they close with the
enemy in a trench, they can have superior firepower. And the answer to that was,
absolutely, the submachine gun. Now one of the first things the Germans actually
tried out was a fully automatic conversion of the Luger.
But the Luger is not really ideally set up to do that sort of thing, it was
closed bolt, it tended to be vulnerable to cookoffs once it got hot, and the
parts are just too small. It wasn't built to be a machine gun, and it didn't work out well.
So they ended up trying about half-a-dozen other designs from a bunch
of major designers and manufacturers in Germany. And the one they eventually
adopted was this. This was produced by the Theodor Bergmann Company and it was
actually designed by Hugo Schmeisser. So the name Schmeisser will have a long
history in German submachine guns, appropriately or not. Hugo Schmeisser was
the eldest son of Louis Schmeisser. Louis Schmeisser had designed a number of
other guns for Bergmann, including many of the Bergmann pistols, and then in about
1905 he actually left the Bergmann company for some other work, and his son,
Hugo, who had been working there since about 1900, took over for him as
technical director of the company. And it was Hugo
who is responsible for this submachine gun design.
So what we have here is in some ways fantastic,
and in some ways really quite awkward.
The most awkward part about it is the magazine.
So interestingly, Schmeisser originally used
a standard type box magazine. Because when this project was requested in 1915,
or early 1916, the existence of this, the 32 round Luger Trommelmagazin,
or drum magazine, really wasn't widely known. So it's understandable that the
inventors who are submitting submachine guns wouldn't have had access to
something like this, or even known about it necessarily. So once the ...
weapon was presented to the military, they requested that it be adapted to use
this drum magazine, because this is what was available. These have been in
manufacture already for Artillery Lugers, they are out there, they were produced,
it's a working magazine, (mostly). So it's what they wanted to go with. As a result,
this thing has a magazine that hangs way off on the left side.
People often complain about side mounted magazines causing balance issues for
submachine guns, and to me in general it's not really an important factor, it doesn't
really make that big of a difference. But I'll tell you what, on this, even just
with this empty drum you can really feel it trying to pull the gun over to one side.
But again that was the drum that was available, the magazine that was
available, at the time. There were no other high-capacity 9mm or
pistol calibre magazines being used. So that was on there.
And then the mechanism of the gun is a very simple one, which is part of what
endeared this to the German military. It's just blowback. There is no locking system.
And so it's a very simple gun to manufacture, and ... this would set the
standard for submachine guns, and is still to this day.
When the German military finally adopted this and decided it was what they wanted,
they placed an order for 50,000 of the guns in late 1917.
Not all of those, in fact nowhere close to all of those, would actually be manufactured.
The highest serial numbered gun known still today
(that is actually wartime acceptance proof marked),
is serial number 17,677. So about a third of the order
was actually produced and accepted by the end of the war. But even then, not all
of those guns actually got to troops at the front. It's estimated that only about
3,000 of these guns ... actually saw combat by the time the war ended.
So they were only introduced very late in the war, and only in really pretty small numbers.
However they saw enough combat that people ...
everyone really fairly quickly recognised their suitability to trench warfare.
So there are some elements to the submachine gun that we can really
credit to Hugo Schmeisser that we take really for granted today.
And one of them is this safety notch, the idea that instead of having a safety lever on a
submachine gun (and the MP18, by the way, did not have a selector lever or a
safety lever, it was full-auto only, no semi-auto mechanism), and the safety was
simply to pull the bolt all the way back and lift it up into this notch.
The idea is from there it can't be bumped anywhere, it can't close, the gun's safe.
It holds the bolt open, so you can get air flow through the barrel to help cool
it if you've been firing a lot. And that's a safety mechanism that ...
you would continue to see used on a wide variety of other submachine guns for decades to come.
In order to use this magazine that was
designed for the Luger, the magazine well had to accommodate, basically,
the grip angle of the Luger. So it's tilted back at about 60 degrees.
In order to remove the magazine you push down on this button and pull the
magazine out. One thing to take note of here, is that the magazine well on the MP18
is substantially shorter than the grip frame of a Luger, so if you were to
insert this under stress and in too much of a hurry, it is easy to over-insert it,
and jam the feed lips up against the bolt or override the magazine stop, and
then have the bolt hit the magazine and damage things. So originally the Trommel
magazines were issued with this little sleeve that fit this extra space, and
prevented you from over-inserting the magazine. This particular drum doesn't
have that, but it was typically used.
Now the drum itself is a single stack 32 round magazine. These are all in 9x19mm.
And you could load the first bit by hand, but only down to the first handful of
cartridges, before this coil-spring got stiff enough that you really had to have
the special loading tool. And then you would use this to wind the magazine.
And what's kind of cool is this mechanism, this lever here, would actually indicate
the amount of ammunition you have left. So we have markers for 12, 17, 22, 27 and 32
rounds remaining. And this end of the winder would point you to where you were.
So the other way to do it is just to look at where this was, because this
would rotate a single turn around. So when this was up here you had 32, and as
it came around, by the time it got to this point you knew that there was nothing left in the drum,
and you just had the 12 rounds left in this stack going up into the magazine well.
These drums were really the Achilles heel of the MP18.
While they may have been the best option available at the time, they were not a
good option. After the war certainly, once there was any other choice, this
sort of magazine would be dropped as quickly as possible.
Now in terms of mechanics, the MP18 is, well, obviously and by definition a first-generation
submachine gun. These parts are all milled, this is a rather heavy gun.
It does have a perforated barrel jacket up here to protect the users hand.
And it has this pretty cool disassembly mechanism, where it's actually hinged
right here. So to take this apart, we're going to start by dropping the
bolt down, let it forward.
And then, we have a little latch back here.
Push that latch in and lift up, like so,
and you can pivot open the whole mechanism of the gun.
Then to get the bolt out, we're going to take the rear cap and we're going to
rotate it. You can see there are two marking lines. This is in place and ready
to fire, this line is for disassembly. So we're going to take this,
rotate it to that position, and then gently let it out.
One of the downsides to the MP18 is that it has
this very long and very thin recoil spring, which is
really prone to binding and kinking when it's installed.
And you can see that on this one.
Now with the spring and guide out we can
take the bolt out. To do that, we're actually going to pull it back to this
point, and then we have to rotate it down, and then we can pull it the rest of the
way out. And then we can see that Schmeisser actually used a two part
bolt and striker here.
To be honest I'm not really sure what the advantage is of
having this striker as a separate piece.
The spring actually goes into the back end of the striker,
and the sear is on the bolt. So it's not
like these two pieces are ever going to be not in contact with each other.
There isn't really any time when you've got spring pressure on the striker
relieved in some way. So maybe it was just manufacturing, maybe it was just
that this was literally, basically, the first submachine gun out there. And this
is the way Schmeisser chose to do it, and people would recognise that it wasn't
advantageous later and switched to things like fixed firing pins.
The trigger mechanism here is relatively simple, it is simply a bar that goes
forward with a cammed sear inside the receiver tube.
OK, so down at the bottom of the tube there, on the left,
is the sear and when I push forward on this plunger in
the trigger group, the sear drops down.
That releases the bolt and allows it to fire.
That firing is done just by pushing this forward, and that's what the trigger
does when the whole thing is assembled. So since this isn't assembled, there's no
spring pressure on the trigger right now,
but all the trigger is doing is pushing that bar forward.
Since there's no disconnector or semi-auto mechanism,
that's as complicated as it needs to be.
Note that in good traditional German style, pretty much everything is
serialised, from the rear end cap here,
to the receiver and the magazine well, of course.
And even down to the big screws, like that hinge screw.
As for markings, we have an MP18 comma 1 there on the top of the receiver.
This then has a 1920 property stamp. I have a separate video on what that 1920 means,
if you're not sure about that, go check out that other video. But that is not a manufacture date.
These guns are not actually dated when they were produced.
One thing to touch on here, that 'I', it's either a Roman numeral 1 or a capital I,
nobody's really sure which.
And nobody's really come up with a definitive explanation for what that
means, while there is an MP28 comma 2, or I I ["MP28,II"], and there is also at least
one version of MP18 comma I V, there haven't been, and no-one's located, an
MP18 comma 2 or comma 3 or an MP28 comma 1.
It's not sure, it's not really well understood.
... One theory is that the 'I V' the 'V' stands for 'verbessert', or improved,
which makes sense in some ways but not necessarily in all ways.
That's just an interesting mystery out there. Until someone finds more
documentation we probably will never know.
The side of the receiver here is marked with 'Bergmann Waffenbau Suhl', the manufacturer.
And the only other marking on here is the S on the safety catch or 'sicher'.
The rear sight on these was a V-notch with two positions you could flip
between, a 100 and a 200 metre.
And that was paired with a nice large barleycorn style front sight post there.
(Also serialised to the gun.)
There are two different ways that appear to have been experimented with for using these in the
field. One was to form machine-gun squads where you'd have 12 men, 6 of them
armed with MP18s, and 6 of them acting as ammunition carriers with more
loaded drums. Because those drums are slow and tedious to load and are not
something that you're going to do in the field under stress. So you'd have, for
every guy with a gun, you'd have a second guy carrying a bunch of spare ammunition for him.
The other way was apparently, and I think this is how they were
originally intended to be issued, was that each NCO, and then 1 in 10
riflemen, would be issued an MP18, as kind of a way to spread the
firepower through every unit. So between those two you really have the two
major options for how to use firepower like this. Either one concentrated unit
that you can use specially for, you know, situations that call for it.
Or attempting to ... spread it through all of the units, so that if
anyone goes into close combat there's going to be someone
around with a weapon like this to make use of.
One of the questions that comes up with a gun like this is,
how do you hold on to something with a side magazine? Well the first step
is remember that you're right-handed, because in the Army in World War One
everyone was right-handed. So we don't have to worry about a left-handed solution.
And if we look at some of the pictures of guys using these in the
field or in training, there are two different ways of actually holding the
gun that show up. One is using these finger grooves, like this.
That seems to be kind of the obvious solution, however there's another method that you do see
photographed quite a bit. And that is holding on to the magazine well and the
magazine, and the way it's pretty much always done is with an underhanded grip,
like this.
This is particularly often done from a kneeling position,
where instead of resting their elbow on the table,
the shooter is resting this elbow on the knee that's sticking up (that they're not sitting on).
One other interesting thing to point out is the rate of fire on the
MP18 here was actually quite slow. It was about 400 rounds a minute, or about
the same as the US World War Two Grease Gun. That stands kind of in stark
contrast to the Italian counterpart, the Villar-Perosa
(and it's ... broken in half submachine gun progeny),
which had extremely high rates of fire. On the Villar-Perosa it
was 1,200 to 1,500 rounds a minute on each of the two barrels.
So you see the beginning of the difference in basic philosophy of the
submachine gun, whether you have a very high or relatively low rate of fire.
So after the war the German military wasn't allowed to have
submachine guns, they really had made a big impression in those few weeks
or months that they were being used. So the vast majority of these guns that
survived (because a lot of them were just destroyed), the ones that survived were
typically issued out to police forces, who were allowed to have that sort of thing.
... They would use the Trommel magazine version, this Luger drum
magazine version, as they had them. Once the improved version with the better
double stack box magazines came out, they would use those.
But not very many of these original pattern Trommel magazine MP18s survived.
So very cool to be able to take a look at this one, which as far as I can tell
is all matching original. Which is really ... quite the rare piece.
If you would like to have this one for your own collection,
take a look at the description text below. You'll
find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on this guy, you can take a
look at their pictures, their description, their price estimate and everything else.
And if you decide that you need to have it, you can place a bid
here live at the auction, or over the phone, or through their website.
Thanks for watching.