For all the ambitious Wunderwaffen programs that Hitler had,
it turned out the most common weapon
of the Volkssturm in Germany was the Carcano.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and we're taking a look at
a pretty unique special Carcano today,
that being one that was actually converted
to 8mm Mauser by Heinrich Krieghoff
in Germany in early 1945.
But before we talk about this, let's cover why there are Carcanos
being used in the last ditch defence of Germany in the first place.
So our story basically goes back to September of 1943
which is when Italy officially surrenders to the Allies.
And Italy is chock full of German troops at this point,
and the Germans actually maybe see this coming and have a pretty good plan in place,
and managed to pretty effectively disarm the Italian troops
that are within German-occupied areas.
Germany still has a really good effective transportation network in Italy,
and they are thoroughly occupying it.
And as Allied forces push north through Italy,
the Germans are able to retreat in a reasonably cohesive manner.
And they're shipping all of these captured Italian weapons
that they've taken from disarmed troops,
they're shipping those north ahead of their retreat.
So by December of 1943 for example,
the German forces in Italy report having a stockpile of nearly 400,000 Carcano rifles.
And this would increase, this would be combined with other
batches of Carcanos that they had access to.
And some of these rifles were in fact reissued at the time,
and used by loyal Italian units, or various other groups.
But the majority of them simply got warehoused, especially up in northern Italy.
And we can then move forward to basically late 1944,
when Germany is really in severe deep risk.
And the German government starts looking at ways
to come up with basically emergency arms programs,
even more so than they had been before.
And it's here that the Carcanos basically get assigned,
"Well, we've got these warehouses full of Italian guns under German control,
let's ship those essentially to ... Germany,
and use them to arm this newly-created Volkssturm group.
Well you can create the Volkssturm all you like from an administrative standpoint,
but that doesn't mean that they have guns. Well, here's a supply of guns."
So the Volkssturm gets all sorts of captured foreign gear,
but they have more Carcanos than they have anything else.
That's fine and all, but there are some problems
that come along with this widespread issue of Carcanos.
First off, they are a bit confusing. The Italians had a massive number of different variations,
but more significantly they had two different calibres.
The Italians made these in 6.5, and then 7.35mm, and then back to 6.5.
And so German logisticians have to keep track of not just Carcanos and Carcano ammo,
but there is two different calibres of the guns and the ammo.
And that's going to cause some problems.
Well, someone gets the bright idea of, "Why don't we convert them to use German ammunition?
Because even if we do keep track of all the ammo that's floating around,
well the Germans aren't making Carcano ammunition."
All they've got to work with is what they have captured and stockpiled from Italy,
and that's going to run out.
Well, if you can convert these things to use 8mm Mauser that simplifies a lot of things, right?
Sounds good, so ... basically January of 1945
they put together a program to actually test out this idea.
And the way they do this is they bore out the barrels.
So they don't put in new barrels, they take the existing 6.5mm barrels
(and these experiments are predominantly done with 6.5mm Carcanos),
and they just drill them out, and drill in new rifling in 8mm.
There's a lot of talk that these guns aren't safe.
Well everything that I've seen, it actually appears that they are safe.
The Carcano action will handle 8mm Mauser.
Probably doesn't have quite the safety factor,
certainly not the safety factor it originally did in 6.5.
Probably not a safety factor we would be real comfortable with today,
but I'm not familiar with any actually exploding from this process.
And to be honest, the Germans wouldn't have gone through
with the conversion process if it actually was risky.
There's a level of crudity to a lot of last-ditch guns,
but it's actually counterproductive to spend time and money converting a firearm to something else
if it's then actually going to pose a danger to your own soldiers.
So countries didn't generally actually do that sort of thing.
Anyway, they bored out the barrels,
they made a few other changes which we'll ... take a look at in just a moment here.
The biggest single thing that stands out on the Carcano
is they were looking at how to deal with the magazine.
The Carcano uses its own ... proprietary 6 round en bloc clip
that just isn't compatible with 8mm Mauser.
So there were some experiments with converting Italian clips.
There was a plan to do a magazine-fed 8mm version,
but ... even at the time they didn't expect ... samples to be available until May of '45.
May of '45, ... they're not really making much more new stuff at that point.
So what they go ahead with in January and February of '45 is just a single-shot conversion.
So let's take a look at it, because that is what we have here.
Here we go, one German-converted Carcano in 8mm.
Now if you're looking at this from a distance, or from a profile,
the easiest way to distinguish one of these German conversions is this guy right here.
One of the elements of the German conversion program was to add a recoil lug into the stock.
This is not here on a typical Italian Carcano, it's not necessary.
The additional recoil of 8mm Mauser makes it necessary.
Now I also want to point out, and we'll touch on this a little bit at the end,
there's another batch of Carcanos converted to 8mm that have two,
that also have a recoil lug in the wrist.
If it's got one in the wrist it's a post-war gun and it's different,
we'll cover those in a different video.
So, you've got one recoil lug that was added.
If we take a look at the top of the action here,
you will see a little HK stamp, that's Heinrich Krieghoff.
This is one of the German military firearms manufacturers,
and it's the one German company that got a contract to do some of these conversions.
Now the other markings on here are largely going to be the original markings on the gun.
So this was originally made by Terni for the Italian Army, the Royal Army.
The Germans added a 7.9 here to the barrel when they converted it.
They also, it's a little hard to read there,
but they crossed out the original Cal 6.5, and replaced it with Cal 7.9.
The sights are set for a fixed 200 metre zero.
Now that's easy to do on an M38 short rifle like this one,
because it already had a 200 metre zero,
so they didn't have to do anything to the rear sight block.
However, it's worth pointing out that the Germans did this conversion
to everything ... including these M38 short rifles, but also M38 carbines and M41 long rifles.
And some of those other guns have more complicated adjustable rear sights,
and on those the German standard practice was to fix them at a 200 metre zero.
If the gun had a movable elevator, that often meant taking that out.
In order to set these to shoot properly at 200 metres,
the German conversion involved putting on a new front sight blade.
So that's the new one.
That is what the original Carcano M38 short rifle front sight would have looked like.
So you'll notice this is the full length of the front sight band,
the German one is a little bit shorter.
Being Germans, even though this is the desperate last months of World War Two,
they are still going to go ahead and put their own serial numbers on these guns.
So the original serial number was up here,
and it's been fairly crudely stamped out with a bunch of zeros,
and a replacement serial number has been marked both on the barrel and on the receiver.
And this is an "H" block serial number,
all of the Krieghoff conversions were, at least as far as we can tell.
In this case the H stamp is only about half applied but you can see it,
it would have been a capital letter H there.
And the best information I have, and this isn't 100%,
but this is best speculation at this point as far as I know it,
M38 short rifles like this one were in the 6,000 to 7,000 serial number range, H6000 to H7000.
M41 long rifles were numbered between 7,000 and 7,800 and change.
And then the carbines, both the folding bayonet and the special troops carbines,
were numbered from 8,000 to about 9,500.
So, ... if you see one of these, it should have an H block serial number,
and it should fit into that scheme.
One last marking here, and that is a little eagle with a swastika there
under the original production date of the rifle, that is a German firing proof.
And that indicates that this thing was in fact test fired with a proof load of 8mm Mauser,
and survived the experience, which contrary to what a lot of people will say
about the Carcano action, it was strong enough to survive that.
I should also point out the bolt was also re-serialised,
but that was done by electro pencil and you can see it right here, 6864,
which is the serial number that's on the barrel and the receiver of this rifle.
Now here's one of the original Carcano clips.
And if we take a round of 8mm Mauser, you can see that this - just - it ain't going to fit.
It's spreading this clip open.
6 of them are not going to fit top to bottom.
Really ... 5 of them will fit vertically,
but the case head of 8mm Mauser is bigger than the back end of the clip,
and you can't just force that in.
So in lieu of trying to figure out a brand new clip to manufacture,
which is something that was in the works,
what they did instead was put in a wooden loading platform, which this rifle does not have.
It should be a solid wood block that ... kind of has a round indentation all the way down its length.
Now the purpose of having this loading block,
which isn't in this rifle for reasons that I cannot explain 100%,
was that you had a way to load this.
The problem is the Carcano is a controlled feed rifle, which means as you push the bolt forward
the cartridge is supposed to basically click into the ... bolt as it comes out of the clip.
Well, if you don't have a clip you can't really do that,
and so instead ... that wooden tray gives you a place to drop the cartridge,
and have it actually load and chamber reliably and conveniently.
Note here that there is no cutout made in the front of the opening here.
On the other 8mm Carcano conversions that you will see,
there is a notch cut to make sure that this is long enough for all 8mm ammunition.
One last mechanical element of the conversion was to open up the bolt face a little bit,
so that it would conveniently and properly fit an 8mm Mauser cartridge like that.
The 6.5 and 7.35 Carcano cartridges (which have the exact same diameter case head),
are a bit smaller, and an 8mm cartridge won't fit easily into an unmodified Carcano bolt head.
The original, typically ambitious, German plan was to convert 200,000 Carcanos per month,
and to, in total, do something like a million and a quarter of them.
Obviously that was complete fantasy.
The first month of actual conversion was January of 1945, where they did about 3,000 of them.
February of 1945 they were actually able to convert
another 12,000 or so between Krieghoff and the Brescia plant.
And that's pretty remarkable actually, but that's where the program ended.
Production ended ... at the end of February 1945.
In total it appears that about 15,000 of these conversions were actually produced.
Some of them by Heinrich Krieghoff in Germany, and some of them by the FNA Brescia plant in Italy
which was still under German control for a while.
Very few of them seem to survive,
and unfortunately there are quite a lot of fakes of these out there
because a standard Italian Carcano M38 short rifle, or carbine, or long rifle
is not a particularly valuable or historically desirable rifle.
But thanks to the general interest in German militaria,
a German-converted Carcano is a quite valuable and quite desirable rifle.
And this has led to a profusion of fakes.
So I am about 98% sure that this is a legitimate real one.
But to be totally honest the conversion is not that complicated,
and it is possible that this could be actually a fake.
But I don't think so, I'm pretty confident in this one.
Why exactly it doesn't have the magazine block, I can't explain.
The most likely answer is someone ... took it out,
or actually just replaced the whole magazine unit,
to make it appear like a proper, correct gun.
And they may have thought that that was a sporterisation at some point,
and they were actually fixing it, when they weren't actually.
So it is also worth pointing out that there is another batch of 8mm Carcano carbines
(in particular) that is available, and it is actually a lot more common
on the collectors market, at least here in the United States.
And that is a batch of guns that were converted by Italy
after World War Two for use in the Middle East.
And we'll talk about those in a separate video,
because they are different guns, they have a number of distinctive features,
and they don't have the historical impact that the German Carcanos do.
So I should point out, ... it doesn't appear that these were actually issued to
front-line combat Volkssturm units.
They seem to have gone more to police, and some other kind of secondary troops.
The German Infantry Board thought these things were awful.
The recoil ... made them totally useless.
They were thoroughly inaccurate, probably because of the recoil.
And the Infantry Board really didn't think it was a good idea to even
bother with these conversions, but it was done anyway.
And so they did get out there, and they did get used,
at least to some extent, by some folks in the very waning couple of months of 1945.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video.
A big thanks to the viewer who loaned me this particular rifle to be able to show you.
Thanks for watching.