I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to an ultra-nerdy Great War top ten special about obscure, unusual,
or rare firearms during the First World War era.
This is an episode in collaboration with the Rock Island Auction Company and some of the
rare and obscure guns you see here are actually up in their next auction.
And if you are curious to learn more about these weapons, Ian from Forgotten Weapons
actually examined a few of them and their history too on his channel.
Anyway, without further ado, here we go...
Number 10, the Schwartzlose 1898 prototype.
A self-loading pistol from 1898 is pretty exotic in the first place, but the Schwartzlose
M1898 was truly ahead of its time.
It was fairly ergonomic and had a unique spring and recoil mechanism, but they only made around
1,000 of them.
I have no idea how to really explain why they failed.
Ian from Forgotten Weapons says one factor might have been the cost, and he’s probably
right, but there should be more to it than that.
Actually, a few were shipped to the Boers during the Boer Wars, and the Russian Social
Democratic Party also bought some for a planned insurrection.
If you wonder who that party was, it was illegal for most of its existence and indeed eventually
split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
Look it up after you watch this.
Number 9, the Norwegian Hagen design French prototype test rifle.
Okay, many people have a somewhat unfavorable image of the French army during World War
One.
This is unfortunate because it was a major fighting force, however at the beginning of
the war you can see where that image came from.
Marching out in bright red colors, advancing en masse over open fields against machine
guns, the Lebel rifles, and so on, they began the war in the past.
However, after the “Shame of Sedan” in 1870, a humiliating loss to Prussia, there
were many who wanted to reform and re-outfit the army for modern combat.
Even just before the war, they considered a khaki uniform, but that idea died in committee
because “the red pantaloons are France”.
How many men you think that decision cost?
Anyhow, another might-have-been is the semi-automatic Hagen rifle.
Low recoil, simple firing mechanism, great accuracy, a few other flaws supposedly made
it impractical.
More impractical than a Lebel?
Wow.
Number 8.
Okay, this is a two fer.
The 1916 Mauser 9mm self-loading -Selbstlader- carbine and the 1908 Mexican Mondragon rifle.
Self-loaders had been experimented with for decades before WW1, and these two notable
designs ended up in the hands of the Flieger Korps.
Both were pretty impressive from a design perspective and were quite accurate, but were
totally impractical for ground troops since they were easily affected by dirt, mud, and
debris, which is exactly what you don’t need in trench warfare.
But isn’t the design oddly familiar to us from today’s perspective?
Number 7 isn’t a gun but an attachment, the 40 or 25 round stick magazine for the
Pedersen device.
The device was supposed to allow a soldier to transform “his rifle into a form of submachine
gun or automatic rifle” in about 15 seconds.
It replaced the firing mechanism of the previously modified Springfield M1903 and pretty much
turned it into a blow-back weapon with an expanded magazine.
The idea was to give soldiers a boost in firepower for the planned 1919 spring offensives, and
tens of thousands of them were made, but most were destroyed and only around 200 exist today.
Number 6, the Hellriegel heavy submachine gun prototype.
This is a contestant for first submachine gun.
There’s not a ton of info on it but it seems the first tests were in October 1915.
It was apparently fed by a 160 round drum magazine that was belt feeding into to the
rifle.
It was water-cooled, which may be one reason it was not effective as a mobile weapon, but
we just don’t know much about it, though it looks really interesting.
Number 5, the Bergmann MG15nA.
This heavy machine gun was at first intended for use in Zeppelins or aircrafts, but was
lightened and outfitted with a butt stock for infantry use.
It wasn’t mass-produced until late 1916, and was pretty advanced for its time.
It relied on the short-recoil principle that forced the bolt to travel further to compress
the spring.
Together with the typical compact Bergmann lock system the MG15nA provided innovative
ideas and shared many similarities with the design of future machine guns.
Fed by 200-500 round belts and fired with a pistol grip and trigger, its effective range
was about 1,000m.
In fact, around 6,000 of them were made and were mostly sent to the Eastern Front or the
Palestine Front in early 1917.
Number 4, the Perino, Model 1908.
Italian engineers were experimenting well before the war with machine gun designs.
The 1908 Perino was recoil operated and water-cooled, and was - interestingly - not fed by a belt,
but by 20 round clips that were loaded and ejected as strips.
The box on the left, which held five clips, could easily be refilled by the second gunner.
This design lost out to the Fiat Revelly design, which was based on the Maxim.
An honorable mention side-note here, the Italians also experimented with a light machine gun,
the SIA Model 1918, an assault machine gun light enough to be carried into battle, but
the war ended before it saw action.
Number 3, the RSC Model 1917, a perhaps not exactly rare, but quite modern French semi-automatic
rifle.
Manufactured with a rotating bolt, which was forced to rotate by a gas piston, it rapidly
and reliably fired its five round clip.
It was a bottom loader, with a hatch that that could be sealed, which was an invention
born out of the mud of the trenches.
More than 80,000 of these were issued after production began in April 1917.
Some sources say that these were rather fragile, particularly the loading system, and they
could jam when out on the front lines, but overhauled versions in 1918 were more robust,
shorter, and lighter.
Number 2, The T-Gewehr, a single shot, bolt action, anti-tank rifle.
It was nearly as long as I am tall and weighed loaded and with a bipod attached to it18.5
kilos, so it wasn’t popular to wield, especially since it had ridiculous recoil, and in fact,
some sources claim that a single soldier could only fire a handful of shots before the recoil
wore him out.
It was basically a more powerful version of the Mauser with more stopping power, and its
armor piercing bullets could breach the newer Mark IV tanks, where the Mauser no longer
could.
Instead it used 13,2mm TuF - Tank und Flieger - calibre cartridges.
The weight of the solid bullet was 51,5g and could travel 785 m/s at its peak, enough to
penetrate 20mm of armour on 100m.
It was intended to be enough to punch through the first armour plates and then ricochet
inside the tank to cause the maximum amount of damage.
Around 16,000 of these were built toward the end of the war.
And number one, the periscope rifle.
Pretty much all armies in the war used periscope rifles in trench situations.
Periscopes themselves were used for observation in trenches early in the war and the next
logical step was periscope rifles, allowing the soldier to aim and shoot without himself
being exposed.
The first reported use was actually at Gallipoli, where the enemy lines were very close and
an Australian engineer came up with the idea.
After that, they even had some improvised production lines for them.
And that’s my list.
As you may have guessed, it’s not really in any particular order, but to do that I’d
have to go with either rarity, weirdness, effectiveness or some other single characteristic.
I suppose the one thing they did all have in common was that they were developed to
make the enemy soldier die quicker than yours.
I bet that some of you have some other weapons you’d like to add to this list, so please
put them in the comments.
I will be seeing you all on Thursdays during our regular weekly episodes.