You may have noticed a few changes to the right sidebar of the site recently – we have a couple new sponsors of Forgotten Weapons that I would like to welcome!
Rock Island Auction Company is the premier auction house in the country (probably in the world, actually) for firearms and militaria – we have been drooling over their glossy color catalogs for years. We’re very happy to have them aboard, and we look forward to visiting their showroom in person for one of the upcoming Premier Auctions. In the meantime, they have a regional auction coming up next week with thousands of guns looking for good homes.
The American Gunsmithing Institute is one of the best sources of detailed information on maintenance and gunsmithing for enthusiasts who want to become professional gunsmiths, folks in the business already who want to expand their knowledge base, and gun owners who want a better understanding of the guns they have. AGI has DVD Armorers’ Courses on dozens of guns, from Ruger automatic pistols to the Browning 1919 machine gun.
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Michael Heidler has again come up with a one-of-a-kind German firearm, and sent us this writeup. This time, it is an experimental variation on the MP38 submachine gun. Thanks, Michael!
The German experimental light-weight submachine gun MP38(L)
by Michael Heidler
One would imagine that everything about German submachine guns of World War Two has already been written. But in-depth research still goes on and sometimes little treasures surface:
The MP38(L)
The submachine gun with serial number V3013 is kept in the outstanding collection of the Czechoslovak Military Museum in Prague (Vojenský historický ústav Praha). Until today no other example of this model was found. The relevant literature mentions this weapon, but no detailed pictures have ever been shown.
The MP38(L) field-stripped. The barrel with front sight, the bolt with recoil spring covered by a telescoping tube and the firing pin do not differ from the standard MP38.
At the beginning of 1938 the Erfurter Maschinenfabrik (ERMA) received an official order for the development a new submachine gun from the Heereswaffenamt (office for army weapons). Already a few months later, at the beginning of June 1938, ERMA presented the “Maschinenpistole MP38”. This achievement is impressive, however the time interval seems to be much too short for developing such a new weapon. This fact must arouse suspicions that a (nearly) ready draft must have slumbered in the drawers of ERMA. And now the time had come to take it out. And actually, the MP38 wasn’t a complete new design by any means, but rather the advancement of a nearly unknown predecessor model: the EMP36.
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In addition to studying and researching unusual firearms, I enjoy shooting, and like to take any opportunity I can get to get trigger time with the more obscure designs out there. The local 2-Gun Action Challenge Match gives me a great opportunity each month to try out a new firearm in an environment designed to simulate some of the rigors of actual combat use. If a gun is going exhibit malfunctions or handling problems, they will probably come to light when you are reloading under pressure, running, shooting from unorthodox positions, and so on. I enjoy the physical challenge of the match, and it’s a great way to get a new perspective on different firearms designs.
I didn’t have an unusual pistol to use this month (I used my trusty Argentine Ballester Molina automatic), but I had a semiauto Madsen LMG for the rifle portion. The Madsen was the first light machine gun design to see practical military service, and was also one of the longest-serving guns of its type. The Madsen first came on the market in 1902, was being manufactured new into the 1950s, and was in service internationally until the 1990s, notably with Rio de Janeiro police teams. I will be posting a video on the Madsen’s operating system and mechanical details next week, but I figured it would be fun to post the video from this past weekend’s match using it…
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This video took a bit longer than planned to put together, but it’s here at last…
There is a long-standing urban legend about the Canadian Ross rifle, a straight-pull bolt action that was used in lieu of the SMLE by Canadian troops early in World War One. The story is that the Ross would sometimes malfunction and blow the bolt back into its shooter’s face, with pretty horrible results. Well, I wanted to learn “the rest of the story” – could this actually happen? What caused it? How could it be prevented? In short, what would a Ross shooter need to know to remain safe? And if I could get some cool footage of a bolt blowing out of a Ross in the process, all the better.
Well, reader Andy very generously provided a sporterized Ross for the experiments, and I started reading into what the issue really was. Turns out that the legend was quite true – you can put a Ross MkIII bolt together the wrong way, and it will allow you to fire without the locking lugs engaged, thus throwing the bolt back out of the gun at high velocity. However, the issue was recognized fairly quickly, and the vast majority of Ross rifles were modified with a safety rivet to prevent this from happening. It is also quite easy to determine if a Ross is assembled correctly, once you know what to look for. So sit back and relax as we examine:
The Myth and Reality of the Ross MkIII
As you see at the end of the video, there are some folks I need to acknowledge for helping out with the experiment:
Andy for generously providing the rifle
Andrew Tuohy (who runs an excellent site at Vuurwapenblog) for helping out with high-speed footage
Aaron and Karl for camera and setup assistance (and the ballistic soap that we tried to use)
Thanks, guys – your help was invaluable!
For what it’s worth, I think the next such investigative project will be a followup on the safety of a .30-06 Bannerman Mosin-Nagant conversion, using strain gages to see if we can get some empirical evidence on the matter. So stay tuned!
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First up, it looks like I’m going to be traveling to San Diego for the week of July 21st – does anyone know of a museum in the area with a good small arms collection to check out? Or alternatively, do you have a cool collection that you would like to share with the Forgotten Weapons readership? Drop me a line, and let me know!
Secondly, we got a handful of photos from reader Eddie, who is trying to identify a submachine gun. I don’t recognize the gun, perhaps someone reading will know more about it? The closest thing I can come up with is a Czech ZK-383, but it isn’t one of those (click to enlarge each photo for a better view).
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US soldier inspecting a German Panzerschreck (left) and a US 2.36″ Bazooka (right).
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We spent a bunch of time earlier this week covering the Webley-Fosbery “automatic revolver”, and I would like to close out the week with another pistol of that type, but one that’s even weirder than the Fosbery. I don’t have much information on this piece, but did find some surprisingly good photos that were originally in a Norwegian magazine. Pretty much everything I know about it comes from the captions in the pictures, which you’ll see if you read Norwegian or translate them.
Anyway, this is a design patented in 1899 by a fellow named Halvard Landstad, who lived in Kristiana (now called Oslo) at the time. He designed the gun on his own dime, and presented it to military trials in 1901, which it failed miserably.
Landstad automatic revolver (click to enlarge)
What makes this design really unusual is that it uses both a revolving cylinder and a box magazine (a bit like a Dardick, actually). The magazine – which doubled as the left grip panel – held six rounds of 7.5mm Nagant ammunition (a common caliber in that time and place). The top rear of the action contains a slide that comes back with each shot:
Top: ready to fire Bottom: Slide back, ejecting case
More unusually, the cylinder was actually flat, with only two chambers:
Landstad cylinder mid-rotation. Note how it is flat, with only two chambers.
The firing cycle went like this: a round from the magazine would be loaded into the bottom chamber of the cylinder. Pulling the trigger would rotate the cylinder (like a DA revolver), moving the round up to the top, in line with the barrel. The hammer would fall, fire the round, and the recoil energy would cycle the slide assembly at the top rear, extracting and ejecting the empty case.
I’m unsure on a few points, like whether it could be fired single-action as well, and how the mechanism controlled loading of cartridges from the mag into the cylinder. Here are some photos of the Landstad disassembled:
Left side, disassembled (click to enlarge)
Right side, disassembled (click to enlarge)
And here’s the one patent drawing I found:
From Norwegian patent 8564, April 11 1899.
The gun never went into production, because of its dismal performance in trials. But it appears that the inventor kept the prototype gun, and brought it with him when he emigrated to the UK, living in Middlesex until his death in 1955. It was donated to the British NRA and kept in their museum at Bisley until 1977, when it was sold at auction.
The Landstad 1900 differs fundamentally from the more commonly known auto-revolvers like the Webley-Fosbery and Mateba in that it actually ejects cases when empty. The other guns are more accurately described as “self-cocking revolvers”, since they must be loaded and unloaded just like typical revolvers. Not a tremendously important distinction, but a valid one all the same.
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I’d heard some negative things about today’s book before I picked up a copy, and I was happily surprised by its usefulness. The book is German Pistols and Holsters 1934/1945, by Major Robert D. Whittington III. It is a pretty straight-forward work, written to aid collectors and historians in understanding and identifying the handguns that were used by German military, police, and Nazi party officials. Each of those groups used a different procurement process and different associated markings. The military ones are pretty well documented, but it is much rarer to find a useful discussion of police- and party-specific weapons.
The mainstays of the German sidearm at this time were the P08 Luger and the Walther P38, but a wide variety of foreign-made pistols were also used, from Belgian High Powers to Polish vis 35 Radoms to French Uniques. Whittington covers all of these, explaining what specific markings should or could appear on each, when they were procured, and how many were used. It is not a particularly flowery book, but I found it quite useful. The numerical data is well presented, and the descriptive notes about each gun are both concise and pleasantly informative themselves.
Original copies of German Pistols and Holsters are pretty spendy, but the recent reprint has all the information at a quite reasonable price:
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Patented in 1896 and going into production in 1901, the Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver was the brainchild of British Col. George Vincent Fosbery, VC. Fosbery was a career military officer who had served in India for many years (and won his Victoria Cross there in 1863). He was also an avid fan of guns and firearm technology, and the Webley-Fosbery was only one of his several relatively successful inventions (others include an exploding bullet used largely for range-finding and the Paradox system for shooting shot or ball relatively accurately through the same barrel).
Fosbery’s rationale for the self-cocking revolver was a search for a sidearm that would combine the rapid fire and crisp trigger of the automatic pistol with the heavy .455 cartridge of the British service revolver. The automatic pistols available in the late 1890s were virtually all chambered for rather small cartridges, and Fosbery believed that large projectiles were much better suited to combat (proving in addition that nothing changes over time, as this theory and its opposite continue to be argued back and forth to this day). So Fosbery devised a way to harness the recoil energy of a revolver to recock the hammer and rotate the cylinder. His initial model was based on a Colt SAA, but after finding Colt uninterested in the idea he began working with the Webley company, and his production guns are based on their standard revolver.
Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver, caliber .455
Mechanically, the Webley-Fosbery operates by virtue of the barrel and cylinder assembly being independent of the grip assembly, the one riding in grooves machined into the other. Thus when fired, the grip stays in place and the barrel and cylinder assembly slides back, while a cam pin running in the conspicuous cylinder grooves rotates it to the next chamber and recocks the hammer.\
Webley-Fosbery cutaway view (note full-moon clip for cartridges in .38 ACP caliber)
This system worked well when clean, and gave a shooter a constant single-action trigger pull, a full-power .455 service cartridge, the capacity for quite rapid fire (as fast as any semiautomatic pistol), and also absorbed some of the recoil from that relatively large cartridge.
The Webley-Fosbery is one of the few revolvers to feature a manual safety, which was necessary because of its manual of arms. The trigger mechanism was single action only – so you could not carry it with the hammer down and fire by just pulling the trigger. Instead, the piece needed to be cocked (either by the hammer alone or by manually pushing the upper assembly back to mimic firing) and carried with the hammer back. To make this safe, a manual safety lever on the left side of the grip could be engaged, which would lock the trigger and the sliding frame both in place.
To empty spent cases and reload, the procedure was identical to a typical Webley revolver. A lever just to the left of the hammer would allow the action to break open (pivoting around the bolt located in front of and below the cylinder), and an automatic ejector would push out all the empty cases. Reloading a .455 model could be done one round at a time, or with a Prideaux speed-loader.
Cartridges
The Webley-Fosbery was available in two different cartridges; .455 and .38. It is often assumed that the .38 caliber guns used .38-200 (aka .38 S&W) ammunition, because this was the round used in standard .38 caliber Webley revolvers – but that assumption is incorrect. The .38-200 was not adopted by the British military until the 1920s, while the .38 ACP was a hot new item in the American market, having been introduced in 1900. It was this .38 ACP round that was used by the smaller caliber Webley-Fosberys, using 8-round moon clips (see cutaway diagram above). The design of those moon clips was a bit different than what we are used to seeing today, with a pointed spiral sort of shape. You can see the cut-out area in the cylinder for the clips in this factory nickel-plated example:
.38 ACP Webley-Fosbery cylinder
The more common caliber for the Webley-Fosbery was the .455 British service round, which did not use a clip. In that caliber, the weapon had a 6-round cylinder.
Variations
At the time of its introduction, British officers supplied their own sidearms, and were required only to use the standard cartridge, so more than a few chose to purchase .455 Webley-Fosbery automatic revolvers, although the gun was never formally adopted. The most common model was a 6″ barrel and blued finish, but Webley was willing to make the guns in several other configurations. One could buy the gun with a 4″ or 7.5″ barrel as well as the 6″, and they could also be supplied with multiple barrels for the enthusiast who wanted a target option as well as a more conveniently sized version to carry. Nickel finish was an option (not many produced this way, though). The longer target barrel were also set up with sights more styled for competition, as the Webley-Fosbery was noted as a quite effective competition gun at the time.
Overall production was approximately 4200 pistols, although serial numbers go to approximately 4500 (a few blocks of numbers were skipped), and the vast majority of these were in .455 caliber. Only 417 were originally produced in .38 ACP, and 141 of those were dismantled at the factory and used for parts. Another 72 (at least) were converted to .455 at the factory, and thus no more than about 200 left the shop – making the .38 caliber Fosbery pistols particularly valuable today. Given that the main market was military, this caliber discrepancy should not be particularly surprising.
Production ran from 1901 until 1924, generally at a rate of 10 guns per week, although there were periods where none were being made (such as during WWI, when production of standard Webley revolvers had much higher priority).
Epilogue
The Webley-Fosbery had a following of both target shooters and Army officers, but it was ultimately not hugely successful and is remembered today promarily because of its unique mechanism. The guns were used by British pilots before machine guns became commonplace aircraft armament and they served well enough in that capacity. They were used by infantry officers in WWI and worked fine as long as they were kept relatively clean, but the sliding recoil mechanism was prone to becoming incapacitated by dirt or debris.
The Webley-Fosbery was submitted to the US pistol trials of 1907, where it was rather quickly discarded as not offering any useful advantages to offset its bulk and susceptibility to fouling. Of course, the US trials stipulated a .45 caliber cartridge, so Fosbery’s original goal of improving on the 6mm and 7mm early pistol cartridges already met.
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So, I was doing a bunch of driving this past weekend and had lots of time to think (a dangerous thing). Well, the thought occurred to me that folks might be interested in an “Introduction to Military Gun Collecting” seminar, and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the idea. I know a lot of regular readers here are extremely knowledgeable shooters and collectors, but there are also a lot of folks who are interested but haven’t had the time or obsessiveness to learn a lot yet.
The seminar I have in mind would be intended for the person who may or may not have a few military firearms already, is interesting in getting more into collecting them, and doesn’t really know what to look for. My goals would be three-fold; helping folks understand what they are looking at, preventing folks from getting ripped off, and enabling folks to recognize really good deals. It would be a class that would pay for itself pretty quickly, if you were in the target audience. Here are the main points I’m envisioning:
Focus on standard rifles and pistols from the major combatants in WWI and WWII (Germany, Italy, Russia/USSR, Japan, USA, UK, France, Austro-Hungarian Empire)
Cover the major variations of each weapon (using Russia for an example: M91, M91/30, PU sniper, M38, M44, Ishevsk, Tula, early producers, and other Warsaw Pact variants)
Special focus on how to identify guns, so good pictures of different markings and explanation of what they mean
How to identify counterfeits, when applicable (like 91/30 snipers and No5 Enfield carbines)
One day timeframe – something like 9am to 4pm on a Saturday with a lunch break
Price ideally $99 per person, maybe a much as $150, including a catered lunch
Printed study guide also included in price (based on presentation slides/photos, so folks don’t have to try to memorize all the designations and markings)
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Please let me know what your thoughts or suggests are in the comments! For instance, would you rather learn about iconic but more expensive guns like German Mausers, or cheaper but less used guns like Swiss K31s and Steyr M95/30s?
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are pretty spendy, but the recent reprint has all the information at a quite reasonable price:
Patented in 1896 and going into production in 1901, the Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver was the brainchild of British Col. George Vincent Fosbery, VC. Fosbery was a career military officer who had served in India for many years (and won his Victoria Cross there in 1863). He was also an avid fan of guns and firearm technology, and the Webley-Fosbery was only one of his several relatively successful inventions (others include an exploding bullet used largely for range-finding and the 
Introduction to Collecting Seminar
So, I was doing a bunch of driving this past weekend and had lots of time to think (a dangerous thing). Well, the thought occurred to me that folks might be interested in an “Introduction to Military Gun Collecting” seminar, and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the idea. I know a lot of regular readers here are extremely knowledgeable shooters and collectors, but there are also a lot of folks who are interested but haven’t had the time or obsessiveness to learn a lot yet.
The seminar I have in mind would be intended for the person who may or may not have a few military firearms already, is interesting in getting more into collecting them, and doesn’t really know what to look for. My goals would be three-fold; helping folks understand what they are looking at, preventing folks from getting ripped off, and enabling folks to recognize really good deals. It would be a class that would pay for itself pretty quickly, if you were in the target audience. Here are the main points I’m envisioning:
Please let me know what your thoughts or suggests are in the comments! For instance, would you rather learn about iconic but more expensive guns like German Mausers, or cheaper but less used guns like Swiss K31s and Steyr M95/30s?
Was this article worth 15 cents to you? For less than the cost of a newsstand gun magazine, you can become a Forgotten Weapons Premium Member and help support the site, as well as get some cool industry discounts and access to our Members-Only forum!