When the French took over control of the Mauser factory complex in May 1945, the plant had some 85 tons of pistol parts on hand – 7.3 million individual components in various stages of production. This was enough to make a whole lot of guns, even if many of them were not completed parts. So alongside K98k rifles, HST and Luger pistols, the French restarted P38 pistol production at Mauser.
German military production ended at about serial number 3000f in April 1945, and the French chose to start back up at 1g. They would make a total of 38,780 P38s by the early summer of 1946, completing the G, H, and I serial number blocks and getting mostly through K as well. A final batch of 500 were numbered in the L series after being assembled back in France at the Chatellerault arsenal.
French production P38s are generally recognized by the French 5-pointed star acceptance marks on the slides. They will have slide codes of svw45 and svw46 (the French updated the code to match the year in 1946). Many of the parts used were completed prior to occupation, and various German proof marks can be found on some parts.
My uncle was in the army in WWII, and at one point he ended up at a “liberated” factory where P-38’s were made. Our soldiers immediately started selling souvenirs to other soldiers. When they ran out of pistols, they went and started assembling more. Not all were functional, or had all of the parts they were supposed to, but they made money on it.
In the face of an apocalyptic final battle, Mauser was still cranking out millions of pistol parts? When it could have been making StG45s instead with fewer man-hours per gun? What a misallocation of resources.
“Misallocation of resources” was pretty much the theme of the entire Nazi regime. When you go down the list of “Stupid things the Nazis did”, emphasizing pistol production up until the end of the war is a fairly minor issue.
I don’t know why people constantly lionize the Nazi party and the war machine it built. Absent the legacy of the pre-WWII German military, they’d have likely crapped out as a military effort sometime in early 1940. The SS did not have what it took to be successful, early on. Although, they did learn quickly…
Asking for sanity from the Nazis basically means saying that you wish they weren’t Nazis; the insanity was baked in, what with the whole “Führerprinzip” thing they based their system on. Competing little fiefdoms and so forth are great ways to reduce the odds of anyone building an effective opposition, but the reality is that it’s also a horrible way to organize yourself for total war. Too many bad decisions throughout the system, based on idjit-class personalities like Goering building their little empires…? Yeah; that’s how you lose a war.
The shocking thing about Nazi Germany isn’t that they lost, but that they got as far as they did. That fact speaks literal volumes about how bad our leadership really was. Nobody discusses that, though… ‘Cos, it’d make all the “heroic Allied leaders” look bad.
The fact that the Germans managed to take down France in six weeks during 1940 is a leading indicator of the utter incompetence of the Allied higher leadership. Everyone on the Allied side was convinced that France would again “stop the Germans”. This, while they knew all about things like the stockpiling of decent fighters in warehouses far from the front, and the ineffective leadership from chateaus…
We all should have held tribunals after the war, and the lot of them should have been summarily executed. Especially Mr. “Oh, let me help the Germans conquer Europe and exhaust them for me…” Joseph Stalin. WWII would have been a far different affair, absent the Soviet resources poured into Germany 1939-40.
They’ll never talk about that, though. It’s all “We wuz wictims, see…?”
F*ck Soviet Russia. They got everything they deserved from the Germans. Without them, the war would never have gone the way it did. Remembering the Soviets as victims and “allies” is a travesty.
It’s an irony, but most of the Soviet “victims” of the Nazis were more accurately ascribed to Soviet incompetence at war, than anything else.
Awesome.
Maybe you should switch to de-caf
The major problem with Nazi Germany was…Germany.
The Nazi party hierarchy operated on the same principle as German business and academia. Everybody was out to do over everybody else, and there was no one who would, or even could, make everybody work together.
The “Fuhrer principle” was useful for making the common people shut up and obey, but the “intellectuals” and “social lions” weren’t having any of it. They were going to do what benefited themselves, and to Hell with everybody else.
It was endemic in German industry, as here regarding hypergolic liquid fuel/oxidizer combinations for rocket propulsion;
– Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers Univ. Press 1972. Chapter 2, “Peenemunde and JPL”.
Now multiply that attitude across every single area of work in the country. Yes, it was the Dilbert “Battling Business Units” fallacy run amok.
This is how the Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapon Office) ended up with one hundred and fifty different proximity fuze projects for AAA. You don’t want to know how many torpedo development programs the Kriegsmarine had.
Everybody was working against everybody else because that was the “culture” among the “intellectuals”. everybody wanted to be a “star”.
In The Morning of the Magicians (1967) Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier characterized Nazi Germany as “a philosophical debating society- with tanks”.
German industry was the same thing- with industrial plants used mainly for scoring points in debates.
The Allies were lucky. An efficient Third Reich could very easily have won.
clear ether
eon
You raise an interesting point. I’d always assumed that the idiocy was baked into Nazism, but didn’t necessarily result from natural German cultural traits.
My observations of German culture while I was there, and reading don’t show this as a particular problem outside of the Nazi era, so maybe I just wasn’t looking for it. A lot of Germans are extremely cooperative in daily life, but… Maybe I need to reevaluate that, now that I think about it. A lot of the “cooperation” is enforced draconically and competitively; people don’t necessarily really have reason to give a damn what day you put out your recycling, but you’ll see small-scale local wars break out over the issue, and people become socially conditioned not to do anything other than what the herd is doing simply to avoid all the internecine conflict and unpleasantness.
Of course, that’s as an outsider looking in; what’s really still going on, and how much basic German cussedness fed into the expression of German culture that was Nazism is difficult to say…
Interesting things to consider, now that you point them out. Like I said, I’d always assumed it was “Nazi”, not necessarily that it was “German”. Maybe I’m wrong.
It was very much a class based thing. It really still is.
The “intellectual” class and the “elite'”, then and now, think they have two God-given privileges;
1. Telling everybody else what to do, and everybody else saying “zu Befehl” (“at your orders”);
and
2. Telling everybody supposedly above them in the hierarchy “You’re not the boss of me!”
Germany has always had a rigid class system that is remarkably like the “caste” system in India. “Outsiders” rarely notice it because it’s based more on what someone’s “professional” titles are than anything else. It’s why pretty much everybody above the level of a shopkeeper used to have “Dr. Ing.” or the equivalent in front of their name.
Obtaining that Ph.D or equivalent was largely due to going to one of the prestigious schools, that only admitted applicants of certain social classes. Yes, it was like the American Ivy league system, just even more rigid and insular.
The problem, of course, was that you ended up with highly “credentialed” people in charge of things who might or might not know anything about what they are supposed to be doing.
It could have strange effects by our standards. We might think it odd that the Deutsches Reichspost, the German national post office, equivalent to our U.S. Postal Service, was in charge of most of the high-end electronics development in Germany; among other things,they were the main architects of the Luftwaffe’s air defense radar system, the Kammhuber line.
But in fact, they were also responsible for the German national telephone, AM broadcast radio, and even early (1930s) experimental television broadcast systems. The director, Wilhelm Ohnesorge, was a physicist, a doctoral graduate of the Max Planck Institute (the German equivalent of MIT). The DRP was sort of what we would have had if MIT, CalTech, RCA, ABC, NBC, CBS, DuMont, the Bell System and Bell Labs had all been “owned” by the U.S. government, with the USPS tacked on the end. No wonder they developed radar a year before everyone else (even us).
(Oddly enough, in German “ohnesorge” means “without pity”, which is sort of appropriate as he was an early and fanatic convert to Nazism.)
The man from the “Organization Todt” put in charge of V-2 production in 1943 was originally in charge of producing locomotives for the German national railways. (Again, like having B&O, Santa Fe, etc. all owned by the government.) He told von Braun and Dornberger that as far as he was concerned, building three A-4 rockets was about the same as building one loco. In terms of materiels, etc., that was actually a pretty close estimate.
It was a system that sometimes put round pegs exactly in round holes. But mostly ended up creating square pegs which nevertheless were hammered into place.
And those square pegs weren’t taking orders or “advice” from anybody outside of their “holes”.
Today, that same system is mostly responsible for generating the “managerial” class which runs Germany. Plus the “intellectual class” which runs things like the “Green” Party.
Yes, this is why no matter how inexplicable their theories become, everybody just does what they tell them to.
It’s just the way German culture “works”, always has, and probably always will.
clear ether
eon
Once upon a time, “totalitarian” was not an insult, but a positive theory being advanced by certain intellectuals. The idea was the creation of a society of one unified will. There would no longer be factions or disagreements of any sort.
Of course, we in practice use the term now to label societies that aspired to totalitarianism but really fell short of their goals despite relentless cruelty. Even North Korea has factions, we just can’t see them.
When a totalitarian (-aspirant) society claims to have no factions, the factions are running loose, each claiming to have deciphered the will of the Leader with their own pet projects. That was how the 3rd Reich worked. I don’t know about Germany before or after, but expertise seems to have mattered to the Reich least of all. Any crackpot who could sell the idea that he represented the will of the Fuhrer might get his gadget into production.
Patent wise, one fun fact, Allies after victory officially “stole” all of german up to 1945. patents.
Bureaucratically wise, one example, Rheinmetall wanted to make new (desperately needed) factories in the middle of the (world) war, and local government blocked it and told them they need to have building permits (!?)
Bureaucracy gone mad is a good way to explain a lot of the things that look like sheer wanton stupidity from outside perspective…
And, to a degree, I think every culture has it. It’s a natural human response, and an excellent example for my thesis that our species doesn’t do organization at all well. You have your local governments blocking construction for permitting, and the Brits have their quartermasters at Isandlwana demanding the proper paperwork for ammunition as they’re being overrun by Zulus with spears…
Of course, it’s possible that the local government denials to Rheinmetall were based on someone wanting to sabotage the war effort, and doing so in a deniable and typically German manner… I think you’d have to go back and interview the involved parties, and perhaps resort to enthusiastic interrogation techniques to find out the truth.
Like any culture, it works for the participants. To one degree or another… I knew a German Department of the Army civilian who was a rueful observer and critic of a lot of the things that went on in German culture surrounding us there in Darmstadt, and it was enlightening to talk to him and watch what he did. The gentleman got rather more done than you’d expect, simply by working within the “system” of German culture. There was at one time a huge uproar going on in the ranks of the German employees of the US Army, and it was all due to one particularly inept “Holy Roller” US officer that came in and wanted a bunch of things changed… Did not go over well, particularly the whole “No beer on work sites” thing. Which almost got a strike started, but that got shortstalled by the officer in question being sent back to the US.
Which I found out later was the result of my acquaintance working in the background with a bunch of the local German government agencies, because he’d gotten them going on the whole safety aspect of banning alcohol on jobsites, which led (as he’d expected…) all the local unions threatening regional strikes, not just the one working for the Army. As our idjit officer was the epicenter for the whole thing, the German government basically made him persona non grata, and he was asked to leave… All due to my acquaintance innocently pointing out to some of his peers in local government that the US Army was on to a good idea, and they’d be wise to follow it. Which, as he predicted, resulted in a wholesale uprising across a fair chunk of Hesse.
Or, so he related it to me. I’d assumed that the union for the Army employees had enough power to do what they did, but he claimed they did not, because the majority of the other union members looked down on them for working for the Amis, and figured that they got whatever they deserved. Once he got German management going on the idea, the whole thing blew up, and buh-bye to our meddling do-gooder officer. If I remember rightly, he was from some tee-totaling Southern Baptist denomination…
The whole thing was amusing as hell to watch. Those guys did amazing work, but they took fer-freakin’-ever to get anything done. They started laying cobblestone sidewalks and so forth on our kaserne two months before I got there; took a year to do the area around the quad that was maybe an acre or two, and they were still working on the rest of the areas when I left two years and change later… German construction is amazing, but it’s slow as hell to an American.
@ kirk
The local autority blocking Rheinmetall from building a factory during the war was due to the autority not being responsible to win the war, but to have the papers in order.
Had Rheinmetall built the factory, and Germany won the war, the members of the local autority would not have been those that won the war, but those that allowed Rheinmetall to build a factory where it shouldn’t have.
This is the link I sourced the info:
https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/company/history/125-years-rheinmetall/years-1936-1945
Apparently, it did get built after some fancy “paper dumping” persuasion…
I suppose the part of the problem was that even at that time they did not, or did not want to realise in how deep s..t they were regarding the war (downward spiral) direction.
I noted that books on German World War One aircraft showed, not only a ridiculous redundancy of warplane designs, but the same designs being made by many different companies with their own designations. It occurred to me that this was exactly what Albert Speer was combating in WW2. The Kaiser’s intermarried military and industrial elites were corrupt as hell, and the former was handing out redundant contracts to the latter instead of centralizing and culling obsolete designs. It happened again in the next war even though the Vons were no longer official elites in the Reich.
Everybody in the aviation industry hated Ernst Heinkel. Mostly because he kept coming up with aircraft designs (He219, He280) that were not “conventional”, and did their jobs better than everybody else’s “conventional” designs.
The great over-rated “mainstream” designer was Kurt Tank at Focke-Wulf. He somehow got the reputation of being a wizard at designing “perfect” aircraft. In fact, he mostly designed aircraft that fitted the preconceived notions of the Reichsluftministerium (Air Ministry).
The Luftwaffe’s long-range “Amerika Bomber” project to deliver an A-bomb (yes, they got very close to beating us to that) to the United States came a cropper mostly because RLM handed the project to Focke-Wulf and Tank on the “strength” of their existing Fw200 Condor four-engined bomber; which was actually a modified civil airliner. Virtually all of their bomber projects started out as airliner proposals. It’s why none of them other than the Condor ever were built and deployed.
Heinkel’s one mistake in that line was the He177, a four-engined bomber that appeared to be a twin-engine. (We had a similar Navy patrol bomber, the Martin P4M Mercator.) it ended up underpowered and with a tendency to catch fire if not built just exactly right (no oil leaks, etc). (We had similar problems with the Mercator.)
The reason it was built that way was because RLM had “done a study” that “proved” that was the best way to build a four-engined bomber. They were obsessed with low drag, and being able to use even a heavy bomber for dive-bombing and ground attack. (Yes, they would have tried it with a B-17 or B-24 if they’d had them.)
They ordered him to build it that way; Heinkel told RLM “you’re nuts”.
RLM took Heinkel’s company away from him and had them build the He177 “their way”.
In service, it caught fire, blew up, and was generally inferior in performance just as Heinkel had predicted. Heinkel said “I told you so”.
Albert Speer, the Minister for War Production, embarrassed, “gave” Heinkel back his company and told him “redesign it so it works’. Heinkel simply handed him the He277 design; the same airplane but with greater wingspan and all four engines in separate nacelles, they way the RAF and USAAF did it. He’d already done the redesign while RLM was fiddling with his company.
The He277, except for its landing gear, bore a startling resemblance to…the Boeing B-29. That’s what happens when two sets of competent designers are working to basically the same specification. The laws of aerodynamics are unforgiving. (Compare and contrast; Bf-109, Spitfire, P-51 Mustang.) And if you violate them, God help you.
But that’s how everything in German industry worked, and not just at the RLM.
Anybody who believes that “the nail which sticks up gets hammered down” is purely a Japanese expression never took a close look at how Germany was run.
And still is, for that matter.
clear ether
eon
“(…)everything in German industry worked, and not just at the RLM.(…)”
That being said British made similar attempt (heavy bomber with twin-engine drag) which result in Manchester https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=691
Also it was not first such attempt by German industry, which earlier procured Linke-Hofmann R.II http://flyingmachines.ru/Site2/Crafts/Craft30118.htm with single air-screw (see photos) but 4 engines to revolve it.
“(…)would have tried(…)with(…)B-24 if they’d had them(…)”
German unit known as KG200 did operate captured B-24, not for bombing but for agent insertion. Se lower half of 2nd image from top at https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2020/12/18/kg200/
@ eon
Germans were VERY far from an A-bomb. So far that, after the war, the German nuclear scientists reunited by Allies at Farm All, not knowing to be recorded by Allied intelligence, decided to justify their fiasco inventing the tale of them dragging the research to sabotage Nazi war effort.
Reality is that they had no clue. In May 1945 they had yet to obtain a critical reactor, an ounce of fissile material, and had yet to calculate the critical mass of an isotope required to trigger an explosion. Heisenberg couldn’t even believe the US actually made and used one atomic bomb. As he couldn’t believe in the possibility to obtain enough enriched Uranium.
Dogwalker;
That is the line that’s been used for eight decades, and unfortunately it’s BS.
I’d love to answer you in detail (having studied this subject in detail for about the last two decades- hey, as a retired CSI I have to do something to occupy myself), but the automatic censor on this commenting system won’t allow half the necessary terminology. (IM, that needs to be dealt with. Seriously.)
All I can suggest without getting dumped is that you read an odd book titled Reich of the Black Sun by one Joseph Farrell. There are others but that’s the one most easily found online.
The real story is a lot less reassuring than what he calls “the Cold War Allied Legend”.
cheers
eon
@eon
From “Reich of the Black Sun” preface.
“this is not a work of history. But neither is it a work merely of fiction. It is best described as a case of possibilities, of speculative history. It is an attempt to make sense, by means of a radical hypothesis placed within a very broad context, of events during and after the war that make no sense.”
And that it is. A partial collection of facts that “make no sense” according to the author, seasoned with a “but if the Germans had an advanced atomic program to defend instead…”
But the “explanation” makes even less sense. IE:
“why 350.000 German soldiers were left in Norway until the end of the war”?
Ok, since the same author stated the Germans had no more need of Norway after the destruction of the heavy water production plant at Ryukon in 1942, why 350.000 German soldiers were left in Norway until the end of the war?
Why the Afrika Korp had not been evacuated from Tunisia in 1943? A nuclear facility to defend there too? There was a nuclear facility to defend in Stalingrad? Or Hitler didn’t like to cede territory, there was an ongoing battle, since the Soviet invasion of Norway started in fall 1944, and almost every German retreat in WWII had been done against Hitler’s orders of resisting to the last man? The German generals that, hearing Hitler’s farnetications in the last days of war “sighed” thinking of the 350.000 men they had left in Norway, probably sighed even louder thinking of the 460.000 that surrendered in Italy at the end of April, when the Alpine passes could have been defended by a fraction of them.
Why “In March and April of 1945, US General George S. Patton’s Third Army is literally racing across southern Bavaria, as fast as is operationally possible” towards Czechoslovakia?
Because that’s what Patton did in Sicily and France (until he had been stopped at Metz)? His way of fighting was to occupy the most territory possible, at the highest possible speed, regardless of strategic considerations? If Prague was so important, why Eisenhower stopped Patton as soon as Stalin complained that the liberation of the city was up to him? And why the Soviets were not in any hurry, and occupied the city only after the end of the war in Europe?
“The BuNa was an uranium enrichment plant”.
Ok, even ignoring the thousands of people, from technicians to slave laborer, that worked at the BuNa without realising it, there were British prisoners at Auschwitz, building that factory. They were in a camp separated from the ones of the Jews, but worked togheter. So togheter that a British officer exchanged place with a Jew inmate for a week, before escaping and reporting, with the help of the Polish resistance, the conditions in the camp to the Allied intelligence.
Who the hell whould have left Allied prisoners, likely to escape, near to a secret nuclear facility, not to say working in it?
Are we supposed to believe that, in october 1944, with the Germans still occupying Poland, Norway, etc., a test nuclear bomb had been detonated just east of Ludwigslust, in a densely populated area of Germany, with only a guy in a He-111 noticing the explosion and a 7000m high mushroon cloud?
Or maybe the fact that the story had been told on 19 August 1945 has something to do with the pictures of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud and recounts of the explosion having been on newspapers for the previous 12 days?
etc. etc.
@Dogwalker,
Notwithstanding your arguments, which are based on known facts, I’d submit that there’s a hell of a lot we simply do not know about what the hell was going on in Nazi Germany.
Couple of things that make me wonder: One, there is no damn way anyone doing even off-the-cuff calculations could have come to the conclusion that the V-2 effort was worth it. A ton of payload delivered once, for the cost of a reusable B-17 or B-24? WTF? How does that make sense…?
As we’ve just seen in Ukraine, a ballistic missile sans nuclear warhead is pretty much a joke of a strategic weapon.
Yet… The Nazis were convinced that the V-2 was a war-winner. Why? Were they unable to do basic math?
Or, alternatively, was there something else we don’t know about? Something that they thought was going to work?
What with the insular and entirely schizophrenic nature of the Nazi war effort, I’m not convinced we know everything. There are tantalizing clues still left out there that nobody has bothered to account for, or explain, and while I’m skeptical of the idea, I do think there’s enough “unknown” out there to leave room for the possibility that we only missed a Nazi WMD by inches. Whatever the hell it was that blew up in Poland near Ohrdruf in 1945 has yet to be explained; there are lots of eyewitness reports, and questionable records that do not match up with that which is “known”, and given the track record for the usual suspects with this crap… I maintain an open mind.
I do know for a fact that there were (and I quote…) “anomalies” found in both Poland and Eastern Germany that were never satisfactorily explained when the START inspections went on. Per one of my informants, they found “typical residue” from a “fizzle” event that was not recorded by the Soviets, and there’s zero records of the Soviets ever doing nuclear testing in those areas. It’s possible that they had a subcritical accident with one of their own nukes that went bad and then they covered it up, or… You tell me. I suppose an alternate explanation might be that the Soviets cross-contaminated soils and what-not from their own test sites, but… That’d also posit a hell of a lot of carelessness.
Then again, Chernobyl… Who knows?
@ Kirk
For the V-2, it has to be seen what story had been told to Hitler. If it was good enough for him to say “build it”, then it had to be built, regardless of the utility. Many times Nazi cost-benefit calculations had been “corrected” with ideological considerations when the results weren’t the expected ones. IE the ones about the feasibility of entire Operation Barbarossa. And then there is the sunken costs fallacy. Probably the real costs of building ballistic missiles was not perfectly clear at the start. Until they had spent already enough.
Then there is some other consideration. It’s true that a single V-2 costed like 29 Ju-88 at the start of production, and like 14 at the end of the war, but 29 Ju-88, in 1944, had exactly “0” chances to reach England, and would have been the death of 29 trained crews. It’s true that it needed 30 tons of potatoes to distill the ethanol to fuel a single V-2, but a Ju-88 couldn’t be fueled with potatoes. In Germany, until almost the very end of WWII, there had not been any real food shortage, while fuel was scarce. It could be madness wanting to keep on hitting Britain when they were clearly losing the war but, if the Nazi really wanted to keep on hitting Britain, there were not many other possibilities.
“The Allies were lucky. An efficient Third Reich could very easily have won.”
Not easily, nor hardly. 😉
In 1937 the US counted for about 42% of the world’s industrial output, Soviet union for about 20%, Germany and UK were almost paired at 14%, France Japan and Italy were far behind.
Worse. The US was the only major economy that had yet to fully recover from the great depression. That means it still have reserve industrial capacity even before going full war economy.
Even with better torpedoes, Germany would still have lost. Also things like the outcome of the “battle of the beams”, or their inability to find a contermeasure to the British “Oboe” navigation system, show how much amateurish they were in certain fields, IE electronics.
Albert Speer actually talked Hitler out of using chemical weapons. (No, Hitler had no “personal horror” of them, that’s another myth.)
He pointed out that their most effective ones, the “G agents”, Tabun and Sarin, were really nothing more than alkyl thiophosphite-based insecticides that had been overly concentrated.
And that DuPont, the biggest chemical combine on Earth at the time, made more of those types of insecticides in one month for farmers in North America than the entire German chemical industry could produce in an entire year.
Speer calculated that if the German Army started using chemical war agents again, inside of six months DuPont alone could produce enough to literally blanket Germany from the Rhine to the Baltic, killing pretty much everybody in the country.
The punch line? It wouldn’t even have put a minor crimp in their deliveries to the agriculture industry. Yes, DuPont had that much excess capacity on standby.
Germany could have won, with greater efficiency. But they also would have needed to keep the United States neutral.
And their egos just wouldn’t let them do that.
cheers
eon
I’ve heard/read a theory (or a fact) that they had all these state of the art (at the time) nerve agents but were reluctant to use it as they supposed allies had them (invented) also – but the truth was they actually did not! It was a technology possesed only by germans at the time.
@ storm @ eon
See the German bombing of Bari on Dec. 2 1943
Roosevelt warned Berlin that any use of chemical weapons by them would have been followed by an immediate reprisal of the same nature. For that reason the War Department decided to transfer in the Med. 200.000 M47 gas bomb, enough for a 45 days bombing campaign over Germany.
Many recall the Goering words “No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Göring. You can call me Meyer.” (often misquoting the location as Berlin), but none recalls Air Marshall sir Arthur Coningham, on the evening of Dec. 2 1943 stating that the Germans had lost the air war and, referring to the port of Bari “I would consider it a personal insult if the enemy should send so much as one plane over the city.”
Five hours later, 107 Ju-88 bombers assaulted the port, sinking 17 transport ships and seriously damaging 8. Among the sunken ships there was the Liberty Ship John Arvey, loaded with 2000 M47 gas bombs, and the mustard gas covered the harbor. About 1000 allied soldiers and about the same number of civilians died for the attack and the contamination.
The “Grey Ghost” P.38 “byf”+“swv”
From “byf44” onwards, MAUSER began to phosphate; pale green-grey. However, there are also so-called “dual tones” in this production batch, because P.38s were assembled from already existing burnished main parts with newly produced, phosphated parts; SNR 6500 b – partly 7000 d, Produktion ca. 18.000. From SNR 5150 d – 4550 e, however, “newly produced” P.38s were only phosphate, ca. 2000. During the “byf44” period, MAUSER in part also assembled parts supplied by WALTHER, marked “ac43”, 7000 d – 1830 f, ca. 2150, and “ac44”, 5545 d – 8385 e, ca. 2850. These with locks produced by FN
“swv45″: Partly still as ‘dual tones’, SNR 7001 d – 2660 f, approx. 7800.
From 3200 e – 2660 f only cpl. phosphated, approx. 3700. Can be recognized by the internal FN markings “m”, “MI” or “mi” on the underside of the bolt or in the cut-out below the base of the sight.
Still “swv45″: Partly as well ‘dual tones’, SNR 7001 d – 2660 f, approx. 7800. From 3200 e – 2660 f only cpl. phosphated, approx. 3700.
Under French occupation from May 1945: The sheet metal stamped grip panels were already designed by MAUSER during the war and were already being in Wehrmacht-use April 1945. (I once had one of these in my hands at a dealer, produced April ’45: only roughly smoothed on the outside with strong traces of machining, but the action and trigger “running like in silk”. Impressive MAUSER quality – even in the middle of the twilight of the gods…
As far as I know, the first “French” production batch from the early summer of 1945 still consisted mainly of main parts rejected by the former HWaA (Wehrmacht Army Weapons Office), which had been stored in the factory cellar. Because: A thrifty Swabian doesn’t throw anything away so quickly, because maybe you can still use it again at some point. Oui, en fait…!! And there were still plenty of small parts available. The French had no idea about the dubious “cellar corpses”, but that wasn’t tragic, because their armament consisted mainly of Allied scrap or surplus stocks, which weren’t exactly in the best condition either. The French would have liked to have received many more P.38s and HScs from “Made in Oberndorf”, but the Soviets, according to a contemporary witness (quote), would not have been able to obtain them from mid-1946 because of the “Potsdam Agreement”: “… ad nauseam…!”), the Soviets repeatedly pushed for the destruction of the factory.
In 1945 the coding “swv45” was adopted by the French absolutely painlessly grinning and, according to MAUSER factory data, 26.605 P.38s were produced by the end of the year, SNR 0001 g – 7740 k. “swv46” there were only 11.250, SNR 1000 k – 10,000 k. A five-pointed star was stamped on the right-hand side of the carriage as a French inventory mark.
Shortly before the factory was dismantled, the French removed the remaining parts and took them to the MAC (Manufacture d’armes Chatellerault). The MAC then assembled another 500 P.38s, SNR 001 L – 500 L, from the remaining parts. (However, these were polished and blued. Presumably these pistols were used up in Indochina).
But the “Grey Ghost” story did not end there. The new German Bundeswehr then introduced the already well-tested P.38 from 1957 as the “P1”. It was also phosphated again, probably in a dark green-grey to anthracite color for production reasons… So the Ghost was not sent back “into the bottle”…
Did germans utilized french arms factories after occupation?
Seldom you heard of arms made in france for them, as compared to czechoslovakia and some other.
A good question. The MAS36 rifle and Chatellerault LMG could have been redesigned for 7.92mm I should have thought. Both would have bulked up German supplies of small arms. But it was never done. Perhaps the Germans just looked down on French arms and did not want to use them.
Did germans utilized french arms factories after occupation?(…)
MAB Modèle D automatic pistol (firing 9×17 mm cartridge) was according to https://unblinkingeye.com/Guns/MABHist/mabhist.html …produced during the German occupation should range from approximately 47,000 to 97,000, plus L1 through L1160. The Model D was manufactured from 1933 until 1964…
You have to “follow the money”: Germans would not have profited from utilization of French arsenal assets in France. So, no, they did not convert French plants to build German weapons, nor did they utilize French plants to build French weapons in German calibers. Nobody in Germany would have made any money off of that… And, they’d have had to pay the French something, in order to keep it all going.
There are reasons they confiscated French machinery, moved it to Germany, and then conscripted French labor to work on that equipment in Germany. That was so they could keep the money “in house”.
You can’t analyze Nazi Germany as a normal, sane nation: They did things for Nazi reasons, which were rarely rational or reasonable. Or, in keeping with their propaganda. Despite propagandizing for a “United Europe”, the whole thing was “Loot, pillage, and rape for the benefit of Nazis and Germany”.
It would have made good sense for the Germans to have utilized French industry to build their war machine. However, comma… That would have meant paying French industry, and that wasn’t on. Once they got through stealing everything, actually continuing the logical progression of that process wasn’t going to happen, because they a.) did not have the money to do so, and b.) that wasn’t ideologically possible. The Nazi regime was meant to benefit Nazis, not French industrialists. They were really only interested in German industry inasmuch as they could take it over and loot it; look what happened with the Austrians and Steyr, at the various industrial centers they turned into Nazi fiefdoms and then ran into the ground. Goering took rather more out of the Nibelungenwerke than they got out of it in terms of war material. It was all an excuse to loot, pillage, and burn.
Interesting. My uncle was trained in using poison gas while in the Army in WWII. he went in on D-Day plus 2, and was stationed at airfields as the front advanced. If the Germans had used poison gas, we had it and were ready to respond.
Kirk:
You may well be right on this. Since Vichy France was nominally a French ally, I suppose they would have had to work with them to convert MAS36s and Chatteleraults to 7.92mm, and, as you say, pay for them.
As far as I know, they took all the French artillery they captured in 1940, but did not make any more. The same thing with regard to tanks and aircraft. French industry could have been a big help to the Germans, so we have to be grateful for that.
France being one of the world powers pre and post ww2, its strange germans didnt utilize their industrial capacities. I mean, France is not freaking czechoslovakia!
But we (here) dont know if theres has been some stealing of equipment and factories and such. No frenchie here in comments freak section, from what I know.