German 18

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German 18
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with 18th Army (German Empire) .
Georg Lindemann visiting the trenches at Leningrad
The 18th Army (German: 18. Armee ) was a World War II field army in the German Wehrmacht .

Formed in November 1939 in Military Region ( Wehrkreis ) VI, the 18th Army was part of the offensive into the Netherlands ( Battle of the Netherlands ) and Belgium ( Battle of Belgium ) during Fall Gelb and later moved into France in 1940. The 18th Army was then moved East and participated in Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

The Army was a part of the Army Group North until early 1945, when it was subordinated to Army Group Kurland . In October 1944, the army was encircled by the Red Army offensives and spent the remainder of the war in the Courland Pocket .

Küchler, Georg Generalfeldmarschall Georg von Küchler (1881–1968)
Lindemann, Georg Generaloberst Georg Lindemann (1884–1963)
Loch, Herbert General der Artillerie Herbert Loch (1886–1976)
Boege, Ehrenfried General der Infanterie Ehrenfried-Oskar Boege (1889–1965)

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Action open, looking down on the toggle-locking mechanism
Right side – note small vertical door for clip ejection
Looking into the feed box. Note “rack” for lifting cartridges up the clip to the boltface and chamber
Clip, front side. Each column holds 8 cartridges
Left side, with feed box door closed
Feed box door open, with empty clip inserted


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From Max Popenker , we have a set of photos of a very funky German submachine gun from the first world war (presumably 1918). The weapon is currently in possession of the weapon design department at Tula State University in Russia, and that’s where these photos were taken. Until now, the only photo available of this gun was this one (and it has some minor differences from Tula’s example, including the front grip and oil bottle in the stock):
Well, it turns out that the gun in that picture is missing its feed box, which is a pretty important part, and tells us a lot about how it worked. The gun actually fed from a multi-column clip which held 8 rows of 10 cartridges each, somewhat like a cross between a 1914 Fiat-Revelli and a Japanese Type 11 LMG . When first loaded, the first column of cartridges is engaged by a sort of rack and pulled up to the chamber one by one. After the 10th round is chambered, the entire clip is stepped to the right so that the second column of cartridges is in position to be fed upwards. When all the rounds have been fired, the now-empty clip is pushed out through a slot (with its own spring-loaded dust cover) on the right side of the feed box.
The action of the gun itself is based on the Maxim MG08/18 air-cooled machine gun, using the same type of recoil-operated toggle lock, just scaled down to a the 9mm Parabellum pistol cartridge. Instead of having the recoil (fusee) spring on the outside of the gun, in this case it is located inside the buttstock, like many other more modern designs.
Pretty much nothing else is known about this gun, including who made it, exactly when, whether it ever saw field use, how many were made, and whether or not it actually worked effectively. Heck, I don’t even know what the proper name of it is…but it certainly is interesting and unusual. Thanks, Max!
When the German military first requested rifles in the new 8x33mm Kurz cartridge, there were two companies that provided designs. One was Haenel, who would eventually win the competition. The other was Walther, who submitted […]
German troops with captured Mosin Nagant rifles (and one SVT-40).
This particular 1902-made example of the C96 Mauser incorporates several experimental features of the design that would never go into mass production. It was an effort to make a version of the C96 that would […]
At first glance i think that this gun is from post-apocalyptic movie or game, but on the other hand it is also steam-punk looking.
Note that this gun is designed also to provide more controllable full auto fire.
It would have been an appropriate prop for the “John Carter” movie.
Any info on how much it weighs? Will you put any other data you have on it on your excellent website? In any case, many thanks!
That gives us a constraint for its earliest possible date.
The magazine looks quite large for a single 9mm round, it looks as if two could fit on each “tray” perhaps.
it’s a bunch of stripper clips attached to a backplate
That is cool, Many thanks to Max for sharing it with us.
Daweo has already pointed out that the gun is adaptated for controllable automatic fire (inline layout and is that a swivel for mounting – aircraft? or ground position – perhaps in the role occupied by artillery lugers? or perhaps for supply crews?
It is tempting to draw analogies to “missing link” fossils, such as ground or tree dwelling dinosaur fossils with feathers, or archaeoptrix a feathered bird with clawed fingers on its wings and teeth in its mouth,
but that would be to ignore that the fossils were of critters which had successfully exploited ways of living, better than anything around them had up to that point.
Guns like this are exploring possible applications, for which there are probably better solutions too
and there may also be better applications for the gun too.
Like the roughly contemprary Villar – Perosa, this looks to be an attempt to scale down the conventional machinegun, complete with attachment to a tripod or other fixture, however the stock on this one does suggest that a more mobile use was also anticipated, but hardly to the highly mobile trench raiding and house clearing which evolved in conjunction with the more developed SMGS.
This is such a wonderful little gun and a link to such an interesting time in the development of guns.
Good observation! Is that a pintle mount under the wood pistol grip?
A very bizarre gun. Ingenious, certainly, but bizarre. Very “steam punk” indeed!
It certainly looks like a pintle mount rod. Coupled with the sling bar on the left side of the barrel cooling jacket, and the fact that it has that cooling jacket, I’m almost inclined to think that it was originally intended as an “observer gun” for aircraft.
If so (and I don’t insist on it), the actual model number might be more like “08/15”. By 1916 the Germans had pretty much abandoned the idea of pistol-caliber MGs in aircraft, but they were considered a viable concept as late as mid-1915.
The sling would probably have been intended for attachment to a harness worn by the gunner to steady the gun in the slipstream.
A good theory, but the front grip suggest that ground use was envisaged as well.
The front grip would be equally as useful in a mounted setup given the placement of the pintle.
With a high AA ring sight in a small aircraft cockpit or observer position? I can’t see how it would be useful.
A lot of flexible guns had a post front and notch rear, much like a ground gun. This was especially true of guns with shoulder stocks, which were fired in a stance much like a normal rifle. The flexible Lewis gun was one example.
This weapon’s sights would be consistent with that practice. Or ground use, as you point out.
Yes, you are right that especially early on many observer MGs had ground style sights, so if this really is a 1915 development, it would fit. Regardless, I still can’t see any use for the front grip in aircraft use.
Early on, observers learned that it generally takes both hands to control a “single” flexible gun in the air, less from recoil than the slipstream trying to “push” the gun around. The second grip up front would be for that use, especially because having the pintle mount on the main pistol grip doesn’t give the gunner very good leverage at the rear. Compare this setup to a single Lewis or Vickers VGO on a Scarff ring, and you can see the difference.
This design, if intended as an aircraft flexible gun, should have had a Lewis or Parabellum-type mount at the front of the receiver. Then again, in 1915 they didn’t know that yet, as aerial gunnery of all types was in its infancy.
This could have been one of the experimental designs that, when tested in actual aerial trials, showed them the right way to mount such a weapon, by making the drawbacks of this setup obvious.
Yes, it suppose it might be somewhat useful, although I would think holding onto the shoulder stock with your left hand would probably be as good if not better. Also, why the shoulder stock if the gun was designed for aircraft use? The Villar-Perosa had spade grips, which in my opinion would make much more sense. Later Lewis AA and flexible aircraft variants also dispensed with the shoulder stock and replaced it with a spade drip.
Well spotted about the barrel jacket.
Adding water cooling, complete with a condenser can would take the steam punk to an even higher level than this lovely little gun has already achieved.
Does anyone have an indifference engine to do the indirect fire calculations?
“It is tempting to draw analogies to “missing link” fossils,”…Boy Keith, you said it, and nailed it.
Thank you all for bringing another amazing anachronism out into the light!
Note that for some reason the drum (Trommel) magazine of Luger pistol was not used. Do you know reason to rejection of drum magazine?
The Trommelmagazin 08 wasn’t all that reliable in feeding, as the German Army learned when they tried to use it on the Bergmann MP18 SMG. (Note how fast it was replaced by a proper “box” magazine on the MP18.1 aka MP28 version after the war.)
Also, it would have stuck out much further on the left side, with most of its weight in the “drum” section, thereby overbalancing what was probably a pretty cranky handful to manage to begin with.
Also, I’d expect a weapon like this, with a lightweight bolt/toggle assembly and short travel, to have a very high rate of fire even in 9x19mm PPatr.08. Probably roughly equal to that of the original Ingram-designed MAC 10 SMG in 9x19mm, or about 1,100 rounds per minute.
I can personally attest to how fast a “Mac Ten” can empty a 32-round magazine on full-auto, having done it a time or two. You just about get your wits collected enough to let up on the trigger when it goes dry, until you learn to “tap” the trigger to generate five-or-six-shot bursts. It’s much easier with an MP5 (even without a three-shot burst control on the trigger group), and dead easy with an MP 38/40, M3, Thompson M1928 or M2 Carbine, as they all have lower ROF. (Been there, done that.)
The large-capacity “Gardner”-type magazine of this widget was less of a problem as a weight on the left side due to being closer to the bore axis. And holding at least 80 rounds, allowed a decent number of bursts between reloads, which were apparently automatic anyway, with two “trays” in a loaded box giving 160 rounds total. At MAC 10 fire rates, that’s about eight or nine seconds’ worth of fire at 18 rounds/second.
Not a bad ROF for an aerial gun, actually. Almost up to the “twinned” Gast gun system (1,600 rounds/minute) of 1918. And with the slipstream and barrel jacket, plus the lower heat transfer of 9x19mm, barrel heating would have less of a problem than with the later rifle-caliber weapons.
Cool man, it looks like the “machineguns” we created as a kids in uncle’s garage from scrap metal and firewood.
I like the magazine, a form of it might be ok in kind of:
If it was mounted in the G11’s manner…
The feed hopper setup reminds me irresistibly of a Nordenfeldt or multiple-barrel Gardner. Basically their system turned on its side and given a spring-power option.
It also has some elements of both the Revelli M-1914 and the Japanese Type 11 (1922) MGs, the latter using a hopper feed that took the five-round stripper clips for the Type 38 (1905) Arisaka bolt-action rifle.
Exactly why Mauser would have come up with such a feed setup at that time, when they were already using fabric feed belts on the MG.08, is a very good question.
It might be another indicator that the gun was intended as an aircraft-mounted weapon. At the time, the German Army was concerned with loose belts being a problem in an airplane in flight. Mainly being thrown about by the slipstream and hitting the crew or a sensitive part of the airplane’s structure- like a fabric-covered wing or tailplane, for instance.
The “feed blocks”, by comparison, could be ejected through the slot in the right side of this weapon’s receiver and caught by a collector bag, more or less like ejected cartridge cases could be caught by a “brass-catcher” bag. This would keep them from being whipped backward by the slipstream and possibly damaging the aircraft’s empennage.
Aircraft, pivot mount etc seems apt… Rear gunner or something, 9mm underpowered for aircraft… Possibly a model, with the notion to make something bigger. Bet a rear gunner in WW1 would have liked an An94, just saying he he.
That large foresight would suggest it wasn’t for firing from the hip also…
I think I might have an explanation as to why an aircraft weapon (assuming that’s what this is) was chambered for such an inappropriate calibre
Basically there was a point in WWI when the need to arm the aircraft with an automatic weapon was widely known but due to weight constraints the pilots were very limited in what they could carry. There’s this anecdote I remember about a member of the R.F.C who took a Lewis gun up with him, the weight of the gun and ammunition meant that he took a whole hour to reach operational height on landing he was told to ditch it because of the damage to performance
Eventually engines got more powerful so you could mount rifle calibre machine guns on the aircraft but for a time I think a pistol calibre machine gun would have been considered better than just a rifle. I thought the Italians were the only ones to actually build one, never knew the Germans had experimented with the concept until now.
Early on, the Austrian Army Air Service experimented with Steyr M1911 9×22.8mm automatic pistols with extended (fixed) 16-shot magazines for air use. And the Royal Naval Air Service did likewise with M1911 Colt autos in .455in Webley Self-Loading caliber, with 20-shot magazines and “brass-catcher” cages attached to the right grip. (Smith, Small Arms of the World , 9th ed. [1969], p.149.)
As you state, weight was the main factor. But once more powerful aero engines like the Hispano and Oberursel came along in late 1915 and early ’16, the rifle-caliber machine guns rapidly superseded the pistol-caliber weapons, not to mention the side-by-side shotguns some early pilots favored.
At least one technical drawing exists of a twin Villar-Perosa built to take the Italian 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge. This may have been an experimental model; intended to “spike it up off its knees” and give it the range and power an aircraft flexible gun needed to begin with. And blowback or retarded-blowback rifle-caliber MGs were not unknown at the time, such as the Austrian Schwarzlose, Italian S.I.A., etc.
(In fact, both of those survived into WW2, along with several straight-blowback training LMGs used by the Japanese Army with reduced-charge 6.5mm Arisaka; the latter showed up in NKPA and Chinese PLA hands in Korea.)
AFAIK, no “rifle-caliber” VP was ever built, but the drawing shows that the idea was at least considered.
Oh, and BTW, the British Royal Flying Corps, always pound-phobic, issued Roth-Steyr M1907 8mm auto pistols to some of its pilots early in the war. Exactly where and how they came by them would be interesting to find out. The R-S, of course, had a searage and trigger action that was a forerunner of the modern Glock-type “Safe Action”.
Early AN94, two rounds in each column, one feeds, fires barrel moves back with toggle, toggle opens ejects the other fires before the barrel returns…
On the premise, the magazine looks over sized for a single 9mm round.
The rack thing, a sort of Treeby chain gun magazine mechanism is it… One round in front of the other, per rack lug if you will “said lug being in the middle of both rounds in each column”
Then the second, which is already positioned behind the magazine position if you follow me.
Ahem, cough… Er, I had assumed the round/s laid in the columns, laid flat, and you had multiple clips stacked on top of each other which moved across and up. Think that’s because I thought of the G11 straight away and imagined the rounds be as above per column but falling vertically into said Hk weapon, then the next clip. From this misperception, I thought two rounds per column one laid in front of the other.
Oh great, just what I need. Another wildly strange gun that I can obsess over trying to figure out exactly how it works.
While on first glance this does look a lot like a MG08/15, it does appear to be quite a lot more than just a scaled down version of the action.
First of all, the gun is upside down (compared to a MG08). It looks like the ejection port is above the barrel, and the charging handle is forward while the bolt is closed (like on a Vickers)
Also, the MG08, like other Maxim guns, had a two stage feeding system where it would pull back the cartridge from the belt, put it in line with the barrel, and chamber it. This meant that the belt was located directly above the barrel. This SMG appears to be feeding from well behind the barrel, so it must be feeding the cartridge from the clip to the bolt once the bolt is at it’s rear most position.
Well you appear to know more about Maxims, guns etc than I C.Oelund so how does what you just said fit with what I suggested i.e. Think a Swiss Lmg25, but with two magazines… Barrel forward, chamber a round with the toggle, fire, barrel moves back with toggle, toggle opens ejects, toggle inline with rear magazine, toggle loads from this fires, rest of sequence similar to an An94 in away I know not what.
The magazine box is definitely not big enough to have two rows of cartridges.
I think it looks bigger than it actually is. The rear most part of it has room for the clip (which looks to be very thick), and the front of the box has what looks to be the clip-shifting feeding pawl that pushes the clip sideways once a row is empty.
So if you subtract those two empty spaces there really is just room for one clip.
You can also see this by the feeding comb at the end of the feeding box. If you look at the diameter vs length of each of those slots you can see that those match the dimensions of a single row of 9mm cartridges.
The Maxim guns have a recoil barrel. It is the recoiling movement of the barrel that breaks the toggle link and causes the gun to cycle. If you look at the picture of the right side of the gun, you can see a slot which the charging handle is sticking out of. this slot shows you how much the barrel is moving back every shot.
These clips does not allow the cartridges to be stripped forward (like from a magazine or a en-bloc clip) so the feeding mechanism will have to strip the round upward.
One way it could work is that it feeds it directly on to the breechface, since this looks like a more or less traditional Maxim design. This type of bolt does not have an extractor claw or ejector like you see in most other weapon designs. The breech face is a rail that the cartridges can slide into (muck like how the are held in a clip). The cartridge is held in place
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