Book Review: Captured Arms (Beutewaffen)
Forgotten Weapons
•
7m 35s
Get a copy for yourself here: http://www.sipublicaties.nl/
"Captured Arms (Beutewaffen)" by Guus de Vries is Volume 9 of the Propaganda Photo Series by SI Publicaties out of the Netherlands. I really like the whole series, as they do a very good job of combining really interesting original photos with engaging and fact-dense writing. This volume is a bit different from previous books that specialize on individual weapons, as it covers the whole vast range of foreign arms captured and used by the German military during World War II. Its main chapters cover each of the 12 main countries that Germany acquired arms from (Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, the UK, the US, and Yugoslavia).
Each chapter provides an explanation of how the Germans got the weapons in question and what specifically they used. In some cases arms factories were kept in production, and sometimes captured arms were converted to use German ammunition instead of whatever they had been originally designed for (like the DP-28, for instance). In some cases, the arms being captured were actually German arms taken as war booty after World War I! It is very interested to see the context for what was being reused by Germany, and I tihnk many people do not appreciate the true extent to which Germany depended on captured arms during the war.
Up Next in Forgotten Weapons
-
BESAL: Britain's Emergency Simplified...
The BESAL is a simplified redesign of the Bren light machine gun, developed by a BSA employee named Faulkner. The design of the gun was motivated by the disastrous retreat of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940, where they abandoned a huge amount of weaponry and war material, including most of ...
-
W+F Bern P47 Experimental Gas-Delay P...
The Swiss were the first country to adopt a self-loading service pistol; the Luger in 1900. They would keep those in service clear through World War 2, at which point they began seriously looking for a more economical and more modern replacement. During the 1940s, a number of experimental designs...
-
W+F Bern P43: A Swiss Take on the Bro...
In 1940, Switzerland began a series of trials to replace their Luger service pistols with something equally high quality, but more economical. They had squeezed as much simplification out of the Luger as they could in 1929, and by this time the guns just needed to be replaced. The first 1940 tria...
