Book Review: The Dutch Luger (Parabellum) - A Complete History
5m 55s
Bas Martens and Guus de Vries are a pair of very knowledgable Dutch small arms researchers and collectors who published "The Dutch Luger (Parabellum) - A Complete History". As one might expect, it is a thorough and comprehensive history of Luger pistols in Dutch service. This includes the Dutch Army, Navy, police forces, and East Indies Army. However, the book has more than just that. It also includes a major section on the Dutch pistol trials that led to adoption of the Luger. These trials involved a lot of the interesting early automatic pistols (Schwarzlose, Bergmann, Mannlicher, etc) and the Dutch records survive well. As a result, this is a significant source of insight into the performance of many of those other designs, which are generally poorly understood.
For the collector of Dutch arms and the Luger scholar, this is a must-have book. I think it is also well worth having for anyone interested in early automatic pistol development simply for that section on the Dutch handgun trials. Unfortunately, the book is out of print, and now available only on the secondary market. Here are a few copies on Amazon:
https://amzn.to/3JJdjiR