The choice of using larping russian footage with that tranny voice is somewhat funny, but the news is saddening. I remember watching his MG42 build video in 2016 i want to say when I bought my first parts kit.
based on the last photo, I can imagine why he doesn't want it recorded- even audio. He may want the last 'public' exposure to be one in which he was stronger than he will be (he still looked pretty good in the last video he was in, all things considered)
Wait til you hear how Comrade Stalin secured the powerplant of the MiG-15!
Just what the Right needs, more podcasts!
They don't call it podcast race for nothin'!
The Germans were always so erratic about how they managed captured weapons. For example they captured a handful of British 3.7 Inch AA Guns which the Luftwaffe loved, and they set up a production line to manufacture Ammunition for less than 40 guns.
Luftwaffe was just rife with corruption. For the longest time I have held the belief that the Luftwaffe Drillings meant for crew survival were actually gifts from Goering to the crew once the wars was over.
Germany has a higher need for AT guns than low level artillery. And the French 75 by that point was 40 years old and larger and heavier than the German 75mm gun.
They didn't threw them away many of those guns were pressed into service. And also a lot of those guns were Mosins which only the Fins could make ammo for and nobody was rechambering them.
7.62 Tokarev is one way interchangeable with 7.62 Mauser, a somewhat common civilian handgun round that was also used by some European militaries and as long as there was supply of it the Wehrmacht did issue it for captured 7.62 Tok weapons. And I want you to ask what is more efficient. Making 3 calibers, 7.92, 7.92 kurtz, 9mm or 4 Calibers for guns you do not manufacture as such have a finite supply.
If the Germans could cajole the French to make things against their will they would have put them to make Tanks or Aircraft engines or other strategically significant equipment. It was so hard to make the French work using their own factories that it was easier to ship them to Germany.
Those factories didn't stand still. They just made German guns. And it's one thing to say make a self loader, it's another to actually do it. The Japanese spent the better part of a decade trying to make a semi auto in the inter war period, again cloning Zh-29s, Pedersen Rifle and a home grown gun. None of the guns were deemed fit for adoption and the program was dropped as it was not worth the money. All self loader programs, even the successful ones took years. And to be fair the Germans started their program in 1940, by 1941 they had a dogshit gun and by 1943 they had a functional gun. And honestly even if every Wermacht solider in 1941 had a self loading rifle instead of a bolt action rifle that wouldn't have won them the war.
The backbone of the German logistics system was the railroads, and they made a mess of them. Below is a video from a Military historian that specializes in logistics, and he just goes into detail about one fuck up after another. Key points being that changing the track gauge on Soviet railways wouldn't have been a major task for any sort of competent rail organization civil or military. It's fascinating and it gives an insight into the wider Wehrmacht.
They wouldn't have had to clone the ZH-29 they actually had not only the full set of drawing but the machine tooling, likewise for the MAS40. It's just in both cases they didn't seem to realise it.
They captured nearly a thousand 47mm Belgian AT guns, which had significant better penetration than the PAK 36, however nobody is certain what happened to them, apart from being put into coastal fortifications. They used Czech 47mm on A panzerjaeger but not many.
By throwing away, I mean they didn't make the best use out of them.
The ZH-29 also used Aluminum components. And in 1938 the Germans still didn't want Semi Auto rifles.
Considering the Dieppe raid and the German interpretation of it maybe they taught they were better served there. They also sent some Char B1s there as well. Also the Germans under estimated their need of AT until after Barbarossa began.
The French modified guns were 30% cheaper than a PAK 40.
What's the best use of a few million Mosins?
In 1942 the Germans were only really fortifying Ports and towns along the coast, most of the coast was lightly defended. Despite what the British claimed after Dieppe wasn't even particularly well defended it was just a large port in an obvious location to be attacked.
You take a secondary theater (or potential theater) say Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece etc, and equip all the forces stationed there with Russian caliber small Arms. Russian Maxims would actually be perfect in the coastal defence role, no need to swap out barrels. Set up a production line for Ammunition. It also prevents the weapons from being recaptured by the Soviets.
Even modified the muzzle velocity was still too low for a decent AT gun, and it would tear itself apart after constant use becuase the guns recoil system wasn't intended to be used at low elevations. (interesting side note the recoil system was also one of the reasons the British 3.7inch AA gun wasn't used in the AT role)
So you waste limited rail capability to gather up all the Mosins. Then send them over to places that already make use heavily of local guns and take those local guns and send them somewhere else. You also waste limited industrial tooling to make ammo for a gun that is most likely to not be fired in anger. And the only benefit is that the Soviets don't get to use a gun they already make millions of. This is at best rearranging chairs on the titanic at worst it's setting fire to the ship to keep warm.
It can kill a T-34 from the front. That's better than most German AT prior to 1943. And considering in 1941 the Panzerjagers were so desperate they experimented with bouncing shots of the ground into the floor plates of the tank I think they didn't care about the low life span of the gun if it meant higher life span for the user.
What I'm suggesting is that the Mosins should have been treated as a weapon system, and the training, logistics and support processes put in place to get the most out of them. They should have been issued en masse to large scale formations, instead of just being doled out to rear echelon units together with whatever ammunition was to hand. They also shouldn't have been used on the Eastern front where they could have been recaptured (which I have a suspicion a lot were) but in a secondary theatre on the western front. There was a huge amount of German equipment in Norway (which kept the Norwegian Army supplied for decades after the war) that could have been better used on the Eastern front. Also have a watch of the video on German Railways during WWII, using retuning suppy trains to bring equipment back for maintenance was what they were supposed to do. Wehrmact doctrine was as much as possible to get equipment repaired back in the factory. Which is what a lot of modern militaries call "1st line to 4th line"
And again what benefit you get from all this effort?
PAK 38 could only reliably pen T-34s and KV1s using the very expensive Panzegrenate 40 APCR round, by comparison HEAT is cheap. And 500 meters is not bad for an AT gun that can be camouflaged and is facing soviet tanks with terrible vision.
The .30-06 Garand was already chosen the winner a month prior to MacArthur making it a formality. The logistical concerns extended beyond just ammunition as everything had to be retool or rebuilt to manufacture everything. To the guns themselves, magazines, enbloc clips and all of the other assorted stuff.
German HEAT had a lot of problems, particularly when fired from any sort of weapon that wasn't extremely low velocity such as a Panzerfaust. Also I'm not quite sure it's that cheap, the main reason the Germans didn't deploy crew served recoilless rifles more widely was that they used a lot more propellant than a round fired from a closed breach.
It's also because their main recoilless design used Aluminum and production was scrapped in 1941 as it was weapon meant for paratroopers. There was a crew served equivalent to the Panzershreck but since it had a similar warhead it wasn't produced much. Instead the Germans preferred doing things like mounting spigot launchers on outdated AT. Also nobody really employed crew served recoilless during the war. The Americans had very limited numbers of them by 1945 and those early German ones that were used in 1940.
The whole matter of German currency and the broader macroeconomics has more to do with Germany being in perpetual ever expanding debt starting before the war, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down in occupied territory and less with the Mark being inflated.
I doubt that since I have accounts of Romanian tank crew from 1944, just before the King's Coup in which they recall using Panzergrenate 40 to destroy IS-2s. Some of those IS-2s even got paraded in Bucharest.
