Modularity is the holy gospel in military circles these days. Distilled to its essence, a modular weapon system uses a single basic chassis that can then be customized to perform specific missions. Think of it like Barbie dolls for gun guys. By mixing and matching accessories, you can be ready for a hard day at the office, a vigorous romp through the woods, or a festive night on the town.
Springfield Armory has gone all in on modularity. Their superlative Echelon pistol is built around a removable, serialized Central Operating Group (COG). The COG is a steel chassis that can be fitted with sundry slides, frames, and assorted ditzels to make the gun into pretty much whatever you wish it to be. And then there is their extensive line of AR rifles.
The Springfield Armory SAINT’s all orbit around common receivers. There’s one size for 5.56 and another for 7.62, but those two basic designs can be had as carbines, long rifles, and handguns. That’s the cutting edge in modern small arms design.
One might be forgiven for believing that this was all a new fad. However, it seems that one Georg Luger, an Austrian of some renown who contrived the most popular handgun cartridge in all of human history, became enamored with the concept of modularity more than a century before it so suffused the modern military mindset. The P.08 Parabellum pistol he designed was indeed a prescient thing.
Origin of the Luger
In 1893 Hugo Borchardt designed a handgun based loosely upon the toggle lock of the Maxim machine gun. He christened his creation the C-93 (Construktion 93). The C-93 fired a 7.65x25mm bottlenecked high-velocity cartridge, weighed more than two and one-half pounds, and was better than a foot long. To make things worse, the pistol grip met the frame at a right angle. That made most everything about the gun awkward. However, it was nonetheless still an undeniably groundbreaking design.
Deustche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM) produced the C-93. Georg Luger was a DWM employee tasked with promoting the radical new pistol to both military and commercial users. Georg took the basic Borchardt action, fixed most of its most obvious flaws, and, in so doing, changed the world of combat pistols forever.
The basic Luger action was indeed an amazing thing. The technical term is biomimetic or biomimicry. This means a mechanical contrivance that is patterned after something found in nature. Common examples include Velcro, the Japanese Shinkansen “bullet” train that was inspired by the beak of the kingfisher bird, and certain adhesives that were based upon the feet of the gecko lizard. In the case of the Luger pistol, the action was inspired by the human knee joint.
When extended and locked, the mechanism can support a great deal of linear force. This allows the firearm to manage fairly high-pressure cartridges. Upon firing, the upper half of the gun slides backward along a track in the frame. The hump on the back of the frame cams the toggle lock upward, breaking it in the manner of the human knee. This action then ejects the empty case. A spring in the butt drives the bolt forward to strip a round from the magazine and repeat the cycle.
It is a fairly straightforward thing to demonstrate this with an unloaded example of the gun. Press the muzzle against a firm surface, and you can watch the way the action operates. It really is an inspired design.
Curiously, the US Army actually came fairly close to adopting the Luger in .45 ACP as a service pistol. In 1901, the U.S. Army Ordnance Board bought 1,000 copies for field testing with the mounted cavalry. These Model 1900 Lugers sported American Eagle stamps over the chambers, 4.75” barrels, and U.S. Army ordnance flaming bomb proof marks. Possession of one of these original guns today would serve as a down payment on a decent house.
Variety Is the Spice of Life
While a serviceable combat pistol in its basic form, Herr Luger envisioned his P.08 Parabellum as something much greater. An early leaf spring design was changed to the more efficient coil spring drive in 1906, but the guns remained externally identical. The aggressively swept grip met the frame at a 155-degree angle. Throughout the sundry variations, the basic Luger frame remained common to all variants. Most all frames were cut to accept shoulder stocks.
In 1904, the Imperial German Navy adopted a modified version of the Luger Parabellum pistol designed for use in close-range ship-to-ship combat. The Navy Luger was designed to give U-boat captains a weapon with which they might snipe at their opposite numbers while their ships duked it out in surface engagements. That’s honestly fairly ridiculous, but it made for a cool gun.
This novel pistol sported an extended 6” barrel as well as a two-position rear sight selectable for 100 and 200-meter ranges. When fitted with a detachable shoulder stock, this gun formed a nifty little carbine at a time when the industry standard was a meter-long bolt-action rifle firing massive cartridges the size of your middle finger. I doubt they were ever used effectively for their intended purpose.
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In 1908, the German Imperial Army adopted a standardized version of the P.08 Luger pistol with a 4” barrel. This was the definitive model issued throughout the German military on all fronts during both world wars. Production finally ceased in 1943 when the Luger was supplanted by the more advanced Walther P.38.
The Germans produced more than two million copies of this weapon by the end of World War I. Despite being compact, powerful and reliable, the Luger’s trigger wasn’t all that it could have been. However, it was an eminently serviceable sidearm and a prized war trophy during both world wars.
In July of 1913, the Kaiser personally authorized another major variation of the standard Luger pistol. This firearm included a 7.9” barrel along with an eight-position tangent rear sight graduated out to 870 yards. The gun included a board-type shoulder stock with an associated leather holster. There was also a complicated clockwork 32-round snail drum magazine intended to increase the gun’s onboard firepower. These long-barreled weapons were technically intended for use by German artillery units for close-in defense.
Without really intending to do so, Herr Luger had produced one of history’s first Personal Defense Weapons. As a result, these artillery Lugers were prized by both aviators and Stormtrooper assault units. At a time when most infantry weapons were massive polearm-style affairs, the artillery Luger made for a proper fast-handing carbine.
Denouement
All of the sights were too small and too complicated to be particularly effective. There was even a weird cam built into the rear sight on the artillery Luger that supposedly compensated for spin drift or Coriolis effect or some such. You can see it in action if you look really close while adjusting it. This thing is insanely overbuilt.
The eight-round, single-stack magazines sport dimpled floorplates, because you have to tug on them a bit to get them free. The action, though inspired, is all externalized so it is susceptible to battlefield grime. However, given that the state of the art at the time was a double-action revolver, the Luger family of pistols was amazing for its era.
All three of these firearms were built around a common frame. By mixing and matching upper assemblies, you could theoretically make that one chassis into a service pistol, a stocked target handgun and a close quarters carbine. The Germans did not issue the gun to be used that way, but they could have.
Georg Luger designed the 9x19mm Parabellum cartridge in 1901. That inspired little round is produced in the billions each year worldwide, even today. At around the same time, Herr Luger also serendipitously contrived the world’s first truly modular combat weapon. He was indeed a man well ahead of his time.
Special thanks to www.WorldWarSupply.com for the cool replica gear used in preparation of our photos.
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