Alternate Weapons of War thread...
- Thread starter Franz Josef II
- Start date
Carbine Variants of the StG-45 and StG-44 Respectively known as the StG-45K and StG-44K
The Sturmpistole-47
The Base variant, in which it could fire 37mm Grenades as a Grenade Launcher.
The Sturmpistole-47 equipped as an underbarrel grenade launcher for the StG-44, from the collection of the Whermacht Museum in Germania
The Base variant, in which it could fire 37mm Grenades as a Grenade Launcher.
The Sturmpistole-47 equipped as an underbarrel grenade launcher for the StG-44, from the collection of the Whermacht Museum in Germania
The Sturmmaschinengewehr-47 or StMG-47, an StG-44 Derivative in an LMG configuration.
UNMEG Chieftan Mk.10 of the Berlin Armoured Squadron, attached to the Gloucestershire Regiment, outside the former headquarters of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, Wünsdorf 1986
The United Nations Mission to East Germany was born out of the expected not happening. When the Soviet Union became ever more unstable in the aftermath of Leonid Brezhnev's asassination in 1980, the subsequent leadership struggle made many western analysts fear that The Big One would eventually happen as a way to have an external threat, meaning NATO, stabilize the internal Soviet factions. Instead, the one thing the significant factions inside the Soviet Military and bureaucracy were sure was that they did not desire any sort of Western interference and it quickly became an unwritten rule that the internal troubles must not move beyond Soviet borders. However, this was not to be. Over the next few years, the revolving door of Soviet leadership, with no less than nine General Secretaries between 1980 and spring 1982 led to the Warsaw Pact as a whole de-stabilizing. The first to break off was Poland in winter 1982 after Soviet high command reduced the GSFG by almost two-thirds in order to brace for what was coming in Russia itself. While the new Solidarnosc-led interim Government never officially left the Warsaw Pact until it's formal dissolution in 1992, the remaining Soviet forces in East Germany, as well as the East German leadership were all too aware that their supply lines to an already increasingly unreliable Soviet brother state had been effectively cut. The situation grew much, much worse when the Chairman of the KGB tried to sieze power by force of arms, and resistance by Soviet Army force spiralled into the beginning of the Soviet Civil War.
It was this moment that just about everyone expected the Nukes to be flying shortly, but amazingly enough, the Section of the KGBs forces that were tasked with safeguarding the warheads as opposed to the rockets themselves declared their neutrality. Just about every faction either tried to buy them off or seize the warheads by force at one point, but having been one of the best funded and equipped parts of the Soviet military, these efforts came to naught, especially once U.S. President Reagan recognized the Nuclear Neutral Zone and promised it's enforcement as far as was possible for NATO Forces without entering the Soviet Union proper.
At the same time the Soviet Navy had largely sided with the so-called loyalist faction around the Leningrad Party Secretariat. That faction came to a quiet agreement with NATO and the European Community that no Nuclear Weapons would be used against Western targets. In return, the United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany, France and Canada recognized them as the legitimate Soviet Government.
In East Germany, and to a lesser extent the entire Soviet bloc, the various regimes found themselves cast adrift. The Czechoslovak and Hungarian regimes were overthrown with little to no bloodshed, declaring their exit from the Warsaw Pact and their general neutrality in a joint statement in 1984, while Romania and Bulgaria saw significant fighting, with Romania falling into it's own civil war that lasted until the last vestiges of the Communist regime were removed in 1987.
East Germany on the other hand saw an ailing Erich Honnecker desperately trying to hang onto power in the face of a population in a state of near-rebellion. However, without Soviet support the economy was in more of a free-fall than it was already, even as Poland slowly transitioned to a free market economy and began to see significant growth. So it is hardly surprising that in 1985, the National People's Army opened fire when angry demonstrators seemed all set to storm the headquarters of the German Socialist Unity Party. What followed was on a scale of brutality not seen in Germany since the end of World War Two, to the point where the West-German Government seemed poised to intervene without NATO assistance when repeated calls for peace from Bonn were ignored by both the warring factions in East Germany and at the UN.
However, this would have been in severe violation of a number of post-war Allied powers and agreements, but as much as London, Washington and Paris wanted to intervene, if anything to push the Iron curtain out of Germany, it wasn't until the Commander of what was left of the GSFG defended his nuclear warheads and other b/C weapons by force against elements of the East German Army and declared his own neutrality, quietly letting NATO know that his troops would not fight except in self-defence should NATO troops (with the exception of the Bundeswehr) cross the border.
So it was that NATO crossed the border by adapting an old theoretical Warplan from the early 1970s. After a year of fighting, the exhausted factions in East Germany had little to fight the highly motivated, well-trained and technologically vastly surperior NATO-led UN mission when they crossed in March 1986, and by the end of the year, the country was fully secured, with the Allied troops in Berlin having broken through the wall and re-united the city.
In the end, the GDR formally joined the Federal Republic in 1988, and the Soviet Civil War ended in a peace of exhaustion in 1990, with Russia today still being divided into the states that coalesced from the quagmire that had been the war.
A Mauser produced StG-71 from the collection of the Wehrmacht Museum in Germania.
A Gustloffwerke Produced StG-71k made for the Egyptian Army, courtesy from the collection of Firearms Blogger Ian McCollum
When the American M16 and it's 5.56x45mm cartridge were introduced in 1963, the Germans quickly began development on their own cartridge, the 6.92x33mm, and two new guns, which would eventually become the the StG-71 and StG-84 respectively. Due to problems with the development StG-84, which was an entirely new design, the Haenel design team, developed a derivative of the StG-44 in the new cartridge. It StG-71 was adopted in 1971 and began entering service with the Wehrmacht in 1972. The StG-71 was nothing more than a stop gap for the development of the StG-84, in which only 2.4 million StG-71 rifles were produced.
Oh my god. This is the greatest thing I've seen tonight! An actual belt-fed 9mm submachine-gun! Brilliant!
The SG-60 General Purpose Machine Gun, a modernized SGM Machine Gun for the GPMG role.
Heya guys, I got a request if anyone's up for it.
Can anyone here make a bolt action rifle with elements either from the K98, MAS-36, or M38 Carcano Short and mix them together to make a new rifle?
If you don't want to do a rifle, then can I make a request for an LMG that combines elements from either the MG-34, Beretta Mod. 1930, or FM 24/29 LMG to make a new LMG?
... OR, if you don't want to do either of those, then a new SMG combining elements of the MP-40, MAS-38, and Beretta MAB-38?
Can anyone here make a bolt action rifle with elements either from the K98, MAS-36, or M38 Carcano Short and mix them together to make a new rifle?
If you don't want to do a rifle, then can I make a request for an LMG that combines elements from either the MG-34, Beretta Mod. 1930, or FM 24/29 LMG to make a new LMG?
... OR, if you don't want to do either of those, then a new SMG combining elements of the MP-40, MAS-38, and Beretta MAB-38?