Tore’s Tuesday… I have stated that my focus will be on mainly obscure stuff, and today is no exception.
Here is a pretty rare bird, the Jägerpistole. It was based on an absolutely brilliant idea, intended to be the Glock of its time, but for several reasons it was no success.
The caliber is 7,65mm, one of the most common calibers of the time, and the magazine took seven rounds.
It was designed by Franz Jäger in Berlin and the idea was to make a cheaper and lighter pistol by making many of the parts out of stamped steel plate instead of forging and grinding. So it would require less labor to produce and save precious resources as well. A brilliant idea! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, unlike today’s Glock, they lacked the materials and technology to do it well. The pistols design had to be overly complicated to work with the stamped steel parts and that led to a few very significant design flaws. I will describe one of the worst in detail further below.
The pistol was manufactured from 1916, but only 12000 examples were made. A number were bought by the army (about 1/3 of total production I believe?), desperate for arms. The rest were sold commercially as officers private purchase weapons etc. Those bought by the army have military acceptance stamps. Mine does not have those.
So, what went wrong? I have already stated that it was overly complicated, and that is a fact. It is not a joy to dismantle and clean. There are two push buttons beneath the slide on the pistols right side. One near the muzzle, the other one over and slightly behind the grips. The magazine is intended to double as a takedown tool. Notice the protruding pin at the bottom of the magazine, that is for depressing the push buttons. Those buttons secure the frontstrap and backstrap that must be lowered in order to dismantle and clean the weapon. Under the grips is a screw that the bottom of the frontstrap pivots on, and if that screw is not tight enough you are in trouble…
The thing is that when you fire, the front push button is a weak point, and with the aforementioned inaccessible screw too loose the frontstrap may fall down, and it only takes a few mm of lowering the frontstrap for the pistol to seize up. If, at that point, you do as one will tend to do, remove the magazine to clear the jam, a crucial piece in the trigger mechanism will fall out through the magazine well. Good luck finding that tiny piece in the deep Ypres mud in a hurry and getting it back in….
Would you trust this pistol to save you in a crunch? Nah!
So, thus it was a short lived thing, never a success and very few made. Rare, because in the end not many wanted it.
Nevertheless, my pistol was used in WWI. It came to Norway with the occupying German forces during WWII and upon capitulation it was taken by the Norwegian army in 1945. Our army probably did not use it, it will have been in army storage as there were enough P08 and P38 pistols to go around. It was stamped with the Norwegian rampant lion in the 60s to show that it was legally sold out from the army, so though it was a failed pistol in many ways, it still saw action in two world wars.