MP 18

Origins

By 1915 the Western Front was a stalemate of trenches, and the German army was developing new tactics to break it: small assault detachments, the Stoßtruppen, who would infiltrate the enemy's line with grenades, flamethrowers and light weapons rather than advance in waves. They needed a weapon lighter than a machine gun that could fire automatically at close range in a trench. The Rifle Testing Commission asked for a light automatic carbine, and Hugo Schmeisser, working for Theodor Bergmann's company, designed one around the 9mm Parabellum pistol cartridge of the Luger P08. It was approved in 1917 and entered service as the Maschinenpistole 18 in early 1918 (see German Arms & Weapons).

Design & Construction

The MP 18 is extremely simple: a heavy bolt driven forward by a spring from an open breech, with no locking mechanism at all — the weight of the bolt and the spring alone hold the breech closed during the brief pressure of a pistol cartridge. It fires only on full automatic, at a relatively slow and controllable rate of about 450 rounds a minute. The barrel is enclosed in a perforated cooling jacket, and the whole gun is set in a wooden rifle-type stock. Its magazine was the 32-round TM 08 snail drum designed for the long-barreled artillery Luger, which fitted into a sleeve on the left side of the receiver; it was awkward to load and needed a special tool. At about nine pounds, the MP 18 was heavy for its cartridge but steady in the hands.

Combat Use

About 10,000 MP 18s were probably made before the Armistice, and several thousand reached the front in 1918. German doctrine issued them to the assault squads of the spring offensives, beginning with Operation Michael in March 1918, where one gunner with an MP 18 was supported by an ammunition carrier with extra drums; the infiltration tactics of the Stoßtruppen came close to breaking the Allied line. The Allies nicknamed the weapon the "Kugelspritze," or bullet-squirter, from its German slang name. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles restricted submachine guns to German police, and the MP 18 served with the Freikorps and police in the political violence of the early 1920s.

Legacy

The MP 18 established the submachine gun as a type. Schmeisser's own improved MP 28, with a straight box magazine, was sold abroad and copied in Britain as the Lanchester; the drum-fed and box-fed guns of the interwar years followed, and the German MP40, the British Sten Gun and the American Thompson Submachine Gun all belong to the class the MP 18 created. Surviving World War I-issue MP 18s are rare, and most are held by museums or as registered weapons in advanced collections.