Handgun author and enthusiast Elmer Keith observed that the Luger design had been unfairly criticized by gun writers over the years as unreliable, partly due to poor experiences with Lugers constructed from salvaged parts. "Bill" Ruger praised the Luger's 145° (55° for Americans) grip angle and duplicated it in his. The Luger barrel, which was rigidly fixed to the barrel extension and carried the front sight, provided excellent accuracy. Assembling the gun using a sideplate from another pistol, for example, may prevent the sear from working, making the pistol inoperable. The design requires hand fitting of certain parts for proper operation. Luger pistols were manufactured in Germany and Switzerland to very close tolerances and exacting standards using the highest quality materials of the day, and original pistols were known for having a long service life. The 'snail drum' magazine for the MP 18, which was used by German Stormtroopers towards the end of the war, was originally designed for the Artillery Luger. The Luger proved to have an excessive rate of fire in full-automatic mode, however, as did the Mauser C96. Submachine guns were found to be effective in trench warfare during World War I, and experiments were conducted to convert various types of pistols to fully automatic machine pistols, including the P08. This malfunction with under-powered cartridges does occur with Browning-type and other pistol designs as well, but the Luger is sensitive to cartridges other than the brass-cased ammunition that it was designed to use. This results in the breech block either not clearing the top cartridge of the magazine or becoming jammed open on the cartridge's base. This mechanism works well for higher-pressure cartridges, but cartridges loaded to a lower pressure can cause the pistol to malfunction because they do not generate enough recoil to work the action fully. The entire sequence occurs in a fraction of a second and contributes to the above average mud resistance of the pistol. The toggle and breech assembly then travel forward under spring tension and the next round is loaded from the magazine into the chamber. The barrel strikes the frame and stops its rearward movement, but the toggle assembly continues moving, bending the knee joint, extracting the spent casing from the chamber, and ejecting it. The toggle strikes a cam built into the frame, causing the knee joint to hinge and the toggle and breech assembly to unlock. After a round is fired, the barrel and toggle assembly travel roughly 13 mm (0.5 in) rearward due to recoil, both locked together at this point. The Luger is a toggle-lock action that uses a jointed arm to lock, as opposed to the slide actions of many other semi-automatic pistols, such as the M1911. The name Parabellum, which also featured in DWM's telegraphic address, comes from the Latin phrase, Si vis pacem, para bellum "If you wish for peace, prepare for war." Ĭutaway drawing of the Luger pistol from Georg Luger's 1908 9mm patent. The pistol is a common sight in fiction, especially in works set during World War II, but it has made appearances elsewhere. The Luger is well known from its wide use by Germany during World War I and World War II, along with the interwar Weimar Republic and the postwar East German Volkspolizei. The Model 08 was eventually succeeded by the Walther P38. In the German Army service, it was adopted in a slightly modified form as the Pistole Modell 1908 (Pistole 08) in caliber 9×19mm Parabellum. It was widely used in other countries as a military service pistol and by police forces. The Luger was also the standard service pistol of Switzerland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Brazil, Bolivia, and Bulgaria. The Luger was officially adopted by the Swiss military in 1901, the Imperial German Navy in 1906 and the German Army in 1908. It was followed by the "Marinepistole 1904" for the Imperial German Navy. The first production model was known as the Modell 1900 Parabellum. It was meant to be an improvement of the Borchardt C-93 pistol, and was initially produced as the Parabellum Automatic Pistol, Borchardt-Luger System by the German arms manufacturer Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM). The design was first patented by Georg Luger. The Luger was produced in several models and by several nations from 1898 to 1948. The Pistole Parabellum-or Parabellum-Pistole ( Pistol Parabellum), commonly known as just Luger or Luger P08 -is a toggle-locked recoil-operated semi-automatic pistol. 350–400 m/s (1148–1312 f/s) (9mm, 100 mm short barrel)Ĩ-round detachable box magazine, 32-round detachable drum