Guns of the ‘Original’ Stormtroopers

With those 10 simple words in 1977, an obscure 33-year-old filmmaker named George Lucas legitimately changed the world. His classic space opera Star Wars enraptured adults and kids alike around the world. I was one of them.

If you can divest yourself of the familiarity we all have with this iconic fantasy, many of the terms are actually pretty silly. Skywalker, lightsaber, Death Star, Darth Vader and Chewbacca are all fairly inane if you think about it. A great deal of the Star Wars canon was obviously drawn from fairly pedestrian historical stuff.

Lucas was born in 1944 and grew up watching Saturday afternoon movie serials. WWII aerial combat inspired the X-wing and TIE fighter dogfighting sequences and many of the latent themes were drawn from American Westerns. Amidst the villains, however, we see a pervasive intentional darkness.

Vader’s soulless malevolent legions were known throughout the occupied galaxy as Imperial Stormtroopers. The very term conjures imagery of oppression and dread. Forget these supposedly crack troops can’t actually hit the broad side of a bantha. Their cool white plastic armor also seems vulnerable to anything more vigorous than a stiff breeze. The Stormtroopers are nonetheless the archetypal villains.

However, Lucas’ Star Wars was not actually the world’s first introduction to Imperial Stormtroopers. Back in 1915 the German Empire deployed the world’s first real Stormtroopers onto the modern battlefield. Their tactics and weapons shape combat operations even today.

Origin Story

One year into the First War to End All Wars the planet was reeling from its rude introduction to unfettered war on an industrial scale. Battles morphed into campaigns that shed blood like a river. It all began as a glorified misunderstanding in June of 1914. A young anarchist named Gavrilo Princip murdered Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, and this metastasized into the planet’s first true World War. Driven by unprecedented advances in military firepower, the war devolved into a protracted bloody grind in the fetid trenches of Europe.

Both sides of this gory conflict burrowed into the ground. Trench systems included such niceties as field hospitals, supply depots, machinegun and artillery emplacements, and communications systems. Between the trenches was a denuded no-man’s land of death and chaos. Amidst this bloody stagnant charnel house, military commanders were desperate to regain both the initiative and mobility.

This drive to break free of the rancid rot of the trenches eventually led to the world’s first tanks. However, in 1915 Imperial Germany dabbled in simpler stuff — specially selected soldiers carrying specially-selected weapons trained in radical new infiltration techniques. Today we might call this Close Quarters Battle (CQB). These elite WWI-era Special Operators were indeed the world’s first Stormtroopers.

Sturmtruppen

These specialist soldiers were formed into companies christened Sturmtruppen. This word literally translates as “shock troops” or “shove troops.” The individual soldier was the Sturmman. In the 1930s Nazi Germany resurrected these terms with the Sturmabteilung or SA under Ernst Rohm.

Imperial Stormtroopers were specially selected and rigorously trained. Their mission was one of infiltration and close combat, and their attrition rates were astronomical. The Sturmtruppen were viewed as elite troops who were generally afforded better food and minimal time in the trenches. They were rock stars brought up from positions of relative safety when and where their unique capabilities could be most effective.

In addition to a unique training regimen, the Stormtroopers availed themselves of some unusual weapons. As their mission was to engage the enemy at close quarters they needed weapons that were compact and maneuverable. In many cases this meant entrenching tools, improvised clubs, maces wrapped in barbed wire, and simply breathtaking numbers of hand grenades.

The firearms wielded by the Stormtroopers ran the gamut from conventional to revolutionary while forming a synergistic whole. Bolt-action rifles in both conventional and carbine lengths provided knockdown power and reach. The MG08/15 water-cooled, belt-fed machinegun was an undeniable boat anchor to hump yet remained technically portable.

Stormtroopers also utilized stocked handguns like the Artillery Luger as well as the C96 Broomhandle. Mauser produced about a million of these C96 pistols. The most radical weapon used by the Imperial German shock troops was the MP18 submachinegun.

The Gewehr 98

The Mauser Gew 98 rifle replaced the previous Gewehr 1888 in, you guessed it, 1898. A manually operated, magazine-fed, controlled-feed, bolt-action repeater, the Gew 98 was one of the first combat rifles designed to fire smokeless cartridges pushing Spitzer (pointed) bullets. The internal magazine contained five rounds, and the weapon sported a complicated Lange Visier rear sight named after a German officer named LTC Lange.

The design included two primary bolt lugs as well as a third lug serving as a backup in the event of a failure. Metallurgy was not then what it is today, so this was a legitimate concern with period ammunition. The standard Gew 98 was 49.2″ long, while the carbine version spanned 42.9″.

MG08/15

The original Maschinengewehr 08 Maxim gun on its sled mount fired standard 7.92x57mm ammunition and weighed 152 lbs. The simplified MG08/15 weighed 40 lbs. equipped with a crude wooden shoulder stock and pistol grip. It was intended to accompany mobile troops on the assault. The short-recoil, toggle-locked action was the product of an American-born Englishman named Hiram Stevens Maxim and drove the British Vickers gun as well.

The MG08/15 was the most prolific German machinegun of the war, with MG08/15s allotted six per company or 72 per regiment. Despite its prodigious weight and bulk, the MG08/15 went on to inspire the subsequent MG34 and MG42 General Purpose Machineguns that changed everything about Infantry combat. Even today the MG08/15 has an influence on German culture. The German slang term Null-acht-funfzehn (08/15) denotes something ordinary or lacking in originality.

Artillery Luger

Georg Luger began developing his toggle-locked recoil-operated Parabellum pistol and the 9mm cartridge it fired around 1898. The action was patterned after the elegant but flawed C-93 Borchardt. The gun first saw production in 1900. The Imperial Navy adopted their variant with a 6″ barrel in 1904 and the Army followed suit in 1908. While the standard P08 Parabellum featured a 4″ barrel, the Lange Pistole 08 Artillery model sported an 8″ tube.

Fully tricked-out, the Artillery Luger also included a detachable wooden board stock, an attached leather carry rig and a complicated 32-round snail drum magazine called the Trommelmagazin. Thusly configured the Artillery Luger was an effective close combat tool. However, the exposed nature of the action demanded the gun be kept clean for reliable operation.

MP18

The Italian Villar Perosa was technically the world’s first pistol-caliber submachine gun. However, the German MP18 was the first SMG that was tactically effective. Hugo Schmeisser and Theodor Bergmann working for the Bergmann Waffenfabrik designed the revolutionary gun in 1918 specifically for the Stormtrooper mission.

The MP18 fired 9mm Parabellum ammunition and fed from the same snail drum Trommelmagazin used by the Luger pistol. The gun ran from the open bolt, weighed 9.2 lbs. and cycled at around 450–500 rpm. Though meticulously crafted out of quality machined steel, the MP18 laid the foundation for untold millions of inexpensive pistol-caliber submachine guns yet to come.

Epilogue

In a prelude to the planetary hemoclysm known as the Second World War, the German Empire and the Central Powers saw themselves overwhelmed by the manpower and production capacity of the Allies. WWI ended on November 11, 1918 with the Treaty of Versailles. The subsequent suffocating stipulations and reparations demanded of a broken Germany set the stage for the rise of the Nazis and the Third Reich.

Despite their defeat, the close-quarters infiltration tactics pioneered by the Kaiser’s elite shock troops rewrote the book on Infantry combat. Modern tactics of fire and maneuver orbit around mobility and violence of action. The small-unit doctrine taught at the American Ranger School today had its genesis back more than a century ago with the world’s first true Imperial Stormtroopers.

WorldWarSupply.com

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