#Odd

For this fifth installment of our series on unusual, strange, or remarkable magazines, we’ll be talking about a Czech weapon designed in Britain in the 1940s for the war effort against Nazi Germany. Joseph Vesely was a Czech migrant to the UK in the late 1930s, with most sources having him fleeing the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939. During and after the so-called “Phony War”, the British were looking to re-arm with new weapons, including submachine guns, having purchased over a hundred thousand .45 caliber Thompson submachine guns from the American concern Auto-Ordnance, and having copied the German MP.28 submachine gun as the Lanchester. Vesely approached the British Ordnance Board with blueprints of a new weapon which utilized a tandem column magazine of 64 cartridges (initially) of 9mm Parabellum. At the end of this post I will provide resources for our readers to learn more about the Vesely submachine gun designs, but the primary interest of this post is the magazine system itself, and how it worked.

The submachine gun had been perfected by the end of World War II as a dirt cheap, nearly disposable weapon for arming large numbers of men to fight the largest war of economy in history. However, despite this, post-war submachine gun designers would seek to push the concept into new roles and niches that would require a rethinking of the conventions established in that conflict. The submachine gun would be re-imagined as a close quarters battle weapon, and an echelon weapon, or PDW, for troops whose primary tasks was not combat. One of the primary obstacles to their suitability in this role, many designers recognized, was their long, protruding stick magazines, and so after the war pencils were put to drafting paper to come up with possible solutions.

In the early 1980s, German gunmaker Heckler & Koch began to design a new submachine gun that would improve on the existing MP5, in response to a US Navy solicitation for an advanced submachine gun as part of the Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP). The SMG I, which was the product of this development, is not the focus of this article, so instead I’ll refer readers to the HKPro article on the weapon:

Matt of the Historical Firearms blog sends us a few photos of the Dardick, a decidedly unusual handgun famous for its absolutely bizarre mechanism that combines both magazine feed and a revolving “nutcracker” cylinder, all made possible by its unusual ammunition, called “trounds”: