Does anyone know the reason why the German's used some wooden bullets in linked ammo? I have heard that they used it to conserve ammo, lube or clean the barrel and as actual ammo. This 5 round linked belt was found and purchased at some show a while back as I had heard of this happening and took the opportunity to acquire this example. There are three distinct cartridge types in the short section of linked ammo.

Mark

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A friend of mine in California used to use wooden bulleted 45-70 in his Gatling gun to get the action to cycle properley.Then he made two more chambered for 7.62 and used cheap military surplus crimped blanks
Your bit of belt looks like an effort to conserve ammo but give enough back pressure to operate the mg smoothly What date headstamp do they show? as they are painted red could the wooden slugged one be tracer??

A J,

the shorter round is headstamped 10 43 va st+

the red wooden ones are both stamped 10 43 am st+

the larger metal cartridges are stamped differently. One is stamped P131 S* 51 38 and the other P28 S* 2 38

Interesting. I don't think the wooden ones are tracer and one of the wooden bullets will come out of one just by pulling on it. Maybe it lost it's powder over the years. I don't want to pull the other one out and take a chance on not getting it back in the brass.

Mark

I think they were used to fire some type of rifle grenade, but I don't see why they would be included with real bullets in an automatic weapons feed belt.

Dave

Hi Mark,

Your two wooden cartridges are called Platzpatrone 33 (Blank, model 1933) which contains a hollow wooden bullet, usually painted red but unpainted ones exist also. This cartridge contains a reduced load of powder.
Why this would be present on a linked MG belt is a mystery to me. I would think this would cause the weapon to malfunction during the firing cycle because of the strong springs in an MG-34 or MG-42.

Thanks Denny, that was very interesting. Maybe someone just assembled them in this short section of links. I am glad to have them as examples as I have heard of them for years and finally saw these and bought them. Some of my stuff is one big junk collection that I have little idea of what it is, I just liked it.

Mark

I asked about the headstamps as if late war it might support the saving ammo theory but they appear to be 38 and 43 manufacture so your theory about just being assembled in the links is probably correct.Definitely not tracer if the one bullet comes out it would have been burnt by the phosphorus

I agree most wooden bullets were used for gernade launching, but it's makes no sense in a machine gun belt.

Mark, Thanks for starting the topic. I don’t what if anything I might still have. But for a short while I collected some of the ammunition types but got sidetracked and never really got back into it. Which is unfortunate, because it is a very interesting aspect of WW II German militaria.

This is drawn from information acquired a long while back. But my recollection is the wooden bullets were simply to allow blanks to be fired in Mauser bolt action rifles. The wooden bullets guiding the round into the chamber. When fired they turned into confetti falling away a short distance from the muzzle thereby not posing a danger unless someone was right in front of a rifle being fired.

* There was however a black wooden bullet grenade launching cartridge for the large A.P. grenade. But other types of different grenade launching cartridges used different colored rings to distinguish the type of grenade they were used with. And often the cartridges were packed with the grenades (not loose) presumably because the powder weight was calibrated to the grenade.

* And Denny zeroed in on the problem with use in a machine gun. I’ve never fired the MG-34. But have used a postwar descendent of the MG-42. Which uses different sets of springs to adjust the cyclic rate. And with no bullet weight to push against the expanding gas there would be minimal recoil to function which is one issue. But it also uses a muzzle booster to ensure reliability. And confetti going downrange is not going build up the pressure needed to make it work properly. Regards to All. FP