Wartime mags?
 

why do so many wartime Lugers have mags that don't match the numbers on the pistol? Thanks Eddie.

Eddie, I think it just comes down to real use. The magazine got beaten up by normal use

or maybe

They went to the range, all the guns were laying there, others loaded the magazines and so they got mixed up

Or by armorers, soldiers, some got broken and some got replaced

And then our GI's brought a gun home and I have heard more than once that a guy had two magazines, one nicer and he kept that one, while he gave away the numbered magazine.

All those things led to mismatched guns and magazines. The magazine is the easiest thing to mismatch, harder to do that than grips I think.

Ed

Edward,

Another facet of this situation would be that when the gun was captured the first thing in the GI's mind was to render it inoperable. To do that you drop the mag on the ground and clear the gun. Then you might stick the pistol in your belt, if you want to keep it, and recover a magazine after the prisoners had been moved out and there would likely be a number of mags on the ground.

I think the same thing happened with bolts in rifles. You remove the bolt, the rifle becomes a club. The rifle goes in one pile and the bolts in another. To acquire a souvenier the rifle was picked out of the rifle pile and the bolt was picked out of a bolt pile and "matched". If it fit, it was good enough. No one would have paid attention to numbers.

My thoughts, Leon

Let me make another hypothesis. Lugers were apparently used in the Great War by trench patrols. Common military practice would be to issue pistols and magazines when the patrol was sent out and to collect them when they returned. Magazines would have been removed, reloaded if necessary and reissued for the next use. If this was the practice, magazines would quickly have been scrambled. Just a thery with no evidence. One of the questions I should have asked my grandfather.

I would guess that German soldiers might have ditched the magazines along with the Lugers if they thought they were about to be captured and wanted to surrender.

My father picked up an artillery Luger that was missing the trigger and sideplate and apparently he found the sideplate,but not the trigger.

were all lugers issued with mags ser numbered to pistol,even later ones?

No Eric,

The last issue magazines for wartime Lugers were the extruded steel type (not stamped sheet metal) and they had black plastic or bakelite bottoms that were not serial-numbered... These type mags are generally considered correct for late war Mauser military Lugers... They were also issued as replacements for lost magazines...