Re: 1900 Luger (Con't - for Bill)

[Johnny Peppers]

For any of your posting to be accurate it must first be accepted beyond a shadow of doubt that the records from the Bureau of Accounting are absolutely correct, and there is no proof of this. Everything is based on a bean counters notation. The first pistol may well have been 6099 and in a bean counters logic the last pistol would have been 7098. First off, the list of test pistols sold to Bannermans contains 11 pistols beyond the range indicated by the B of A records. Secondly, it is indeed strange that except for one pistol, the test pistols sold were in two blocks of consecutively numbered pistols. The pistols sold to Bannermans accounts for all but 20 of the original shipment of 800 pistols. There was a record of where each pistol went and when the call went out to return the pistols they were not very hard to account for. The second consecutive block of pistols contained serial numbers 6361 to 7108 which is 10 pistols above the B of A records, and as a group of 748 pistols gives a good indication that the effort to have all the pistols accounted for was a success. The pistols sold to Bannermans were condemned and sold more or less as scrap. Springfield kept some of the pistols, and it would stand to reason that they would only keep the best. There would be no reason to think that the first of the pistols that arrived would be retained at Springfield to remain in the best condition, but plenty of reason to believe that the second shipment would not all be sent to the field and therefore be the "best of the best". Since the condemned pistols were sold and contained 11 numbers above the B of A cutoff, there is no reason the remaining pistols could not have been in an even higher serial number range.

Dr. Scott Meadows in his book "US Military Automatic Pistols" now extends the range of the test pistols well into the 7000 range, and he spent many weeks at the National Archives gathering information before he released his book. He does not explain his reason for doing this, but I doubt that it was done without reason.

There is absolutely no proof that the markings on the 1000 test pistols were to be any different from any other US imported commercial Luger pistols. DWM seemingly changed marking at will, and the markings found on the test pistols are found before the test series, and after the test series. No proof can be attached to the markings or lack of markings.