The homeland of the 9x19mm Parabellum pistol cartridge is in Germany, and during World War I and World War II, the cartridge was the standard pistol cartridge of the German army. This article is a long-form article on how to balance penetration and expansion?The evolution of 9mm Pak Bullet technology and typical models for law enforcement and personal defense in the United States, introducing the 9mm Pak Bullet produced by Nazi Germany during World War II, the changes in its warhead structure and materials along with the course of the war, and a peculiar technology tree opened by Germany.
Before World War II and at the beginning of World War II, the 9x19mm Patron bomb used by Germany was the 08 ordinary bullet (Pistolenpatronen 08), and the warhead structure basically followed the old products of World War I and the commercial bomb of World War II.
The Type 08 ordinary bullet with brass back armor, brass shell, and lead core is very similar to today's military standard 9mm bullet.
Originally, the cartridge case of the Type 08 ordinary bullet was brass, and the warhead was armored with brass and white copper, and later because of the saving of copper during the war, there were also copper-clad steel shells, steel copper-plated cartridge shells, and even painted steel cartridge shells, which were mainly used for pistols, so the output was not large.
During World War II, infantry detachments had not yet popularized assault rifles, and infantry squads generally adopted the mode of light machine gun + rifle + submachine gun three-gun combination, and the proportion of submachine gun equipment was much higher than today, so the consumption of pistol ammunition was much larger than today, and Germany was no exception. Due to the huge ammunition consumption of submachine guns, the original use of brass back armor, lead core bullet 08 ordinary bullet needs to consume a large amount of non-ferrous metals, the cost is obviously too high, so Germany from 1941, a large number of low-cost 9mm bullets for submachine guns, the model is 08 m.E. ordinary bullets.
The full name of the 08 m.E. ordinary bullet is Pistolenpatronen 08 mit Eisenkern, which means "Type 08 ordinary bullet with iron core". In order to reduce the cost, the core material of the bullet is changed from lead to soft steel core, and the shape of the steel core is mushroom-shaped, the front end is expanded to basically fill the warhead, and the rear is filled with a lead sleeve between the reduced section and the armor, which is used to buffer the extrusion between the cylindrical part of the warhead and the rifling. The core of the bullet is changed from lead to steel, which greatly reduces the production cost, and because the steel density is smaller than that of lead, the mass of the warhead is also lighter than that of the 08 ordinary bullet, which is reduced from 8g to about 6.42g, and is fired with the MP-38/MP-40 submachine gun, and the muzzle velocity can reach 400m/s.
08 m.E. ordinary bullet profile, the warhead has a mushroom-shaped steel core, and the mushroom handle part of the steel core is filled with a buffer lead sleeve between the mushroom handle part and the back armor of the warhead.
The 08 m.E. ordinary bullet is the largest number of 9mm Pa bullets produced in Germany during World War II, and brass shells were also used in the early days, and later a large number of painted steel shells were used to reduce costs.
08 m.E. type ordinary bullet with painted steel shell and primary color copper-clad steel back armor warhead
A normal 08 m.E. type bullet with a painted steel shell and a blackened warhead
The mushroom-shaped steel core of the 08 m.E. type ordinary bullet had a great impact on the Soviet Union, and most of the 9x18mm PM pistol bullets produced by the Soviet Union for the Makarov PM pistol used in the post-war period were steel core bullets, and the steel core structure was a mushroom head, which was similar to the steel core of the 08 m.E. ordinary bullet.
A 9x18mm PM pistol cartridge with a mushroom-shaped mild steel core, clearly affected by the structure of the 08 m.E. ordinary cartridge.
As the war entered 1943, Nazi Germany's consumption on the front line, especially on the Eastern Front, was like a bottomless pit, and the mainland was facing Allied strategic bombing, industrial production capacity was stretched, and various resources were increasingly scarce, and even the production of 08 m.e. ordinary ammunition was unsustainable, and it had to be stopped in 1943. In order to fill the huge gap, the Germans looked for a way to further reduce the cost of gun and ammunition production, and started a new technology tree, which from 1944 produced an even more strange structure of the 9mm bullet, called the 08 S.E. ordinary bullet.
The full name of the 08 S.E. ordinary bullet is Pistolenpatronen 08 Sintereisen Eisenkern, which means "sintered iron warhead type 08 ordinary bullet". The warhead completely abandons the traditional armor + bullet core structure, and adopts an early powder sintering technology, that is, scraps such as iron filings containing ash cast iron, crushed into iron powder, and then added adhesive, and then sintered at high temperature.
A Type 08 S.E. ordinary bullet with a sintered iron warhead and a painted steel shell
In fact, the technology of sintered iron warhead was not developed in 1944, as early as before the outbreak of the war, German companies developed this technology, but there was no need to promote this technology at that time, so it was only used as a technical reserve, and in 1943, because of the deterioration of the war situation, it was officially put into production. The sintered iron warhead is coated with copper steel and soft steel cores, and almost all of them are processed from metal industrial waste, and the shells are all painted steel shells, which are cheaper. This warhead is lighter than the soft steel core armor warhead of the 08 m.E. ordinary bullet, only about 5.9 g, and the muzzle velocity is also higher than that of the 08 m.E. ordinary bullet, reaching 420 m/s. In 1944, at least half of the 9x19mm Pas supplied to the front were ordinary Type 08 S.E. shells with such sintered iron warheads.
However, the hardness of the sintered iron warhead is higher, the wear and tear of the barrel is also more serious, the warhead is difficult to deform when it hits the human body, and the stopping effect is not good, but the real large-scale production of the bullet was already 1944-1945, at this time Nazi Germany was at the end of the road, the dog jumped over the wall in a hurry, and there was still time to consider what life is not life, even if it is fired, the rest of the "people's rifles" have been built, what more bicycles?