There are flare guns, and then there are Nazi flare guns—talk about an artifact one doesn’t see every day. Currently in the collection of Annapolis Maritime Antiques, this stainless-steel Madelon 27-mm Doppel Schuss (“double shot”) was manufactured in 1941; in addition to the German eagle superimposed over a swastika, it bears an “M” denoting maritime use. Prior to World War II, such signal pistols were made of brass; war demand for brass led to the switchover to stainless-steel manufacture, and when that commodity grew scarcer as well, the Germans started to make them out of bakelite.
The most fascinating thing about this particular double-barreled Third Reich relic is the ship from which it hailed. The current owner acquired the gun from the family of the late U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Roy M. Hutchings Jr., who brought it home, along with a pair of German binoculars, as mementoes from a captured Kriegsmarine ship, the Horst Wessel (named after the Nazi Party martyr who penned the infamous/eponymous “Horst Wessel Song”). Lieutenant Commander Hutchings was second in command on board the prize Wessel (ba-dump bump) as she made her way to a new home in America with a combined U.S. Coast Guard/surrendered German crew.
The Horst Wessel was somewhat anomalous among the great gray fleets of World War II: She was a sailing ship, built in 1936 for training purposes, reconfigured with antiaircraft weaponry in 1942. After she fell into American hands as spoils of war, she continued to stay afloat—and does so to this day, as the celebrated U.S. Coast Guard training ship USCGC Eagle (WIX-327), aka “America’s Tall Ship.”
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