Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here at the
Sisak Municipal Museum in Sisak, Croatia,
taking a look at a number of cool guns from the Croatian
Homeland War that they have in their collection.
And in particular we have a locally produced,
very limited production, submachine gun from
the very early days of the Homeland War.
Which is known by the name of the Alar submachine gun,
named after its designer, Stipe Alar.
Now Sisak is a heavily industrialised town, there ... was a bunch of industry here
and there were also a number of industrial educational facilities.
So there was a design school, there was also ... an industrial trade school.
And these guns, 80 of them, were manufactured at the design school
by design school students based on the design of Stipe Alar.
Who interestingly first designed this submachine gun back in 1971 and built one,
and it was cool, except that it wasn't quite legal.
And he went to prison for it and the gun was confiscated.
Well, he ended up getting out of prison after his sentence was completed,
goes to work as a ... machinist here in Sisak.
And when Croatia gets its independence, when the Homeland War starts,
he basically brings his design back out of retirement
and students at the local school go ahead and manufacture a bunch of them.
So what we have here is a very simple submachine gun with some interesting influences,
in particular from the Papasha 41 and the MP40.
So we have the very first prototype that they made, we have an early production example,
and then we have sort of the standard production example.
So let's go ahead and take a look at all three of them.
Let's begin with the very first prototype.
This has of course all the hallmarks of a prototype development.
We've got the magazine well, but it doesn't quite fit the standard magazines.
The mechanics of this are very, very simple.
So there's a threaded on end cap here.
Inside which we have a recoil spring ... and a bolt.
This one unfortunately has been deactivated, but this would have had a fixed firing pin on it.
The bolt design is clearly influenced, inspired by the Papasha 41.
So bolt handle on the side, extractor on top, it is top ejecting ... right there.
Now on this one we just have a threaded in barrel, and it's actually un-rifled.
So there's threading on there. You know what, we'll leave that threaded in.
Now the prototype here has a fire control group that's actually
a little more complex than the final product.
This is a progressive trigger which you pull back to there: you can hear that click.
There we go, that's semi-auto.
And then if you pull it back just a little bit further you get full-auto functionality.
So I can actually show you that if I take the barrel out.
Like I said, there is a lot of threading there, and it's an un-rifled barrel.
But now we can look down the receiver tube so you can see the sear right there.
And when I pull it down until it clicks
that's our sear right across there, that has popped back up.
And then if I pull it down just a little bit further,
pulling the trigger back all the way, that gives us our full-auto function.
So that is ready to fire, then fires,
and the sear pops back up for semi-auto.
And then an additional trigger press pulls the sear down for full-auto.
Now with that prototype finished, the students learned some
pros and cons, what to do what not to do, some changes to make.
And went on to start production of a fully functional version of the gun.
And that is this, this is the first version. It has a side-folding stock on it.
There's no locking mechanism, it just opens up all the way like so.
The magazine is an MP40 magazine, slightly modified to add a magazine catch notch right there.
And ... it looks like they filed this one down just a little bit to better fit their magazine well.
You can see here, that's the magazine catch.
The socket head screw is a base to it, just pushes that catch out.
Easy to rotate too, so this is really pretty close to a home-made style of gun.
We do have a number of markings on this one.
This particular gun was actually a gift from Alar to a buddy, Šetu. Which is sort of a nickname.
And it's dated here, so this would be September 5th 1991 when this gun was given.
That would be almost certainly after all the production was done,
and there was an occasion to present one of these.
So it just says to Šetu from master,
like
We have an additional marking on the side here, and this is actually the name
that Alar gave this particular gun that he gifted to a buddy.
That is: first, Posavski is a region in this area, and krvolok is bloodthirsty.
So the First Posavski Bloodthirsty.
It doesn't translate all that well into English, but I think you get the idea.
Now when it comes to production, the students at the school manufactured
every component of these guns themselves ... using the tools at the school.
With the exception of the barrels, because where that prototype had an un-rifled tube
the actual production guns had proper factory-made barrels.
And those were actually produced by Steyr, they were purchased from Steyr in Austria.
Now Croatia was under embargo at this time,
but the Austrians were willing to sell stuff to the Croatians.
It was just left up to the Croatians to figure out how to get it
out of Austria and back across the border.
So when it came to these barrels in particular,
apparently what the students did was ... pass them off as car roof rack material.
And of course they weren't turned barrels at that point, they were large diameter barrel blanks.
And they were brought into Croatia that way
and then cut and finish turned into submachine gun barrels.
Now this first one has a pretty simple large front post for front sight,
and then its rear sight is actually just a notch cut in the front end of the receiver.
Not the world's greatest sighting system.
The rest of the mechanism is pretty clearly inspired by the Papasha 41.
So what we see here is a latch safety just like the PPSh.
You push that in and it locks the bolt in place, pull it back and the bolt can cycle.
We still have a top ejection port.
A fairly small ejection port, one suspects that might have been the cause of some reliability issues.
If this had ever gone into more serious production, I'm sure that would have been enlarged.
The other changes that were made from the prototype were getting rid of the select fire mechanism.
So instead of having a progressive trigger, these now just have a simple:
pull trigger, sear drops, bolt cycles until you release the trigger.
There is a pretty large polymer buffer that was put into these.
Let's fold the stock and we can take that out nice and easily.
Basic construction stays the same, we have a threaded on end cap.
So actually honestly, that looks like it may have been inspired by an AR-15/M16 rear buffer,
but it just serves as a shock absorber.
And by shortening the stroke of the bolt travel that much
this is actually going to increase the rate of fire a fair bit.
Take the bolt out, relatively lightweight bolt.
You can see it's got a cut there so that the recoil spring
nests nicely around the back end of the bolt.
Again fixed firing pin, and that's mechanically all there is to the gun.
Moving on once more, we now have the standard production version.
And they changed a couple of things here from that first gun.
So first off, the stock is now an under-folding stock.
I'm not sure if that's better. The design is very similar,
it just has an under-folding mechanism instead of a side-folding mechanism.
There's a button right on this side, push that in and you can fold the stock down.
Note that there's a little bump in the stock to clear the magazine release button.
And ... there's a little bit of friction as we pull it around the pistol grip.
And then it locks, a little wobbly but it locks in position.
The front sight is taller, it's smaller, and it has a full front sight hood.
And Alar called these guns "owls" after that rounded front sight hood.
Those are used in conjunction with this rather large rear V-notch sight.
So a couple of protective wings, a single fixed sight,
definitely better than what was on that first gun.
These are numbered, so this is number 122.
And that number also appears on the lower housing
and on the stock itself.
And ... there has been a second bolt notch added.
So this is the cocked position of the bolt, and from here I can
flip it back just a little bit (there we go)
I can engage the safety there, which locks the bolt in the open position.
So that was an added feature that wasn't on the first version.
We can lock the bolt open or closed now.
So serial number 122, pretty sure they started at 100 or thereabouts,
because only approximately 80 of these were actually manufactured.
So here we have all three iterations.
The first prototype, first production gun and standard production gun.
For what it's worth, the standard production gun is in the museum
with a pair of magazines jungle clipped together with electrical tape.
That's the sort of thing that kind of becomes common everywhere,
people do that throughout all conflicts.
Standard magazine, it's an MP40 with an extra notch cut in it.
The Alar is really exemplary of early Croatian submachine gun development.
At the beginning of the Homeland War Croatia had very little in the way of military organisation.
It didn't have a lot of small arms and there was a rush to
import or produce as much as could possibly be got.
And this development took place right at the very beginning of that process.
Now shortly into the war there were a series of attacks called the Battle of the Barracks,
where Croatian forces were able to capture a number of significant arms caches
from Yugoslav National Army barracks located here in Croatia.
And that really ameliorated the arms crisis for a while.
And so once those guns were captured (those of course were largely thousands of M70 pattern AKs),
once the Croatians had those, the incentive to be building things like this was significantly reduced.
And so production of these ended at that point.
But it's very cool that we get a chance to take a look at
not just one surviving example, but basically the whole design process here.
So a big thanks to the Sisak Museum. Because these were designed and made
here in the town they have a bunch of them in their collection.
Thanks for watching.