Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a fantastically cool rifle, this
is an early Type E pattern of German FG-42,
or Fallschirmjägergewehr 42. This is the German
paratroop rifle developed during World War Two specifically to meet the needs of German paratroops.
You see early on these guys had dropped with only basic hand weapons on them,
pistols and hand grenades, with all of their proper weapons,
rifles, submachine guns, heavy machine guns, all that sort of stuff dropped in separate canisters.
That sounds fine on paper - like you land, you get the weapons canister, you open it up.
And that way you can drop from a lower altitude, your parachutes are simpler, etc. etc.
The problem is in practice the paratroops ended up jumping into some situations
where they weren't able to get to their containers of weapons because they were kind of mis-dropped.
And they ended up having to do a substantial amount of fighting with very minimal firepower.
So in order to resolve this situation, Hermann Göring decides that they need to have a new rifle.
The German Air Force specs out this thing, essentially it needs to be
the size and weight of a bolt action Karabiner 98k, but function as a semi-auto rifle,
as an emergency purposes light machine gun. ... Like, it has to do everything.
And the company that comes up with a successful design for this
is the Rheinmetall Company, led by designer Louis Stange.
And he comes up with a fantastically brilliant design.
This gun is really probably one of the most impressive small arms of the Second World War.
It is remarkably light, it is exceptionally svelte, it's thin, it's small, it's compact.
It has a folding bipod, it has a bayonet (this one's missing the bayonet).
It is select fire, fires from a closed bolt in semi-auto, from an open bolt in full-auto.
Detachable magazines. And what's really impressive is
despite being chambered for the full-power 8x57mm cartridge, it's really quite controllable.
Now, the development of this rifle went fairly quickly.
By April of 1942 they had 50 test models that were ready for essentially field trials.
Or not field trials, but ready for extended trials to figure out,
"OK, we've got the basic layout done, we've got the production sort of ready.
Now let's run a whole bunch of guns through the gauntlet,
find out what's going to break, fix all that, and then put the gun into production."
So between February and April of 1942 they ran 100,000 rounds through 6 of these trials guns,
and they found the parts that would break. There were actually a fair number of parts that would break.
They had issues with firing pins, bolt stops, ejectors,
and a whole bunch of other parts to a lesser degree.
Now what's interesting is, in assessing the cause of the breakages
they realised that most of these problems could actually be resolved
by changing the material specification or the heat treat of the parts.
They didn't really actually require re-design of the component itself, just material changes.
And so what had been in trials ... has been post-war by collectors and historians defined as the Type D.
So A and B were very early developmental prototype-y sorts of things.
C was the very first batch of pre-production guns, D were the trials guns.
And after making some changes to the Type D in April of 1942,
they are ready to produce the Type E. And this is a Type E.
Now, all of the development work was done by Rheinmetall.
The production was then done by the Krieghoff Company,
which is typical of ... World War Two German Air Force tradition.
Hermann Göring had a financial stake in Krieghoff, he liked the guys at Krieghoff,
and so he made sure that Krieghoff got the contract to actually do the production of these guns.
They were granted a contract to make 5,000 of them.
They would only end up being able to make about 2,000.
And this is serial number 1864, one of the very last
with a number of updates that were made to it due to lessons learned over the course of production.
So let's take a closer look at this extremely rare and extremely cool gun.
The main markings on the FG are here on top of the receiver.
We have the model designation FG-42. We have the 3 digit production code,
this is "fzs" which is Krieghoff, and then we have a serial number.
There are a couple of proof marks here on the side of the receiver.
There is no Waffenamt on the FG-42 because it was specifically ... a Luftwaffe project,
and so it actually has a Luftamt, an Air Force production approval stamp on it.
The safety selector is here on the left side of the pistol grip.
What you have to do is actually pull it out and then you can rotate this selector lever.
So front is semi-auto, the bottom position is safe, and the rear is full-auto.
Put that back up there.
On the early versions the whole pistol grip assembly here, including the trigger guard,
was stamped as two separate sheets and then welded together.
And you can see the weld here, the seam, on the pistol grip.
Now a little bit later on they realised that that early version
... well, the trigger guard was a little bit too small, it was hard to get a gloved finger in there.
These guns were being used in cold areas in the winter, ... or they were going to be.
And so they made a change. They got rid of the integrated trigger guard on the stamping.
And instead they used a separate piece of metal that is riveted in place there and back here.
And that's a bit larger, much easier to get a glove into.
So that's one of the major changes in late production early model FG-42s.
The FG uses a rear aperture sight on this drum adjustment, which is pretty cool.
To adjust it you actually push the sight down, you can then rotate the drum
to whatever position you want, you let the sight back up and it changes height.
So you can see there it's at 600, if I bring it back down to 100,
well there we go, there's 100, there's 200, the sight is much lower.
The front sight also folds down in order to
stay out of the way and not catch when you're jumping with it.
So when it's folded up it's a big barleycorn style of sight.
That would change to a hooded post on the late pattern FGs.
We have an early pattern muzzle brake here,
this is essentially just a hollow ... cylinder with a bunch of holes in it.
It's a pretty poor flash hider, but it's a really good muzzle brake.
It does a very good job of helping to control recoil and muzzle climb.
So by making it as two separate parts,
one that threads onto the barrel and one that threads onto the adapter,
they were able to simplify the machining requirements to make something
that otherwise could have ended up being pretty complex.
You'll notice at the very bottom there are no holes,
so if you're shooting down prone against the ground you're going to kick up less dirt with this.
And we have our serial number, 1864, on the muzzle brake there.
When designing the FG-42 there was some debate about where to put the bipod.
You could either have it mounted in the centre of the rifle (which is what they ended up doing)
and fold it down, or you could have it mounted at the front of the rifle and fold it forward.
They tested both, they found that a front mounted bipod ... allowed slightly more accurate shooting.
However the front mounted bipod tended to fold back when the gun was being manipulated.
When you were getting into position, when you were changing magazines,
things like that, where the rear-mounted bipod did not.
In addition the rear mounted bipod made it easier for a gunner to basically to move around,
to pivot the gun and cover a wider field of fire.
With a front mounted bipod you'd have to pick up the front of the gun
and move it if you wanted to shoot in different directions.
And so considering all of those factors in balance,
they came up with the decision to mount the bipod in the centre of the gun.
Which they would then reverse when they did the later version of FG-42,
and they'd swap it to be mounted at the front.
The FG was also required to have a bayonet in it,
unfortunately the bayonet is missing on this example. ...
In fact originally it was just a modified French MAS 36 bayonet,
which then of course went into standard production by Krieghoff for these guns.
The idea there was kind of like the Johnson bayonet,
to meet the bare minimum military requirement of having a bayonet
even though everyone knew it was stupid, so let's make it as light and as low profile as possible.
So it's just a very simple cruciform spike.
It sits this direction inside the bipod when not in use.
To mount it, you flip it around and snap it on the front and it extends like that far past the muzzle.
It's really a pretty worthless ... bayonet.
In order to conserve space in the design and keep the overall rifle short,
the magazine was mounted on the side, allowing it to be co-located
with the pistol grip and the fire control unit.
So if you had the magazine mounted vertically down, you'd have to move ... all of this forward
and it would make the whole rifle a bit longer.
So this is sort of a pseudo bullpup. It's not actually a bullpup,
the ejection port is in front of the shooter's face.
But you get some of the benefits of a bullpup in terms of space efficiency.
Unfortunately, also this one is missing its magazine.
... The Type E, the Type F and the Type G FG-42s all used 10 and 20 round
detachable magazines, standard 8x57mm Mauser.
All three of those patterns used their own different magazines,
which are not interchangeable with each other which seems like a really dumb idea.
But that's German World War Two ordnance for you.
... It's interesting, the ... prior owner of this gun passed away, this is an estate situation,
and his family swears that they have seen the bayonet and the magazine for the gun,
they are somewhere, but they cannot find them in the deceased gentleman's house.
And so the idea is if and when they do,
Morphy's will simply send them on to whoever ends up with this rifle, which is nice.
Magazines for FG-42s are not exactly easy to come by.
One of the other things that makes the FG-42 rather easy to control, relatively speaking,
is that there's actually a spring-loaded buffer between the stock and the receiver.
So the whole gun is essentially floating in the stock here.
And I don't know if we can see it, because it's a really tough spring.
Yeah, on camera I can't really compress that to show you,
but when you fire, ... the receiver is going to recoil into the stock.
So let me take this apart and show you.
What you want to do is push this button in, and you can then pull the stock off the gun.
We're going to be very gentle here because this is a ridiculously expensive valuable firearm.
There we go. This is again two pieces of very thin stamped sheet metal
that are welded together. The butt plate is then a third component.
By the way, Type Ds were smooth, the Type E they added some ribs to strengthen this.
But you will occasionally see Type E guns that were actually fielded
with the earlier smooth-sided stocks.
Now here's the buffer.
You can see the really big heavy spring right there.
We can remove this ... simply by pushing this spring down,
rotating the whole thing about 90 degrees, there you go,
and that just pops out the back of the receiver.
We can then pull the bolt handle back.
The operating mechanism on the FG was very specifically copied
from the ... British Lewis gun of World War One.
Which is a really interesting choice, but it worked well enough for them.
We pull the charging handle back to here,
we then have to pull the recoil spring out.
This is going to actually lock the charging handle in place.
With that out, I can lift out the charging handle.
This pin sits inside this little notch in the charging handle
so that the handle can't go flying out while you're shooting.
And then we can pull the bolt carrier and gas piston out.
... So this is a long stroke, gas ... operated rotating-bolt system.
It has two locking lugs, and what's interesting about this is ...
well, we have a sear catch up here and a sear catch back here.
So that one is used in full-auto, one is used in semi.
And when the gun is ready to fire, the whole gas piston is actually set back about that far.
The bolt is locked in place, but the gas piston is held back.
And the gas piston right here, is actually holding onto the firing pin.
So as you can see in there,
when I move the gas piston back the firing pin retracts.
So when it's ready to fire it's being held here.
You pull the trigger the bolt stays in place, but the gas piston snaps forward
... being pushed by this remarkably stiff firing-pin spring.
Which gives it kind of an unusual operation shall we say.
This system would go on to be used in the M60 machine gun by the US.
... In fact the first prototypes of what would become the M60
are actually modified second pattern FG-42s.
So that's the basic field stripping.
I'm going to go ahead and leave the fire control group on
because ... it's a little fragile and I don't want to mess with it.
... It's important to point out the receiver is an insanely complex piece
to actually manufacture and fabricate, there are a lot of internal cuts.
This would prove to be very expensive for the Germans, very time consuming.
And it would be the thing that they would want to get rid of
and redesign as quickly as possible.
Production of the Type E, the early FG-42s,
had really just barely begun by the time it was already being replaced.
By the fall of 1943 Germany was having trouble getting the materials necessary to build these rifles.
... The caveat for being able to build a gun that is in a heavy cartridge,
but still controllable and very light and very slim, well, it used a lot of pretty expensive alloys.
There was a lot of nickel steel. The receiver in particular required a big chunk of nickel steel
that had elaborate extensive machining required to produce the final receiver shape.
And that wasn't really a sustainable thing.
There were also a few other complaints about the gun, the grips in particular.
There's a story that this grip is designed for shooting while you're descending on a parachute,
which I think doesn't pass the smell test.
Like German parachutes had one central connection point to the soldier.
You start shooting a machine gun from a German World War Two parachute
and you're just going to start spinning in circles.
I suspect this was done to reduce snagging
and to duplicate the handling of a Kar98k bolt action rifle.
At any rate, no one really liked it, and so the replacement version
would have a much more traditional, almost vertical, pistol grip on it.
More importantly, the replacement version, which was initially the Type F and then the Type G
(the F was sort of the experimental early version,
the G was the major production late pattern of the FG-42)
those guns used a stamped sheet-metal receiver.
... The Germans took the lessons learned from production of the MG 42
with its stamped receiver, applied them to the FG-42,
and did a remarkably talented job of coming up with a stamped receiver version of this gun.
But of all the production of these guns,
we're looking at about 7,500 FGs total produced by the end of the war,
2,000 of them are these early guns. Of those, somewhere around 12 or 15
are known to survive registered in the United States.
There are about 60, give or take, total FG-42s legally registered in the US,
and 20%, maybe 25% of them are the early Type E pattern.
So this is a really remarkably rare firearm.
Very cool to get a chance to take a look at it. And like there are reproductions of these out there.
I've done some shooting with a reproduction first model.
But it's just always impressive to pick up one of these
and ... get reminded just how advanced of a firearm this was for the time.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.