Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Institute of Military Technology
taking a look at some very interesting firearms,
like this German World War Two
bullpup anti-tank rifle actually made by the Czechs.
Now, that's a cool gun. Now this is a Model of 1941,
sometimes called an SS41, or an MSS, or an SS-M41,
couple of different nomenclatures for it, anti-tank rifle.
It is chambered for the Patrone 318, which was kind of the
standard German anti-tank rifle cartridge of World War Two.
Which was kind of obsolete when it was introduced, but still did see some use.
Like many anti-tank rifles, the primary combat tanks, especially the medium and heavy tanks,
were pretty quickly developed with armour that was far thicker than something like this could actually penetrate.
But these rifles remained useful through the end of the war for targeting things like emplacements, pillboxes,
light vehicles, that sort of thing. And you could potentially damage even a larger tank by shooting at tracks or bogie wheels.
Whether that would be effective or not is kind of situation dependent,
but these rifles did see use, as did all other anti-tank rifles, through the course of the war.
Now this particular cartridge is a little bit unusual in World War Two anti-tank cartridges in that it is 8mm or 7.92x94.
So it's a relatively very small bullet with a huge case full of powder behind it.
The German idea here was to have velocity do the armour penetration rather than mass.
So most of the other ... anti-tank rifles out there are 12, 12.5, .50 calibre, or 13mm, or 14.5mm, or 20mm.
The Germans were kind of the only major World War Two power that went with an 8mm anti-tank cartridge.
Specifically this fires a 220 grain bullet at right about 4,000 feet per second, so very high velocity.
For you metric types, that's 14.3 grams at 1,210 meters per second.
And of course it was a tungsten core projectile, so good hard AP core and decent armour penetration.
It would do 30mm of vertical armour at 100 metres, and it would do 20mm of penetration at 300 metres.
Alright, so that's some of the numbers. The developmental history of this goes back to the 1930s in Czechoslovakia,
where the military was watching the development of armoured vehicles,
and decided we really need some sort of infantry portable weapon that can take out tanks in the 1930s.
And in the early to mid-30s most of the tanks that were around and being used were vulnerable to
weapons like this. So a lot of countries developed them, almost everybody kind of developed one.
The Czech military interestingly had a whole lot of different ideas going at the same time.
They were developing rifles like this in 15mm, 11mm and 8mm.
And of course the bigger they got, the heavier they got, and the more crew they required to operate.
And ultimately the decision kind of came down that they wanted to focus on something that was
small enough that it could be handled by just a crew of two. Basically a gunner and an assistant.
And that was kind of where this came in. Now there were a whole series of these rifles developed,
a lot of prototypes, I don't have any particularly good information on them.
Apparently they were developed by a couple of the names that you see all the time
in this period of Czech firearms development, the Holek brothers and Koucký.
So they came up with a bunch of things. This is kind of the one that got the farthest and it was a Model of 1941.
When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia this research was still ongoing,
and this weapon was redesigned to use the German anti-tank cartridge, which made it interesting to the German military.
Now this is known as the SS41. It was primarily used not by the Wehrmacht, but by the SS.
A lot of people think that the SS, being, you know, super-elite combat troops and
Hitler's personal pick of the military, they must have gotten the best gear. Actually the opposite is true.
The SS were controlled by the Nazi party directly, not through the normal military chain of command.
As a result the SS had to source their weapons kind of on their own. And this led to a lot of oddball guns being used by the SS
because they weren't necessarily able to get standard production military rifles, because
the normal army, the Wehrmacht, and maybe the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe had priority on those guns.
So for example, the Germans went into World War Two with the Panzerbüchse 39, their own (in that case single-shot), anti-tank rifle.
The SS wasn't able to get their hands on any significant quantity of those, but here they are in Czechoslovakia,
you've got the CZ factory making this rifle, or capable of it. Well the CZ factory can be contracted with,
and they bought a bunch of these rifles to use. They were primarily used on the Eastern Front.
And not very many of them survive today, probably a dozen, maybe a little more, maybe a little less.
This is a particularly nice example, so it's a good one for us to take a look at.
Alright, let's go ahead and take a closer look at the mechanics of this thing, because it's really pretty cool.
In order to cycle this thing you actually grab the pistol grip,
unlock it by the pistol grip, the breech is fixed, the whole barrel assembly slides forward,
and then you go ahead and close it, pick up a new cartridge, lock the action, and you're ready to fire a second shot.
So let's take a closer look at that.
Alright, let's start by taking a look at a couple of the markings.
Here on the receiver, on the left side of the magazine well actually, we have the CZ plant logo.
Then we have the model designation. You can see that actually isn't ... the letters "SS", that's actually a pair of SS runes.
These were marked model SS41, presumably because they were actually contracted directly by the SS
rather than the Wehrmacht or another official part of the German military.
Now the magazine catch for the gun is here, and we actually are going to roll the magazine out by the front,
and lift it out.
It is a single stack magazine, holds I believe 10 rounds. All the literature says 10 rounds.
Although I don't have 10 rounds to work with, I do have one dummy cartridge here, so we can show that in the magazine.
Drops in just like so, and it is interesting to point out that the magazine has this interrupter.
Kind of actually similar to what you'd find on a Mosin-Nagant, or some other designs as well.
The idea behind that is when this interrupter is pushed down, it allows one round to pop out the top of the magazine.
That's important because we don't have a typical bolt action here.
Instead of pushing a round up into the chamber from the back, this functions by having the barrel come up from the front,
pick up a cartridge,
and then push it back onto the breech face.
So a little bit different style of operation, which requires a different style of magazine to work, in this case.
This is a little different from the blow forward pistols, which are able to use pretty much a standard style of magazine.
So if we take a look at the front end of the gun, we have a pretty big, square, blocky muzzle brake there.
And then the front sight is interesting, I want to point this out. That front sight is really, really, wide.
So just in comparison, that's almost like a half-inch wide front sight post.
Which seems kind of ludicrous until we look at it from behind.
Now the rear sight is pretty standard looking, just a pretty normal notch cutout there.
But when you actually look at these together, that front sight comes into its own.
Sights aside, let's take a look at the action.
The lever here is your unlocking lever. Pushing this down allows you to rotate the bolt handle, or the barrel handle I suppose,
which is what you have to do to cycle the action. So what you would do is...
First off, this is also your safety.
When it's locked back like that,
the trigger's locked and the opening mechanism is locked.
So you flip it forward into the fire position, then push it down and rotate it like this.
So the shooter (this is only a right-handed gun because it is a bullpup), so the shooter depresses the latch,
opens the handle, and then pushes the barrel forward.
That is going to kick this ejector out,
right there. You can see the ejector moving right there, that kicks out the empty case.
Now you're ready to load a new round.
Now loading that new round is where this interrupter on the magazine comes into play.
As we pull this back the first thing
that's actually in contact is the barrel hits the front of this interrupter, and starts to push it down.
The nose of the bullet drops into this feed ramp,
and then as we pull the barrel back, you can see it's able to pull this cartridge out of the magazine.
The interrupter is dropping down and ensuring that the next ... cartridge in the mag doesn't also come out.
This is going to come back, right there the cartridge has popped out of the magazine entirely,
but now it's fed sufficiently into the barrel that it's not going to fall out, and it will now slowly lift up into the breech face.
Here's the whole process again from a different angle. Going to open the breech,
pull the barrel forward, that would eject the empty case, and then I slide the barrel back, down, and lock it.
So this anti-tank rifle needed to be infantry portable.
... The whole point was to have an anti-tank weapon that could be with the infantry at all times,
because, sure, there are much better anti-tank weapons, things like towed artillery, anti-tank guns.
But what happens when the infantry gets separated from those weapons? That's the purpose of something like this.
So portability was an important consideration.
Now this was intended to be a two man weapon, the whole thing weighs about 28.5 pounds or 13 kilos,
and they incorporated a number of elements into the design for portability.
One of them is that the sights fold. So I can take the rear sight here
(if I remember which direction it goes, it goes back),
so the rear sight folds down, so it doesn't snag on things.
The front sight also folds down to get out of the way.
We have a carry handle here, leather over metal tabs, for carrying the barrel assembly.
This shoulder rest folds down to make things a little bit more compact,
so you don't have this sticking up in the way.
And then the whole gun can be disassembled remarkably easily.
So here on the side of the gun we have two locking levers, and what we're going to do is go ahead and open the barrel,
unlock it, pull it forward a little bit, and then I can pull these two levers off,
what I do is push forward and then I can lift that up.
Those allow me to simply pull the barrel assembly
completely
off the gun. (Maybe. There it is.)
There we go. Now we've separated the gun into two much more transportable pieces.
This is certainly still not light or small in any way, but it's a lot easier to move that than to move the gun as a complete unit.
Now you have two separate pieces that you can split between the two-man crew so it's easier to haul this thing around.
While we have this apart, I want to point out something right here.
This actually has a pair of rollers,
and that's part of what makes this gun so smooth to cycle is that the barrel is actually not rubbing on this front
surface. It's actually riding on two nice smooth rollers.
This can also give us a nice good view of the breech block here. As I mentioned, this is fixed in place
because the barrel cycles forward off and onto it.
We have three really big sets of dual locking lugs there, that's an extremely strong system.
Certainly there's no way the bolt's coming out the back of this thing, because the back ain't going nowhere.
So here's another consideration for an anti-tank rifle, especially a high velocity, small bore one like
the PzB, well the Patrone 318, anything using that 8x94 cartridge.
Because the velocity is so high you're going to have really fast erosion of the barrel,
and it won't take all that long before the rifling is in bad shape, the throat's kind of eroded away from the heat of those cartridges firing.
It would be nice to have an easy way to change out barrels, and the Czechs have that on this rifle.
So the breech block assembly here is actually just threaded onto the barrel.
But there we go. You can take the breech assembly completely off the barrel.
Now you have just a barrel with its sights, and that's an easy replacement part.
A couple last little things we can take a look at. In this breech block we have the threading for the barrel,
and we have the locking lugs of course at the back.
And you can see that's the trigger transfer bar. So when I pull the trigger, all it's doing is just lifting that up.
That's going to hit a sear that's sitting at the breech block, and that's what will actually fire the weapon.
And then this has two elements on there, one here and ... once you pull this down then this is able to rotate up to unlock.
So in total only a few thousand of these were made.
They served primarily on the Eastern Front, which is largely why very few of them exist in the United States.
They just weren't in a situation to find their way back to the US.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
These guns are very scarce today and very cool to get to take a look at this one here at the IMT.
If you're interested in small arms research, things like this, the IMT actually kind of focuses on American firearms,
but they do have a pretty substantial collection of European and other foreign weapons as well.
So the collection is not generally open to the public, but it is available by appointment.
So if you're interested in this type of thing, by all means get in touch with them and arrange yourself a visit.
I think you'll enjoy it. If you enjoy seeing these on YouTube without travelling down here to the IMT,
well in that case definitely consider checking out my Patreon page.
It's contributions from folks there that make it possible for me to travel to places like this,
and bring you guns like this SS41 anti-tank rifle.
Thanks for watching.