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 of their
esoteric and unusual firearms. The one we have specifically today is this Hungarian 43M submachine gun.
Now there's some interesting political, historical backstory to this.
But it's also a very interesting gun mechanically, because while it is a submachine gun,
it's a big submachine gun. It's really about as big as you can have a submachine gun before it turns into a light rifle.
So, first off, it weighs right about 8 pounds, 3.6 kilos.
... I mean the whole thing is almost rifle length. And it's chambered for the 9x25 Mauser export cartridge,
which was ... 7.62 Mauser necked up to 9mm.
And that was about the most powerful submachine gun cartridge that was around for a long time.
It ... fires a 128 grain bullet at 1,475 feet per second, for you metric folks that's 8.3 grams at 450 meters per second.
It's a lot of power for a submachine gun, and as a result
this is not actually a simple blowback mechanism like most sub guns, it is a lever delayed blowback mechanism.
This was designed by a Hungarian designer named Pál Király, whose name I probably just butchered,
who had previously worked for the SIG company. And while he was at SIG they were making the MKMO and MKPS
series of submachine guns, which have a lot in common with this gun. He brought a lot of those
design concepts with him when he went back home to Hungary in the 1930s.
So he would later actually move to the Dominican Republic after World War Two, where he
continued to use this lever delayed system, designing some San Cristobal carbines for the Dominican military.
Anyway, back to this guy. We have a 40 round magazine of 9x25, it's a pretty potent cartridge.
... Couple that with a pretty long barrel for a submachine gun to get the most power out of it.
And this is an interesting twist on the idea of a submachine gun,
with as much range and power as you can get from a submachine gun, but without taking that step up to a full-power rifle cartridge.
Because ... well this original design was 1939, which is really before there are any intermediate cartridges in major use.
So you had the option of a big pistol cartridge or a small rifle, and they went for a big pistol cartridge.
Now I said 1939, the original version of this gun was the 39M.
And it actually had a fixed wooden stock, the barrel was about three inches longer.
And the Hungarian military found this interesting. This was designed by Király
and it was going to be manufactured by the Danuvia Motorcycle ... Factory.
And Danuvia looked at this design and calculated that they needed to sell about 7,000 of the guns
in order to make their money back on the tooling and the investment in the design.
So they were of course excited when the Hungarian government was interested,
and then got less excited when the Hungarian government excitedly ordered like 600 guns, instead of like 7,000.
So they didn't really want to put all the money into tooling up to make these when ...
they're going to be losing a ton of money by doing this, and who knows how many guns are going to be ordered.
So they kind of waffle and delay and delay and the Hungarians order a handful more.
And then finally in 1942 something clicks and someone goes,
"Oh crap, there's like a big war and we're going to need a lot of guns."
And the Hungarian military finally decides to order a large number of these things.
And Danuvia at that point is caught totally unawares and now all of a sudden, "Oh crap, now we have to actually build these things."
And so they start kind of rushing to get set up to produce them.
And at the same time they've been working on an improved version, which is this, the 43M.
So they had barely started delivering 39s when they presented this gun,
and the Hungarian military officially adopted it as a replacement for the 39.
Now they would ultimately make a little over 13,000 of the early version guns,
because they would continue manufacturing them while they set up the different tooling to produce this.
And then in 1944 or so they transitioned from production of 39s to production of these 43s. ...
There are a couple interesting changes. The magazine on this gun you can see is just slightly tilted forward to improve feeding.
On the 39s it was perfectly perpendicular to the barrel, straight up and down.
And the magazines are actually not interchangeable between the two which is unusual,
and as far as I can tell there are actually no markings on the magazine to indicate which it is.
Which seems to me like it would be a source of problems.
At any rate, they put this really horrible-looking folding stock on the gun. They shortened the barrel a little bit.
And ultimately they produced somewhere around probably 5,000 of these by the time the war ended,
well actually by mid-1944 when Allied air forces bombed ... Budapest.
They didn't actually destroy the factory, but in the aftermath of the bombing raid
in order to protect the machinery against potential future raids ... the machine tools were split up and
kind of located in safer areas and production of the gun ended.
Then in early '45 the area was occupied by the Russians, who confiscated the machinery and took it back to Russia.
And that was it for production of these guns.
The ones that were produced would stay in service until like the 1950s with army and police units.
They were actually a very well liked gun, despite the kind of weird handling, especially the weird design of this folding stock.
They're apparently quite good guns. They were well liked.
And they were used by Hungarian troops and also German troops to some extent.
You'll find a few pictures out there of troops with these, mostly with the 39s that have the traditional style of rifle stock.
So I should show you one of the other neat features here, which is that
this gun has a folding magazine in order to make it a bit more compact.
We have a button right here.
That looks like the magazine catch, but it's actually not. That allows you to fold the magazine.
So you push it forward, it's a bit stiff,
and then you can fold the magazine in. You get this cover plate that seals up the receiver behind it.
Then at the back end here we have a folding stock.
There is a push button right here which allows the stock to fold down under the gun.
And then in order to fold the butt plate we actually are going to take one of these side struts and squeeze them together,
that allows the butt plate to fold down, and then it sits in position right there to further make the gun a little more compact.
And there you have the transport mode for the gun.
So ... it helps a bit, this reduces it to about the size of a modern rifle with a folding stock I suppose.
Then to put it into action you just grab the stock
and push this button in, that allows the stock to unfold. The ... butt plate just snaps back into place. That locks like that.
And then the magazine, push this forward again, the magazine folds down, like so.
Now you're ready to fire.
The magazine release is a bit awkward. It's this, which you have to push forward
in order to pull the magazine out.
You've got this locking catch right here, and then this is an over-travel stop, ...
well, just on this side. That over-travel stop locks into that.
Now the magazine is locked in place.
The safety selector is located here on the back of the receiver, and it's a rotary sort of design.
We have "Z" for safe, then "E" is semi-automatic,
and if we roll this all the way over to "S" that is fully-automatic.
So it is a select-fire gun, not just safe and full-auto. You do have a semi-auto only option.
So here's the one marking on the gun, "43M" and a serial number.
That number and then an "M" is the standard way Hungary designated its firearm models.
So they did also have a 43M bolt-action rifle, as well as the submachine gun. That's our equivalent of "M-" something else.
Disassembly is really easy. I'm going to push this locking catch in,
rotate the receiver end cap 90 degrees and it will come off along with the mainspring,
and then the whole bolt assembly comes out the back.
So if you're not careful this will go flying across the room, because it's a pretty tight spring.
There we go.
Now we can use the bolt handle to pull the bolt assembly back, notice the half cut out there.
Bring the bolt all the way back, and I can pull out the bolt handle. And then
drop out the bolt assembly.
Now this is pretty cool. You can see we have two elements to the bolt, and this end cap is quite heavy.
There's a lot of mass in this, which is important.
What happens is when this goes fully into battery (there's our
... bolt face),
when this is all the way in battery, this lever locks the two pieces of the bolt together.
And it's hooked against a protrusion inside the receiver.
So when ... you fire, the whole bolt is going to try and move back,
and it can't because it's locked against this piece.
So ... that forces this lever to pivot around this pin. So there's our lever.
You can see when this is all the way up, now the rear half of the bolt has moved farther back.
Now there's nothing protruding down and the whole bolt can cycle.
What this is actually doing is forcing the energy of the cartridge
to push this heavy piece of the bolt backwards before this front piece can move.
As long as the front piece doesn't move, the cartridge stays in the chamber and
your high pressure is successfully contained.
So as this tries to push backwards, this accelerator lever pushes this back, then at this point the whole thing cycles.
We can pull this pin out, which allows us to take out the lever,
and then we can pull the two parts of the bolt apart.
And the firing pin is actually just this little guy sitting on this friction reducing roller.
And then there is the rest of our bolt assembly.
So these two pieces slide together just like that, with their connection controlled by the delay lever.
So this all goes back together actually pretty easily.
I get the firing pin in there,
put the two pieces of the bolt back together, drop in the delay lever.
So the levered delay system isn't a particularly common one.
The French used it in the FAMAS rifle and the AA-52 machine gun, ... the AA-52 is not a very well liked gun, the FAMAS is not bad.
In high pressure guns like 5.56 in the FAMAS, this lever delay system is kind of ammunition sensitive.
You have to tune it to fairly tight parameters.
In these submachine guns it's an ideal system. It provides just a little bit of delay
without needing too much extra additional mechanism.
So you ... can fix the barrel, you don't have to have a recoiling barrel, you don't have to have a gas system at all,
just this little bit of extra inertial delay before the bolt can open.
One last element I should point out while we're looking at the whole gun here is
in keeping with the idea of it being kind of a submachine gun verging on rifle,
this was set up to take the same standard bayonet as the Hungarian bolt action rifles.
Which is this big heavy reinforced thing.
So, there's your bayonet on your submachine gun.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
This is an extremely rare gun to get to take a look at today.
Most of the ones that survived the war ended up kind of over on the Russian front,
and so there aren't a whole lot of them here in the United States.
Very happy to have gotten to take a look at this one here at the Institute of Military Technology.
They have a fantastic collection of primarily American historical arms, dating all the way back to the founding of the country.
But also ... European and other foreign military arms as well.
It's a collection that's not strictly speaking open to the public, but it is available by appointment.
And anyone who is an interested small arms researcher should definitely get in touch with them
if there's anything in this collection you'd like to take a look at.
And if you like seeing this sort of video content, please do check out my Patreon page.
It's subscriptions from folks there that makes it possible for me to travel to places like this, and bring you guns like this one.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]