[ M39 PH Sniper ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have an opportunity
to take a look at a very rare, very cool, and
well, OK, it's very cool but it's also
pretty terrible as a practical matter.
This is a Finnish sniper rifle, this is an M39 PH sniper.
And this is basically the closest thing the Finns had
to a standard sniper rifle during the Continuation War.
Now the story of Finnish sniper rifles goes back to about 1927.
Because originally most of Finland's armament came from Russia,
it was what was left in Finland after the War of Independence.
And that's why Finland had a lot of Mosin-Nagants,
Russia left them in Finland when the Finns kicked out the Russians.
However, at that point in World War One, the Russians didn't have
any scoped versions of the Mosin-Nagant, and so the Finns didn't inherit any.
Now in the 1920s telescopically sighted rifles started becoming popular for hunting rifles.
And in 1927 the Finnish Army set up a committee
to investigate the potential use of scoped ... rifles for the military.
And they spent about 10 years doing pretty much nothing, or nothing of substance.
The Civil Guard manufactured a couple of dozen,
they manufactured like 11 M28 sniper rifles, and a couple of dozen 28/30s.
But this didn't really go anywhere until 1937, when the army made an actual bulk order of scopes.
And they are these scopes, this thing.
This is a 3x power, 24mm lens scope made by a company called Physica Oy.
This was a company ... formed by a Finnish professor,
who actually manufactured telescopic sights for rifles
as a side profession for hunters before the war.
... These were ordered in '37, but before this he made scopes, so he was aware of how to do it.
What the Finnish Army specifically wanted was a universal telescopic sight
that they could use on sniper rifles, machine guns, and even small cannon like 20mm cannons.
There were a lot of 20mm Madsen guns floating around this part of the world at the time.
And so this is an idea that ... if you don't know what you're talking about, this sounds good on paper.
Like, great, one scope, easy logistics, we can buy them all at once.
The reality is this is a terrible idea,
because a scope that's ... good for a cannon is going to be awful for a rifle, and vice versa.
And ... well, it only ever got used on rifles, and it was pretty terrible for them.
So the scope itself weighs 800 grams, which is about
if I've done the math in my head correctly, about 1.75 pounds.
It is a very chunky scope, there's a lot of mass in there.
And it would suffer problems
of fogging, in particular in cold weather, when it was actually in service.
We'll take a look at this up close, but it's interesting to note that it has
two different dovetail brackets on it for mounting,
so that it could be used in any of these universal roles.
Now, because these were ordered from a very small company it took a long time to procure them.
In 1937 the Finnish Army ordered 250 of these scopes.
By the time the Winter War began they had received 84 scopes,
and had mounted none of them on anything.
They would finally end up receiving all of the scopes.
And what they ended up doing was ... they put 150 of these scopes onto M27 pattern rifles.
Remember in the work up to the Winter War there was really no M39.
The M39 arrived just before the Winter War.
So the M27 was prior to that the army standard pattern rifle,
and that's what got these scopes, and that was called the M27 PH
for Physica, p-h-y etc. etc. - it's the name of the scope.
Some of those would end up being used during the Winter War, not a whole lot of them.
... Oh, and I should point out: the other 100 scopes.
So they ordered 250 scopes, they made 150 rifles,
they put the other 100 scopes aside to be mounted on machine guns,
but that never actually happened.
It was in fact only in 1943 someone noticed that there were 100 of these scopes
sitting in a warehouse doing nothing, and said,
"Hey, we could certainly use some scoped rifles. Let's go ahead and throw those on guns as well."
Which they proceeded to do.
Between the ... Winter War and the Continuation War, in addition a lot of the M27s
had the scopes removed and rebuilt onto M39 PH rifles.
The M39 was the new and improved rifle for use by both the Army and the Civil Guard.
It ... had some substantial upgrades, mostly far better sights than the M27.
And so the M39 became the standard pattern of rifle.
So, with all of that out of the way, let's take a look at this M39 PH.
Alright, there's the reticle in the Physica scope.
It's actually a really kind of an interesting and unusual reticle.
You can see the range-finder there doesn't just have
hash marks for the height or width of a human,
it actually has little silhouettes that you can fit to your potential target
to try and identify range.
As well as, of course, more traditional windage and elevation hash marks.
... The overall design is that of a simple German post,
with a heavy pointer in the centre and a horizontal line.
The modifications that were made to the rifles all exist basically from here back,
and there are really only three of them.
So one is this gigantic cheek rest that was added,
which, while it looks really clumsy, it is ... actually kind of essential
because the scope is offset substantially to the left side of the rifle.
They actually tried an elevated mount back here, and it was just totally impractical.
So the next best option was to offset it to the left.
The second modification is of course the attachment rail itself, the mounting point.
And the third is bending the bolt handle very much like a Russian sniper.
And that's done because, while you don't have to worry about clearing an overhead scope,
you do need to have a way to be able to hold onto the bolt handle right next to the scope,
and the standard Mosin bolt coming up here would have been a bit awkward.
Of course the stripper clip guide remains intact, so these can be loaded by stripper clip.
As an interesting little aside, the Finns did develop
a special curved stripper clip for some of their other sniper patterns
(which we'll talk about at the end of this video),
that had centre mounted ... scopes on top.
They actually had a curved stripper clip that came out to the side.
The cheek rest is a separate piece of wood, you can see a seam right in here.
And that was drilled through the stock and held in place by two really big wooden pegs.
So these were not initially part of the design,
some of the early M27 snipers don't have them, but they were added on.
You can also see this was not ... converted from a standard stock, it was made as a sniper,
because the ... single piece of wood for the stock comes out to here.
The bent bolt handle, ... there's not really a whole lot there that we need to talk about.
The more interesting thing is going to be the scope and the mount.
So here we have actually one of the M27 PH rifles
with the exact same style of dovetail mount.
So this is a tapering dovetail, and it's tapered going this way
so that every time you fire the rifle ... inertia tends to hold the scope in place,
and the rifle moves backward under recoil, so it actually tightens itself with every shot.
And so that's how they were able to do a dovetail without actually having
any other form of locking system, which is a little bit unusual.
The brackets were fairly crudely welded in place.
There is a little bit of a cutout required in the stock, but not very much.
And then the scope itself has a matching dovetail rail there on the side.
And of course it also has a dovetail mount on the bottom,
and that would have been for use with a machine gun or a light cannon.
It is a prismatic scope, so you look in down here and it reflects up, comes out the top.
You can see the SA Finnish Army mark there.
And we have the company name there: Oy Physica A/S, Helsinki,
on the back side of the scope.
Windage and elevation can be adjusted with these sort of old-style locking dials.
These don't move the reticle within the eyepiece.
So a lot of scopes of this vintage, when you adjust elevation
you can see the whole reticle move inside the eyepiece.
This does not do that, the reticle stays centred and it just changes your zero.
And then when you've got it in the right place you can tighten this down.
It's just ... basically a thumb set screw.
And you've got a second one there for windage.
It's worth pointing out that on pretty much all examples of these
the front face here is hammered up.
And that's because once this is thoroughly set in place, every time you fire it, it tightens.
And so the only way to take the scope off is to basically use a punch and a hammer,
and pound the thing out of its dovetail.
Lastly, note that these scopes are all numbered inside the bottom dovetail.
In service these were not particularly popular scopes, they had some reliability issues.
Like I said, they tended to fog in the cold, which is a bad thing if you're fighting in Finland.
They also have only 40mm of eye relief, so about that much.
You have to have your eye really close to this scope compared to what's a little more typical,
and that would take a little bit of practice, and good shooting form,
to make sure that you don't get punched in the face by that brass ring on the back of the scope.
Add to that of course the fact that they are quite heavy, they are rather awkward,
the cheek rest is rather awkward on the rifle.
Is it worth it for 3x power magnification
in combat where often shots were being made certainly within 200 ... metres?
Maybe not strictly all that necessary.
This is definitely the most distinctive Finnish sniper rifle of the World War Two period,
but it is far from the only one.
So in addition to the smattering of rifles that were
put together by the Civil Guard before the Winter War,
there were also about 200 M39s that were fitted with captured Russian scopes,
those being PEs and PEMs.
There was really zero official use of the PU scope by Russian forces,
but they did use the PE and the PEM, about 200 of them, that was the M39 SOV, Soviet.
There probably would have been more, except that
Finnish troops who captured Russian sniper rifles apparently tended to keep them
and use them themselves, instead of turning them over to the military
... to have the scopes removed and put on Finnish rifles.
In addition to that, Finland tried to order 2,000 AJACK ... 4x power scopes
from Germany during the Continuation War. I think it was in 1943.
The order was accepted, but by the time production was a possibility
Germany needed those scopes itself, and everything was getting more difficult because of the war.
Ultimately Finland received 500 AJACK scopes, and they did build those into M39 rifles.
There was also then an attempt ... to make a domestic Finnish optic
that basically copied the AJACK, and that was the M43.
A couple of hundred of those were manufactured as well,
but they didn't actually see service in the Continuation War. ...
By the time they were ready the war was effectively over.
So, what you see here, the M39 PH, is the primary Finnish (not just captured),
... Finnish sniper rifle of the Continuation War
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. This is a tremendously rare gun,
and it's very cool to get a chance to take a look at it.
Thanks for watching.