Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Cody Firearms Museum,
part of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, here in Cody, Wyoming.
And I'm taking a look at some of the guns in their very cool collection,
and one we pulled out today is the Villar Perosa, now ...
this isn't a particularly unknown gun out there, but it's
hard to find good detailed pictures and information on it.
So, the backstory to this thing is it was developed in 1914, and adopted in 1915 by the Italian military.
And it ... is a strong contender for the role of the first submachine gun ever developed.
Now, it was developed as an aircraft gun. And design features that seem pretty goofy and stupid,
to be blunt, when you consider this gun in its later ground use,
are actually things that make a lot of sense in an aircraft role.
So let's talk about that.
In 1915, aircraft in World War One were still pretty early. At that point you didn't really have
the heavy, synchronised, belt-fed, forward-facing machine guns on aircraft.
They hadn't developed synchronisers yet. So, you had a couple of options for guns.
If you had a biplane or triplane, you could mount the gun way up on top on the top wing,
which made it difficult to access to reload, but it could point straight forward.
One of the more popular solutions though, was to have a two-seat aircraft.
You'd have a pilot who actually did the flying, you had an observer who could do the shooting.
The observer would have a rotating moveable gun mount
that they could point in pretty much any direction except down.
This was designed as an observer's gun. Now one of the other things about air combat
at that point, is planes are moving around quite a lot. You don't have a lot of
opportunity to fire good shots at an opponent. You need an opponent to be fairly close,
you got to get things lined up, once you have that brief opportunity to take a shot,
what you really need to do to maximise the chances of having some effect,
is put as much lead on that other aircraft as possible. With a 1915 or 1916 airplane,
things are pretty darn fragile. You don't need to have, you know, large calibre
armour-piercing or exploding projectiles like they would by World War Two.
A little 9mm Glisenti cartridge like this fired, ... would be just as effective in
puncturing a hose, or knocking off a spark plug, or severing a control wire, or simply injuring the pilot.
A little cartridge can do all those things just as well as, for example, an armour-piercing 8mm.
These planes are made of fabric and wood, it doesn't take a lot to puncture them.
So the small cartridge means that recoil is minimised, it means this whole gun can be
very small and compact, manoeuverable, and the rate of fire on these guns was
pretty phenomenally high. Each one of the barrels, because it's a double-barrelled
system here, each one independently fires between 1,200 and 1,500 rounds per minute.
It's a simple blowback submachine gun, and the idea was you
wait until you have just the right moment. And then when your sights are lined up
and the enemy's actually there, you hit both triggers you fire both barrels,
and you just dump as much lead as you can, as quickly as possible.
You combine these you've got about 2,500 rounds a minute going downrange.
Now the magazines only hold 25 rounds each, but again
standard operating procedure would pretty much be: every time you get that opportunity,
dump both magazines. And then the pilot's going to take some time to try and ...
... get you into another decent firing position. And while he's doing that, you can reload the gun.
Now when you get into ground combat, those features make a lot less sense.
All of a sudden you really want to be able to do things like slow sustained fire,
you know, being able to, say, keep an enemy suppressed.
Get them, you know, behind cover and try and keep them behind cover. And
2,500 rounds a minute of a little dinky pistol cartridge isn't optimal for doing that,
However, they had the guns at that point, and the problem was not:
what do we design to use as a ground gun? The problem was: we have all of these aircraft guns.
By later in the war those had been replaced by synchronised guns.
Once you had synchronised guns you ... could get rid of the observer entirely.
The pilot could aim the entire aircraft instead of relying on a flexible gun mount,
and you could actually make use of a ... heavier cartridge to get a little bit longer range. So
once the belt-fed, heavy, synchronised machine guns made this sort of thing obsolete,
now what do we do with all these guns?
Well, we're not going to throw them away, they're still functional guns.
So let's put them into service with the ground troops. And the Italians
made a bunch of different experiments as to how best to do this.
I haven't found any pictures of it, but I have seen references to, like, walking fire
arrangements with slings. Where you could fire one of these from the hip while
advancing, kind of like the idea behind the US BAR and the French Chauchat.
They mounted them on bicycles.
You could take this whole thing and basically bolt it onto the front handlebars of a bicycle,
that way you could still use the the thumb triggers.
They developed a couple of different models of tripod for them.
They developed an armoured shield that kind of acted as a mount.
So you could ... plonk this thing up on the edge of a trench and have the guy
aiming it and kind of moving the whole shield with the gun.
All of these things were tried.
Ultimately what they decided to do was sort of scrap them, they got rid of this brass
grip assembly and trigger assembly. They got rid of the connecting bit up here at the front,
separated the two receivers apart, and rebuilt each receiver with a shoulder stock and a conventional finger trigger.
OVP, Officine Villar Perosa, did that to some of the guns,
and Beretta also did that to some of the guns. They both had a version
of what would become known as the Model of 1918 submachine guns.
You can recognise those, because they pretty much always retain the top mounted magazine.
Although ... this kind of charging handle went away and obviously they have a wood stock.
Now the Beretta ones actually have a charging handle like this.
The OVP ones actually had a sheath over the receiver, kind of like a pump-action shotgun,
and you would slide that whole thing back in order to charge the guns.
And these 1918 Italian submachine guns were actually put into service within a couple weeks of the first
German use of the MP18 submachine gun. So ... they're arguably some of the first submachine guns,
traditional shoulder-fired submachine guns, put into use.
... There's argument both ways about whether the Italian guns were first or the German guns were first.
I don't think anyone will ever actually really know. Suffice to say they both entered service
pretty much simultaneously, and right at the end of the war.
Now knowing some of that backstory, why don't we go in and take a closer look at the gun here.
Because it's got some really, you know, because it's one of these early designs of guns
it's got some weird features on it that you look at today and go
"that's obviously wrong". Well in 1915 they didn't know it was obviously wrong. So,
got that, we also happen to have a ... transit chest for the gun, with a bunch of
magazines and a bunch of spare parts, so we'll take a look at that as well.
So as you probably saw, or got from my references earlier, the Villar Perosa is a two barreled gun assembly.
Now these are two completely independent guns that are locked together by this
cast brass rear housing, and this steel front plate.
Now this front plate includes the front sight, and it also acts as a lock. This is
(you can see it's got a couple of flanges here and here),
this is what would lock the gun into its mounting cradle, and so this was used for both
originally aircraft mounts and also later on for ground mounts.
And these are actually threaded in place, I'll show you that in a minute.
Right, now the firing mechanism is a pair of thumb triggers.
So this is reminiscent of something like a Maxim gun, you push in to fire.
What's different about these though, is these are actually independent triggers.
So the left one fires the left gun, the right one fires the right gun. On a Maxim
the two thumb triggers, or sometimes single connected thumb trigger, they worked as a single piece.
We also have our safety back here.
This is a very simple safety, when the safety is engaged
these two bars simply prevent you from pushing the trigger far enough for it to fire the gun.
Safeties disengaged, now there's nothing stopping the trigger, and it goes all the way down.
So the last thing to take a look at back here is this little hole that the safety is actually pivoting around.
That is your rear sight, I'll try and get a closer view of that for you in a minute. You look through that,
onto,
this, this is your front sight.
There are actually five different front sights, and it's a little ... spring-loaded detent here.
Those are one through five, so 100 through 500 meters, that gives you your range.
And you simply set the height of front sight for the proper range.
Pretty interesting sight design, not something that we would use anymore.
But, you know, it kind of makes sense I guess in this application, or at least it works.
Now the action itself is, like I said, simple blowback,
although with a little bit of a twist. The bolt actually has to rotate down
into firing position, before the firing pin can be released and the gun can fire.
That does add a little bit of a delay when the action opens, not very much, but slight.
So that comes up and then cycles back, forward, down, etc.
To charge the gun we have these two big handles here, these are just levers. So
pull the lever all the way back, that locks the bolt in position, and
now when I push the trigger in, the bolt drops forward like that.
So mechanically very simple. There's not a whole lot going on here.
... This one cast brass piece has two plugs,
and that's just a split pin, pull that out and then you can pull the receivers off the front of this ...
element. The triggers are just ...
This is a sear that holds the bolt back, and when you push the trigger in, this drops down which releases the bolt
so it can go forward. Everything on here, like I said, is very simple.
So the magazine release system is another kind of
"what on earth is that thing" element when we look at it today.
But again, at this point in history ... there weren't any other guns like this out there.
So you can understand that the Italians may not have figured out the best way to do it on their very first attempt.
This thing looks like a spring-loaded latch. It's actually not, this whole piece is a rotating collar.
So to take the magazine out, what I do is take this and push it to the left, and
then the magazine just lifts straight out. There are locking lugs on the front and the back of the magazine, and
you can see that they lock in, for example, right there. When the collar rotates over,
it just doesn't let that lug come out.
So to load a magazine, we open the collar, put the magazine in,
lock the collar and you're all done. And you can do that independently on both ... magazines.
Now often in a ground role, my understanding is that you would have an assistant gunner.
And when used on the ground in the double barrel configuration,
the gunner himself would shoot one gun at a time. And when he emptied the magazine
on one gun, he would switch to firing the other while his assistant gunner
reloaded the empty magazine for him.
I happen to have a spare bolt assembly from that spare parts and transit chest.
It's missing the bolt handle, the little
Bakelite or rubber halves here. But I can show you the basic functioning of the bolt.
We have a firing pin insert,
this is hollow in the back and the mainspring goes inside here. And this slides into the bolt body,
and when it's fully forward like this, the firing pin protrudes out in the front like that.
However, if this is in line with the bolt handle here,
The firing pin does not protrude. This
forces the bolt to be locked all the way down, which means it has to be all the way forward
before the firing pin can make contact and fire.
So that prevents this from firing out of battery, which is a helpful safety issue.
The extractor is not on this spare bolt. And then this cutout is for the ejector.
So the barrels have a 360 degree complete feed ramp,
because it doesn't really matter what position
they're in when they're threaded into the receiver. You just want them nice and tight.
This ensures that they can feed, they don't have to be indexed to a particular feed location.
And then you'll notice there's this finer threading up here just in front of the chamber.
This actually threads into that circular block that holds the two barrels together.
So when you are assembling the gun, ... you thread this into the receiver,
and then you'd thread the whole receiver assembly into this front block,
this guy, and then only after you had both receivers mounted in this
would you then mount the rear cap. This ensures that
these guns are very solidly mounted in this thing. They're not going to wobble,
they're not going to move. This allows you to make sure that they're both firing to the same point of aim.
It's a very secure way to do it. Maybe not the fastest way,
maybe not the best way, but it was an effective way. You can see here
that these are both threaded in. And then they've got a lock nut on the front to just cap everything in place.
So here's our label tag on the top of the transit chest: Officine Villar Perosa,
the company, the technical concern, that manufactured the guns. And then, if we take a closer look at this,
open this up. You know it's interesting, normally you get this big huge chest to carry a machine gun and its components.
The Villar Perosa is a nice compact little thing that all fits in this chest. So, got a setup for the handles in the back here,
cradle for the chambers, and two slots here for the barrels to fit into.
The gun drops in here nicely. We can pull this out
and then take a look at some of the other components.
Got a cleaning rod.
And then interestingly, we have here this wooden cover, and under that
is storage for a whole pile of magazines, 10 spare magazines in there.
These magazines are really hard to find, that's an impressive set of Villar Perosa mags.
The rest of this ... there's clearly a few bits missing. And this was designed to carry a number of specific spare parts,
which I don't think are exactly what's in here right now. But, got a bunch of replacement mainsprings.
We've got a ... couple trigger levers in there,
the official Villar Perosa wrench,
And you get the idea, other various spare parts, whatever you would need to keep
a gun like this operating and functional.
Thanks for watching guys. Hope you enjoyed the video.
I'm excited to finally get my hands on one of these Villar Perosas.
I've seen a couple of them, but this is the first chance
I've had to really mess around with one, and bring it to you guys on video.
So thanks very much to the Cody Firearms Museum for giving me the chance to do this.
Definitely stop by here if you're ever up in Cody, Wyoming, or frankly if you're
anywhere in the Mountain West. It's worth traveling to Cody to see this museum.
And of course, if you like this sort of content please consider checking out my Patreon account.
It is funding from my excellent Patreon supporters that allows me to do some of the travelling,
like this, to come up here to Wyoming and bring you these cool guns.
Thanks for watching.