Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look at a French MAS 36 CR39.
This is the paratrooper version of the MAS 36,
that CR39 stands for "Crosse Repliable",
or a folding stock, pattern of 1939.
Now I am looking at this today because my book on French military rifles,
entitled "Chassepot To FAMAS", is finally in stock and shipping.
So if you want to get a copy of it and find out more about
the CR39, the rest of the MAS 36 family, or any other French military rifle
between the Chassepot of 1866 and the 2016 adoption of the HK416,
check out the description text below you'll find a link there
to FrenchRifleBook.com, where you can pick up a copy.
And find out everything you ever wanted to know.
Anyway, moving on, back to our CR39 here.
These were developed almost immediately upon adoption of the MAS 36. So,
that rifle, as the name implies, was finally adopted in 1936, or finally finalised in 1936.
They spent many years working on developing the design,
and once they had the full-length standard rifle in hand they realised that,
"You know what? Some of the specialty troops are really going to want a little bit different version, particularly paratroopers.
We want to give the paratroopers something that they can actually jump with in hand right out of the airplane."
The alternative is dropping their heavy arms in separate containers,
which is what the Germans did for a while, until they developed the FG-42.
And then the problem is if you drop all the rifles and the machine guns in a separate container,
well, OK, it's lighter and easier for your paratroopers to get out of the plane,
but what if the container lands in a pond? What if the container lands five miles off away from where the paratroops land?
Any number of things can cause a problem when you have guys jumping without their actual weaponry.
So they wanted something that could go right out the door with the paratroops.
And to that end they started working in 1937,
and they finally came up with this completed design in 1939, when it was adopted as the CR39.
Their solution for making the gun smaller was to cut the barrel down a little bit,
we'll compare this to a full-length rifle in just a moment,
and they gave it this very distinctive looking aluminium folding stock.
So there's a lever on this side, which again we'll take a look at in a moment, and the stock simply
folds up underneath the rifle. The sling winds up inside there, which is a really cool feature.
And now you have something that is very compact and convenient to throw in a rucksack,
strap across your chest under a parachute harness, anything like that.
They didn't really end up making the rifle any lighter, but it is definitely shorter.
So, these were produced starting in 1940, ... the design was finalised in '39,
but it took them a little while to actually get production up and running.
We don't know exactly how many were manufactured before the Armistice.
Production started in the spring of '40, that didn't give them very long.
However, this is a pre-war production model at serial number 1884, so they probably did at least about 2,000.
Now production would restart after the war almost immediately
with the Saint-Étienne Arsenal being liberated from German occupation.
The standard MAS 36 went back into production, the CR39 went along ... right with it.
And they would ultimately produce just under 34,000 of these rifles, with the last ones made as late as 1960.
So, let's take a closer look at how this stock works, because it's kind of a unique and very cool feature.
How the sling works, and how you can tell a real one from a fake one.
Let's start with markings, this is also by the way one of the most important things to check
to confirm the legitimacy or the authenticity of a CR39.
Our receiver marking is the whole designation, MAS Model 1936 CR39.
And that is centred in this cut out flat section of the receiver. There's then a serial number below it.
These started out as script letter prefixes, so this is F 1884.
And note that every single CR39 is an F prefix gun.
These were done in a different serial number range from the standard MAS 36,
they only got to about 34,000, so they never moved on from F to G. They'll all be F series guns.
... No standard 36s were ever converted by the French military into 39s,
so if you see one of these that is anything other than an F prefix, it is not an original authentic CR39.
I also want to show you this guy, this is a standard MAS 36.
Note that its marking, which just says MAS 36, is also centred in this receiver flat.
So if you see one where you have MAS 36 right here in the middle, and then CR39 stamped on at the right end,
that's been faked by someone. Because the original markings the whole thing is centred like that.
You will also find serial numbers on all the other standard places for the MAS 36.
So there's one on the magazine floor plate,
there's one on the handguard, there's one on the bolt handle.
There will also be one on the stock. Now on later examples the
serial number on the stock would be right here above the lever, on the very early ones
they put it on the top of the stock. Just ... kind of where the butt plate would normally be.
So F 1884 there on the top.
The stock itself is cast aluminium, and it's hollow because it has to fit the rest of the gun up inside here.
So really kind of a unique and unusual design. And then the sling is on this wind-up spool
on the inside there. Now the early slings, like this one, were canvas, kind of a woven cloth.
They would change to leather after World War Two.
Let's see, if I open that all the way up, there you go, you can see the end of the winder.
These winders have a ... spring inside them, ... like a clock spring.
They're really quite fragile and it is rather uncommon to find them in working condition like this one.
Usually they're broken, and then at that point either you have a sling that has no tension on it,
or what's more common, especially with like Vietnam bring back examples,
is that the original sling will be long gone and there will be something like a
Chinese SKS or a Mosin-Nagant sling that has been put on in there.
The problem is while there are replacement sling winders available, these are held into the stock
with a rather permanent rivet. So I've looked into trying to fix one of these before, and if you want to do it
you actually have to drill this out, and then replace the rivet. So it is absolutely a gunsmithing project.
There's the other side, there's the front head of the pin that goes through.
This is not just a matter of unscrew one part and put in the other,
because that sling winder is permanently built into the gun.
So to operate the thing we have a locking latch here at the back. When I lift the lever
it's going to lift that latch, which allows me to fold the stock.
And that can then swing up
under the bottom of the gun, you'll see that the sling has wound up nicely.
And it doesn't latch in place in this position, it just kind of sits there.
The sling winder puts a little bit of tension on it, but that's all.
So I think a really cool package. Now there are some downsides to this system,
one is that of course, they really didn't lose any weight to this rifle.
They did make it a little bit shorter, and it's definitely shorter folded like this.
However, the aluminium stock is rather uncomfortable to shoot for a couple of reasons.
First off, until 1952 this was just solid cast aluminium.
So if you were a mountain troop, you know, a ski soldier using this thing in cold weather,
that's pretty darn cold on your face.
If you happen to be using this in a desert, where like say Algeria,
where are the French had quite a lot of troops, or quite a lot of ... military presence,
that's really hot on your face, and so that was a little uncomfortable.
And of course the bottom of the stock is wide open where you have a grip,
so not the most comfortable pistol grip sort of thing to hold on to.
In '52 they did add a ... green rubberised coating over the stock that you can see in some pictures of later guns.
That definitely helped with the comfort. It also helped your hand from slipping on what was just bare metal.
So that was a nice improvement.
These did also differ between pre-war and post-war examples.
Pre-war guns have a lot of heavy duty milled components on them,
and after the Liberation in '44 and '45 the French military actually looked at some of the German
stamping technology for firearms, and realised it made a lot of sense.
And they went ahead and incorporated a lot of stamped components into the MAS 36 post-war production.
So on post-war guns this would become a single stamped assembly with a rounded sight hood over it,
identical to the standard MAS 36s.
The barrel band and front sling swivel really did not change pre-war to post-war on these guns,
because it's not a standard part to begin with. It has to have this little bottom sling swivel to accommodate the folding stock.
The pre-war guns did have a milled floor plate, a milled follower, and they would lock open when empty.
There's a flat right there on the back of the follower that prevents the bolt from going forward.
On post-war guns that changed, these parts became stamped, and they actually
angled off that flat stop so that the bolt would close when the gun was unloaded.
The rear sights also changed.
This one is a little bit interesting in that it has a post-war style of rear sight with an adjustment button.
The early ones you actually would push down on this rear leaf, and then move your adjustment slider.
However, we can see from a little detail here that the front of this sight box is actually enclosed.
This was originally built as a pre-war style of rear sight, and it was modified at some point in French service.
The original pre-war sights were like this one. You'll notice there is no button,
you just push down on that, and then you can move that slider to wherever you want it.
And then the barrel. So a standard rifle and the paratroop version.
The standard rifle had a 575mm barrel, that's about 22.6 inches.
The paratrooper they shortened that to 450mm, which is about 17.7 inches.
So they cut almost five inches off the barrel, and they did the same with the bayonet.
Didn't have to remove quite as much material from the bayonet, but
they had to make the bayonet shorter so that it would still fit within the shortened handguard.
One last thing to show you here. And this is the other main point to look at
if you're trying to authenticate a CR39 is you look at this rear tab on the receiver.
Because the receiver is basically the same on this gun as it is on a standard MAS 36, except for this little tang at the back.
On the CR39 this is cut pretty much rectangular, or squared off, in order to properly fit the ... locking latch.
So if you see a rounded receiver tang on the back of your CR39,
that's a very good indication that it was not originally made as a CR39.
And one last bit of neat trivia for you. Pretty much the very last
official military use of the CR39s was as late as Desert Storm in the 1990s,
when the French Air Force was still issuing these as survival rifles for some of their transport aircraft crews, so pretty neat.
So these rifles did see a little bit of use in World War Two, primarily in the hands of Alpine troops.
In addition to paratroopers, the mountain guys on skis got a small number of these things.
You can imagine that throwing one of these in a rucksack
is definitely ... an easier way to carry it around when you're a cross-country skiing than
dealing with having a rifle on a sling the whole time while you've got skis and poles that you're trying to work with.
So these did see some use up in Norway.
They then saw a little bit of use during the rest of World War Two, but supply was quite limited.
After World War Two the French would go on to have major conflicts in Indochina and Algeria,
and both of those made a fairly heavy use of paratroopers, and the CR39 rifles were,
I wouldn't say common, but they were substantially used in both Indochina and Algeria.
And you can actually see some original pictures of the rifles in use there.
Ultimately, they ... are bolt-action rifles, they did become obsolete with the development of the French semi-auto rifles.
And most of them were eventually scrapped and destroyed, these weren't sold for surplus.
However, there were a couple little batches of them that did manage to come onto the civilian collector market.
Of course one of the primary sources (and these are very scarce rifles today, so there aren't a lot of them floating around),
but some of them were captured by the Vietnamese or their allied forces in Indochina,
and then recaptured by American troops in Vietnam and brought back to the US as souvenirs.
That's how a lot of them came into the country I suspect, and then there were a few other bits and pieces.
So I believe it was in the '90s ... Century Arms International actually brought in a batch of
demilitarised parts kit CR39s. Those did not have receivers or barrels, but they did have the aluminium butt stocks.
So a bunch of people who bought those parts kits then took standard MAS 36s and
cut them down to make replica CR39s. That's the most common fake that you'll find out there.
Apparently there was actually also a batch of stocks, or a batch of rifles as well as stocks,
made for some French movie projects around the same time period.
I've heard rumors that some of those are floating around the US, but I haven't seen one in person so I'm not entirely sure.
At any rate, it is one of the scarcest, if not the scarcest model of the MAS 36,
and I think this folding stock is a really cool and unique feature, so.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If as I said, you would like to know more about French military rifles
from the Chassepot all the way through the FAMAS, check the link in the description text below,
order yourself a copy of my fantastic new book.
I definitely think you'll enjoy it, hopefully you did indeed also enjoy the video.
Thanks for watching.