Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a Beretta Model 38/42 SMG.
Now this is part of the evolution of the Beretta Model 38 submachine guns.
When the war began Beretta was producing the Model 38A,
which was a brilliantly well-liked submachine gun by everyone who got their hands on it.
And it was a gun that had a lot of fancy features on it.
... It was an expensive gun to manufacture.
Fairly long barrel, full length barrel shroud, bayonet lug on it, magazine cover,
full-length stock under the barrel shroud.
Expensive gun to manufacture, but very pleasant to shoot.
Low recoil, low muzzle climb, good rate of fire, just a really nice gun.
A little bit heavy, which probably helped on the felt recoil.
It weighed about 4 kilos, which is just under 9 pounds.
And as the war went on this continued to be a very popular gun.
The issuing of the Model 38 would expand to more and more troops,
not just the initial sort of specialist troops and non-commissioned officers.
But more and more people wanted these and got their hands on them.
There would also be a series of foreign contracts made.
The military of Romania bought a batch of Model 38s.
Germany would buy 38s through the entirety of the war.
After the Italian armistice in 1943
Germany would continue to ... get Model 38s from Beretta.
And this necessitated simplifying the design.
And we see this happening to basically all submachine guns during the war.
The fancy nice features, great to shoot aspects become less important than,
"How many of these can we crank out in a given time with a given amount of raw materials?"
And so the 38 ... has the same progression.
Now a lot of these changes are incremental.
They are replacing milled parts with stamped parts, they're slowly simplifying elements.
And there aren't a lot of really black and white changes that are made.
But one of them is the Model 38/42, which is what we have here.
And this is where they get rid of the barrel shroud, they shorten the barrel substantially.
They shorten the stock, it no longer extends past the magazine.
The magazine well cover is removed, like,
"Well, that's too fancy, we don't need it, not important enough.
Ditch it, make the guns faster to produce."
However, there are a series of different ... styles
of Model 38/42 that all kind of fall under the same generic heading.
So let's take a look at this one and let me show you what it has.
And what some of its, well, sister submachine guns under that 38/42 name will include.
A couple of things to touch on first. This is of course registered.
This is a curio and relic, fully transferable example of a 38/42.
Unfortunately the lacquer on the stock is not original.
We can still see some of the markings in there which I'll show you in a moment, but
normally the stock would not have had that shiny lacquer finish on it.
There are a variety of different marking schemes that are found on the Beretta 38s.
They include some that have essentially German markings from post-Armistice.
Most of them will have Beretta markings on the tube, but this one does not.
The markings on this are actually quite sparse. We have a CS,
the significance of which I'm not entirely sure.
... I've seen some sources that suggest
that a lot of subcontractors were used for some of the components.
I'm going way out on a limb here, but it's possible that this was
from a batch that had a ... receiver tube made by a subcontractor.
But then we also have the serial number down there.
And then up behind the rear sight we have a "CA9",
and that's the calibre marking. These are all in 9mm Parabellum.
So as I mentioned a moment ago, the Beretta 38As
had a stock that came way out in front of the magazine, and they had a magazine well cover.
The 38/42 dispenses with that, we have just a very simple system
here with a magazine well spot welded onto the receiver.
The stock ends right behind the magazine well.
We have a magazine release lever right there.
All of the Berettas would use the same magazines, so these are all interchangeable
across all of the different platforms. And they're a fantastic magazine.
They were made in 20, 30 and 40 round capacities.
They are a double-stack double-feed design, they're reliable, they're easy to load.
This is a key component of a good submachine gun design, and Beretta did a great job with the magazines.
I should say Tullio Marengoni, the designer of this system, did a great job with the magazine.
The other really distinctive change for the 38/42 is this shortened barrel.
This is a 9 inch long barrel, including the muzzle brake out there.
It has no barrel shroud on it.
And there were actually a couple of different styles of barrel that were done sequentially.
So when they first started making these simplified guns
they actually put in a heavy fluted barrel.
That was eventually replaced with a smooth profile barrel as it becomes fairly clear that
barrel heating just really isn't that big of a deal on a 9mm submachine gun.
So I should add as an aside here, there are some sources
that refer to the smooth-barrelled ones as a "38/43".
However there is actually a formally designated Model 38/43
and it's a folding-stock paratrooper gun.
... In doing the research for this video, I came down on the side of these are all 38/42s,
there is just a variety of features within that designation.
And I think the attempt to further specify something as a "38/43"
is an after-the-fact attempt to rationalise design features
and assign names to things that didn't actually have their own specific names to begin with.
The front sight here is a gigantic sort of triangular post.
And that's matched with a two position flip sight.
It's not an L-shaped bracket that rotates back and forth,
it's one fixed sight for I believe 100 metres
with a second flip up notch that will change your zero to 200 metres.
... The Model 38As originally had a full tangent-leaf rear sight back here.
And replacing that with a fixed notch sight was one of the simplifications that was done over time.
I mentioned that we could still see markings in the stock.
And there's one in particular here, it's this round "4UT ", that's an Italian Army stamp.
So this is an original stock on the gun, it's just unfortunately been lacquered.
When it comes to the controls, the Beretta 38 is one of those guns
that separated its safety and selector controls.
So we have a lever on the side for safe, that's safe in the back, fire in the front.
And then all of the 38 family, even the most simplified guns
that would come at the very end of the war, had a two trigger fire-control system.
So the rear trigger is for full, and it's serrated
so that you can tell by feel which trigger you're using, and the front trigger is for semi-auto.
Mechanically this is just a simple blowback gun.
Fires from an open bolt, not a whole lot to it there.
For disassembly we're going to push the back plug in,
that's connected to the recoil spring, and then rotate this cap about 30 degrees.
You can actually see an arrow here on the cap,
when that's lined up on the top of the receiver this end cap will come off.
... Push that in, rotate that up and it comes off.
Alright, this comes off. This is one of the other elements
that changed over the course of the evolution of this system.
... So very early 38As actually had a floating firing pin
where there's a essentially a hammer, or a pivoting lever, on the back end of the bolt.
When the bolt was fully in battery that lever would hit
a protrusion on the receiver, which would kick the firing pin forward.
Fairly quickly, by 1941 or '42, that had been replaced by a fixed firing pin which we see here.
However, there would continue to be a progressive change in the design of the recoil spring system.
So the early 38/42s, typically the ones with fluted barrels,
will have the recoil spring and the bolt actually as one fully contained system.
There's a solid tube running from the back of the bolt,
and the spring is completely encased and it looks kind of like this.
As the war progressed, as they wanted to make the guns cheaper and cheaper,
they abandoned that in favour of a couple of separated parts, and that's what we have here.
So, for this later pattern of 38/42 the recoil spring guides in the front and back are separate.
We have a small diameter recoil spring in there.
And then other than that, this is fundamentally just a fixed firing pin, ...
simple blowback bolt.
We can disassemble this a bit further by taking the two screws out of the trigger guard.
Note that these originally had locking screws in there,
but those are both missing on this example.
Alright, long screw in the back, short one in the front.
That allows me to remove the trigger guard.
And then the stock can come off of the receiver.
So there's your bare receiver, we have our fire control group here welded to the bottom of it.
It's worth pointing out that this receiver is not actually a tube so much,
it is a single flat piece of steel that is bent around a mandrel.
Note that it's open all the way through here.
And then there's the one area at the front where it's a complete ... cylinder.
However up here this has actually been butted together and welded, and then smoothed over.
The barrel is held in place by a pin right there.
And we have the magazine well welded on.
And the fabrication on this example is a little sketchy.
If we look at the machine marks here, the fit and finish, really the finish,
things like these welds on the back.
This is a level of production quality that would not have been acceptable
on the pre-war Beretta 38As, but that's what wartime necessity does to a design.
And there you go, there's a Beretta 38/42
relatively late example, all field stripped apart.
The Model 38 stayed in production not just until the end of the war,
but actually came right back into production after World War Two.
The Beretta 38 would go on to become the Beretta Model 5
to kind of hide its pre-war origins.
And would continue to sell on the export market fairly well in the 1940s and into the 1950s.
So really a very well-liked submachine gun.
Very long-lived, even in its more simplified form like this.
Now, tomorrow we're going to take this out to the range and do some shooting with it, I think.
I've previously done some shooting with the Model 38A, which is fantastic to shoot.
And I should point out, these are perfect guns for left-handers.
They eject out the left, the charging handle is on the right,
it's really well set up for someone like me.
So stick around for that video, hopefully that will be fun too, and hopefully you enjoyed this one.
Thanks for watching.