Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, taking a look at
Poland's first attempt at a domestic submachine gun.
This is the wz. 39 Mors (or "Death").
Continuing Poland's tradition of
having interesting names for firearms projects.
At any rate, this began as the project of a pair of sort of arms designers
working for the State Rifle Factory, one ballistician and one arms designer,
by the name of Piotr Wilniewczyca and Jan Skrzypiński.
Who in about 1936 started putting together a design for a submachine gun.
Of course, the Polish military at this point did not have any submachine guns.
There were a small number of them in Poland for the police,
in the 1920s the Polish police forces had bought about 100 Thompson guns.
In the 1930s they ... were unable to get spares for their Thompsons,
so they ended up buying actually a couple of hundred Suomis out of Finland.
And that was sort of the current status of submachine guns in Poland by the mid/late 1930s.
Now Poland was a major supplier of small arms to the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War.
And one of the Polish state export companies ended up buying
the entire stock of the Erma Company out of Germany
and supplying Erma EMP submachine guns to the Spanish.
And it's ... fairly obvious that the Erma EMP
had a design influence on Wilniewczyca and Skrzypiński,
because, well, this is pretty distinctively similar in layout to the EMP.
Although substantially different in some of its internal mechanisms.
At any rate, they start working on this about '36.
They present it to the military for initial testing in 1938.
The design is worked on by the State Rifle Factory.
And in 1938 ... actually the first version of the gun is pretty much fantastic.
With the exception of a few little issues: namely it's inaccurate in semi-auto fire.
It's also inaccurate in full-auto fire, the stock's too long, the barrel comes loose,
the sights aren't very good, and the grip is not really well positioned.
So in other words, everything about it is sub-par.
So the factory goes back and they keep working on the design.
And ... one of the big complaints is the gun fired too fast,
and to rectify that they substantially lengthen the receiver on the second pattern.
And they actually extend the barrel a little bit, they lengthen the receiver very substantially.
That is able to drop the rate of fire, but not quite enough, it's again rejected by the military.
They come back with a third version in January of 1939
where they have now lengthened the barrel again.
And they've added ... a pneumatic rate reducer to it
that in theory should bring the rate of fire down to about 450 rounds per minute.
This is deemed acceptable.
... There were three prototypes originally made,
and then a batch of 36 is ordered for military field trials.
Now, one of the areas that was specifically intended for these submachine guns
was the Polish Tank Corps because they are using very small tankettes.
And there's no way that they can fit a standard carbine inside one of these TKS tankettes.
So, "Oh, we've got this short submachine gun."
And in fact the first pattern of the Mors was relatively short,
borderline, but it would have worked in the tanks.
By the time they get to the field trials version here,
this is like an inch or two shorter than a Polish Mauser 98 carbine.
Not really all that practical for the Armoured Corps anymore.
At any rate, they went into some military field testing,
and so we'll talk about the results of that testing after we take
a closer look at what it was they were actually testing at that point.
Since I mentioned it, here is an Erma EMP and here's our Polish vzor 39 Mors.
Obviously you can see the similarities, there are substantial differences as well.
Of course the Erma has a side-mounted magazine as opposed to the bottom-mounted magazine.
The disassembly method is totally different on the two guns,
but the layout most likely was influential.
We have a couple of markings here we can start with. A Polish state crest.
FK is the factory marking, that is Fabryka Karabinów, the State Rifle Factory.
And then the designation Mors Model 39, and this is gun number 38.
The sear springs in this are broken, unfortunately, but I can show you more or less how it works.
We have two triggers, the front trigger is full-auto, the rear is semi-auto.
And when you pull the front trigger it actually pulls the rear trigger at the same time.
Pull the rear trigger, it moves by itself, so.
The vertical ... midpoint grip on the Mors
is similar in design to the early Erma EMPs in that it has an extendable monopod in it,
which we can snap down right there.
The idea is of course you can press the gun on this when you're shooting.
The problem is because this is mounted
basically right in the middle at the balance point of the gun,
if you actually try to use it the gun ends up rocking back and forth on that monopod.
There's no way to like load pressure into it, and it's frankly practically pretty useless.
Which is why Erma stopped putting them into the EMPs.
And the EMP example that we have here for comparison
is a later pattern without one of those monopods.
In order to retract it back in you have to push down this little flat spring,
and then that slides back into the gun there.
Unfortunately we don't have a surviving magazine for this gun.
However, it was a 24 round magazine, and that was specifically chosen
because ammunition for the vz. 35 pistols was issued in 8 round packets.
And so the magazine would hold three 8-round packets of ammunition.
The rear sight would normally be a fairly typical rifle style V-notch rear sight.
Unfortunately the rear sight is missing on this example.
But you can see the barleycorn-style front sight out there.
There were in fact a bunch of fancy elements to the vzor 39.
The monopod for one, the double-trigger firing system for one,
and you have a quick detach barrel.
So this disassembly lever doubles as disassembly and barrel removal.
If I rotate it forward, I can ...
pull the barrel out.
There's your circular cutout for the barrel to be locked in place.
This is one of those features that you find occasionally on early submachine guns
before people really recognised that
this isn't a very useful practical feature on a submachine gun.
You really are not going to put enough ammunition through one of these
fast enough to require changing the barrels.
For disassembly we can then rotate this lever down 90 degrees that direction,
and then pull it out. So ... it's a keyed pin.
And with that out, I can just lift the upper off the lower receiver.
Now there's a really cool feature hiding here inside the lower,
and this is an automatic magazine release.
So when the follower of the magazine lifts up on this tab when the magazine is empty,
it does two things: it's going to lift up this sear,
like the firing sear, but this catches on a second ... catch on the bolt.
That locks the bolt in position, holds it open since your magazine is now empty.
And if you look in here,
when this goes up, these two fingers on either side get pushed down.
That acts to push out the now empty magazine.
So it locks the bolt open and kicks the magazine out automatically when the gun's empty.
However, the gun was only ... intended to be issued with 3 magazines,
and you don't want to just lose them
from having them automatically kicked out when you weren't expecting it.
So they also thoughtfully added a flat spring in here for magazine retention.
So that now your automated magazine drop
actually just automatically kicks the magazine a few millimetres down, where it's held in place.
So you still have to pull it out manually to replace.
And by the way, there's the actual magazine release lever.
Again, unfortunately, we don't have a magazine for this gun.
There are, I think, four of these now known to survive.
And they're pretty much all missing at least one or two pieces.
In fact the barrel of this one is a reproduction.
Anyway, once you remove the empty magazine,
when you put in a new loaded magazine it's going to push up on these two fingers.
Which is in turn going to kick this sear automatically down,
which will release the bolt to drop just slightly forward onto the firing sear.
Moving on to the upper assembly, just pull our bolt handle back,
pull the recoil spring out and then I can pull the bolt handle out.
And then the bolt slides out the back of the receiver.
The receiver tube itself is fairly simple, basically just a tube there.
A trunnion in the front.
There, one through pin hole to lock the barrel in place as well as attach the lower assembly.
And a barrel shroud.
The bolt has perhaps more machining operations than strictly necessary.
But fundamentally it is a fixed firing pin, simple blowback,
open bolt, 9x19mm submachine gun.
So this is the catch for the magazine hold open system.
The actual firing sear catches back here.
Just to compare once again to the Erma EMP,
we actually have a lot of similarities in the bolt as well.
The Erma has an encapsulated recoil spring here,
which the Mors also does, like so.
So protects the spring, keeps dirt and gunk out of it.
It is unclear if this was originally intended to be fixed in the bolt.
It doesn't look like it, but the Erma is.
We don't have another good example of the bolt mechanism from a Mors to look at.
So when the recoil spring is fully in the bolt (you can see that it extends through into there),
and ... that is what holds the bolt handle in place.
So that goes in, as long as the recoil spring is in place the bolt handle can't come flying out.
In order to make sure that the barrel is always aligned, there is a permanently installed pin,
right here, that extends through into the line of the barrel.
And we have a ... groove cut right there.
So when you are putting the barrel in, ...
as you're inserting the barrel you can see these two cuts.
Your last chance is this hole to align them.
And then as long as they are lined up properly,
the barrel will go (there we go) all the way in - just about flush.
If you don't line up those grooves ...
you can't get the barrel all the way in.
Unfortunately we don't actually know what the results were of the field trials,
... to the extent that field trials were able to be held.
The 36 guns for those trials weren't delivered until June of 1939.
Of course war is going to break out in September of '39.
There isn't really that much time for a substantial field trials program,
and all the records that may have been generated have been lost.
Ultimately of course the gun never did go into production
because the war broke out and everything changed.
For the tankers specifically, there was really no need for field trials
because it's pretty clear right from the get-go that this wasn't going to fit in their tanks.
So they decided, "You know, we'll scrap this, we'll go back to the original plan
which is the vz. 35 pistol (sometimes called the Radom pistol),
with a ... holster stock attached to it."
Which is why there are stock attachments on all the vz. 35s.
But then people didn't see the war coming quickly enough,
there were no stocks actually made, and the poor tankers didn't end up with those either.
A grand total of just 39 of these were manufactured: 36 for trials, 3 original prototypes.
And after World War Two none of them were actually in Poland.
And nobody really paid much attention until the 1970s,
when there was a bit of a resurgence in national pride and arms development.
And the Poles went looking for one to try and have for a museum display,
and pretty well scoured the country in Poland and were unable to find any examples.
They reached out to the Russians, and it turned out the
Central Army Museum in Moscow actually had two of them.
And so this one, number 38, the second to last example manufactured,
was gifted back to Poland, and still resides today at the ... Polish Army Museum in Warsaw.
So a big thanks to the museum for giving me access to it in turn to film for you guys.
If you find yourself in Warsaw, definitely ... set some time aside to go visit the Army Museum.
They have a really cool display of ... small arms history.
Including, by the way, one of those TKS tankettes that this was supposed to be issued to.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.