Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming April of 2018 Premier Firearms Auction.
And today we have a really cool, goofy
artefact of World War Two and the OSS.
Now the OSS was the American covert special operations,
intelligence gathering, wealthy adventurer's playboy club, sort of.
OSS was really ... a frontier sort of organisation.
It was set up by William Donovan in New York,
and he was basically looking for a group of well-rounded,
talented and intelligent individuals to help the resistance movements in Europe.
And this would eventually turn into the CIA and one of the major organs of US covert intelligence,
but in World War Two it's a pretty freewheeling, unorthodox and quirky sort of group.
And when it comes to the devices and the weapons that they designed and developed and produced,
... I mean it's Q out of the James Bond movies plus some. And this is a perfect example of that.
So one of the things that OSS wanted in general was a silent weapon for shooting sentries
and similar sorts of tasks. ... Ideally they wanted something that had no sound, no flash,
had an effective range of like 100 yards, could be reloaded in less than 30 seconds.
So this wasn't something they were trying to get a high volume of fire out of, they wanted one shot, effective and undetectable.
And they experimented with a whole lot of different sorts of contraptions.
At the most normal end they had firearm silencers or suppressors.
And then at the other end they had weird stuff like this which is a CO2 powered dart gun.
They had a silent mortar that they experimented with that I don't really know the details of.
They tested out a number of different crossbows, and all sorts of weird and goofy ideas.
Now this particular one was code named Flying Dragon, or SAC-46.
And it first shows up in the documentation about 1943, and it is another attempt at a silent, flash-less weapon.
And basically, it's a CO2 powered dart gun.
But the problem is how do you make a CO2 powered dart gun lethal out to like 100 yards? That's a pretty tall order.
This thing fires a pretty intimidating-looking giant dart,
not that different, by the way, than the dart for the Bigot 1911 pistol conversion that is discussed elsewhere.
Definitely check that video out if you're interested in some of this goofy ... OSS stuff.
But the conclusion that they came to ... You see, the problem is if you hit ...
You know the idea of the gun being silent is great, but if you hit a sentry with a gigantic razor-sharp dart like this,
it's got to be going pretty fast to actually kill them. Because if it just hurts them,
you've lost the whole point of a silent firearm if the guard that you shoot with it gets stabbed with this thing and starts screaming
his head off because he's just been shot with a giant dart that's sticking out of his leg/arm/chest or whatever.
So they had to figure out a way to actually make it lethal, and tossed around some ideas,
and ultimately the conclusion they came to was it pretty much had to have some sort of fast-acting poison on it.
They did a little bit of investigation, I don't think it rose to the level of experimentation,
but they investigated the possibilities of that, and kind of came to the conclusion that it wasn't feasible.
They were not able to find any suitably appropriate poison to put on there.
Now obviously poisoned dart sorts of things are standard fare in Hollywood,
but this is one place where reality does break with the movies.
And you have a lot of practical problems. If you're sending someone off into combat operations with poison tipped darts,
well, you don't want them to accidentally poke themselves. (And I'll tell you what, this thing's really sharp.)
... Let's just look at practical things, the poison needs to be durable.
You need to apply it and have it not wear off or lose potency during transport,
during potentially weeks in between when it's made and when it's actually used.
It needs to survive the firing process without trouble, you know, it needs to not be wiped off when it goes through clothing.
It needs to be effective enough to actually work.
There are a lot of practical problems trying to come up with something that the movies make look really simple.
So, in the true spirit of the OSS, when they came to the conclusion that there wasn't really a practical
poison that they could put on this, they wheeled off into some other discussions like,
"Aha, what if instead of a dart, what if we use it to shoot a little syringe, and then that will inject somebody with a poison?"
I'm not making this up, this is actually what they were looking at.
That went nowhere for kind of obvious reasons. Their next idea after that was,
"We can make the gun more effective if, instead of having a CO2 cartridge that you know you
use like a typical dart gun and you tap the pressure off of it and fire a dart, what if we turn the CO2 cartridge itself into a dart,
and then you puncture the base of the cartridge and shoot the whole thing out like a little CO2 rocket?"
That also went nowhere. There are some obvious problems with that, like well ...
you have to have it precisely aligned so that the thing actually shoots where you want it.
Because again the point of a silent firearm is totally lost if you can't actually hit something with it.
Ultimately none of these things would go anywhere. But we are left with a couple of really interesting,
quirky artefacts from World War Two.
So let's take a closer look at this, let me show you exactly how it works.
Alright, so here's the whole assembly. We've got the action itself.
We've got the pistol barrel, note that it has a front sight on it.
We have the barrel extender if you would like to set it up as a rifle.
We've got one of the darts, and we have a loading tool. So let's start with the action.
We have, I believe, a cast aluminium grip that would have originally been painted all black,
but much of that paint ... has chipped off in the last 70-some years.
There is a hollow compartment in the handle, and that holds either the loading tool or
a CO2 cartridge, not sure what their intention was on that.
The trigger is just this little bar right here.
The CO2 cartridge that you're using is located in this bottom compartment.
You would put it in nozzle pointing that way, and then lock it in place like that.
This is the actual barrel stub. We have our rear sight up here.
... It says 50, I'm gonna guess that that's 50 feet because I don't think this is capable of going out to 150 yards,
and that's what the sight actually goes up to.
Now you'll notice that there are "R" and "P" markings, that's rifle and pistol,
depending on what length of barrel you're using, so.
100 and 150 there and just 50 here on the folded down side of the sight.
In the documentation I've seen this is identified as a loading tool, or a ramrod.
... Honestly I'm not really sure exactly how that's supposed to be used.
What I can see in this is obviously you want the dart at the back end of the barrel when it's going to be fired,
and the dart only goes in right about that far because this tube is only hollow back to right here,
so it's gonna go in like that.
Now the barrel, and this is the front half of the barrel with the front sight.
If you just put on this barrel you have it in pistol configuration. This goes on like so.
And it's a nice tight fit to be pretty much gas tight. You lock it in there,
rotate it up, and now it's not going anywhere.
Well, in order to maintain the best possible gas seal to get the most velocity,
there is a little rubber gasket right here at the base of the dart's tip.
So if you were to load this into the barrel it goes right to there,
and then that rubber gasket catches.
And so what you would need to do is press this in with a fair amount of force to actually seat the dart.
And I'm sure you'd want to do that at the breech end, not at the muzzle.
So what I anticipate you would do is actually take the barrel off, put the dart in the back,
and then press the barrel on over the front tip of the dart. That's going to seal that rubber obturator ring in the barrel,
and you'll be ready to fire. Remember that in general the OSS's reload requirement was 30 seconds.
So the idea that reloading this required removing the barrel
and then putting in a new dart,
and then pressing the barrel back on,
that's really not out of the question at all. That would still fit with their intended purpose for this thing.
Now if you wanted a longer barrel for more velocity, longer effective range, you can put on this barrel section,
and then it also has a set of locking tabs. So we can then put the front end on that one.
And then you have this totally Batman and Joker looking really long rifle version of the gun.
Now these were first ... documented in '43, they weren't actually produced until the early summer of 1945.
So by the time they were making these it was pretty late in the war.
They made 6 at first, did a little bit of R&D and came back with a few changes they wanted made.
They produced another 9, and so in July of 1945 they had 15 of these things that were sent off.
And that was the whole of the production and the project.
Three of them got lost somewhere, used, destroyed, damaged, discarded, I don't know what.
But at the end of World War Two the OSS had 12 of them and just over 1,000 of these darts still in inventory.
They never went to any other purpose and I imagine most of them were simply scrapped,
because there's not a whole lot else you can do with something like this, so.
Fortunately a couple of them did survive past the end ... of the OSS turning into the CIA, and
getting rid of old leftover stuff like this.
And this is serial number 5, as you saw, and it is actually available up for sale here at Rock Island.
Remarkably, despite all of its weird, covert applications and intentions, it's not actually an NFA
type of firearm in any way. So free to own, in fact I don't think it's even technically a firearm.
If you'd like to have it yourself, it is certainly one of the coolest pieces of OSS memorabilia you could find,
take a look at the description text below the video, and there you'll find a link
to Rock Island's catalogue page on this guy. That has their pictures, their description,
photographs of a couple pages out of really the only definitive book on OSS weapons.
So there's some discussion there with a little more information than I covered here in the video.
You can take a look at all that, and if you'd like to place a bid on it you can do that right through Rock Island's website.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]