hi guys thanks for tuning in to another
video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm Ian
McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock
Island auction company taking a look at
some of the guns that they are going to
be selling in their upcoming September
of 2017 premier auction and today we're
looking at an interesting 1930s
submachine gun actually this is a 1940s
or 50s submachine gun but it's a
licensed copy of a 1930s design
specifically this is a Spanish model 41
44 which is a copy of the ARMA II MP
which is a purchased version of the
Vollmer VMP submachine gun
so heinrich Vollmer first developed well
the predecessor to this design in 1925
where he entered it in a German a kind
of sneaky secret German competition or
evaluation of submachine guns
now the Germans weren't allowed to be
developing submachine guns at this point
based on the Versailles Treaty but by
1925 they started doing it anyway and
there are a number of participants
Vollmer brought his VMP submachine gun
Vollmer machine and pistol and well
didn't really do all that well the whole
trial was inconclusive
what Vollmer had in 1925 was a gun that
looked pretty much like this except it
actually fed from a drum magazine not
with that unlike the MP 18 of World War
one there was a follow-up trial in 28
and Vollmer had improved his gun in a
couple of ways he actually got rid of
the barrel shroud and he originally had
cooling flutes on the barrel and he
ditched them as well he realized and
this was a bit prescient of him that
cooling the barrel on the submachine gun
really wasn't going to be an issue that
had to be addressed it just wasn't that
much heat in the barrel the barrel
shrouds have remained reasonably popular
just as a way to prevent people from
accidentally grabbing a hot barrel but
as far as actually trying to keep the
barrel of a submachine gun cool it's
really just not something you have to
worry about so for the the second
follow-up trial
Vollmer got rid of the drum magazine and
actually replaced it with a pretty good
box magazine design a double feed double
stack design unlike the Schmeiser style
magazines that were double feed
stack single feet that's a distinction
that we get into in some other videos
but actually a quick side note
interestingly volmers machine pistol was
tested by the Russians in 1927 and 28
where it was found to be not bad in any
way but not superior to Tokarev
submachine gun designs from the time and
they thought that they saw that
togoyev's gun had a longer sight radius
than roamers 'm and that was the
deciding factor and they kind of dropped
investigation of the vulnerable Soviets
anyway
Vollmer was getting a lot of his
financing from the iwg the instruction
and instruction for gujrat for Vasa
McGarrett so like the guns and stuff
Inspectorate they were funding a lot of
his operation he was not actually at
this time associated with a large
manufacturer which is typically what
inventors would do so unfortunately for
him in 1930 the Great Depression hit the
German government which didn't have a
whole lot of money in the first place
had a lot less money to be throwing
around and they cut his funding at that
point he was only able to sell about 400
of his VMP submachine guns on the
commercial market so that was not enough
to sustain his factory operation and so
in 1930 he basically shut it down he
sold all the rights to the gun and its
associated patents to Burma Burma
promptly put it into production in 1931
it reached the commercial market in 1932
irma left the gun completely unchanged
except for adding a barrel shroud back
onto it to potentially protect the
shooters hand and did actually quite
well with it herma sold at least 10,000
potentially more than 20,000 of these
guns on the commercial market worldwide
a lot of them went to Latin and South
America they were used in the Gran Chaco
War a lot of them also went to Spain
these were popular with both of the
Republicans and the Nationalists in
Spain used by both sides interestingly
they were used by the Republicans in
nine milimeter nine Parabellum they were
used by the fascists in nine Largo nine
by twenty-three the
were marketed in a variety of calibers
pretty much whatever caliber you wanted
for the international military
commercial market whatever you wanted
our mo would be willing to build that
version for you and there are a number
of different models of the gun made a
couple different air lengths there was
an 8 inch and a 12-inch so like a 200
millimeter and a 300 or 320 millimeter
barrel you could get banette lugs there
are a couple different styles of sights
there was an option for having a monopod
in the vertical front grip that vertical
front grip by the way is quite
distinctive of Vollmar guns pretty much
all of his submachine guns had that
anyway they proved to be a fairly
popular submachine gun in fact in Spain
during the Spanish Civil War the
Republicans tried to set up production
of them and probably made a few but not
very many
and then the La Coruna Arsenal after the
war was a licensed producer of this gun
and that's what we actually have here is
a Spanish 41 / 44 model which has just a
couple of little tiny details that are
different from the Irma or Romer guns so
let's take a closer look I'll show you
the differences how you can tell the two
apart and also how you take this thing
down because it's a pretty cool
disassembly method the markings are
really one of the primary distinctive
features separating the Irma guns from
the La Coruna guns the Irma's would have
been marked here on the receiver end cap
the German production guns also have
safety selector markings that are e and
B for Ines L fire and dour fire or
pronounced something like that where
these are F and a now that is so that is
your your fire selector this doesn't
have a manual safety in the form of a
button or lever this is a takedown lever
which we'll get to in a moment there is
a safety here in the form of locking the
bolt up and back however that doesn't
prevent the classic submachine gun
safety issue of what if you are carrying
the gun with a loaded magazine and they
bolt closed on an empty chamber and you
either drop the gun on its butt or you
managed to catch the bolt handle on
something to pull it back far enough to
clear the magazine
and then drop it forward for it to fire
inadvertently so the Spanish added a
second safety to fix that right here in
front of the trigger guard is this sort
of plunger deal and you'll notice it's
mark F and F for fire and s for safe and
if we wrote what we have to do is pull
this out and we can rotate it in the
safe position this plunger extends
inside the magazine tube and it actually
catches on the sear notch of the bolt so
if you have that plunger in and you
attempt to fire the gun it goes this far
and then stops before it's able to
actually chamber a cartridge or fire it
in the same way if you have the gun the
safety engaged here and the bolt forward
if you do manage to catch the bolt and
pull it back a little bit it will stop
here again before it fires in order to
fire what you have to do is have the
plunger extended downwards and it does
lock into position there you have to
pull it down in order to move it so it's
not likely to be bumped out of position
although it does look kind of weird and
awkward there once it's in this position
then the bolts can travel freely forward
back now you could get an umma from
Burma with a tangent sight like this
however the Spanish guns all had the
tangent sight like this
herma also often made them with flip you
know like to position slip up notches
now the other distinctive feature here
marketing-wise is this Cal 9l this is a
pretty typical Spanish marking we have a
serial number on top and then the 9 l
stands for nine-millimeter largo that's
9 by 23 and that was the span the
standard cartridge for the spanish
military for a long time one of the
really interesting anecdotes this isn't
quite appropriate to a Spanish 41 44 but
it's such a cool story that I'm going to
tell you anyway with the herma emps
there are a lot of them that were
actually produced and sold in to Spain
during the Spanish Civil War
so German guns going into Spain when the
Spanish Civil War ended a lot of the
Republican fighters fled across the
border over the Pyrenees into France and
of course
took their guns with them and the French
actually confiscated a lot of firearms
right at this time on their southern
border including something like thirty
two hundred and fifty forma EMPs they
were a popular submachine gun in Spain
so the French ended up with a lot of
these things in inventory and in
1939-1940 when world war ii is starting
the french were really had just barely
started producing their own submachine
gun the MAS 38 and so they took a look
at this big inventory of armas and
decided well why not just use those two
they were in nine by nineteen
so ammunition was available the problem
was they only had about half as many
magazines as they did guns so about
fourteen hundred and some magazines for
their thirty two hundred and fifty guns
they took what magazines they were able
to and they did end up issuing seven or
eight hundred of these things to the
Jean de Marie and the garden will be
used and they were used to fight against
the German invasion at the beginning of
World War two then of course Clinton
when the Germans won that campaign they
ended up confiscating all of these are
guns again so you now have German guns
that went to Spain and then to France
and now they're back in German hands and
a lot of those guns ended up being
issued to German police units and to the
SS because the SS was of course outside
of standard military procurement so it
kind of had a more difficult time and
had to look to some less than standard
guns like the ARMA EMPs anyway quite a
substantial creeps about through Europe
for some of these emps disassembly is
one of the elements where the Irma has
something to contribute to history
because its disassembly would be copied
in large part by the MP 38 and MP 40 so
to do this we need to plunder safety to
be in the fire position we want the bolt
forward and then we're going to take
this lever and pull it back this is just
a disassembly catch pull this back and
with the gun on fully automatic you pull
the trigger all the way back as well and
then you can rotate the whole barrel and
receiver element so take these two pull
them this rotates down and now we have
separated our upper and lower
components very similar to the mp40 the
mp40 would get rid of the the trigger
element and it would just have a plunger
kind of like this to prevent the gun
from disassembling I should point out
this is a potential point of malfunction
in the gun if you are firing the gun and
you are foolish enough to grab this
trigger as well as the firing trigger
because you do have this offset weight
of the magazine it is possible again if
you pull both of these for the weight of
the magazine to pull the receiver to the
side rotate it down at which point the
sear will become disconnected from the
receiver tube and this would cause the
gun to run away and fire until the
magazine is empty now that may or may
not have been a lot of a problem
probably didn't turn out to be much of a
problem because this disassembly
technique was maintained through several
military trials and all the way through
Irma's commercial production now there
is a semi-auto disconnect er built into
the trigger mechanism so if I just pull
the trigger back you can see the sear
drops and then clicks back up into place
if I have the gun on semi-auto that's
all it does switching to full auto
simply remove the block and allows me to
do that and then pull the trigger
farther and hold the sear all the way
down so in this position it will
continue to fire until I let this you're
up what this also means is that in fully
automatic mode you can make single shots
very easily because there is a very
distinctive difference in trigger pull
between this single single fire setting
and the full auto so you kind of get the
benefits of a selective trigger and a
selector lever or a progressive trigger
as well as a selector lever in the same
mechanisms pulling the bolt out just
slides out back we can see another area
where the Vollmer gun would contribute
to the mp40 the recoil spring is located
inside just too this is a telescoping
shroud over the recoil spring pretty
similar to what the mp40 would have now
there's a little bit of a
controversy about who invented this
because it was actually patented by
Schmeiser however what's what's curious
about this is Schmeiser patented this in
1928 but his patent wasn't actually
granted and published until 1931 but
Vollmer introduced this mechanism on to
his VMP submachine gun in 1930 before
schmeissers patent had actually been
published so who exactly came up with
the idea first is really open to
question
however Schmeiser was the first to
patent it while simultaneously Bulmer
was the first to actually use it beyond
that we have a pretty simple mechanism
here we have a fixed firing pin cut out
for the extractor in the magazine old
handle or sear is back here and that
safety plunger in the stock if I turn
this to the safe position the plunger
comes up right there which is going to
push it through this hole in the
receiver and as you can see if I put the
bolt in we have our sear surface right
there which is going to catch it
glare off that sear surface is coming in
right there so if this safety plunger is
in the upward position it's going to hit
on that that sear and hold the bolt back
in position right right there which as
you can see in the magazine well is
totally safe reassembly of the gun is
just as easy as disassembly we just want
to pull both the trigger and the
disassembly lever we're going to put
this in with the magazine facing roughly
down we want this set of interrupted
lugs to be at the 12 o'clock position
pushes back rotates into position and
there you go gun is assembled and ready
to fire I personally think that pretty
much all guns associated with the
Spanish Civil War are interesting just
for that reason Spanish Civil Wars quite
the convoluted and tragic but very
interesting historical conflict to study
so
meat to me to see this gun that is
basically an outgrowth of the Spanish
Civil War and beyond that of course the
relevance to the development of the mp40
that we touched on so if you would be
interested in having this one yourself
it is a fully transferable registered
submachine gun here in the US and if you
take a look at the description text
below you'll find the link to rock
island's catalog page on this gun you
can take a look at their pictures and
description and all the other
information they have and place a bid on
it over the phone over the web or live
in person at the auction thanks for
watching