[ French Resistance No.4 Mk1 Enfield]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at a
Number 4 Mark I Enfield with some really cool provenance.
This is a gun that was dropped to the French Resistance
in 1944 as part of Operation Carpetbagger.
Which was the combined British/American mission
to arm and equip the French Maquis, the French Resistance fighters.
Now, the program started in January of 1944 with some covert night-time drops
by B-24 Liberators, a relatively small-scale program.
But it really ramped up by the summer of '44.
Now the reason for this ... wasn't just,
"Oh, ... we've got some spare guns around, let's drop them to the French Resistance."
The idea was in the build up to the invasion of France, both in Provence and in Normandy,
armed active French Resistance units could do a lot of good for the Allied effort.
Namely, they could prevent the Germans from being able to
redeploy units from areas of occupied France to the invasion zones.
The fewer troops that the Germans can concentrate at those initial landing sites,
the fewer troops that they can send to oppose Allied advances into France,
well, the easier the invasion is going to be, the faster that France can be liberated.
And so with this intent, tens of thousands of containers of small arms and other equipment
were dropped to the French during the first 9 months or so of 1944.
This would include a lot of small arms.
In total, the breakdown was almost 50% submachine guns.
So the most common single gun that was dropped in this way was the Sten gun.
It was cheap, it was small, it was light,
it was easy to use, it had a lot of firepower, it's an ideal gun.
In fact in some ways the Sten Mark II was partially designed for this purpose
with all of its various takedown and packing features.
The Mark III, not so much.
But in addition to that they also dropped Bren guns, they dropped M1 carbines,
they dropped various pistols, and they dropped Number 4 Mark I Enfield rifles.
So let's take a closer look at this one. And let me show you how we actually know,
through a couple of different mechanisms, that this is a French Resistance gun.
What we have here are totally standard Number 4 Mark I Lee-Enfields,
that is of course .303 British calibre, bolt action, 10 round magazine.
A couple of things to point out, first off,
we have the original factory markings here on the receiver socket.
So this is a 1944 Maltby production gun, Maltby was one of several factories
set up in the UK to manufacture Number 4 Enfields.
"BS" and "1" are actually the Maltby serial number codes.
So ... the rifles that were being made by Maltby
all have a five digit serial number where the first digit is 1.
2 and 3 were used by Shirley and Fazakerley, other factories.
So they did essentially runs of 10,000 guns at a time.
This is 9439 in series "BS".
Maltby started with ... a no-prefix series in 1941.
And after they did the first 10,000 they then went to "A" and then "B" and then "C".
And eventually when they got to the end of the alphabet they started over at "AA"
and then "AB", and by this point in 1944 they're up to "BS".
So that's the explanation of the serial number there.
This "PP" is a mark that was added by the French.
We have that marking repeated up here on the top of the receiver
along with a four digit inventory number.
And the reason for that is these guns were rounded up by the police after the end of the war.
While fighting is going on, of course it's important to get ... guns
distributed out to all sorts of different Resistance units who can put them to good use.
But once France is fully liberated, well now you've kind of got a different situation.
There are a whole variety of armed Resistance units with widely differing political views.
Everything from the far left, to the far right.
And the French government, wanting to prevent civil unrest, or a potential civil war even,
and of course wanting to make sure that it's their own position that wins, that comes out in charge,
well they passed some laws about civilian firearms ownership.
And they start rounding up a lot of the guns from former Resistance fighters,
and they are put into storage by the police.
When that happens the guns are marked PP, inventory.
The number there is simply to catalogue the guns that they have on hand.
This wasn't done just to Lee-Enfields, but to a wide variety of other guns that were collected.
And this was done by a lot of different police units.
So it's not like this is a single standard national type of marketing, it's not.
The guns are then of course put into long-term storage.
They still have their original slings on them, these probably were never actually taken off.
You can see there is a bit of rust on the sling connectors there.
When they were put into storage, that was done without the magazines.
So this is how they were actually stored.
When Navy Arms found these and decided to import them there were no magazines.
And apparently nobody was ever able to find where the magazines had been put.
So when these were imported ... Navy Arms set them each up with a reproduction magazine.
So the magazines here are not original, everything else on the gun is.
At the same time the rifles were also stored without their bolts,
but they did find the bolts when the guns were being imported.
So they went through and manually matched the bolts up with the rifles.
So a lot of them are matching, some of them are mismatching
because not everything was able to be identified to a specific original gun that it came out of.
Now there's one other really cool little detail from these particular rifles.
And that is a bunch of them are Maltby Number 4 Mark I* rifles, like this one.
However, this is not actually a Mark I*.
The Mark I* was a version of the Number 4 that was made only in North America
by Savage and Long Branch, and it was a simplified bolt release mechanism.
So instead of having this lever that you push down.
So to take the bolt out of a regular Number 4 Mark I you bring the bolt back to here,
push this down, pull the bolt past it.
You can then flip the bolt head up and take it out of the gun.
The North American factories came up with a simpler way to do it
where they just basically had a little spring catch here and no latch on the receiver.
And that was designated the Mark I*.
And the Maltby factory never made that.
However in 1944 they screwed up some of their markings,
and ... there's a known phenomenon of ... early '44 Maltby guns
that are marked I* even though they're actually Number 4 Mark Is.
And in this ... cache of French Resistance rifles there are actually a bunch of these mis-marked guns.
So here is a Maltby (see the BS down there) star.
Here's another Maltby example: 1944, this is BT series, 18,000.
And by the time the guns got past about BT 15,000
they had corrected the roll mark on the side of the gun to just be Number 4 Mark I.
So those were generally considered an extremely rare variation of the Lee-Enfield,
those mismarked Maltbys, and a substantial number of them have shown up in this cache.
It's likely that a lot of Maltby's early '44 production
was actually assigned to Operation Carpetbagger for dropping to the French.
Not all the guns are Maltbys of course, here's another one.
This is marked "M47C", that's the code designation for the BSA Shirley plant.
1944, and there's its serial number, and again the French PP police confiscation marks.
What these rifles do all share is of course 1944 production features.
So they've got Mark II sights on them, which are a stamped adjustable sight.
It's not the really emergency two position flip sight,
but it's also not the very early production
expensive, complicated, milled, click-adjustable sight.
This is what was being done in '44.
The guns basically all have their original slings on them.
And at least all the sampling that I've seen, these are in really excellent condition.
Because, well, they were treated really well.
These rifles were all imported into the US by Navy Arms, ... they've been working in France.
They recently imported a bunch of FR-F2 French sniper rifles that are pretty darn cool.
And well, they found these at the same time and figured,
"What the heck, these are pretty cool, we'll import them."
Now personally, I think this is a really cool piece of history
specifically because of its ties to the French Resistance in World War Two.
But beyond that, for anyone who's interested in just Enfields in general,
this represents a great example of a Number 4 Mark I
that came straight out of the factory in 1944 and hasn't been molested since.
Normally, when you get surplus it's because rifles were produced, were used,
then went back into military storage in their original country
and went into sort of a reserve stockpile.
And when that happens they're typically overhauled, upgraded.
If they're not the most recent version of the rifle, they are brought up to the most recent version.
They are refinished, maybe the wood furniture is replaced if it's banged up.
And then they go into storage and then a few decades later
they are ultimately sold as surplus once they are considered obsolete.
Which means for the collector you're not quite getting a snapshot
of how that rifle came out of the factory.
These, you actually are, this is exactly how the gun came out of the factory.
With the two exceptions of the American import mark
and the French property mark, and that's pretty cool.
And it used to be something not that hard to find with Lee-Enfields.
It's got a lot harder more recently, stuff is just drying up.
So I think these are a pretty cool opportunity for collectors.
You never know where surplus is going to come from.
One day you'll get stuff out of Ethiopia that is in unfortunate condition often,
that's been stored in really poor conditions.
And then sometimes you'll get things like this that were stored in great condition,
were never used much first, and present a fantastic option for collectors. ...
Anyway, the rifles that you saw in this video were all loaned
to me by Navy Arms for the purpose of this video, FYI.
I am absolutely going to get one myself, but they are going to make me pay for it.
So if you enjoyed this, perhaps consider subscribing on Patreon
so that I have a few more bucks to buy one of these for myself.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.