Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
Today we're out here with a neat British rifle. This is in fact almost the shortest serving British service rifle.
This is a Number 5 Mark I quote-unquote "Jungle Carbine".
The development of these goes back to 1942, when the British military was getting some reports that,
especially in the Far East, that the Number 4 service rifle was really longer than it needed to be, and was
causing obstructions, it was not convenient. And a lot of troops wanted a shorter carbine.
So they started experimenting with shortening Number 4 rifles,
and by ... early 1944 they had a design pretty much in mind, which was this.
These went into production in 1944, about 250,000 of them in total were made.
And they were declared obsolete in 1947.
So a total of 3 years from when they started making them to when they just cut them off.
Now there are a couple reasons for that that we'll get into, but first let's take a look at what makes this gun different.
For one thing I should point out a lot of these are faked. Sometimes people are just making replicas
and acknowledging them as such. Sometimes people are trying to sell you a "Jungle Carbine" that they've made out of another rifle.
Because there is a price premium for these.
What the British did that really makes this different, other than there's some obvious things,
the stock is shorter. The barrel has been cut down, it's an 18.7 inch barrel.
... 20.5 inches overall when you include the flash hider. And the flash hider is another added part.
And of course the buttstock is different. A little different profile, it's got a side sling mount,
and it's got a little rubber recoil pad on it. Which is sort of a joke, but we'll touch on that as well.
So those are the obvious external changes, and when people fake them that's what they change.
What's much harder to fake is the fact that the British also lightened a whole bunch of different parts of this rifle.
This is actually just over 7 pounds, so it's quite a bit lighter than the standard Number 4.
They did that by taking cuts in places like scallops on the rear of the receiver here, and here.
There are lightening cuts to the side.
The most dramatic one that you can see is actually under the handguard.
We'll pull that off in a minute or get a picture of it.
The barrel has been almost fluted for about an inch right in front of the chamber here.
And ... these machining cuts to the receiver and the barrel are things that are very difficult to fake.
They're just not cost-effective. So if you know what lightening cuts to look for,
you can generally do a very good job of avoiding inauthentic rifles.
You'll also find the markings on the socket here, where all Enfields are generally marked,
these Number 5s were made by two companies, Fazakerley and BSA.
The BSA ones will be marked M47C, that doesn't have anything to do with the date,
that's BSA's production code during World War Two.
The Fazakerley ones will be marked ROF(F) ... so Royal Ordnance Factories, Fazakerley.
And if you don't see those markings, that's a pretty dead giveaway that it's not a legit rifle.
They will often be electro-pencil marked Number 5 Mark I. That's not uncommon, and that can be legit.
And then of course serial numbers, it's typically a four digit serial number with either a one or a two letter prefix.
Now, the problems that these had, the reasons that these got made obsolete so quickly,
or judged obsolete so quickly, was what's called "wandering zero".
There's a lot of rumour, a lot of myth about this.
... Basically what happened is during the war troops really liked the size and the handling of these carbines.
What they didn't like was that a lot of them seemed to have trouble zeroing.
You'd zero them once, and you come back later and they'd be shooting somewhere else.
And you re-zero them, and then you come back later and they'd be shooting somewhere else again entirely.
And the British actually went through quite a bit of trouble trying to diagnose what was going on here.
Some of the rifles work fine, shoot fine.
I'm sure a lot of them were in the hands of troops who didn't notice, or didn't really
put enough effort in to care about exactly where the zero was.
But ... there were a bunch of theories.
Some people thought that the stocks were swelling with changes in heat and humidity.
Some people thought it was the muzzle brake that was causing accuracy issues.
Enfield, or the British government, tested a bunch of these different hypotheses.
What they came to find was that the dispersion, the accuracy problems that the rifles had,
were actually statistically very similar to the problems you would get from a Number 4 rifle
where the bolt wasn't machined correctly, and wasn't always coming up perfectly square with the face of the barrel.
And ... the conclusion that they came to was that the wandering zero was caused by
lightening cuts under the stock here on the receiver (that were of course made to lighten the rifle as part
of its role as a lightweight carbine), but they were allowing the receiver to flex slightly under maximum strain.
And that was
putting an angle between the bolt and the receiver very slightly, and that was causing the zeroing problems.
And they tried to make some fixes. They ultimately concluded that it was simply an inherently flawed design.
And that's why they they decided to render these rifles officially obsolete in July of 1947.
Now some production did continue until the end of '47. There are some known authentic guns dated as late as December of '47.
But that's the official story: lightening cuts in the receiver caused inaccuracy, caused wandering zero,
and led to the dropping of this rifle as a British standard.
Now as a handy shooter's gun, I'm really looking forward to shooting this.
It is definitely handier, it's got the nice fast bolt action of an Enfield, it's got a 10 round magazine. I think it'll be pretty cool.
One other thing to point out. The flash hider on here, ... the standard running thing
is that's there so that the shooter doesn't blind themselves shooting at night.
In this case, whether that's true or not, the reason that the flash hiders were put on
was actually because the British armed forces figured that in jungle combat concealment was very important,
and it was a significant factor to conceal a rifle flash from the enemy.
So that's the reason, the justification that they gave for developing this flash hider. And it did work pretty well.
You don't need one on the Number 4 rifles because the barrel is longer
and the ammunition doesn't generally have a visible flash during the day.
With this carbine length it did, so they needed to put on a flash hider to conceal it.
So loading on these is just like a standard Lee-Enfield. We have a charger bridge. We have 5 rounds stripper clips.
We're probably going to get some hang fires with this ammo, this is 1941 production ammo.
5 rounds, that's only got 4 in it.
Second clip. One thing to keep in mind, as always with Enfield clips you want the second and fourth rounds
to have the rims riding up on top of rounds one, three and five.
That ensures that you won't get rim lock when you load the magazine up.
Or maybe it doesn't because that's exactly what I have here. Let's fix that, there we go.
Rear sight on the Number 5 is this very large ghost ring.
If you want a more precise sight, you can flip it up and you have a smaller aperture
that you can run out to 800 yards. I'm just going to go ahead and use the ghost ring for now.
Three for three, that's pretty good.
Now I mentioned the recoil pad that these have. That was originally intended to actually soften recoil.
Of course it's ... a lighter carbine using a standard service cartridge, so it was thought recoil would be hefty, and it was.
... The problem when they designed this recoil pad though,
is that it's actually significantly smaller than the profile of the end of the stock.
So, (and pretty much all of them today are pretty much rock-hard), but originally you had, yeah, a softer recoil pad,
but you're also focusing all the recoil of the rifle onto this smaller area.
So I'm not sure it really did a whole lot of good.
Today it definitely doesn't do any good because, like I said, they're all 70 years old and rock-hard.
Not bad, I like this. It's definitely shorter. It's definitely handier.
Obviously, I haven't actually tested this one out to see how it holds zero,
but for up-close jungle fighting, I think these probably would have been effective.
Certainly a lot of troops would have preferred them over a full-length rifle.
Thanks for tuning in guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Very cool, 1945 dated, Number 5 "Jungle Carbine" here.
Tune back into ForgottenWeapons.com for more World War Two service rifles.
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