[ Australian Prototype Jungle Carbines ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
James Julia Auction House taking a look at some
of the guns that are going to be up for sale
in their spring of 2017 auction.
We have three here today that are all
variants on the same theme,
and that is Australian lightweight Enfields.
So in 1943, pretty much across the entire British Commonwealth
it was decided that they needed a handier, lighter, shorter rifle for jungle combat.
The standard Number 1 and Number 4 rifles were nice,
but they were kind of long and kind of heavy.
So experimentation began in three different countries all pretty much simultaneously.
Now in Canada and in the UK this experimentation took place on Number 4 actions.
And while Canada's experiments would kind of end up dissolving into nothing,
the British experiments led to the Number 5 Mark I rifle,
which we commonly know today as the "Jungle Carbine".
And these were made in fairly substantial numbers at the end of World War Two.
In Australia however, the experimentation was done on Number 1 Mark III receivers, SMLEs,
because Australia had never transitioned to manufacturing the Number 4 rifle.
Now, sure, it would have been possible for the British to supply them
the technical package for the Number 4.
But since the factory was already tooled up for the Number 1,
why bother changing during the war?
The Number 1 Mark III was working well enough for the Australians as it was,
it didn't make sense to put in the time and the expense to change it during a conflict.
So what we have here is one of the first Australian experiments
into a handier carbine version of the SMLE.
They took a standard rifle and they really only made two substantive changes to it.
They cut the barrel down by about 5 inches, so it's a 20 inch barrel, 20.2 I believe.
And then they replaced the rear tangent sight with a rear aperture sight.
Kind of a simplified two position aperture.
And that was done because with the shorter barrel there was a shorter sight radius,
and it was deemed to be too short of a sight radius with that tangent sight up on the barrel.
Move the rear sight back to the charger bridge.
And this also kind of duplicates the sighting system of the Number 4 rifle
which was pretty good, so why not do that?
Simultaneously they also designed a new bayonet for it,
a 10 inch bayonet instead of the previous standard 16 inch.
Again, making things a little shorter and lighter.
Now what this rifle did not do was make any serious attempt at lightening.
So this rifle is 8 pounds 11 ounces, which is slightly lighter than a standard Number 1 Mark III.
And all of the lightening is due to 5 inches of barrel and stock being removed.
That would turn out to be not really sufficient.
The Australians would move on to these two rifles as a later and more successful experiment.
This was the Number 6 Mark I rifle.
And it was the same basic concept,
but they took the lightening part of "shortening and lightening" more seriously.
So these rifles have substantial lightening operations made to them.
So the barrels have been cut lighter, the front sights had been made lighter,
the receivers have been made lighter, the charger bridge has been made lighter.
What this is, really, is a British Number 5 rifle as if it had been built on a Number 1 receiver.
In total they made just under 200 of these.
They did 96 of this pattern and 98 of this pattern.
And both of those production runs were split in half.
50% of them, so ... 48 or 49 rifles,
were made with a brass butt plate and the other half were made with a rubber butt plate.
So in total, they had four different variations that they were going to test,
and they had basically 50 of each. (I think it was actually 48 or 49, but.)
The difference here is this, the Number 6 Mark I rifle,
has a rear aperture sight very much like a Number 5 or a Number 4.
And this, which is the Rifle ... Number 6 Mark I/1,
this has the tangent sight from the Smelly, the SMLE.
And that's really the only difference, there are some changes to the handguard
that are necessitated by the different rear sight, that's incidental.
So the Australians went through manufacturing all of these rifles,
and they were doing this during 1944 and into 1945.
And ultimately they would finish having them all ready to work on - in August of 1945.
Of course the other thing that happened in August of 1945
was the US dropped a couple of atomic bombs on Japan and World War Two ended.
So the fighting in the South Pacific, as it applied to the Japanese, also ended.
Now the British would be back in that area fighting, in Malaya for example.
But as ... soon as the war ended, the urgency of developing a new carbine version
for the South Pacific, that urgency evaporated as well.
And so this project ground to a ... pretty sudden halt.
Now before it did, there was actually an order placed for 40,000 of the Number 6 Mark I rifles.
They weren't going to be manufactured new,
they were going to be made as conversions from existing SMLEs.
But with the end of the war that contract was kind of put on hold,
and ultimately never fulfilled.
So this is just the shortened pattern of Number 1 Mark III.
And this was actually the intermediate length of this rifle.
There was also some consideration given to a rifle that
would have been actually 2 inches shorter.
So this is a 20 inch barrel, they considered an 18 inch barrel
which was designated the "Short Version".
Ultimately they decided to put the intermediate into production
for trials, and so that's what we have here.
You'll notice there are a couple of other changes made to the design, and they may not be obvious.
But when you look, there is no fitting here for a sacking swivel.
So a standard SMLE has an additional what looks like a sling swivel sitting right here.
And it's got an open loop sling swivel,
and you use it to hook three rifles together to stand them up.
These short versions don't have that.
And ... it's not just that the loop itself is gone,
but the ... hump where the screw would have gone through is also gone.
So it's a custom fabricated nose cap for these.
There are a set of grasping grooves, three on each side, cut into the stock - that's non-standard.
And then most significantly the rear sight is gone, having been replaced by an aperture.
This rear aperture ... has two settings on it, 2 and 5 for 200 and 500 yards.
And then in theory it would have a spring loaded detent that would allow you to pop
... the aperture itself up and down.
Now on this particular example, the detent isn't there and it's a solid screw.
So in order to adjust it you actually have to unscrew this,
and then lift the sight to its other position, and then tighten the screw back down.
I'm sure that's not how this would have worked in production,
I think it's just a short cut that they made for the trials gun.
As far as markings go, on all three of these shortened experimental rifles
you'll find standard markings on the butt socket here.
Lithgow, it's designated as a Mark III* SMLE, and dated 1944.
However, there will be a serial number on the front of the receiver.
On this one that is XP 50, "XP" is experimental production.
And there ... was a long range of XP serial numbers of
rifles like this of all sorts of different configurations.
We have basic proof marks here on the opposite side at the front.
And then this one actually has a few other markings
stamped into the right side of the buttstock.
A Lithgow stamp, "HV", I'm not entirely sure of the significance of that, and 1944.
Now looking at the two Number 6 rifles, we'll see some different changes have been made.
Specifically they've started to do things to actually lighten the gun
beyond just cutting down the barrel and the stock.
So things like (and these are mostly things you'll also see on the Number 5 British Jungle Carbines),
the centre of the bolt handle has been drilled out hollow, it's a little bit lighter.
The trigger guard is actually just slightly narrower,
so they shaved off just a little bit of material on the outside there.
There are some internal lightening cuts to the receiver, to the sear, a couple of other parts.
So these sound like they're pretty insignificant weight reductions,
but when you total them all up, they did take a fair amount of weight off the guns.
So where ... that first prototype we just looked at was 8 pounds 11 ounces,
these rifles come in at 7 pounds 7 or 8 ounces each.
So about a pound and a quarter removed through little changes like this.
Now looking at the front of the rifle they've added a flash hider cone,
very much like a Number 5, but it is not in fact identical to a Number 5 part.
So if you run into one of these rifles, even if it looks pretty legit
if it's got a Number 5 flash hider on it, it's not an original Australian short rifle.
Another interesting part of that is the bayonet lug is again very similar to a Number 5
but this bayonet lug is cut to fit a standard pattern of 1907 bayonet.
Which is what the British used on the SMLEs.
The Number 5 rifle has its own unique bayonet with a slightly different shape of bayonet lug.
Interesting to note here that the protective wings on the front sight are an independent piece
that is fitted on, not cast as one unit with the rest of the front sight block.
Now the front of the stock looks very much like a commercial sporter style.
It's just rounded off like that, that is correct.
You'll notice the brass reinforcing pins in there.
A series of grasping grooves have been added to the upper ... handguard and the stock.
And then this being the Number 6 Mark I, it has a flip-up rear aperture sight.
very much like that of a Number 4 or Number 5 rifle.
It's graduated out to 800 yards, and it works just like any other Enfield sight of that type.
You'll notice they had to make some changes to the receiver here to mount this sight on.
The other rifle here, this is the Number 6 Mark I/1, has a standard SMLE receiver back here,
and then it still has the tangent rear sight up on the barrel.
Now the protective wings are a bit different.
Here you can see ... a fluting cut to the base of the barrel.
That ... exists on both of these Number 6 rifles, but you can only see it on this one
because the handguard is shorter to accommodate the rear sight.
In all the other particulars this is identical to that last rifle.
It has the same sort of flash hider, bayonet lug and front sight.
It has the same contour to the stock and the same grasping grooves.
Serial number wise, this I/1 rifle is serial number XP 8, so experimental production eight.
And then it has some interesting marks on the stock.
The serial number again, XP 8. And then a date of 12/1944, so this was a very late one.
This I believe had some modifications done to it.
The typical I/1 rifles were in the XP 100 or 200 serial range.
Our Number 6 Mark I ... is again an XP serial number.
In this case XP 244, and it does not have any additional odd markings on it.
It does however have a socket date of 1945.
Now you may have seen rifles like these for sale, and that's for good reason.
There are some companies out there, primarily Navy Arms and I think a few others,
that are making and selling rifles like these, especially like this one.
And they are often marketed as a "Number 6 Jungle Carbine".
And what they've done is just take an existing SMLE and cut it down to this length
without making the other more technical changes to the design
like the stacking sling and the rear sights.
And they then sell them as commercial items.
And this is a popular thing, they are handy little rifles, there's no doubt about that.
And it's in the same vein as the "Tanker" Mauser rifles that you see out there
which are also fabrications.
Or the Tanker Garand rifles, which are also fabrications again.
A gun where there were a couple made as a prototype at one point,
but they were never issued.
And certainly not in the way that some of these companies sometimes market them,
or at least the way people assume they would have been.
So I thought it would be a really valuable thing to bring out a couple of real examples of these
because there are very few of any of these patterns left in existence today.
And by taking a look at the real ones,
for one thing it allows us to help distinguish between real ones and commercial fakes.
And it also lets us see what the actual design intent was with some of these guns.
So for example on this guy, that rear aperture sight
gives you an interesting additional insight into what the designers were looking to accomplish.
If you would like to own any one of these three, or all three of them,
if you'd like to [be] probably the first person on your block
to have one of these that is legitimate and authentic,
take a look in the description text below.
You'll find links there to Julia's catalogue pages for all three of these rifles.
You can take a look at their provenance, and pictures, and description,
and place bids online right through the website if you're interested.
Thanks for watching.