Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, and I have a hypothesis that's probably going to raise some eyebrows today.
And that is that this rifle, the M38 Carcano, the "Fucile Corto", in 7.35mm
is in fact one of the best thought out rifles for World War Two.
So the problems with the Carcano's reputation here in the United States have largely been based on ammunition.
The 6.5mm version, which is what Italy, of course, had in World War One
and ultimately actually used mostly in World War Two as well,
doesn't use a standard 6.5mm bullet. Standard is .264 inch. The Carcano
uses a .268 inch bullet, ... and a lot of people for a long time didn't really realise this,
they just hand-loaded ammunition with standard store-bought 6.5mm bullets
and the problem is those don't quite engage the rifling very well. And they led to really poor accuracy.
So the Carcano developed a reputation for that, and then the M38 version in 7.35 has its own problem,
which is that it also uses a non-standard bullet diameter, in this case .300 instead of .308.
So .308 bullets cause overpressure and don't shoot very well, and
.300 bullets aren't used by anything else and are very difficult to come by.
So these also developed a reputation for not being very good accurate guns.
Throw in the Kennedy thing, that doesn't help of course.
And everyone viewed Italian guns as kind of crap for a very long time. Unfairly, I would surmise.
So let's take a start by looking at the rifle that the Italians used in World War One.
This is an M91 Carcano, and I think it's going to be like long enough that I can't really get the whole thing in frame here.
But it is a kind of typical first generation bolt-action small bore smokeless powder rifle.
Introduced of course in 1891, this is right in the same era as the introduction of the Mosin-Nagant,
the first Arisakas, ... the Commission Rifle followed by a number of different Mauser designs.
All of these rifles kind of came about in the same handful of years, the same decade or two.
And like most of them, the Carcano has a rear sight which in this case is adjustable up to 2,000 metres.
And a little bit different than most here, and it has a battle sight of 300 metres.
Everyone assumed that combat would be taking place at much greater distances
since the projectiles and the new gunpowder could make that possible.
It has a long barrel, which is partly a holdover from earlier black-powder rifles,
and it's also partly a holdover from the tradition of firing ... in ranks, where you have multiple ranks,
either two or three ranks, of men firing one after the other. And having a long barrel is important so
that the muzzle of the guy in the back rank protrudes beyond the back of the head of the guy in the front rank,
so that you don't have guys accidentally swinging the rifle and
shooting ... the front rank of troops in the back of the head. That's a problem.
And that's one of the reasons that long barrels like this were maintained into the 20th century.
Unfortunately, of course in World War One they're not really doing any of that style of shooting,
and that makes this rifle kind of long and bulky and heavy.
You don't want to, for example, storm a trench with this thing.
Bayonets were also relatively long at this point. This was considered an important weapon,
the length is important along with a bayonet for defending against cavalry.
Of course, by the end of World War One cavalry is not really the same thing that it was in the 19th century,
so that's going to go out of style. And a lot of countries adapted to this.
First off, when they were issuing these rifles, pretty much everyone also had a carbine version of their rifle
to issue to guys on horseback who didn't have a lot of these same issues. They didn't fire in ranks,
they didn't need bayonets, because often they'd have a sabre already.
Or at least they didn't need to be defending against mounted cavalry with a long weapon because they were on horses themselves.
So most nations had an infantry long rifle, and then a short little cavalry carbine. Italy's no different.
However, in World War Two things change. Cavalry's gone, we have this newer idea
of how war is going to be fought. Anyone who looked at the data is going to realise that
this long range 2,000 metre stuff is just ludicrous fantasy. It doesn't actually happen.
... Everyone kind of adapted to this and some adapted better than others.
One of the main things that was done is the adoption of the short rifle concept.
One of the classic examples of this is the British SMLE, the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield,
and the SMLE was an intermediate length rifle that replaced both the long
infantry rifle for the grunts, and also the short cavalry carbines for the guys on horses.
Just give everyone the same standard pattern rifle.
We acknowledge that the barrel length isn't that important any more,
and we can give everyone something that's short enough that it will work fine for the guys on horseback.
And it simplifies the production, we only have one version of the gun instead of trying to manufacture a bunch of different ones.
The Germans, for example, did this. That is the Karabiner 98k.
Now they actually didn't really have a shorter version, they had
a mountain troops rifle that was a little bit short, but that kind of is an exception.
So the Germans went to a short rifle in general. The Americans did,
we had with the Krag–Jørgensen, the American military had the rifle and the carbine.
And when they adopted the 1903 Springfield, they tested a bunch of different lengths
and decided to go with an intermediate length, about the same as the SMLE.
Now the Italians did that as well.
And the Italians kind of took things a little bit shorter than most people, which makes sense.
The long barrel - really you didn't even need as long of a barrel as the Americans and the British and the Germans had.
This has ... just over a 21 inch barrel, even that's probably longer than it really needs to be, but
one benefit you get from a little bit of a longer barrel is you don't quite have as much muzzle blast and noise
and concussion from the rifle. Which is important because they're not issuing these guys earplugs
and you don't want to totally deafen your soldiers in the first few weeks of training.
So the Italians went with a shorter rifle than most, and they did a number of other things that...
What they did was better appreciate the lessons from World War One going into World War Two.
So the bolt handle on the M38 here is turned down, the Germans also did that, but not everyone did.
Not everyone recognised, I guess that most people did, but the Japanese, for example,
maintained ... a straight bolt handle.
The Italians went with a turned down bolt handle.
The rear sight is one of the biggest departures of the M38 from kind of the world standard pattern of rifles.
Now, even the Germans had reduced the complexity and the range of their rear sight.
That rollercoaster ... Lange Visier sight on the original Gewehr 98
that thing was not a particularly good sight. At the beginning of the war it had a
400 metre zero, which meant you had to aim at a guy's boots in order to hit him up close.
... Not a very practical sight, it was good for what they thought war would be,
wasn't good for what war actually turned out to be. Now the Italians by 1938 recognised
what war was really turning into which was you're not shooting people more than 300 yards away.
... Without optics on the rifle you can't even see people 300 yards away if they're doing even a
slightest bit of attempt to hide from you. So, ... where the Germans simplified their rear sight,
the Italians just made it flat-out fixed. There is no adjustment on the rear sight to the M38 Carcano,
and it's got a 200 metre zero. In the 7.35 cartridge, which we'll get to in a moment,
ballistically you're pretty much on at 50, you're pretty much on at 200 yards,
you're four inches high at 100 yards, and you're getting several inches low out to 250.
A centre, just holding right on the middle of your target, will easily make hits from 0 to 300 yards,
and do it pretty well.
This makes a lot of sense. Now there are a lot of people out there...
There's a lot of common lore about this that, "Well, Italian troops were too stupid to understand
their adjustable sights ... and that's why they went to this fixed sight." Well
let's think about that, really how hard is an adjustable sight to figure out?
It's got numbers on it, 1 to 20, and you know that those are in hundreds of metres,
it's not that hard to figure out how to move it from 100 to 200 to 600. That wasn't the issue,
those adjustable sights don't really have anything to do with marksmanship because
almost none of them are adjustable for windage, which is really where your marksmanship comes into play.
In reality this was an acknowledgment that ... the range adjustment on military rear sights simply wasn't useful.
You're not shooting people at 600 or 1,200 or 1,800 yards, it just doesn't happen.
So, what you do get from that is a sight that can be bumped and the adjustments changed
when you don't expect it. It can be broken unintentionally thus causing problems,
and it's more expensive to make in the first place.
So, why not fix all of those problems and just use a fixed rear sight?
That's what the Italians did, and I think it was actually an excellent decision for them.
Now one other change the Italians made that some countries didn't have to make, but
I like the Italian thought process on this, was they changed the calibre.
Back in World War One this has been adopted in 6.5x52 Carcano.
Long skinny bullet, light recoil, but they came to the conclusion that it didn't have enough wounding potential.
They were hurting too many guys without killing them, and they wanted something that had better terminal ballistics.
So, similar to the Japanese changing from 6.5 to 7.7 in the late 1930s, the Italians decided to
change the standard army calibre from 6.5 to 7.35, which is .30 calibre.
Now the problem they ran into was they started this changeover in 1938.
That's fine, but by 1940 they're still trying to change everybody over and now World War Two is really a much bigger thing than it had been in '38.
And they just didn't have the money and the production capacity and the logistical capacity to institute a
universal change of calibre in the middle of a war when they're trying to also
dramatically increase arms production. So in 1940 they threw in the towel
and they went back to the 6.5. They'd made about 645,000 rifles in the new 7.35 cartridge,
those went to rear echelon type units where the logistical issues weren't that big of a deal.
They sold a bunch of them to Finland, they sold almost 100,000 of these
specific rifles to Finland (in fact this is a Finnish property marked example).
And they went back to 6.5mm. So, not because there's anything functionally wrong with the 7.35, just because
it's 1940, all of a sudden ... the world is engulfed in war and we don't have the logistical capacity
to make this changeover right now. So, you know, maybe when the war's over we'll try it then.
So the 7.35 cartridge is kind of an interesting one in that they actually reduce the bullet weight.
In 6.5 they've been using a 160 grain bullet, they drop that to 128 grain in the 7.35,
and actually increased the velocity. So out of a short rifle like this that's 128 grains at just under
2,500 feet per second. Out of the carbine length M38s, because there were still some cavalry carbines
(a couple inches shorter), it's just over 2,400 feet per second.
So the cartridge they went to is almost identical to 7.62x39.
Now, an intermediate cartridge like that couldn't possibly be effective as a military round.
Well, obviously it is, it was, and it continues to be.
... Why I like that in this rifle is it is an acknowledgment that you don't need the ballistics that the
long-range terminal velocity of a cartridge like .30-06, or 8 Mauser, or the Russian 54 rimmed cartridge.
Because yeah, that's going to have a lot more capacity to injure at say 1,000 or 1,500 metres,
but as we've already discussed no one's ever really using that.
Potentially machine guns are, which is one of the rationales for keep keeping those cartridges,
but for the purposes of an infantry rifle, nobody's shooting at 1,000 yards.
And the kick that you get from a cartridge that's got that kind of effectiveness that far down range is
really quite substantial in a short ... light rifle like this.
Especially when you've got troops who are, I wouldn't say necessarily poorly trained, but quickly trained.
Guys who are not professional soldiers, they're volunteers and/or conscripts.
We've get a couple weeks of training and then go into combat,
they're not lifelong shooters, a heavy recoiling short, light carbine is going to be hard for them to shoot.
It's hard for people today to shoot.
A lot of people complain about taking those Mosin-Nagant carbines, and you know,
they'll kick your butt if you try to shoot them too much, especially prone or from a bench.
So the new Italian cartridge is basically 7.62x39 ballistically speaking.
It's a lot more comfortable to shoot from a short light rifle like this, and yet
it has all the capacity that's actually necessary to injure or kill at those ranges where it's actually being used.
So, all of these things put together, I think this is a really, really undervalued rifle.
I think people ... totally don't appreciate
the correctness and the wisdom that went into the design features on these rifles.
I think a lot of people kind of just assume that the common lore about
Carcanos being all crap rifles is true, when it's really not.
Now a little bit more detail on this particular one, this as I mentioned is a Finnish property rifle.
The Finns actually adjusted the front sights, they put slightly taller front sights on
to change the zero from 200 metre down to 150 metre, which is even better, I think.
And I am really curious how one of these will handle in as close to practical usage conditions as I can get.
So I am actually going to take this one out to a two gun match, and
I'm going to run it in some competition against a friend with a K98 Mauser.
And we will see how it does. Now the first stage of that match is actually publishing today,
at this very same time as you're watching this, and if you'd like to see it
head on over to the InRange TV channel, that's where... I used to have a lot more two gun match stuff on
Forgotten Weapons and most of that has moved to InRange TV.
So if you're interested in two gun matches in general as well as, of course,
this specific rifle in particular, head over to InRange TV and check it out there.
A couple comments on this.
Yes, the cartridge is very hard to find. I lucked out and a local gun shop happened,
I don't know where they got it, but they got 200 rounds of commercial production, recent,
non-corrosive, 7.35 Carcano ammunition. I happened to wander into the store and found it, and I bought all of it.
Which is why I have ammunition to use in this match.
So that's one of the continuing problems with these rifles is nobody is going to really
appreciate them that much, if they can't actually shoot them.
And they're very hard rifles to shoot because of this proprietary bullet diameter.
So, it can be done, you can swage bullets from .308 down to .300, but you really have to want to.
And the reputation these rifles have suggests that no one would want to in the first place.
So, with that in mind I am going to head out to the range and do that match shooting,
and see if this actually lives up to my expectations.
If you're curious, follow-on, find out for yourself, and maybe a little bit of a
renaissance in appreciation for the sadly maligned Carcano rifle.
Thanks for watching guys.
If you enjoy this sort of content, please consider checking out my Patreon account.
It is contributions from folks there that make it possible for me to do things like buy up
7.35 ammunition when I find it because it's not cheap stuff, so.
Thanks for watching.