Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at what I'm comfortable saying is one
of the best submachine guns of the Second World War.
This is the Italian Beretta Model 38A.
Now a couple of years ago I had a chance to do some
shooting with one of these, which we have on camera,
and I'll link to that video at the end of this one.
But at that point I never had a chance to sit down at the table here and take the gun apart,
and describe its history to you. So that's what we're doing today.
This gun was developed by a man named Tullio Marengoni,
who had extensive experience working for Beretta.
He was essentially Beretta's lead designer,
he was responsible for most of Beretta's pistols for the course of something like 30 years.
And he actually had experience designing submachine guns over that long as well.
Because when the Italians had the Villar Perosa Model of 1915 in World War One,
which you may recall is the really funky 9mm, top magazine fed,
double-barrelled, double action, aircraft machine gun that was adapted to infantry use.
And then finally people realised that this was not
a good configuration for a useful infantry weapon.
And so they split the Villar Perosas into two pieces,
and turned them into early real submachine guns.
... In fact the very first submachine guns ever fielded in combat.
Well there were two patterns of those, one done by OVP themselves,
and one done by Beretta. And it was Tullio Marengoni who developed the Beretta version.
So this man has experience with submachine guns dating back to 1918.
Now with the benefit of a couple of decades more firearms design experience,
in 1935 he sets about the beginnings of what would become this.
Now he started from essentially the Beretta 1918/30, which was a semi-auto only carbine.
One of the first pistol calibre carbines, truly.
Also a very interesting gun in its own right, and I have a video on that one as well.
He set about turning that into a military submachine gun.
And the early versions in 1935 had some interesting features.
It had this big funky, steampunk-looking, aluminium finned cooling jacket,
almost like what you see inside the shroud of a Lewis gun.
... Actually I should say, perhaps most importantly,
the Beretta 38 (starting in 1935) was developed for a new pistol cartridge
for the Italian army to use, and this ... would be adopted as the 9mm M38 cartridge.
It was essentially interchangeable with 9mm Parabellum.
Prior to this the Italians had been using 9mm Glisenti,
which is rather lighter loaded than 9 Parabellum.
And they finally got around to just standardising, essentially.
Now the M38 cartridge is a pretty potent one as 9mm Parabellum goes.
It was developed specifically for submachine guns like this.
So anyway, the short version is essentially at this point
... Italy has finally come up to the international standard of 9 Parabellum,
which is essential for this gun to really be a success.
And the extra power does it well, because this gun is easily able
to handle the power of this improved, higher-power ammunition.
So, getting back to where I was.
1935 first prototypes are developed,
funky cooling shroud, they eventually simplify a lot of that down.
The gun reaches essentially this stage of its development
by the very beginning of 1938, January of '38.
It's not quite this exact pattern, this is a third model gun.
In a moment when we take a closer look I'll show you what changed,
but they are pretty much just aesthetic changes to the gun.
Production begins in January of 1938,
it is then 6 months later formally adopted by the Italian army in July of 1938.
Beretta was apparently pretty confident in the gun, and with good reason.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look,
and let me show you how this thing actually works, and let's take it apart.
There are a bunch of things to go over here.
And we'll start off with the fact that the Beretta 38 is a relatively unusual submachine gun,
actually, it's a very unusual submachine gun in that it ejects from the left.
So we have a charging handle here on the right,
and our ejection port is actually over here on the left.
Now the early prototypes were actually a centre-top eject system.
And you may have noticed that I'm talking about Beretta 38, but also Beretta 38A.
And the reason for the re-designation to "A" is a little bit mysterious.
There's no formal documentation that anyone has been able to find
to explain precisely what the "A" modification was.
The best theory that I have found on the ... question
is that it was the change from top eject to side eject, they went from Model 38 to Model 38A.
The ... original 38 did not see any significant mass production.
So ... all the guns that you find out there are going to be 38As,
or the later simplified versions, which we'll talk about in a few minutes.
We have a bunch of markings here on the top of the receiver.
Moschetto Automatico, Model 38A, Calibre 9.
And then patents, a couple of patent numbers there.
And then manufactured by P. Beretta, Pietro Beretta, Gardone Val Trompia, Italy.
And then, interestingly, this one is dated "1943-XXI".
XXI is of course the 21st year of the Italian Fascist Era, which is 1943.
Again, we'll talk about this in a few minutes,
but there were actually simplified versions of the gun that were made starting in 1942.
But they continued to produce the original 38As,
as you can see from this particular example, that is a 1943 date.
We have a proof mark here on the front of the receiver.
We have the serial number and calibre markings there on the front of the receiver, 2396.
The full serial number is G 2396, which you can see on the back of the receiver here.
And also on the stock.
These used a number of features very similar to the Carcano rifles, including the stock.
So things like the sling bar, the stock configuration,
the stamping in it, are very similar to the Carcano rifles.
This particular example is actually the third pattern.
So the first pattern of production guns, which are quite scarce,
instead of having round holes had elongated slots in the barrel jacket.
And they had a really big ... two port muzzle brake.
So the same size as this, but two really big ports, one on each side.
The first pattern also had a bayonet lug on it.
And it used a ... folding bayonet that was conceptually the same as the
Model 38 Carcano folding bayonet, but not actually interchangeable, kind of curiously.
They got rid of the bayonet lugs fairly quickly.
They got rid of the elongated slots fairly quickly.
So the second version retained the bayonet lug, but went to round holes like this.
And then this is the third version with round holes.
Got rid of the bayonet lug, because do you really need a bayonet on a submachine gun?
Mmm, not really.
For controls we have a dual-trigger system that would become very typical of Beretta.
The front trigger is semi-auto, the rear trigger is full-auto.
It's a little hard to see there (and this rear trigger by the way, has been bent just a little bit,
still works, but that's not quite the shape you would normally expect),
the rear trigger is serrated so that in the dark
you can tell if you're on the full-auto trigger or the smooth semi-auto trigger.
There is also a safety lever on the side of the receiver: fire and safe.
What this does is lock the bolt in position.
So if I engage that, the bolt's not going to open.
This does work in either the open or closed position of the bolt. So that's how that works.
The original magazines for the 38A were 20-round sticks like this,
they did later develop 30s, and 40s, the 20s are relatively scarce.
It's really cool that this actually has its original 20-round magazine with it.
And then one of the other features that Marengoni put on the gun is a sliding magazine cover.
So if you're transporting the gun, or for whatever reason just have the magazine out of it for a while,
you can close that up to keep gunk out of the action.
The magazine release is just a simple lever right there.
The rear sight is an adjustable tangent, it goes out to 500 metres.
That's really fairly optimistic for a 9mm submachine gun,
but that was typical for this period, the late pre-World War Two submachine guns.
Now disassembly is very easy. We have an arrow here.
What you're going to do is push the button in,
and rotate this end cap so the arrow is lined up right on top.
(There we go, this one's a little bit stiff.)
And then I can just pull the end cap off.
And we have a self-contained, captive recoil spring system in there.
One thing to be aware of when you're taking this out, the tail on this bolt is flexible.
And it has a tendency to drop down and jam into the stock, right here.
Which you can see has happened a bit in this gun's ... history.
So when you take the bolt out, be careful to lift the tail up so that you don't gouge the stock right there.
For further disassembly, we can pull these two screws out to take off the trigger guard.
And then pull this screw, and take the action out of the stock.
This one by the way is a split screw, which makes it a little trickier to get out.
So this is something that troops weren't really supposed to be taking apart in the field.
Fortunately, from my long period of tinkering with French guns,
I have some split head screwdrivers that will fit this.
So with that nut off, we can pull out the screw which is actually the sling swivel.
And then the front band comes off.
On the trigger guard note that we have the fancy captive screws here.
Alright, with that screw out we can remove the trigger guard.
And now we can take the action out of the stock.
One thing that's worth pointing out here from an engineering perspective
is that this receiver is not a tube, it is a single machined piece.
And if we zoom in on it here you can actually see some of those machining marks still on it,
certainly down here but also on the round section.
So a pretty simple receiver regardless, just a channel for the bolt essentially.
The one feature to point out is our ejector here, which is a solid block,
which is also going to be important for firing the gun.
If we take a look at the bolt assembly, we can see that the Beretta is one of those interesting
early ... first generation submachine guns that ... does not have a fixed firing pin.
Instead you can see the firing pin there.
It actually has sort of a hammer right here.
When the bolt fully closes, this hammer hits the back of the ejector block
and it pushes the firing pin forward to fire.
So that ensures that a cartridge can't be detonated until the bolt is fully closed.
And it prevents out of battery discharges,
which are kind of a rare, but real, fact of life on fixed firing pin submachine guns.
Now this also makes the bolt a little bit funky to disassemble, so let's get into that.
We have a recoil spring inside this tube, it is captive.
So when the gun fires, the bolt is going to reciprocate back like that.
And in order to take this apart we have a little sliding wedge here.
This is definitely under spring tension, so when I open this up I want to hold onto the back end.
There we go. There is a little detent, so that will snap into place there.
And then I can ... let that out.
So there's the spring tube, there's the spring itself.
And now we have the bolt body, that is our firing pin.
And in order to disassemble it, we actually have this serrated thumb pad here,
because what I need to do is pull this all the way back.
That allows the firing pin to come out the back.
So what we've got going on here is this ...
(well, let me pull this out first) so there's our firing pin.
It has a return spring on it right there,
and it has this open ... block in the centre.
This rotating hammer has three separate lugs on it.
So that lug right there is normally the one that's going to sit in the firing pin
and push the firing pin forward.
This is serrated for you to grasp for disassembly and reassembly.
And this is the part that actually hits on the ejector block
and causes the firing pin to go forward, so this is 180 degrees opposite of this lug.
So in order to disassemble it we have to pivot this into
this position so that the firing pin can slide out the back.
In order to reassemble it, and this is worth pointing out,
to reassemble it what we actually want to do is
put the ... rotary hammer here in the horizontal position
so that the firing pin can slide in here.
The firing pin has to be able to slide all the way in, like so.
And then we want to rotate the hammer up into the firing pin and keep it in place.
You see it's got springs in it, so if I don't have a way to lock it in place
it's going to pop back out the back of the bolt. ...
So what I do is snap this lug forward, which locks the whole thing in place.
And then this can actually stay forward while it's in the gun,
because the hammer here ... when it fires it doesn't travel far enough to have to push this lug back.
So this funky thing is just here to allow for disassembly of the firing pin.
The production and the further development of the Beretta 38A
are another interesting story worth telling.
The first 500 guns that were produced went actually not to the Italian army,
but to the Italian African police in October of 1938.
And then there was actually a significant delay in getting these to the Italian army,
because in some time '38, '39, the Romanian army placed an order for 20,000 of them,
and Beretta actually produced those before it produced the ones for the Italian army.
So the Italian army wouldn't actually start getting these guns until 1940 or 1941.
Once they did of course they wholeheartedly accepted them,
and these became very popular submachine guns.
They were initially intended for basically assault troops, paratroops,
sort of the, the special front line elite soldiers.
But as ... World War Two progressed, they would filter out to a lot of other different units,
different organisations, and kind of anyone who could get their hands on these really liked to.
They became particularly popular with the Germans.
Skipping ahead a little bit here, after the ... Italian Armistice
Beretta was occupied by the Germans,
and continued to produce these submachine guns for German usage.
Both these and the simplified version, which I should also mention here.
As early as 1941 there were plans in place
for a much simplified, cheaper version of the Beretta 38.
These would go into production in '42, become known as the Beretta 38/42,
38/43, and 38/44 as they went through a number of iterations.
But what they would do essentially is get rid of a lot of the fancy features.
They got rid of the barrel shrouds, they got rid of the magazine dust covers.
They got rid of like the whole fancy bolt firing system,
and went to a much simpler fixed firing pin, very basic, very plain bolt.
However, these guns actually continued to be produced
in the original Beretta 38 configuration, like this one, through 1944.
And we saw this is a 1943 production one.
They were manufacturing 38As and the simplified versions at the same time.
It's unclear exactly why they were doing this, aside from perhaps leftover stocks of parts.
There are even some really funky hybrid guns out there
that have simplified ... front ends, like the simplified barrel, simplified bolts,
but 38A receivers, that were produced under German occupation.
So that was clearly a matter of cleaning out old parts.
But as I said, they were producing the fancy ones and the simple ones at the same time.
Overall production figures are not clear.
We know that there were at least a couple hundred thousand 38s of various patterns
made during German occupation, because some of the German records survive.
But as far as total production of the 38As under Italian governance,
we just don't really know, but quite a lot of them.
So, lastly, the story of this particular gun is I think worth telling.
This is a US veteran bringback gun from World War Two.
The soldier who brought this back proceeded to, when he got home,
give it to his 9 year old nephew as a gift.
What could be cooler as a 9 year old than getting your own actual submachine gun?
Also, what could perhaps be more American?
And this was in '44, '45, I don't know exactly which theatre it came back from.
But that kid kept the gun.
And in 1968, when there was the ... NFA amnesty,
he went ahead and registered at that point, ... at that point being old enough to do so.
And so this is an original World War Two bringback, unmodified, amnesty registered Beretta 38A.
As I said, these are fantastic submachine guns.
If you haven't seen the footage I did shooting them,
definitely take a look at that, I will link to it in the end cards of this video.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed it.
Thanks for watching.