Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
Movie Armaments Group up in Toronto, Canada,
taking a look at possibly the ugliest submachine gun
ever conceived by humankind.
However, interestingly, also one of the best. One of the really
good submachine guns of World War Two, despite its looks.
This is a Mark 1 Owen Gun, and it was adopted by the
Australian military in 1941, and actually remained in service there through the Vietnam War.
So, this is named after basically a kid named Evelyn Owen, who lived in New South Wales,
and liked tinkering with stuff that was masculine, bombs, guns, that sort of thing.
And he goofed around building himself a full-auto submachine gun in the late 1930s.
And it was marginal, like it worked. It wasn't licensed, it wasn't regulated, it wasn't allowed to be done.
And when it came time for Evelyn Owen to enlist in the army and go off to fight in World War Two,
he left this thing in a bag leaning against the garage of his house (or his parents house I think at the time),
and thought no more of it. Well, the neighbour was a guy named Vincent Wardell,
who was supervisor of a rather substantial metalwork factory, Lysaght Works in New South Wales,
and he found this thing sitting in a bag against the side of his neighbour's house and pulled it out
and looked at it and went, huh, this is an unusual weird-looking homemade machine gun.
And apparently Owen's parents were very apologetic that you know, oops, our kid left his machine gun lying around.
But Wardell thought there was some potential in this, and at this point (we're talking about 1940 here),
Australia's in serious peril, like the Japanese might legitimately invade Australia.
This is about the same time period when we would see development of things like the Charlton automatic rifles,
trying to turn old Lee-Enfields into light machine guns. And so Wardell went back to his shop
and enlisted the help of one of his engineers, a guy by the name of Freddie Kunzler,
and together they put a bunch more development into this submachine gun.
And they got it to the point where it was pretty good, and they presented it to the Australian military.
And for the better part of a year the Australian military basically just
rebuffed them, blew them off, like we don't need your crap.
In large part this was because the Australian government was expecting to get a bunch of
Sten guns from the British. Which, by the way, they were anticipating to be
much better guns than the Sten actually turned out to be.
Well, the reason that this is I think still so heavily associated with Evelyn Owen today
is that part of the campaign that Kunzler and Wardell put together to try and get their gun
actually tested by the military was to kind of make a publicity issue out of it.
Look, this is hometown boy develops machine gun that will save Australia.
You know, we're desperately short of arms and, you know, it's produced here,
one of our glorious lads figured this thing out. And these guys were were taking their case
to the media, to newspapers, to politicians, every time the army rebuffed them. And so eventually
after getting the run-around several times. First they were told to develop this in .38 Smith & Wesson,
with a rimmed cartridge, and by the way, no, we won't give you a barrel or any ammunition to do it with.
So they did that, they actually put it together in .32 Auto using a piece of old Enfield barrel,
and they came back, and the Army went, well actually, no, we want it in .45 and so they figured,
ah, well, you know there's not a lot of .32 or .38 ammo floating around Australia for military purposes
so they probably want it, like, we've got Thompson guns, the military's probably got a lot of .45 Auto,
so OK, they took it back and they rebuilt the gun, reworked it into .45 Auto, submitted it
to the military again. And the military came back and "Oh, I'm sorry. Did you say you made it in .45 Auto?
No, no, no, we meant .455 Webley." So they went back again,
they reworked it again with an old Martini-Henry piece of barrel. And remarkably these guys ...
... I think, as much as I hate to neglect Evelyn Owen who came up with the original core of the gun,
it was Wardell and Kunzler who are really the talented gunsmiths and engineers who made this gun a reality.
And made it so good, as good as it turned out to be. And they managed to make this thing run in
.455 Webley, with a big rimmed cartridge. At that point finally ... like their publicity campaign on the side
took hold, and civilian elements of the government basically said, "Alright, enough of this nonsense,
we do actually need some submachine guns and this could actually be a really good one. So
you guys make it in 9mm, and you guys over in the Army give it a fair hearing."
And they did, in September of 1941. They tested this alongside a German MP38,
(MP40? I think it was a MP38), and a Thompson Gun, and a Sten Gun that was now available.
And lo and behold, the Owen did better than all of them.
It turns out to be a fantastically reliable gun, a very comfortable gun to shoot.
And through its entire career with the Australian military it would be a very highly prized and well regarded gun.
Now there are a couple reasons for that, despite the fact that it looks like some industrial accident.
It is very well balanced, the the gun balances right on the rear grip.
This top feed arrangement looks stupid, but it means you have gravity assisting in your feeding.
It means the ejection port is on the very bottom, so dirt can't fall into the ejection port.
Anything that's gonna fall in, just falls out down out the bottom of the gun.
And then there's a really clever, like, two chamber system to the inner workings of the gun.
So there's more to this thing than just the tube receiver that meets the eye.
So let me show you the cool innards of the Owen gun.
So looking at the Owen gun here. We have a charging handle in the back,
ejection port on the bottom right there.
Magazine, of course on the top.
The magazine holds 33 rounds. It is a double stack, double feed magazine and it has one particular unique feature,
which is this tab in the middle on the back. And that is actually the ejector.
There's no ejector built into the gun, because actually it would make the gun very difficult to disassemble,
for reasons you'll see in a moment. So instead they stuck the ejector right there.
By the way, this magazine is green because during World War Two a lot of these guns
were painted in a yellow and green camouflage scheme for use in the jungles in the South Pacific,
and the gun has been refinished, or repainted, but the magazine has not.
Now there were a couple patterns of these. There was a Mark 1, and a Mark 1*.
About ... the first 12,000 of these were Mark 1, and the subsequent 33,000 were Mark 1*.
Couple changes that were made over the course of this production.
The early guns actually had cooling fins on the back end of the barrel.
This is a Mark 1, but it has a smooth barrel, that was done just for simplification.
All of the guns will have this four slot compensator on the muzzle, right there.
It is very interesting to me that the sights...
Obviously they're offset because you've got a magazine well in the middle, what's funny is the sights are offset to the right.
Which is ideal for a left-hander, and not so ideal for a right-hander. It does work fine right-handed,
you just roll your face over the side of the stock and you can get a sight picture without a problem,
But why they ... didn't put the sights on the other side is really a mystery to me.
There's the rear sight. It is an aperture, and rolled off the right side of the gun.
The other major variations that you'll find are in the trigger frame here and the stock.
So the early guns had a solid metal trigger frame, ... later on in production
they would cut this out just to lighten up the gun a little bit. And there are no actual working parts in here.
So this isn't a problem for dirt or debris, like, something gets in there it doesn't matter.
And then the stocks: early on they actually used a wire frame stock,
and then they later switched to a wooden stock like this one.
Presumably, I don't know if it ... might weigh a little bit less, but it's probably a lot simpler and cheaper to make.
Just to get the stock out of the way we'll go ahead and take it off, and you do that by pushing this lever in,
which unlocks the stock, and we can pull it right out.
(Spring loaded lever there.)
Over on this side we have both of the sling swivels, right there, and the selector lever.
This is safe, semi and full-auto. So full-auto down there, semi-auto and safe.
These did have a bit of a reputation for firing bursts in semi-auto.
That may have just have been poor quality control at the height of production.
Serial number on this one is 28,775.
And the frame markings here, Owen 9mm Mark 1, 1943 production. These were made ...
through 1944, so this is middle/late, both by that date and by the serial number.
And made by Lysaght (I think I'm pronouncing that correctly), in Australia, patent pending.
Now the really clever bit about this gun is how the bolt and the charging handle are set up.
So the charging handle's back here. Being an open bolt gun it does lock all the way to the rear,
(go ahead and drop that). And of course you have your ejecting cases down here.
However, what you've got going on, is you actually kind of have a firewall here in the back end of the receiver.
And there's just a small diameter extension off of the bolt that comes back through this firewall
and connects to the handle here. So while there's a big open slot,
there's nothing back here, and it doesn't really matter if you get dirt into this.
Just like it doesn't matter if you get dirt into these holes. The operating bits are right up here.
So the spring is actually compressed between this firewall and the back end of the bolt.
So you can kind of see it here, that silver bit, kind of in shadow, is the
extension off of the end of the bolt.
And we can make this a bit clearer by taking the bolt assembly out. Now unlike most submachine guns,
this disassembles out the front. So the first thing we have to do is take this plug and lift it up,
and then the barrel comes right out.
That hole, by the way, is not supposed to be there. On the top of the barrel
is this big hole, which is supposed to be there. That is a plug into which
that pin sits, and that's what locks the barrel in position. So we need that in the upward position.
Then what we do is pull this up and rotate it and the bolt will come popping out the front of the gun
There it goes. You'll see why in a moment.
So there's our bolt. It looks like a typical submachine gun bolt. It does have a fixed firing pin,
it does not have any particular safety mechanism to prevent the bolt from bouncing backward if the gun is dropped.
For whatever reason ... I haven't read any complaints about that. So
we have a sear engagement surface here on the bottom.
Extractor.
It does sit in this configuration because remember, it's stripping a cartridge from a top mounted magazine.
Extractor's down here and the ejector is up here. So it's kicking empty cases downward out through this ejection port.
The main spring is compressed between the bolt and ... the firewall right here. And then this hole...
[Let] me back up a sec, let me take the end-cap off the receiver here.
This isn't really a field strip part, but we can do it.
Alright, with this end cap off (and this is just a tension fit over the back of the tube),
now you can see down the tube and you can see the firewall, right
right there, you can sort of see it.
Alright, now with a flashlight there, you can see that firewall in the back of the receiver tube.
So this is a full diameter tube from here down and
from here down inside the front. There's just that block welded about 3/4 of the way back,
So what's going on in there is our charging handle here slides over the back end of the bolt.
This pin locks it into that hole, and that gives you the solid connection between
... the charging handle and the bolt body itself. The recoil spring is compressed inside here up
between the ... bolt and the firewall.
So when you pull this back, the recoil spring here is compressing together, and then expanding forward.
But dirt that gets in here has ... to go around this narrow diameter
rod through the firewall to get into the main working area of the gun. And this is a system
that was basically very hygienic in service, and made for a very reliable gun.
Well there you have one completely field stripped Owen Gun.
Horribly ugly, but actually a very high quality, very reliable, very effective fighting submachine gun.
In total about 45,500 of these were manufactured by late 1944, when they stopped production of them.
It would ... remain the primary Australian Army submachine gun until the early 1960s,
when it was replaced by the F1 submachine gun, which is kind of like a modification of the Stirling.
The F1 was also pretty good.
This would see service in Korea, it would see service in Vietnam. It was well liked everywhere.
Unfortunately, the story isn't quite so happy for the guys who actually designed it.
So the Lysaght works, ... Vincent Wardell's company, who actually produced this,
they did all of the development work early on entirely self-funded. It was really a patriotic program for them,
like we really think we can help the country and help the military in the war effort
by developing this gun and we'll pay for everything.
When the military did adopt it and ... contracted with Lysaght for production,
they ... allowed them a 4% profit margin on it, which is pretty minimal.
You know, you look at things like the Thompson Gun, the Thompson had a profit margin of like 300%.
This was a tiny, tiny fraction of that. And then they actually didn't end up finally paying Lysaght in full
until 1947, years after the war.
And when all the accounting was finally said and done, the actual
realised profit margin on the Owen Gun for its manufacturer was 1.5%. So they basically
did all of this work at cost. So it did turn out to be a patriotic project for them,
perhaps even more than they had anticipated.
As far as Evelyn Owen, he got a one-time payment of 10,000 pounds for his contributions to the gun.
He also, by the way, got out of the army, they brought him back to take part in the production
and supervise and oversee. And to be honest, he didn't really contribute a whole lot at that point.
But he did get a one-time payment, he had all this notoriety from, you know, hey local boy does good.
He ended up an alcoholic, really quite unhappy, he put his money into trying to open a lumber mill
which didn't really go all that well, and he passed away in 1949. So
worked great for the Australian Army, not such a happy ending for everyone else who had been involved, so.
That is pretty conclusively the story of the Owen Gun.
Unfortunately, this particular one has a poorly reactivated chamber
and is not in firing condition, so we won't be able to shoot this one.
I remain on the hunt for an Owen Gun that I can actually take out to the range and shoot for you guys,
because we have one piece of really old video shooting an Owen, and I'd love to get new video on it.
At any rate, I do need to give a big thanks to Movie Armaments Group for letting me take apart their Owen.
These are really quite rare guns worldwide, so that was much appreciated.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.