Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Institute of Military Technology
taking a look at some really cool firearms that they have.
What we have here today is a special operations pistol
developed in World War Two.
This is a literal clandestine assassination pistol.
It's called the Welrod, and it is one of a whole bunch
of sneaky James Bond type gadgets that were developed by SOE,
British Special Operations Executive.
Specifically this was developed by Station IX of SOE.
They were the group responsible for, basically, sneaky
sabotage devices and weapons. They did a lot of explosives,
they did a lot of development of things like
fuses and triggering devices and timers.
In World War Two for resistance groups (like SOE was supplying),
explosives were typically a more useful tool than firearms.
That was better suited to sabotage, especially sabotage of
infrastructure like the classic rail lines or train cars or locomotives.
But there was a demand for firearms as well, and so they came up with this idea.
Now, this is called the Welrod, which is a codename of course.
A lot of SOE's devices had names that started with 'Wel'.
They had the Welbike, and the Welgun, and the Welrod, and Wel this and Wel that.
And that comes from the fact that they were located just outside the town of Welwyn, outside London.
So that's where the name comes from. Now the gun itself, well it was the idea of SOE.
It ... was actually manufactured by BSA, as best we can tell.
These guns are probably still in service today, believe it or not.
We know that they were as recently as the the 1991 Gulf War,
almost certainly still are today.
So BSA won't tell you anything about these, they don't acknowledge that they manufactured them, but a set of
technical drawings did surface not that long ago, that was actually marked as BSA.
So we're pretty sure that BSA manufactured these, while the design came from a guy in SOE.
So one of the things that people are very adamant about, (this is like clip versus magazine),
you don't call something a silencer, you call it a suppressor because it doesn't make a gun silent.
Well, the Welrod is kind of at the far end of that, in that when it's properly set up,
this ... is as close as you get to an actual silent gun.
You can, by all accounts, be within about fifteen feet
of this thing and not recognise that a firearm has discharged.
And, of course, that's done because you have a quite large volume of silencer here,
and this is chambered for the .32 ACP cartridge.
So there's not a lot of powder being burned in the first place.
And then the way that the silencer on this actually works is kind of interesting and a little bit different than most.
What you actually have is a series of baffles and wipes for about the front half of the barrel assembly
and you have an expansion chamber in the back half.
So the barrel is only 3.25 inches long and the barrel is located right in here, and the barrel is actually vented.
There's sixteen or twenty vent holes in the barrel. Now typically on a suppressor that's done to bleed off some of the gas,
to prevent the projectile from achieving a supersonic velocity. Because once it's supersonic
you're going to get a supersonic crack, a sonic boom, from the bullet.
And there's nothing that the suppressor can do about that.
So if you can reduce the bullet velocity, you can prevent that.
On this pistol however (this is a .32 ACP, which is not supersonic in the first place)
the reason for the vent holes in the Welrod is to actually allow the back half of this chamber to act as an expansion chamber.
So some of that gas is able to expand into this much larger chamber even
before it hits the suppressor section (or the silencer section).
So that allows the gas velocity and pressure to reduce.
Then there's a series of 14 metal baffles which act as, ... think of them as separate little chambers into which the
burning gas can expand, thus slowing down and losing pressure
so that when it finally comes out the muzzle there's a lot less of a pop.
Built in with these 14 baffles are 3 rubber wipes,
and what's unusual about the Welrod, again, is that in this case
the wipes don't have holes in them. So it's just a disc of rubber,
and when they, you know, when they're brand new there's no hole.
So the first time you fire a shot through them, the bullet actually
pokes a hole through each of those rubber baffles, and because it's
making a very small hole, that the rubber kind of seals behind itself,
that really improves the efficiency of the suppressor. Now this only works for about 10 to 15 rounds.
At that point enough bullets have gone through those rubber wipes that you've got pretty much bore sized holes in them.
And at that point this gun kind of reverts to the effectiveness of a typical suppressor,
maybe even performing a little worse than a typical suppressor. After all this is
1943 technology, and that's when these were developed and put into production, '43.
However before that, the first couple of shots with a new set of wipes, these are extremely effective pieces.
So the magazine Small Arms Review, a number of years ago,
did some testing with a Welrod and a sound meter that
determined just how effective they really were. And in their setup
they actually found over a 34 decibel reduction in volume compared to a control pistol with the same ...
a .32, with the same 3.25 inch barrel. ...
Their final number for a Welrod with a proper, new set of wipes was 122.8 decibels, which is really good for a handgun.
And they describe that as literally being Hollywood quiet,
you know, that [phht] sort of noise that movies make you think all suppressors create.
Well, they don't. Most of the time suppressed guns are actually still
remarkably loud, but the Welrod is definitely an exception to that.
Now, let's go ahead and take a closer look and I'll show you how this works,
because in addition to being a very effective silencer it's also an interesting mechanism.
So when designing an assassination pistol for covert operators and civilian resistance groups
there are more things to consider than just it's effectiveness as a pistol.
It also has to be something, for example, that can be concealed.
You don't want a German sentry noticing that you happen to be carrying around an assassination pistol.
So that was something that was considered with the Welrod, and that's why it has no pistol grip.
The pistol grip here is actually the magazine.
And the gun itself really does not look like a gun.
Now I'm sure to the folks watching well, you know what it is, you clicked on the Welrod video,
and you've heard me yabbering about how this is a gun, so of course you're going to recognise it as a gun.
But if you didn't know that, this thing really doesn't look much like a gun to most people.
In some circles it acquired the nickname 'bicycle pump' because it kind of looks more like that than a pistol.
The way they were able to do this was to put in just a little bit of a magazine well here, and then use the
magazine itself as the pistol grip. So this is actually a Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless magazine,
has a capacity of 8 rounds, although with the Welrod you're kind of better off just loading it to about 5,
because feeding can be a little bit finicky. A magazine catch has been added to the back,
see that right there. And then this rubber housing was added to the magazine.
It was made out of rubber, something called Ebonite at the time.
And that's just there to give you a little bit more grip than you would get from just a straight magazine.
Now, that magazine fits into this magazine housing and ... there we go,
and the magazine catch locks into a little square notch right there at the back.
This is not an ergonomic gun, by the way, this thing is kind of finicky to handle and shoot. The controls
are a bit awkward, it takes some practice, but that's the cost of the covert nature of it.
Now in order to function, we have a grip safety back here that you have to
depress and then this thing, which looks kind of like a bent nail, is the trigger.
And the trigger ... simply pushes this block backwards,
so when the grip safety is not engaged, you can see that it prevents that bar from moving.
When I depress the grip safety, now that bar can move back, that releases the striker in the bolt, and fires the gun.
And then this plunger is a spring that resets the trigger (which is a little sticky on this one).
So, that's how it fires.
These two plates on the side simply provide guide rails
for that trigger plate. Everything about this gun is really quite simple.
And then the mechanism itself ... it's basically a bolt-action pistol.
So to cycle it you rotate the bolt 90 degrees, pull it back,
you have kind of a typical bolt-action face there. We have two locking lugs here at the rear,
(you know, people know that locking lugs at the rear are inferior to those front, but that's really an issue for
powerful high pressure rifle rounds and the .32 ACP pistol,
not a problem at all to do that). So when you pull this back
you're going to eject the cartridge, the empty case. There's a little ejector sitting right there behind the magazine.
There's our ejector, right there, that kicks the empty case out.
So then to chamber a new round you just push the bolt forward,
you're going to depress it against the spring, it's striker spring, and then rotate the bolt 90 degrees until these two lock up.
And presto, you're ready to fire again.
Now there is an issue here. If you
potentially miss the grip safety because it's kind of small, the grip is
very skinny and narrow because it is basically just a .32 calibre pistol mag.
It is potentially possible to accidentally depress the magazine release while you're trying to do this.
The trigger is awkward.
So like I said, takes some practice to really use effectively.
This screw on the side is the bolt retention screw.
So it actually works kind of like a Gras rifle in that
this screw runs in a channel in the bolt. So I can pull the bolt out now, you can see that channel.
The front of this screw runs in that channel and prevents the bolt from coming out.
Now we can take a look at the front of the bolt face,
there's our striker and spring.
Really simple, and the reason that you would do a bolt-action pistol like this, is because you want to have
(or at least SOE wanted to have) multiple rounds available, but they didn't want to add the noise of a
semi-automatic mechanism, or the potential noise coming out the
breech of the gun instead of just the muzzle. So by doing this
everything's totally locked, the gun's totally silent.You don't have to worry about the,
you know, the clink of a shell case falling out or, for that matter, leaving a shell case behind.
It's a more covert and silent gun in every way because it is a manually operated pistol.
Now the muzzle here is knurled right at the end
and in theory this unscrews, you can pull out the
stack of baffles and wipes and replace them.
This one unfortunately has been kind of peened in place,
because it's been dented at some point in its history,
so I'm not able to pull that out for you, unfortunately.
A little bit of a macabre note here, the muzzle is recessed slightly behind the front of the silencer
That is to make it a little bit more feasible for actual
firing it with the muzzle in contact with the target. That recess makes things a little bit cleaner.
A little gristly there, but that's why they did that. That was a definite consideration when they designed this.
The sights are not bad. It's a big square notch and post.
There's your front sight, lines up right there in the rear.
Last thing, I should point out there were two versions of
the .32 calibre Welrod beyond the prototype, they were the Mark II and the Mark IIA.
This is a Mark IIA, which is the more common type. This had some refinements to it,
like the trigger plates that were added, the front sight is short.
On the very first Mark IIs the front sights were about twice as
long there. And then there were a few other details in things
like the shaping of this ejection port area.
So the Mark IIA had, like I said, some small technical improvements to make it a little bit of a better gun
to manufacture and to operate. And that's what most of them are, including this one.
In total, about 14,000 of these pistols were manufactured,
both during, and actually after, World War Two.
The primary ones were these .32s,
but there was also a version developed in 9mm Parabellum after some people complained that the .32
wasn't effective enough of a stopping cartridge. So those are out there as well.
They were dropped to a bunch of different countries in Europe to aid resistance forces.
And the plan was, ... (in fact interestingly in 1943 there was a plan to have an assassination month,
where they were going to get resistance units across Europe to
assassinate as many SS and Gestapo officers and soldiers
as they could. Now it appears this plan kind of got put on hold by
Operation Anthropoid, which was the Czech assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, which had massive civilian repercussions.
The Germans really took collective reprisals to a new meaning after that assassination.
And that seems to have kind of dampened interest in a wave of SS and Gestapo assassinations),
but that was part of the intended use of these pistols.
So they were also certainly set up for ...
special operations combat teams to shoot sentries at night.
The manual says these are effective up to seven or eight yards at night and up to 25 yards during the day.
Not that much different than the typical pistol in typical hands.
As I mentioned before these were still in use as of Desert Storm.
They continue to be as effective as they were in 1943 when they
were first designed, and they really fill this niche role for sneaky
special operations type guys. So I have no doubt
that they're still in operational use to this very day,
when people need a really, really quiet pistol for something.
If you enjoy this sort of content, please do consider checking out my Patreon page.
It's contributions and subscriptions from folks there that make it possible for me to travel,
bring you pistols like this, from places like the Institute of Military Technology. The IMT, It's really cool,
they have a mission very much like that of Forgotten Weapons, to preserve this type of history and educate people about it.
Their collection is not open completely to the public, but it is available by appointment.
So if you're interested in doing some research or taking a look at the collection that they have assembled
(which is really quite remarkably impressive) by all means contact them, check the place out.
Thanks for watching.