[ Aussie "B*tch" ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
Bear Arms reference collection in Scottsdale, Arizona,
taking a look at a reproduction of
a Vietnam-era Australian FAL.
This is a reproduction of a modification to the FAL.
One of, well, a family of such modifications
that were done by Australian and New Zealand Special Forces units
like the Australian SAS, in Vietnam.
Of course the Vietnam War was fought mostly in jungles.
And most of the equipment that forces other than the Vietnamese
took into Vietnam was not really designed for jungle combat.
It was designed for open Western European mobile warfare.
A lot of long barrel stuff going on, and not too super-handy in a tight enclosed jungle environment.
And so there was a lot of interest in shortening down guns.
Particularly, mostly, among Special Forces units
who had the volition to do that sort of thing, to make their own customised weapons.
To have their own unit armourers who could tinker with stuff
in a way that would get you court-martialled by the regular army forces.
And we see this with a wide variety of guns, so one of the more common ones
that people will probably have seen pictures of are shortened versions of the RPD.
American and other Anglo troops who would capture RPDs
and chop them down at the ... gas block
and have an ... actually really cool short little hand-held hip-fire belt-fed automatic weapon.
By the way, if I can ever get my hands on an authentic one of those I would love to do a video on it.
But you see the same thing with the M14,
there were like the "guerrilla" experimental versions of the M14.
Everything got shortened, and so it shouldn't be a surprise
that the Australian troops would be shortening some of their FALs as well.
So cover your delicate ears, I try to keep this channel as pretty clean language-wise as possible,
but the Australians, bless their hearts, called this thing "the Bitch".
And the idea was take a FAL, either an L1A1 rifle like this
or an L2A1 which was the light automatic weapon version,
heavier barrel, ... bipod built into the handguard,
chop it down, make it full-auto if it wasn't already.
The Australian L1A1 rifles were semi-auto only,
but no SAS unit armourer worth his salt can't very easily change that.
Fit them out with ... the full length magazines from the L2s or the Bren guns.
And carry this thing as basically a break-contact weapon by the point man on a patrol.
The idea being if you get into a firefight as a small unit
Special Forces patrol in the jungle in Vietnam, well first off something's already gone wrong.
Because you are supposed to be ambushing the Vietnamese, not the other way around.
So if you get into a firefight, theoretically good tactic is
dump an incredible amount of fire power to throw the ambusher off guard
and cover your unit's escape from the kill-zone of the ambush.
And what better way to do that than to have a very short, full-auto,
.308 calibre flash and blast concussion inducing Bitch.
So what is this exactly? Well it is a 7.62mm L1A1 Australian pattern rifle.
Now unfortunately this is not an authentic one, this is as I've said, a replica.
And this is made on a DSA American-made receiver.
While it has the original three position selector switch,
it does not actually fire full-auto, this is just a semi-auto rifle.
The selector moves around but it doesn't actually have a working fun switch, sadly.
Now the original ones in Vietnam would, if they were L2A1s
which is the squad automatic rifle version, they would have been full-auto to begin with.
If they were L1A1s, this is not that difficult to modify into full-auto if you are a Special Forces armourer.
So that's an easy fix for the troops.
This replica has been built ... using an actual set of Australian parts.
So we've got all the standard Australian L1A1 type of elements.
We've got the wooden stock, got a butt plate there with a trapdoor for some cleaning supplies.
We've got our standard rear sight, we have the wooden pistol grip
that has the winter trigger element here so you can open this up
and fold the trigger guard down so that you can better use it with gloves.
We've got a non-reciprocating folding charging handle there.
In order to maximise firepower, the magazines from either the L2A1
automatic rifle or the L4A1 Bren gun were used.
These straight magazines are from the L2A1s.
It is worth pointing out here, if you're not already familiar with the Australian FALs,
that they took the automatic bolt hold-opens out.
So I can open the bolt here but it's not
going to lock open, and that is by design for the Australians.
They also had carry handles on the guns.
Then here we go, the ... visually distinctive element is the addition of a vertical front grip.
This was not the only thing that was done to this type of weapon for Vietnam.
Some of them had front grips added, some of them had the handguards removed entirely
and American XM-148 under-barrel grenade launchers grafted on, again by skilled unit armourers.
A lot of them had the barrels shortened.
So it'll hurt your reliability a bit, but you can shorten the barrel basically down to the gas block here.
Yes, that gives you less gas to work with, but these are guns that are designed
to work from tropical up to Arctic environments.
And you've got a lot more leeway in warm weather environments
to deal with reduced gas in the system than you do in cold weather.
So that's something you can get away with in Vietnam,
but it's something that would never be done as a standard element on a rifle like this
because it will compromise the rifle's reliability in ... particular in cold weather environments.
Now on this particular one, the guy who put the ... rifle together,
which by the way ... was Mark Graham of Arizona Response Systems,
opted to leave the barrel full length and just cut down the flash hider,
because he didn't want to damage a good intact Australian L1A1 barrel, which I can certainly respect.
So this isn't quite indicative of what you would normally see.
It is actually also worth pointing out that the Australians actually had
a slightly shortened version of the flash hider that was used.
It was a sub-variant of their rifle specifically for Papua New Guinea.
... It was a slightly shorter muzzle device and a slightly shorter buttstock.
That is sometimes confused with cut down elements on Vietnam-era guns.
Anyway, barrels would be cut down typically around here.
Sometimes a conical flash hider added, sometimes not.
These were all one off conversions done, and so there's not any specific formal pattern to them.
Let me pull the handguard off and let me show you how this was done.
Alright, there we go. Take off the ... right side of the handguard,
and
This front pistol grip is exactly the same as the rear pistol grip.
It's just taking an extra one of these that you had lying around,
add it onto a tube, fit that over the barrel,
and presto, you've got a really good controllable vertical front grip.
It's I think important on a gun like this that the vertical front grip
be connected up to the barrel, not just screwed into this wooden handguard.
The handguard is pretty thin, if you screw a front grip onto this
and then try to use it to control a full-auto FAL from the hip,
and you're very quickly going to rip the screws out
and have a very uncontrollable full-auto FAL at the hip.
By giving it this sort of attachment, it's something that will actually allow you
to maintain control of the gun much better.
And so the end result is one of those cool customised hybridised sort of guerrilla-warfare inspired guns.
I can tell you if I'm hiding in the jungle and I have some crazy Aussie
jump out of the bush and dump 30 rounds out of this thing full-auto at me out of a short barrel,
I don't know that I'd want to hang around very much longer.
So reports are scanty but generally positive about this sort of thing,
that it was done, it was liked.
And of course some guys opted for a grenade launcher rather than a vertical front grip,
and that's certainly understandable as well.
Normally this is the sort of thing that I would try to film an authentic example of,
but I'm not sure that there are any surviving authentic examples around.
These were customised guns that were done by troops in the field.
And my understanding is the vast majority of them stayed in the field.
If troops rotated out, they would just hand this thing off to their replacements.
The guns stayed in Vietnam and never really came back to Australia or New Zealand,
and so there aren't really good examples around.
If I'm wrong about that, please do let me know down in the comments.
I'd love to do a follow-up video sometime when I'm able to visit
Australia or New Zealand on an authentic example.
But I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to show you guys
this really nicely done replica here at Bear Arms.
So a big thanks to Bear Arms for giving me the opportunity to pull this out and film it for you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.