Hi guys! Thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum and today
we''re going to take a look at. Sweden's first submachine gun...
Well, actually their second Submachine gun. Sweden's first submachine gun
was the m/37. which was a licensed [Swedish-made] copy of the Suomi kp31 SMG with a couple of changes made to it:
the [rear] sights are different, the charging handle is a little different, the barrel is shorter, and the stock profile is a bit different.
Now, when this was first adopted in 1937, as I said,
Sweden didn't have a
military submachine gun. And so when they went looking for one they decided that it ought to use the same cartridge as their standard
service side-arm, which make sense. Well, their sidearm at the time was the Pistol m/1907--
A Colt/ Browning [design], Basically, it's a [model] 1903
pocket automatic, scaled up to the 9x20mmSR Browning Long cartridge [7,1g/110-gr. bullet @ 340m/s--1115-fps].
Sweden was one of very few countries that ever actually adopted 9 x20mmSR Browning as a military [handgun] cartridge.
It was a little bit of an awkward cartridge to use because it was semi-rimmed like .32 acp [7,65mm],
meaning that you, did have to, worry about rim lock in magazines with this
gun. Well, at any rate, it is what they
were using in their pistols [so] it's what they wanted to use in the submachine gun. So the Carl Gustav Stad rifle factory
designed a
4-stack "coffin" style magazine for this submachine gun, and it held
56 rounds because the Swedes had been Issuing ammunition in 28-round boxes,
their pistols held seven in the magazine, so that was four pistol magazines in the box. Two boxes then gives you a 56-round
quad stack magazine. And
in that original gun, the magazine was actually canted
backwards [tilted due the placement of the mag well] to accommodate the semi-rimmed nature of the ammunition, so that as you loaded it and ensured that you didn't
stack one rim up behind the one below it, thus causing rim-lock.
Anyway,
the gun was not bad. They had 900 of them [when WWII broke out],
which Isn't a lot. But you know in the early 1930s who really thought you'd need a whole Lot of these things? Well, by 1939
Sweden realized that they did in fact need a lot of these things. They didn't have enough submachine guns. They
weren't in a position to manufacture more of them very quickly, and
so they got a little bit panicky and started buying some guns from Germany. And what they bought were
1,500 Walther HP's--that was what would become the Walther P38 in German military service--and they bought those [pistols] in 9x19mm Parabellum
(9mm Luger) because that's what Walther was making them in. And then they
also bought 1800 Bergmann (Model 35) submachine guns--both the long version and the short version [m/39 in Swedish service]--and those are also in 9x19mm. And
as a result of that,
the Swedish Army kind of inadvertently adopted 9mm [m/39 cartridge in Swedish nomenclature]
When they went to get more of the Suomi submachine guns, they decided to adapt those back to 9mm as
well. Which Is... That's what the Finns were making as was pretty much... Everyone
was buying these things in [9mm caliber], so they made a few alterations and adopted this version of the gun as the Model of 37/
39. So let's take a look at what those changes actually entail.
In 9mm now it used the same standard quad stack coffin-mag and I think you can see here why
it's called that. Uses the same one as the Finnish M31 Suomis.
The original 1937 guns had used a two-position flipped over sight for the rear sight that was 100 and 200 meters.
When they changed it over to 9x19mm Parabellum
they added a third leaf for 300 meters because the cartridge
was more powerful and had a longer range than the 9x20mmSR. Despite
9x19mm being shorter than 9x20mmSR, the 9x19 was a higher, substantially higher, pressure round and thus had a longer effective range.
Now, compared to a normal Finnish Suomi the charging handle is slightly different in contour: it has this hook to it...
That is how you would charge the gun.
The selector lever down here is the same in function to a Finnish gun, [e.g.]
all the way in Is safe, and in the middle position...
middle position is semi-auto, and all the way forward is full auto.
These do have the same quick detach barrel design that the Finnish ones do, so you can rotate this down...
rotate and remove the barrel shroud.
And then remove the barrel as well.
There's the front of the receiver.
The magazine catch has this nice guard behind it so that you're less likely to inadvertently dump your magazine.
And then the Swedes chose a stock profile here that brings the comb up a bit higher than [on] the Finnish gun.
This is almost high enough to give you a straight in-line sort of recoil.
Now I haven't shot one of these. I would be curious to have the chance to do so and
see just how it handles with a stock that's this high on the gun. It'd be interesting to try.
Removing the bolt is the same as on the Finnish guns. I go ahead and
drop the bolt,
hold the handle back because the handle here acts as a locking plate that prevents this [receiver cap] from rotating.
Once the handle is back, we can unscrew the rear cap.
There we go... Remove the recoil spring...
Pull the trigger [so it doesn't catch the sear notch] and the bolt drops out and
that is Identical in form to a standard Finnish Suomi bolt.
You can see however, that has that big H for Husqvarna because it is Husqvarna that was actually manufacturing these for the Swedes.
This has a fixed firing pin because it is a
typical open bolt slamfire submachine gun. And there you go: one field stripped Swedish m/
37/39 Suomi submachine gun.
Sweden probably
wouldn't like me calling it a Suomi because "Suomi" means "Finland" [in Finnish] and they're not Finland but
they went and bought a Finnish submachine gun, so they can deal with it.
So these of course are quite scarce guns to find today [35k manufactured]. It was really cool
to be able to take a look at one of these, and we can see how they differ a bit from the Finnish-Issue Suomi. [Also used by the Swedish Army, but in smaller numbers].
Everyone really likes the Suomi submachine guns. They have a high rate of fire [RoF 900rpm] but, they have large magazines and they're just
generally a well-made and quite well- regarded gun. Hopefully you
enjoyed watching the video. If you do enjoy this sort of [content] online, please do consider taking a
look at my Patreon page. It's support from folks like you, who
put [in] a buck a month that makes it possible for me to travel about and find these guns, and bring them to you guys.
Thanks for watching!