Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are gonna take a look
at a last-ditch Italian pistol. Normally when we think of
last-ditch guns, we think German or Japanese,
but there was some of that going on in Italy as well.
Now Beretta had started making the 1934, 1935 pistols in,
well, 1935 or so, as you might expect.
The 34 is in .380 calibre, and the 35 is in .32 calibre.
These were guns that were a lot better than their reputation suggests today in the United States.
They were very well liked by both the Italian military and police,
and by a bunch of export customers that also purchased them.
Towards the end of World War Two the Germans started using them a bunch,
and that is kind of where this one comes into play.
So ... in late 1944 Italy signed an armistice with the Allied powers,
and this was not really taken well by the German troops who were then occupying Italy.
All of a sudden instead of having an ally, now they had a whole lot more territory that
they had to actively occupy and control to prevent the Italian army from fighting against them.
And so at this point, the Germans took over basically all of the production
facilities that they still had in their geographical control in Italy.
That would include Beretta, and it also included Armaguerra up in northern Italy in Cremona.
Now Armaguerra had been set up making Carcano M41 rifles through most of the war.
They also experimented with a bunch of oddball guns. ... In fact in 1939 they had experimented with a semi-auto rifle.
There were then a couple of submachine gun designs that were trialled, made as prototypes up there.
None of that really came to fruition as any major project, but in 1944
they actually set up a production line for the Beretta 1935 pistol in Cremona.
And this is one of them, let's take a look at it.
What we see here are a couple of things. Primarily really crude manufacturing,
but then also some unusual, or non-standard, markings on the slide and the frame.
Instead of the usual Beretta Gardone Val Trompia, what we have here is a totally different font and style
and this is: Pistol Beretta Calibre 7.65 M35, and manufactured by S.A. Armaguerra
(S.A. is like the equivalent of incorporated, it's the Armaguerra Company),
in Cremona dated 1944. Remember that for Italy World War Two ended in 1944,
so that's when all their last-ditch sorts of guns are going to have been produced.
On the other side we have serial numbers on the frame and the barrel.
Standard for this very short production run, they only made about 400 of these guns.
There's maybe 6 or 8 of them that are documented to still exist today.
They're all a 'G' prefix, followed by a double zero prefix, and then an actual three digit serial number.
So this is number 230, the highest one I have seen reference to is number 392.
Normally, you would expect to see either a military proof mark back here on the tang,
or civilian proof marks on the left side of the tang.
These Cremona pistols have no proof marks whatsoever.
And then in a rather interesting change up, the fire and safe markings are reversed on these guns
compared to the standard Berettas. Now the lever works the same way,
so rearward is safe and forward is fire. And the way this safety is set up
you flip the safety to whichever position you want the gun to be on, fire or safe.
However on a standard Beretta the markings are reversed.
So in this case, what you do is the only visible marking is the one that applies.
So in this case, the gun is on safe because you can still see the 'S'. When we flip it around,
now it's on fire because you can see the 'F' and, of course, you have the red dot.
This is the same as our selector here. So forward is fire,
but for some curious reason, on the Armaguerra guns they decided to reverse the markings.
This would probably make the most sense in the context of German control of the manufacturing process,
where, you know, they decided that this made more sense to them than the other system,
and that it was more in line with other German firearms.
So just as a general comparison here, this is a 1944 production Beretta Model of 1935,
and this is our 1944 last-ditch Armaguerra one. And even from back there
you can see the massive machine marks that are still extant on this last-ditch gun.
The finish is pretty crummy, the manufacturing is very crude, you know, huge machine marks all over it.
But of course, as is fairly typical of last-ditch guns this would still work, it's just not very pretty.
The only other substantive difference, aside from just quality, is the magazine floorplate,
which on our Cremona gun is squared off and substantially different from this rounded Beretta example.
This is definitely one of the ... scarcest varieties of the Beretta 34 or 35,
and it's a really cool example of the last-ditch sort of manufacturing that we don't normally associate with Italy.
So, a big thanks to the collector who offered this for video. Now if you see one with these sorts of
very crude manufacturing marks and unusual serial number and no proofs, you'll know what it is.
Thanks for watching.