Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a very rare Danish
post-World War Two submachine gun.
This is a Hovea m/49.
And it was actually developed originally
for Swedish military trials.
In the 1940s, during World War Two, Sweden actually did a fair amount of arms development.
They adopted a self-loading military rifle,
something that very few small countries did during the war.
And they decided that they wanted to replace their m/37/39 Suomis
with something that was a little bit cheaper to manufacture.
The Suomi is a fantastic gun, but it's really quite expensive and complex to manufacture.
In fact, we'll see even the Finns replaced their Suomis with m/44s,
much cheaper, stamped sheet metal, tube-style guns.
At any rate, the Swedish military put together a series of trials, a competition.
And the two main players were Husqvarna with this,
and the Carl Gustafs Stads factory which produced what would eventually win the trials
and be adopted as the m/45 Carl Gustav.
But Husqvarna didn't give up, and a couple of years later
Denmark decided that it would like to have a new submachine gun.
Now the Danes hadn't been able to do any significant arms development
during World War Two because they were occupied by Germans pretty much the whole time.
So in the aftermath they're looking to foreign companies for submachine gun designs.
Now there is of course the Madsen,
which was only ... in production really by 1950, this predates it a bit.
And ultimately this is what the Danish military would adopt, not any of the Madsen designs.
In fact, it's amazing how Madsen managed to like completely fail
with every small arms venture they had after World War Two - but I'm getting off track here.
Really this is extremely similar to the Carl Gustav m/45.
The one most significant difference is that this can actually take
the Suomi drum magazines, where the m/45 can't.
I know you're thinking about getting rid of the magazine well adapter in the m/45,
so let me show you that.
I have here a Swedish m/45, from which I have removed the magazine well component.
And if we take a ... Finnish drum it will fit, but it will not actually ... lock into place.
Now, the quad stack does. But the drum does not.
And this was apparently one of the significant factors in
the Danish decision to adopt the Husqvarna as (there we go) as the Hovea m/49.
So there you go, the drum locks in just fine here.
Now despite that fact,
when these were actually originally put into service,
they were primarily used with the 50 round coffin mags instead.
Which also of course fit in and lock just fine.
Also worth pointing out the standard 36 round double-stack mags also fit and lock just fine.
Now taking a look at this up a bit closer, we have a few markings here on the left side.
This is marked 9mm, "Mp" ("Maskinpistol"), m/49.
FKF is a Danish military property mark.
And we have a serial number on the barrel jacket, and also on the receiver tube.
The gun is a very basic design: open bolt, simple blowback.
One of the interesting features here is that there is no [automatic] drop safety on the gun. ...
So the bolt can come back to here, where it could pick up a cartridge and bounce forward.
Now the way that that is handled is you can actually push the bolt handle in,
and that will lock the bolt in place to prevent this from happening.
However, for that to work you have to remember to actually do it.
If you want to safe the gun with the bolt open, you have a notch right here.
It goes all the way back to many classic older submachine gun designs.
So that obviously locks the bolt in place.
There is no manual safety, there is no semi-auto switch.
Very, very simple design, like I said.
The rear sight is an open notch, and you've got two different heights.
There's a 50 metre and a 100 metre setting that you can rotate between.
The front sight is this nice big square post with a nice big protective cage around it.
The barrel jacket is very similar to the m/45, although not quite identical.
We have a barrel nut here, which is held in place by a little tab.
There are a couple of teeth on that tab that lock into the barrel nut.
And in theory what you do is pull this
backward to retract this, and then you can unscrew the barrel nut.
This particular one is really tightly jammed in place, and I don't want to try to force it.
So there's not a whole lot there to show you anyway,
the barrel nut comes off and then the barrel comes out, very much like an m/45.
At the back we have a stock virtually identical to the m/45 stock,
and what you have to do is push this out so that that tab comes away from the stock.
And only then can you actually compress the stock.
So pull that out, press the stock down, and then you can fold it.
And around like that.
Locks in place just with tension so you can just pop it open if you need it.
And the stock doesn't interfere with the magazine, or the charging handle,
or anything else, so it can be fired with the stock folded.
For disassembly, you simply push in the back of this end cap.
Rotate it just very slightly, these dimples lock into those slots in the back of the receiver.
So we take the end cap off, that's actually two pieces that are locked together.
There we go, you can see how that works.
Very simple recoil spring.
And also an extremely simple bolt, simple blowback, fixed firing pin.
It is interesting to note that the front of this bolt is reduced in diameter.
Not much is actually done with that reduced diameter though,
there's just a little more meat in the trunnion here.
On some other guns, most notably the MAT 49,
this sort of feature is used so that the chamber is recessed inside a trunnion block.
So if there is an out of battery detonation, it protects the shooter.
In this case, the breech face is pretty much right at the same position
that it would be if you had a full diameter bolt.
So it's not entirely clear to me what the benefit was of doing this.
But it is one of the few significant distinctions between this and the m/45.
The other real distinction between this and the m/45 is simply one of construction.
Which is this is a single receiver tube with elements spot welded onto it
for the grip, the stock, the trigger assembly, and the front and back sections of the magazine well.
On the m/45, the tube and this whole bottom section
is a single piece of sheet metal that's bent around a mandrel.
And then there's a seam at the bottom.
So a little bit of construction difference between the two guns.
In practical terms, extremely similar to each other.
Now this was adopted in 1949.
The first batch of production guns were 750 guns made in 1950.
Production was licensed to a Danish
government-run arsenal in Copenhagen, where they were all produced.
There was a bit of a change however in 1952, the magazine design changed.
I believe what happened is they decided to get rid of the
large capacity magazines like the drums and the quad-stack mags,
and go to the same double-stack 36 round design that Sweden was using at the time.
Because there are those magazines made by Hovea for these guns, and that happened in 1952.
And after that happened there was a second major production batch of these guns,
... 15,000 in total.
And they would go on to serve in the Danish military ... into the 1990s.
These were issued out to the typical people who get submachine guns,
NCOs, drivers, armoured vehicle crews, that sort of thing.
Eventually they were replaced by Diemaco C7 AR-15 pattern rifles.
And when that happened, as best I can tell, the remaining available
m/49 Hoveas were actually given to Lithuania as military assistance.
And they probably still exist over there,
although I don't have any like proof of it, I haven't seen any.
If you happen to be in Lithuania and the military still has Hovea m/49s,
I'd love to hear from you, let me know down in the comments.
At any rate, these are, as you might expect from this sort of development cycle,
extremely rare guns here in the United States.
This is in fact the first one that I've ever actually seen in person,
so very cool to have it here at Morphy's.
It is a fully transferable, curio and relic eligible, live submachine gun.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.