Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company,
I'm taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be
selling in their upcoming December of 2016 Premiere auction.
And the one we're looking at today is a prototype,
experimental really, self-loading combat rifle.
This is an Italian rifle. It is a Model of 1939 Armaguerra.
Now like most other countries, Italy was very interested
in developing a semi-automatic rifle during the 1930s.
They held a whole series of trials. They had submissions from,
like, all the major companies in the industry at the time.
And this is ultimately what won out.
And what a lot of people don't recognise is this was actually formally adopted by the Italian military.
Before it was cancelled, unadopted, but that's less important.
So the development of Italian semi-autos really goes back, it predates World War One.
Factories were experimenting with different ideas.
I have for example a video out on a Terni Arsenal produced conversion of an 1891 Carcano into a short recoil semi-auto rifle.
This kind of coalesced in the early 1930s with some more significant serious work
and better guns that were being produced.
Beretta, for example, came up with a Model 1931 semi-auto, that was actually a reasonably decent gun.
I also have a video on that which you can see in the description text below.
And then finally there was a major Italian trial held in 1938.
Now at this point the Italian military has adopted this new 7.35mm cartridge.
They had been concerned about the 6.5 not having enough terminal ballistic effectiveness,
so, kind of like the Japanese would do, they decided to step it up to a 7.35mm.
They adopted it, they started building Carcano rifles in that calibre,
and that is the calibre that they did their testing in in 1938.
Now in the '38 tests there were a whole bunch of guns, 8, 10 different designs
from all the major companies, Scotti, Breda, Beretta, this rifle, a bunch of different companies.
And nothing was really satisfactory in the '38 trials.
So they came back the next year in 1939 and held a second follow-up trial.
So in the 1939 [trial] we had again the Armaguerra, not exactly identical to this because it was a 7.35mm gun.
A couple rifles from Terni, Beretta again, a bunch of different companies.
And again nobody quite met the requirements, strictly speaking.
But I guess they really wanted to adopt something, so the testing commission decided that
the Armaguerra was the best rifle and they ordered 10,000 of them.
Now this rifle had been designed by a guy named Gino Revelli, who was actually the son of Bethel Revelli,
who was a pretty notable name in Italian firearms manufacture. He was responsible for the 1910 Glisenti,
he was responsible for the Villar Perosa light machine gun.
Cool guy, smart guy, his son apparently kind of took after him.
Now the problem was this had been manufactured by
the Armaguerra Company, specifically Società Autonoma Revelli Manifattura Armaguerra.
Well, they weren't a factory, they were basically just a prototyping design workshop.
And so when the army ordered 10,000 they had no way to produce 10,000 of these rifles.
So what they did was they immediately started working on building a rifle factory in Cremona, and figured well awesome,
you know, we've got the order, that'll secure capital, we'll build a factory, produce the rifles, excellent.
And that was a great plan until the army cancelled the order. They in fact pretty much cancelled all 7.35mm
cartridge related things, because World War Two was starting to get rather more significant at this point,
and they realised they didn't have the resources to fully convert the army to this new cartridge.
So they went back to making guns in 6.5. And when that happened
Revelli and Armaguerra went back and prototyped a version of this rifle back into the 6.5mm cartridge.
That's what we have here, is one of the 6.5mm guns.
Now they did manage to make about a 100 of these. As of June of 1942 the Italian army had right about 100
1939 pattern Armaguerra rifles in inventory. The plan had been to issue these things
to kind of spread them across the army. They were going to put, like, three per squad.
Kind of the way the French issued out the 1917 automatic rifles in World War One,
where you give them to the guys who are really best suited to exploit the benefits of a self-loading rifle.
... In comparison the Germans, for example, when they issued out Sturmgewehrs they took a different approach
where they gave Sturmgewehrs to every man in a unit, and they tried to get these concentrated,
hard hitting small units with all Sturmgewehrs giving the maximum amount of firepower.
These, on the other hand, were meant to be issued to individual soldiers who could use them well,
and to just kind of increase the effectiveness of all units across the board by a little bit.
Now they were also going to be issued out to specialist units, like paratroopers for example,
who needed extra firepower wherever they could get it.
At any rate, none of this ever happened because they only managed to make about 100 of them.
And ultimately that rifle factory in Cremona was switched over to manufacture of Model 1941
Carcano rifles, and that's what they produced in substantial numbers instead.
So mechanically this is a short recoil gun, and it actually is locked by a tipping block kind of like a Walther P38.
This one's a little iffy, I tried taking it apart and it's not really happy with me doing that.
So we're going to take a closer look at it, but unfortunately
I will not be able to take this one completely apart for you today.
We'll start with the rear receiver cover here where there is a crest on this rifle,
although it's pretty light and a little hard to make out.
The top there says Semi-Automatica,
and the bottom is Model 39, ... Brevettato [patented], with this Armaguerra crest.
Now some of the other markings, in fact all the other markings, are easier to make out than that.
Right behind it there on the cover is Genova, Armaguerra, and then Genova again.
And then on the other side Stabilimento De Cremona [Cremona plant] 1940. So this is a 1940 production gun.
That XVIII is 1940 as done in the Fascist calendar dating system. It's the 18th year of the Fascist regime.
Then if we look a little farther up on the side of the action itself we have a serial number which is A 7,
and we'll see a number 7 on at least one of the other parts as we look deeper into the rifle.
And then a note that this is 6.5mm calibre.
One last bit of marking that's on this rifle is this plaque, which is screwed to the buttstock.
Pretty sure this wasn't a standard thing for all of these rifles. It makes me suspect this may have been
a trials gun, or a sample gun that was on display somewhere,
and liberated at the end of World War Two, although that's just a guess.
Anyway it mentions that it's made in Cremona, and it is the semi-automatic rifle Model of 1939.
Now one of the things that the Armaguerra rifle has going for it is it's a really sleek design.
It's not overly long or overly heavy, and it doesn't really have any protrusions sticking out anywhere.
There is no bolt handle, we'll get to that in a moment. First let's take a look at the controls back here.
We have obviously the trigger, which by the way is kind of long and mushy and not very good.
This lever is the bolt release, so when the bolt locks open you put in a new clip and then
snap that and it will drop the bolt.
We have a safety here on the bottom. It's currently in the fire position,
slide that forward into the safe position. That locks the trigger, it also prevents you from opening the bolt.
And then this is your manual clip release, so if you want to unload the gun before it's totally empty,
you open the bolt, hit that, and it releases the clip which will then eject with
whatever number of cartridges are still in the rifle.
I should point out this is 6.5mm Carcano calibre, and it does use standard 6.5 Carcano clips.
So that's a Mannlicher style clip, meaning it holds 6 rounds, you load the entire thing into the gun as a unit,
and when it chambers the last round, the empty clip falls out this hole in the bottom of the magazine.
So this rear sight is also actually pretty slick and low-profile, but appears to do the job just fine.
It's got a reasonably nice V notch on the back. And then this dial allows you to adjust range: 2, 3, 4 or 500 metres.
There's a little notch here, so it's currently set to 5, that's 4, 3 and 200.
With the 6.5 cartridge 200 was considered the point blank zero.
Now one of the cool features here, or stupid depending on how you look at it, is the charging handle, which is actually
the front sling swivel. Now it's locked in place by this button, so if you're just carrying the rifle around, it doesn't do anything
That's a good thing. However in order to open the action you depress that button and then you can pull the charging handle,
or the sling swivel, back like so.
There's a slot in the stock there for it to run in, and it is quite stiff.
I have put on this (I think this is a piece of M1 Garand sling), just to give me something to grab onto to operate this.
Without the sling on there you can do it, but it's pretty stiff and tight and difficult.
So, with that opened up you can see the inside of the action here.
We have a follower, a standard Mannlicher type follower for our 6 round clips.
You can see the whole gun is a short recoil action. You can get a clue of that by, like, the wear marks
right here on this section where it clearly moves.
Up here at the muzzle we have a pair of rails on the barrel that slide in this front nose cap.
So when I cycle this,
you can see the action moves back and forth just a little bit.
(Get that on camera back here as well.)
That's not quite the full travel, but I don't have good leverage on it right now.
So as I mentioned earlier there's a pivoting locking block in the receiver, and that's what actually locks the bolt into the receiver.
It's a short recoil gun, so when you fire the bolt is locked into this whole barrel and receiver assembly.
They're going to come back about half an inch here, probably about 10mm.
That will run this piece over a cam which tilts the locking block out of engagement, and at that point the bolt can
... continue travelling backward to finish the firing cycle.
Alright, I want to give you one more view of this thing cycling and then a quick word of warning.
So I'm going to push the button there (by the way, this button is really handy to do because if you grab the sling
the front knuckle your finger just hits that button very easily), then you cycle this back,
bolt locks open, non-reciprocating charging handle of course there, so that stays in its forward position.
Then when you are ready to cycle the gun, you put a clip in and hit the bolt release.
This does nothing as long as the follower is up because this thing is locked open on the follower.
What you have to do is depress the follower and normally you would do that with a clip of ammunition.
Just pushing the follower in doesn't do anything, you push the follower in,
lock your clip in, and then you hit this bolt release and that bolt goes forward really fast.
I actually ... one of my universal disassembly tools took one for the team here.
I used this to push the follower down while depressing the bolt release, and it sheared this thing off.
That's why you don't do that the first time with your finger until you know exactly how a gun works, by the way.
So we'll give you a quick demo with a big plastic punch that should be able to survive.
Push that down,
whoo, there we go.
So if you happen to get one of these, don't stick your finger in the action unless and until you really know what you're doing.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Italian self-loading rifles are very rare these days outside of Italy, and it's really cool to see this one.
This is the first time I've gotten to take a look at a 1939 Armaguerra.
If you are interested in seeing some of its competitors,
I have links in the description text below to a variety of other
Italian self-loaders that we've had a chance to take a look at.
And, of course, if you would like to own this one, unlike most of the other ones I've looked at,
this is actually in private hands and coming up for sale. So if you take a look again in the
... description below you'll find a link also to Rock Island's catalogue page on this rifle.
You can take a look at their pictures and their description, place a bid on-line or over the phone,
or come here to the auction and participate in person.
Thanks for watching.