Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms
Centre, part of the British Royal Armouries in Leeds.
And we're taking a look at an Australian submachine gun
from World War Two. This is the one that the Australians
would prefer not to remember, as opposed to the Owen,
which was a fantastic submachine gun.
This is the Austen. This is specifically the Austen Mark I.
There was a Mark II which will be a later video.
So, basically what's going on here is when World War Two started
Australia wasn't in any real direct danger.
There was no threat of invasion, you know, the Germans aren't
going to invade Australia, but they might just invade the UK.
So Australia sent a whole lot of guns to help defend the UK, to help equip British basically citizen militias.
In fact the United States did the same thing, we sent a lot of guns over to aid the Brits.
And that was just fine until December of 1941 when Japan enters World War Two,
and Australia declares war on Japan and vice-versa. And
there's a lot more imminent threat of Japan invading Australia than there ever was of Germany.
So now things get a little bit tense, because when Australia went into ... World War Two ...
they had apparently a grand total of three submarine guns.
One of them was an MP18 from World War One that was in a regimental museum somewhere,
one of them was a Thompson gun that an Australian captain, I believe, had brought back from somewhere,
and one of them was a German MP38 that had somehow been confiscated by Australian Customs in Sydney Harbour.
So that's what they had to work with.
Now during this time before Japan entered the war they did start to work on the Owen gun,
and that was pretty much all a private endeavour until it was accepted by the military.
So ... before the ... Austen even exists the Owen is going through a development process,
and that would be a big part of the reason why it was such a better gun
is it actually went through a development process to have bugs worked out, to have the design improved,
and the manufacturing figured out and so on.
Anyway, once Japan enters the war, as I said, things get little more serious for the Australians.
And they in April of 1942, couple of months later,
they finally get a sample of the Mark I and a sample of the Mark II Sten,
as well as mostly complete technical packages for their production from the British.
And they had been told, "Hey, we'll send you ... all of what you need to make Sten guns, the Sten gun's great."
... They imply that it's gone through like a year of design and testing and evaluation and, you know,
we've really optimised it. And so when a Sten Mark I and a Sten Mark II
show up in Australia, the Australians are really quite underwhelmed.
Like, ... this? This really? This is what you've spent a year developing? Okay..."
But they needed submachine guns, and so they ... ultimately put in an order for 20,000 of them.
To be produced split between two different firms, Australian firms, one in Melbourne and one in Sydney.
Now these companies actually kind of specialised in die casting, or at least they had tooling for die casting,
and they also figured the Sten is a piece of crap. We can make it better.
Famous last words, right?
But of course, the only gun... They had a Thompson and they had an MP38 to work with.
And so they ended up basically copying a couple of major elements off the MP38.
And there's actually a lot of mechanical difference between the Austen and the regular Sten.
So let's take this apart and let me show you how the two differ.
So the major differences, of course, between the Austen and the regular Sten, which we have an example of right here,
are going to be the grips, the stock,
the bolt (although you can't really see that from the outside), and some of the manufacturing techniques.
So like I said, the companies that produced the Austen had tooling (I don't know if expertise is quite the right term),
but they had the setup to do die casting. And so this whole front assembly,
the grip and magazine well and all, that is a single die cast part. And the idea was
we can easily make that and then just slide it onto a receiver tube.
And by the way, that is where the markings on the gun are. So DC is the manufacturer, Austen Mark I.
This one is really a very early one, number 160.
Being in the Royal Armouries collection, it's probably a gun that was sent back to the British
as, you know, look we improved your design, here's what we did.
Anyway that die casting process would take a lot longer to get really sorted out than they expected.
And that was part of what led to some production delays on the gun.
The entire trigger mechanism is directly interchangeable and identical to the Sten.
And, in fact, the barrel and barrel nut are also interchangeable. The one difference with the barrel nut being
this pivoting rotary sling swivel which is not on the regular Sten. However, despite that, these parts will interchange.
As you can see here, the Austen receiver is a little bit longer. In order to leave the trigger mechanism in place,
keep the trigger assembly and components all identical, but have room for this rear vertical pistol grip
(which would sit like right here on the regular Sten). So they extended the receiver tube length to do that.
Despite the problems with the Austen I have to say that the vertical grips, the rear one in particular,
but also the front one are a marked definite improvement over the regular Sten.
That's really one of my big gripes with the Sten is how poor the grip is on the thing.
At any rate, that's one of the very few improvements. They went ahead and added an MP38 style folding stock.
The latching mechanism here is totally different than the MP38, but the stock itself is very similar.
In order to fold this you just push the button in, and then it'll rotate down.
The length of pull is quite long because the stock arms had to be long enough
so that the butt plate could loop over the front pistol grip.
One neat thing is that they added a couple of pieces to the stock. They added a screwdriver, with an "S".
There's that guy. Which is relevant for the retention screws on the trigger cover plate and the grip panel screws.
I'm not sure this is all that important. Like, if you consider the purpose of the Sten to be an extremely
rapid and cheap gun to manufacture. Is it really all that important to be putting screwdrivers into it?
Maybe not. This one has gotten tight, there we go. The other side they put in a cleaning rod.
Also a good idea, but you know if you need to make a lot of guns very quickly,
maybe it's easier to make a separate cleaning rod by itself, and just have people throw it in a pack
rather than add it as a special extra feature on the gun.
So there's your cleaning rod threaded into the rear strut of the stock.
The stock comes off the same way as on a regular Sten gun, so we push in the rear cap
(there we go), we can then pull off the end cap, and pull out the bolt assembly.
Now the Sten would have a loose recoil spring in here, and a fixed firing pin, and a very simple sort of
open ... bolt blowback mechanism. This is also open bolt and blowback, but they have copied
the German [MP38] system of having the recoil spring completely contained in
its own telescoping tube, with a separate firing pin in there,
and then the bolt, of course, has a hole for the firing pin.
The sear surface, the sear engagement on this bolt, is identical to the regular Sten
so that the trigger mechanism can be the same. But they went and added this, and
presumably they figured that it would make the gun more reliable by not having the spring open to the elements.
But in reality, when they went through and
developed all of these improved assemblies, every single one of them actually it has more parts
and takes more time and money to manufacture than the original standard Sten.
The stock very obviously so. There's a lot of stuff in here
beyond the very simple stock of a Mark II Sten.
Like, here's option one. It's probably one, two, three, four pieces welded together.
Here's option two. It's something like 22 different components, including several springs, several threaded pieces,
it's got bearing surfaces. Yeah, this is gonna be a lot more expensive.
And again, option one. We have a spring, three very simple pieces, and a solid bolt.
Option two. We have to build this whole assembly with threaded bits up here, and retaining pins,
and a relatively fragile firing pin there, and enough,
you know, extra retaining pins to properly control the spring in there.
And then, of course, you have an extra fitted component. Because the firing pin has to be fitted just right into the bolt
to make sure that your firing pin protrusion is neither too long, for pierced primers,
nor too short, in which case it won't reliably fire.
Whereas on the regular Sten the firing pin's machined into the bolt face. Much simpler to do.
So another place where the Australians, these companies, thought they were improving the gun and they really weren't.
One last interesting differentiation here are the magazines.
The Austen will use a standard Sten magazine. They're perfectly compatible.
However, the Australians did not make standard Sten magazines, they made Austen magazines.
There are a couple differences here. First off, different manufacturing processes.
So rather than having these stamped over-travel guides,
instead they braised an entire collar onto the outside of the magazine body.
So this mag is actually noticeably a little heavier than the standard Sten.
They also reduced the length of the magazine just slightly, and where the Sten was a 32 round magazine,
the Austen is a 30 round magazine with, I believe, the general habit was to only load it to 28 rounds to improve reliability.
They did also interestingly get rid of the witness holes that you find on Sten mags.
So a little harder to keep track of exactly how many you have in the mag.
They went ahead and marked the name of the gun on the magazine, interesting that they put it in quotes.
Like this is the "Austen" magazine.
And then the manufacturing company, and then on the other side
we have a calibre and capacity, which is a little bit unusual to find.
So the Austen would never be a popular gun in Australian service.
It was constantly and completely overshadowed by the Owen, which was really better in every way.
In fact, in most ways the regular Sten gun is actually better than the Austen.
It's more reliable, and it was a lot easier to actually put into production.
Where these Australian companies thought they could improve the Sten, it really kind of backfired on them
by making these elements, these assemblies, actually more expensive and more complex.
And on top of that, the Austen was put into production before it had really undergone any substantial trials,
and before there had been a whole lot of work put into figuring out exactly how to efficiently mass produce the gun.
So even though they went into production at about the same time,
the Owen would far outstrip the Austen in production after only a couple of months.
In total 19,914 of these Austen Mark I guns were manufactured.
They would also do a couple hundred Mark IIs, but we'll cover those in a separate video.
These were actually pulled out of combat service in August of 1944,
which should tell you something about how well they were liked, or how much they were disliked.
They were put back into reserve use with Home Guard type units in Australia.
Ultimately in the late 1960s everything that was still in Australian inventory in warehouses was finally just destroyed for scrap,
because no one (except collectors today), would want Austens.
As a result of that, of course, these are quite rare guns to find today.
So I'm much indebted to the Royal Armouries for giving me the chance to come here
and take this very nice condition, very early Austen Mark I and show it to you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. If you would like to come visit the National Firearms Centre yourself,
they have a big museum open to the public, that's the Royal Armouries Museum.
The collection of the NFC is not open to the general public, but it is available by appointment to researchers.
So if you have work that you are doing, either text or in other media on interesting and unusual firearms,
definitely get in contact with them through the link in the description below,
and set up a time to come and visit the Armouries.
Thanks for watching.