Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw
taking a look at some really interesting Polish small arms.
Today we have one of the "Beha" submachine guns.
And this is a fascinating example of a submachine gun
manufactured during World War Two
for the Polish resistance by essentially ...
just barely more than a teenager
working out of essentially a village blacksmith shop.
And a guy who had never actually seen the inside of a submachine gun before.
So this was designed and built by a fellow by the name of Henryk Strąpoć,
who was born in 1922 in southern Poland.
And built his first gun at the ripe age of 15 in 1937.
He basically got his hands on a Spanish .25 calibre automatic pistol and made his own copy of it.
He was then promptly caught with his pistol, which was not even remotely legal,
and the only thing that saved him from going to jail was the fact that he was a minor.
He promised devoutly not to do it again,
he got basically a couple years of what we'd consider today probation, went home.
And being rural southern Polish, immediately commenced building more guns.
Before the war began he would build 3 more semi-auto pistols and a revolver.
He clearly enjoyed doing this.
And once the war begins he now has an opportunity to fulfil
what had to have been a lifelong fantasy, that of being an actual guerrilla armourer.
By 1942 he has joined the Peasant Battalions, the
(my Polish is non-existent, but that's close enough).
And he's actually joined the resistance, and he's a gunsmith,
and now his job is to make clandestine firearms.
And he sets about designing a submachine gun for the resistance.
And he's never actually seen a submachine gun.
In Polish the term is the same as in many languages, it's "machine pistol".
So he knows that this is pistol calibre, he knows it fires full-auto.
He's probably seen an MP40 somewhere, but not the inside.
And so what he builds is essentially a large, fully-automatic version of
a Spanish .25 calibre Ruby-style automatic.
So it's actually a closed-bolt, hammer-fired submachine gun,
with a rather intricate fire-control system.
Very crudely built, but very interestingly designed. Let's take a closer look inside it.
So overall, what we have is very much a pistol style of action, with a slide on top.
There's no stock on it, this is more of a hide it under your coat
sort of covert gun with no buttstock.
But it does have a sling, pistol grip up to the front end of the barrel.
There are a couple of markings on it, we have "BH", that's Beha,
that actually stands for
But maybe he didn't have a C, maybe ... BCh just wouldn't fit in that nice circle.
Or maybe he just wasn't all that great at spelling. That stands for Peasant Battalions by the way.
And then on the other side of the slide we have W.44, that's
And Henryk Strąpoć's initials right there.
So he actually put his name and date on this gun, which is cool.
It's wise to do if you're building something like this,
if you want ... anyone else to ever know ... who did it.
We have a magazine release on the side here.
This uses an approximately 30, maybe 32 round magazine, all handmade.
This is chambered for 9mm Parabellum.
And it is actually selective fire. So that's the full-auto setting,
that's the semi-auto setting, and that is the safe setting.
Now when we take this apart, you'll immediately see the similarities to a Ruby-style semi-auto pistol.
But right there you can see that there's a fixed barrel.
That hole unfortunately is a deactivation hole, that wasn't originally in the gun.
But when you fire the slide cycles backward.
It's just simple blowback without a locking mechanism.
So disassembly begins at the front end here.
... Originally we had two set screws holding in a block here that holds the recoil spring in place.
One of those set screws is gone.
Take out that set screw, and then that is the spring retainer.
That's the main spring, which may have been a bed spring in a previous life.
We can now remove the barrel, it is threaded in place.
There we go, that's the barrel. Again deactivation holes, unfortunately.
The barrel's threaded back there.
Originally this probably came from a German Gewehr 98.
The source for barrels for these guns were,
basically Strąpoć found where a bunch of World War One era guns had been thrown away, essentially.
And went through the rusty remains of some World War One rifles
to find guns that had intact sections of barrel.
What they would typically do is take one long barrel,
bore it out to 9mm, and then re-chamber it at both ends for 9 Parabellum.
And then cut it in half in the centre,
and thus get two ... submachine gun barrels out of one old rifle barrel.
Now that I have the barrel removed, the next step is to loosen all four of the screws at the back.
These are holding in a pair of detachable slide rails.
I don't want to remove these, I just want to loosen them.
And there we go. So that's what he did for slide rails.
When these screws are tightened down the rails are held out on the outside.
And they run on these two tracks in the slide.
Looking at the inside of this slide you can immediately see the
resemblance to one of those Spanish pistols.
We've got a ... spring-loaded firing pin inside there.
There is a hammer here inside the lower mechanism.
And this works exactly like a blowback little automatic pistol.
The most interesting part of the gun from a design perspective is the fire control mechanism,
which is remarkably labyrinthine and complex, but actually works.
So in the semi-auto position this lever right here, pushes forward on this,
which is going to go down into here, come up, and push that sear right there forward.
Where it drops off the hammer, allows the hammer to fall.
We have a plunger with a spring right here, under my finger, that's the hammer spring.
Then in fully automatic there is actually an auto-sear, an auto-trip,
in this block that also houses the ejector.
So now when I fire this,
when the bolt goes forward ... it's going to actually push this forward ...
right there, which releases the sear.
You can see the sear surface there, and the ejector block there.
And when this goes forward it releases the hammer to fire,
until you release the trigger.
But what's really impressive is that this fires in a controlled and safe manner.
It's not simply slamming forward with the hammer following the slide,
it actually has a fully functional auto-sear in there.
Really impressive for a guy who had never seen the inside of a submachine gun.
Like, the gun is rather crudely constructed, but rather intelligently designed.
One of the hardest parts of a completely homemade firearm is the magazine, always.
So most designers go ahead and use some sort of existing available magazine.
Strąpoć didn't have an existing available magazine, so he had to make his own.
There are a couple of unusual features about it.
One of them being the guide rib is in the front of the magazine,
... much more typical to see that in the back of the mag.
But with his fire control mechanism, he didn't really have space
in the back surface of the magazine well to cut a slot for that.
So instead he put it there in the front, which actually makes sense.
The magazine spring is homemade, you can see
it's a little funky there, but it certainly works.
And then of course a homemade [magazine] follower and a ... two-piece floor plate.
Strąpoć started this project in 1942.
He had his first prototype gun finished and working by the spring of 1943.
He then enlisted the help of a draughtsman friend who took his prototype gun
and drew up a series of technical drawings based on it,
to allow manufacture of parts for additional guns.
Which was done by a number of friends he had in the area.
Guys who worked in machine shops, who were able to on the sly
make parts for more of these Beha guns.
By July of 1944 he had 11 of them manufactured,
something like 20 were done, total, by the end of the war.
The last couple of them were actually made in 7.62 Tokarev.
By that point, like late in the war, Strąpoć had access to Mosin-Nagant rifles
instead of just leftover World War One scrap Mausers.
And it was a lot easier to make barrels for 7.62 Tokarev
using a Mosin-Nagant barrel that was already bored
for the correct diameter and just needed a chamber cut in it.
So the last couple of guns were done that way, makes a lot of sense.
And while there is no photographic evidence of these in use,
they were in fact used in the late stages of the war by the Resistance in southern Poland.
A really cool example of a clandestine, underground manufactured,
very creative submachine gun.
If you want to look for a production version of a gun like this, hammer fired, closed bolt.
MP5? Wouldn't happen for some time after this was done.
I suppose actually there's the FNAB 43. ...
A very unorthodox way of manufacturing a submachine gun, the sort of cool system
that you get from someone who doesn't know the right and wrong way to do a gun.
They just know some engineering basics and come up with a solution.
Anyway, a big thanks to the Polish Army Museum
for giving me access to this very cool [only surviving] example to film for you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. If you find yourself in Warsaw
definitely take some time to come and visit the museum.
They have this and a couple of other underground
clandestine manufactured submachine guns on display.
Thanks for watching.