[ The Dror Part II: Second Model 8mm ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
the Royal Army Museum in Brussels,
part of the Belgian War Heritage Institute,
taking a look at some of their particularly rare
and interesting firearms. And today
we have part two of the Israeli Dror story.
This is a second pattern Israeli Dror.
Not quite as incredibly rare as the first pattern guns, but still pretty unusual to find.
This is chambered for 8mm Mauser.
And well ... if you haven't seen the previous video on the .303 pattern gun,
I would highly recommend going back and checking out that video,
because what we're going to do now is pick up where that story left off.
And that was approximately late 1947.
All the tooling for the Dror (at this point still in .303 calibre)
is sat on a boat and shipped to Haifa.
Now it arrives too late to actually be put into use for the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.
But they do unpack it and set up production, and start building Dror light machine guns.
Now they have a young man by the name of Yisrael Galili,
who is in charge of the production team. You might recognise that name.
He would of course go on to develop the Galil rifle.
According to him, the tooling was a complete disaster to unpack.
They had a lot of trouble figuring out what every individual part was,
... how it was assembled, but they did get it going.
In 1948 Carl Ekdahl came over from the US to assist with setting up production.
It appears that Johnson himself came over at some point
in the late '40s or early '50s, it's not well documented.
But he probably was aware of this project, and probably came over to either
take a look at it, or assist with some of the technical problems.
At any rate, they get the guns into production, they are building .303 calibre guns
and they have their first production run of maybe 400 total.
And they are basically cut off.
The military administration tells them they need to ... redesign the gun
and change the calibre to 8mm Mauser.
The logistics for the newly founded Israeli military have changed,
they no longer have really easy ready access to a lot of .303 British.
Now they're able to get a lot of 8mm Mauser, both ammunition and firearms, through Czechoslovakia.
And so, "Well, we need your machine gun in 8mm now, so deal with it."
Well the production team does. In fact, in the process of redesigning the gun for 8mm Mauser
they change a bunch of the elements of the gun, they improve a lot of things.
They improve the barrel release, the magazine for sure, the sights, the stock.
They add a carry handle to it, they improved the bipod.
Anyway, let's take a closer look at the 8mm Dror, the second pattern Dror.
And then we'll come back to how this actually did when it was put in trials.
The mechanical heart of the second pattern Dror is identical to the first pattern.
In fact some of the internal parts are actually still interchangeable.
Obviously they changed the bolt head to accommodate 8mm instead of .303 British.
The biggest functional change is that they went from the side mounted
(which would have been sticking out here),
the side-mounted Johnson-style magazine to a much more typical traditional box magazine.
So we have a magazine release right here. This is a nose in, rock back magazine.
Excuse the amount of grungy Cosmoline in there.
This is essentially a BAR magazine.
These aren't actually converted BAR magazines.
I haven't seen any data, but I have to wonder if one of the things that Slavin was able to buy
was tooling to make BAR magazines, because this sure looks like it.
But they made their own mags, and then they added a locking tab at the front
along with a locking catch at the back.
So it holds 20 rounds, the same as the .303 guns incidentally.
The buttstock was redesigned to have a bit of a scoop at the top to help hold it into the shoulder.
And on this one I can actually show you the storage compartment.
We have a spring-loaded button right there.
If I push that all the way in I can lift the buttstock up.
And you can see that we have a hollow tube there with just a plunger
so you can store a cleaning kit inside the buttstock.
They added a very sort of Bren-like carry handle.
And it's on a folding mount, so it snaps in position either here or vertically.
The whole front end of the gun was pretty substantially changed.
So the bipod was moved out to the front where it's going to be a little bit more useful,
and there is now rotation and pivot on the bipod.
And then the bipod, if you squeeze the legs together,
can be folded up like that for transportation or storage.
The front sight is now a windage adjustable ... square post with a little protective hood.
And the front sight is now mounted on the end of the barrel shroud.
The shroud is longer on the second pattern guns than it is on the [first].
This does still mean that you can't zero barrels independently,
because you now have no sights on the barrels.
The barrel change mechanism was also simplified, made a lot easier to actually use.
Now the barrel locking lever is up here.
So if I push the barrel back, push this button in, I can lift the lever up.
And then, as long as the bolt is unlocked, I can pull the barrel out.
It has the same basic construction back there,
we still have the locking lugs integrally machined into the barrel extension.
The rear sight remains the same basic style, but it's been simplified quite a bit.
It's still an aperture sight, you still have to flip it up to actually use it,
but it would be cheaper and easier to make.
They also added a little protective set of sort of wings for that sight at the back end of the receiver.
So it's not just flopping out there in the wind when it's folded down.
The charging handle was slightly redesigned, it's now longer, smoother, easier to get a good grasp on.
And now that the gun has a traditional box magazine,
they also were able to add a dust cover to the magazine well.
So you can flip that down to keep dirt out of the gun when it's not in use.
The fire control system remains the same: forward is semi-auto, which fires from a closed bolt,
vertical is safe, and rear is full-auto, which fires from an open bolt.
Disassembly is also the same: we have this crossbar button,
and then we can just pull the upper and lower apart.
The lower is essentially identical, except for the different style buttstock
and rubber (actually plastic) covers instead of fibre Bakelite-type covers over the tubes.
The second model bolt handle is held in place basically the same way.
But they've redesigned this so that it is a much more secure attachment,
much less likely to be knocked out of the gun unintentionally.
So you still have to pull this pin up.
Now however, instead of pushing the handle forward, you push the handle backwards.
Now instead of just a small diameter pin coming through,
we have this much larger plunger that's locking the handle into the bolt.
Mechanically the bolt and carrier are the same design.
We now have a spring on the firing pin.
By the way, this is just actually tension clamped onto the firing pin.
So you can pop this out and the firing pin comes out.
But on the off chance that that's fragile on this one, I'm going to leave it in place.
The bolt head is slightly different,
just dimensionally different to fit 8mm Mauser instead of .303 British.
And this attachment is slightly different to accommodate the new style of charging handle.
The extractor has also been changed so that it is now independent of the charging handle.
It doesn't come off when you take the charging handle out.
And there's the whole thing disassembled.
... Mechanically identical to the first pattern, improved in a lot of ways.
So the question is: did the improvements actually help the gun in a practical sense?
I already mentioned that the gun was put into production before they actually did field trials on it.
That's how excited and optimistic everyone was about it.
Unfortunately it didn't really work out the way they hoped.
In 1950 they finally got around to actually doing a competitive trial with the Dror.
And specifically they were comparing it to the Bren gun and the MG 34.
They had Brens and 34s that were World War Two surplus
that they were comparing against brand-new factory Drors.
There was a factory representative at the trials, or a couple of them,
to make sure that everything went smoothly with the guns.
And yet the Dror lost virtually every aspect of the trial to the 34 and the Bren gun.
Guns that were well-used surplus guns at that point.
It turned out that the Dror kicked heavily when fired.
I've fired a semi-automatic version of one of these, and it does indeed kick remarkably hard.
One really kind of has to wonder how a gun that is this heavy
can ... like this kicks a lot more than say an M1 Garand,
which is the exact same cartridge in a much lighter gun.
But it does, I think it's because the bolt is moving at pretty darn high velocity
when it slams into the back of the receiver tube.
Johnson light machine guns are the same way, they kick remarkably heavily.
At any rate, because of that recoil, the dispersion ... in automatic fire
at range was worse than ... either of the other competitors.
The accuracy in general was not good, the reliability was not good.
... All of the guns they ran through sand tests, mud tests, dirt tests, water exposure testing,
and the Dror failed every single one of those tests.
It ... was really an unmitigated disaster of a trial, and raised a lot of questions like,
"Why did we start building these if this was going to turn out this way?"
So they finished the production run of the Drors that was then in progress.
They'd already invested enough in most of the parts
that were complete that it was worth finishing them.
But the guns never actually saw combat, they were never adopted by the Israeli Army.
They did go into service with the Israeli Navy,
who didn't really need machine guns very much.
And they were used as training weapons.
And that is the extent of the military use of the Dror.
For all of the effort, and the time, and the money that went into
this incredibly circuitous, sneaky procurement of this gun,
it ended up being a complete disappointment in field trials.
So I think ... this is a really interesting story, I love all the intricacies to it.
A truly forgotten weapon, one of those ones that's forgotten for a multitude of very good reasons.
Anyway, a big thanks to the Belgian Army Museum for giving me the access to this
and the .303 calibre gun, especially the .303 calibre gun,
to take a look at, and to film and bring to you guys.
If you are in Belgium I would strongly recommend taking some time to stop by the museum.
It's right smack in the centre of Brussels in a gorgeous big open park.
Extensive galleries of World War One and World War Two uniforms and equipment,
vehicles, small arms, artillery, all sorts of cool stuff here to take a look at.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.