Hi guys.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com
I'm Ian, and I have the opportunity today to take a look at a really cool, very unusual pistol.
Now the pistol here is a French-made Union automatic pistol.
This can be a little bit confusing,
because it's mechanically very much like a Colt Browning,
the same as a Spanish made Ruby, also a copy of the same basic mechanism.
And on top of that, Esperanza y Unceta, one of the Spanish Eibar companies,
manufactured a line of guns called the Union that were the same basic design as this one.
However, There were two distinct sets of guns: You had Spanish Unions,
and you had the French Union pistols, made by different people at different times,
and to definitely different levels of quality.
These French Union pistols are actually really well made. They're well finished,
they're finely machined-- you'll see that when we take a closer look at the gun itself here.
These were actually put into production about 1925.
They were produced until, a few years short of World War II, production finally stopped.
and, among other things, they were actually submitted in 765 French Long Caliber to the 1933 French pistol trials.
Of course, they didn't win that trial.
The model 35A by SACM was selected as the winner there.
But Union did try. Now, kind of like the Spanish pistols, the Unions were made in a wide variety of configurations.
In addition to those French trials guns you could get them in 25 or 32 caliber,
long slide, short slide, six round magazines, nine round magazines;
Some of them had extended barrels like this one; there were a couple different lengths of extended barrel that you could get;
Some of them had selective fire switches that could work as machine pistols.
And that is most likely the reason that we have this horseshoe magazine.
Now this magazine was patented in 1930 in France, so this is several years into the production of these guns.
They're extremely rare to find today:
Probably less than ten in the United States.
The ones that I found reference to specifically are four in total. That's it.
This is a 35 round magazine, so it runs all the way up in *here.*
The last cartridge sits right *here,*
and then *this,* when it's full, is all compressed spring.
It comes with a loading tool because that's the only way you're going to be able to cram this thing full of ammo.
And these are all in 32 ACP caliber.
Really, there are only one or two other pistols that were ever designed with a horseshoe-type magazine like this.
It's kind of unusual. Now, my understanding is,
When Union decided to make an extended magazine (which, again, was probably intended for their select-fire pistols -- that's what would really make practical sense--)
When they started, they actually first tried making twenty-five and fifty round straight stick mags. The problem was,
a straight stick mag that's 50 rounds is going to come to, like, *here* and be really awkward to actually use.
So someone in the company got the idea to wrap the magazine around the bottom *here,* and bring it right back up,
and have it not -- it's not fixed to the gun, but have it kind of stabilized by the front of the pistol frame.
That actually worked decently, believe it or not, so they went ahead and marketed these.
They did attempt to sell these in some foreign countries. Obviously in this time period, early 1930s,
foreign sales of military hardware were a pretty typical thing.
There is apparently some evidence that they were either sold or marketed in China. Makes sense.
In the 1930s in China, a select-fire pistol with an extended magazine would have been a very popular thing, most likely.
We don't know how many, if any, were actually sold in China though.
So here we have all the components disassembled.
We have our extended-barrel Union pistol.
Now, there's nothing to say that you have to use the extended barrel to use this horseshoe magazine.
There's nothing unique or specific about this Union to fit this magazine.
However, it is--
--It does seem to be that whenever these magazines are found, they're always found with the extended-barrel pistols,
so they may well have been sold that way,
as well as with the select-fire guns.
Now, because of the difficulty in loading an extended magazine like this,
they were sold with a loading tool.
This is very similar to the Luger snail-drum loading tool.
It's got a spring tab on the back here with a hook.
That hook latches on to the magazine catch,
Just like *this.*
And then, when you pull this lever up, it pushes the follower down for you, and gives you a lot of extra leverage to do that.
So that's how you would actually go ahead and load one of these.
Something else interesting to notice is the front "stirrup" here
(seems to be a good word to go with a horseshoe magazine)
This doesn't actually affix to the pistol at all;
it just kind of cradles the front of the pistol frame.
At the back end, we have this stiffening rib that runs down through most of the magazine,
but then it is flattened out here where the magazine is actually inside the magazine well of the pistol
And, of course, we have numbered viewing windows every five rounds,
so: "fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five."
And, interestingly enough, we have a-- The name in here is in French.
Again, these were French made Union pistols, not Spanish ones.
And that says, "Chargeur Union," so: Magazine for the Union
"Cal. 765," and then, "BteSGDG"
is a reference to French patent law,
saying that this is patented, but the government, despite patenting it, makes no warranty
that this will actually work like it's supposed to.
So that's this interesting standard patent law fine print that you'll find quite a lot.
So, to load this thing, you would snap this guy on.
I'm not going to do that because it's actually really tight,
and I don't want to mess up the nice finish on this -- snap this on, load it up to capacity (35 rounds)
and then, you take it and simply . . .
. . .run it into the gun here. We've got our magazine catch on the back.
It's a tight fit,
But it's also a well-made fit. The front of this magazine has no wobble in it whatsoever.
These little wings on the side hook around the bottom of the frame,
and, you know what, I bet you this actually works remarkably well.
It's not as awkward as you might think. The pistol's a little bit long,
But the balance, when this is loaded, is going to basically not change that much.
it's going to stay centered right about in the middle of the gun.
Honestly, for a select-fire 32-auto, I bet this would be a pretty slick adaptation.
Thanks for watching, guys. Hope you enjoyed the video.
I'm happy to have had the opportunity to bring you a closer view of this exceedingly rare and really kind of cool-looking magazine.
So don't forget to tune back in every week to ForgottenWeapons.com
for more extended magazines and weird firearms curiosa. Thanks for watching.
Captions by Nathaniel