Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have a super cool
firearm to take a look at here.
This is a China Lake 40mm pump-action grenade launcher.
And this was developed and used by the Navy SEALs
in Vietnam in very small numbers.
Now this particular example is a reproduction,
we'll get into the details of that when we look at it up close.
But originally 24 of these things were manufactured.
They were designed in 1967 by a gunsmith by the name of Alfred Kermode
at the China Lake Naval Base in California.
And they were designed sort of in this period where the M79 grenade launcher
had been developed and introduced.
And [that] is just a simple break-action 40mm grenade launcher.
And [that] thing was super popular, everyone thought [that] was just really cool.
But, if we can have one shot, like what if there'd be a way to get multiple shots?
And the Army, the US military in general,
actually did a fair amount of experimentation on multi-shot 40mm launchers.
... You would see some of this in project SPIW,
where they had a requirement for an area effect weapon that had to carry 3 rounds.
They experimented with, in Vietnam in particular, they experimented with a
triple-barrel, underbarrel, 40mm launcher, ... they only made a couple of them.
Sounded good: in practice it was simple, but it was really bulky and huge, and just a failure.
They experimented with a pump-action harmonica magazine type thing
where you had a magazine sticking out the side.
Those were also actually used in Vietnam in very limited numbers,
and again not particularly successful.
And what did actually come to fruition was this.
This thing never actually had a formal designation, it wasn't the "M" anything, or the "XM" anything else,
it was just called the "China Lake 40mm", or the "pump-action grenade launcher".
And it was made ... primarily for the Navy SEALs, and it fit their modus operandi.
A lot of people think about special forces in Vietnam as teams of guys
who are going to go into the field and hunker down and sneak around for days or weeks at a time.
And that did happen, but it wasn't the SEALs doing it.
The SEALs were much more typically used for relatively short missions.
They would be ambushing this group at this time and place, something like that.
So they didn't need to carry a weapon for an extended period,
these were typically 4 to 12 hour sorts of missions.
They'd insert by boat, walk a little ways to where the ambush point was going to be,
make the ambush, and then get extracted.
And a pump-action 40mm grenade launcher was a fantastic weapon for them to use
as the initiator for an ambush.
Or, if they got spotted on the way in, or the way out, as a way to break cover.
This is a heck of a lot of firepower in a very handy package.
So let's ... disassemble this thing,
it's basically developed off of the idea of a Remington 870.
But yeah, let me show you how it works, and then we'll talk about
how many they made and what actually happened to them.
So you can really clearly see the Remington 870 lineage here in the buttstock.
This was in fact copied from a Remington 870 stock,
kind of grafted onto the back end of effectively an M79 stock.
... Every one of the guns was handmade, and that includes carving the stocks for them.
So, the basic idea here is we have an underbarrel tube magazine,
push that guy up just like a shotgun.
You can load three rounds of 40x46mm grenades in there.
This is the low-velocity ... 40mm grenade, the exact same one that was used in the M79.
That's a grenade that is very cleverly designed, we talked about the origins of
that grenade and what's so interesting about it in the video on the M79.
So if you haven't seen that one, definitely check it out. ...
You have a maximum range of about 400 yards, little enough recoil that it's easily shoulder fired.
In fact, interestingly, at least one or two of the SEALs who used these
reported being able to empty the entire tube before the first grenade actually hit the ground.
So you can imagine the sort of moral impact that would have in an ambush style of situation.
Anyway, we've got a pump handle out here, we've got a shell release on it right there.
Slide ..., rack that sucker open, it will pop a round up, locks in place.
There is a tang safety, so safe, fire.
Fire one.
It does not slam fire, I know people are going to ask that.
You don't really want it to with this, just pull the trigger every time.
They are grenades: just pull the trigger every time.
So you got three in the tube. You can also carry a fourth one
in the chamber, hence a total of a 4 round capacity.
The sights are actually M79 sights. Of course the barrel's the same length,
so they just took the exact same sights off the M79,
clamped them on at the same distance apart, front and rear.
This guy has a little locking lever on it, right here, so it doesn't bounce around.
You can lift the sight up like that, that allows you to adjust out to 400 yards.
More typically, probably, you would either be using it at relatively close range,
where you have it flipped down and you just use ...
the battle sight here, which is 100 yard zero.
Or you are one of the SEALs who practices with these to a significant extent,
and can just kind of shoot it from the hip by feel quite accurately.
I do want to point out this big ol' screw on the left side,
which was originally intended for the sort of clamp-on
sight that you would also see on the M203.
So the 203 had a quadrant sight on top
and also a flip out sight on the side of its receiver.
The original idea was to be able to use that on the China Lake guns.
They ended up deciding that the M79 style was just fine by itself, and so they just used those.
Now disassembly is based on the trigger guard, and while we're talking about this
I want to point out that this whole gun basically is made of aluminium.
That's one of the nice things about ... the high-low 40mm grenade,
is that it ... doesn't have a huge amount of chamber pressure, it's like 3,000 psi.
And so you don't need a whole lot of high-strength steel to contain the whole thing.
By making this all out of aluminium, while it's large,
the whole thing only weighs just a hair over 8 pounds unloaded.
So these components are in fact aluminium.
And to disassemble it we're going to take this lever, push it backwards,
and then we can rotate the trigger guard to the side,
and then we can actually unlock it.
That is going to allow us to slide the bottom half of the gun off.
Now in order to actually take it all the way off, I have to lift up the front sight,
there we go, and then the bottom end just slides right off.
We've got a few of the bits coming out because I didn't hold it upside down.
But in effect you have an upper and a lower assembly.
... There weren't a whole lot of problems with these guns in the field,
but one that was quite legit was that this little guy,
right there, is made out of aluminium.
And when you hand this to a bunch of rather burly SEALs, load it with high explosives,
and put them in a stressful ambush situation and tell them to fire it as fast as they can,
they are going to exert a significant amount of force on the pump handle.
And the result is often that they end up bending this guy.
And if they bend it too badly, when you go to run the pump handle forward,
the whole bottom assembly of the gun comes sliding right off the top assembly.
And that's a very bad situation.
So there weren't a whole lot of problems with these,
especially being handmade they ran well, but that was a weak link of the system.
Now, looking a little more closely here, we have a pair of action bars that are
going to lock into the bolt assembly, which we'll take a look at in a moment.
When the bolt assembly hits the end of travel rearward,
it's going to push on this lever which is going to lift up the elevator.
That'll bring a shell up in line with the barrel.
When the pump handle then goes forward,
the bolt is going to trip this little catch here,
which releases the elevator, allows it to drop down.
And your magazine spring, right here,
is going to push another grenade out onto the elevator ready to cycle again.
Now if we look at the inside here,
to disassemble this you do have to have it cocked, which it is.
And we can then lift out the locking block. This is a pivoting flap
actually rather similar to what you would find in a Walther P38 or Beretta pistol.
This particular one has one of its cam lugs sheared off.
That was helpfully done by the cast of "Sons of Guns"
when they had this particular gun on their TV show.
And unfortunately it remains broken today.
Anyway, we take the locking block out.
There is then this little batman logo shaped piece, that is basically the cocking cam.
We lift that out,
and then the bolt slides to the rear, and lifts out of the gun.
In addition to the bolt there is a sliding dust cover.
... Because the ... bolt is only about half as long as the actual cartridge,
you have that dust cover to keep the action sealed up when the bolt is in battery.
As the bolt is cycling back and forth, this piece right here compresses the firing pin spring,
which is currently in the cocked position.
So that's the purpose of that guy.
And then of course this locking block
is going to sit right there, and ... this one remaining cam
are going to pivot it up and down.
And there are a pair of locking shoulders, right here and here,
that the block locks into when the gun's in battery.
We can also take a look at ...
that right there.
When I pull the trigger that lever lifts.
You can see the whole thing moving down in here, that's your sear bar.
And that is going to act on this guy, right here.
When this gets lifted up, the firing pin snaps forward,
protrudes out the front, and fires the gun.
So mechanically, like I said, it's relatively simple.
It is loosely based on the Remington 870.
And that's pretty much all there is to the inside.
All in all, 24 of the China Lake 40mm launchers were manufactured.
Two of those ended up going to MACV-SOG,
two of them went to Marine Force Recon, and the other 20 were used by the SEALs.
They were very popular. But they were all handmade guns,
there ... was never a production line for this.
It's kind of a finicky design, it took hand fitting and proper manufacturing
to really make these things reliable and effective.
And by the way they were totally effective - at least with high explosive ammo,
which is the only thing that they were ever really intended to use.
... Something like an M79 you can shoot smoke or flares.
That's not the purpose of one of these guys, this is high explosive:
as much of it as possible, as quickly as possible.
So very well-liked. There are just a couple of pictures that survive of them in action.
There's a cool one we've got here of actually a helicopter pilot
who worked with MACV-SOG, although not actually directly a member I suppose.
But he was actually given one by a departing SEAL as a sort of,
"Hey, thanks for picking me up when I really needed an extraction.
I'm mustering out and heading home,
here, have my awesome pump-action 40mm grenade launcher."
And so ... that's a very cool period photo,
a gentleman who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for one particular extraction.
At any rate, when the SEALs got their pump-action grenade launchers,
they were also just starting to use the XM-148 underbarrel single-shot grenade launchers
that were developed. And those were actually used fairly extensively in Vietnam.
They had some issues, and the design was ultimately revamped a bit
and it ultimately became the M203, which was a very popular SEAL weapon as well.
So with the end of the Vietnam War the M203 became the standard weapon.
This wasn't really so much phased out, as simply they were kind of done.
They didn't build any more, these were pretty heavily used up.
As far as we know, I believe 5 of the original 24 still exist today.
Four of them in museums and government facilities in the US,
one of them is actually in a museum in Saigon.
And they're extremely cool.
There's a piece of very interesting Vietnam War mythos,
and in 2004 a project was put together by a couple of guys to try and reproduce them.
So one guy, Dutch Hillenburg, (you saw his name on this particular gun),
got access to one of the original guns while working for the Navy.
Went looking for the plans, as far as anyone can tell no plans survive.
They may be buried in some filing cabinet in the Indiana Jones warehouse somewhere,
but nobody's found them yet.
He got access to it.
There's a gentleman, Captain Monty Mendenhall,
he financed the project to the tune of a substantial amount of money.
And a master machinist and gunsmith by the name of Brian Fauci,
who actually did the manufacture on these.
This would eventually lead to some work with a company called Airtronic.
But we'll get to that association, and what came of that and the ... US Marine Corps'
grenade launching trials in 2007-2009, we'll get to that in a later video.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this look at a particularly iconic firearm that
you will virtually never see outside of a computer game.
It's very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one in person,
especially to be able to take it apart and show you guys how it works.
So a big thanks to Dutch Hillenburg for the opportunity to do this with his personal one.
Thanks for watching.