Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum and I am filming today from beautiful Malta
by gracious invitation of the Association of
Maltese Arms Collectors and Shooters.
And today we are going to take a look at August Coenders'
9mm, belt-fed, submachine gun.
So August Coenders was a firearms designer of German birth. He was born in 1890, and
starting in the very early 1920s he ... actually started his own firm in Germany
doing developmental work on the 20mm Oerlikon gun, or a gun like it. The sources are a little bit vague.
He continued this for about four years until in 1924 the company he was working for went bankrupt,
so he needs somewhere else to go. So at that point he actually went to France,
and he went to work for the Puteaux Arsenal for three more years until 1927.
Again, working on, apparently, 20mm aircraft guns.
When that finished off, he ended up then going to England. So he travelled around quite a bit.
In the 1930s when, you know, international tensions started to build, he came back to Germany.
But, as a result of his time spent working in France and the UK, the German government never really trusted him.
And that would come back to have a real impact on many of his well, basically all of his designs.
So as Germany started to rearm itself and as it eventually got into World War Two,
Coenders designed a number of different guns ... that he wanted to have used by the German military.
This is one of them. This is a belt-fed 9mm,
it's not really a submachine gun, it's sort of a 9mm light machine gun.
We'll pull this apart and talk about it in just a moment, but I also want to point out
he also made an 8x57 Mauser calibre light machine gun, which allegedly competed
in the trials that led to the MG42. Not surprisingly, his didn't win.
He was acting as an independent designer, because of this former work experience
in France in particular, the German authorities just didn't really trust him.
And I think it didn't help that he was apparently quite outspoken,
angrily against people who said his work wasn't maybe the best ever.
When his work was criticised he responded in kind and quite forcefully.
And so he developed really a pretty poor relationship with the German military authorities.
Which, of course, is not going to be helpful in trying to get the German military authorities to buy your guns.
Anyway, he developed an 8mm light machine gun, or medium machine gun, this 9mm thing.
He also developed a Volkssturmgewehr rifle,
what appears to be a five-round
manually operated last-ditch rifle at the end of the war.
None of these went anywhere. The thing that actually did have some success
was a special type of artillery shell he developed.
That's a story for a completely different video, but that's probably the best-known thing about him.
... Because he was independent, he wasn't associated with any of the main German arms companies.
In fact, after World War Two when in fact this gun was captured by American
soldiers at his workshop and taken back to Aberdeen Proving Grounds,
Coenders himself wasn't actually found until partway through 1946.
Apparently he was basically hiding out in a cabin in the forest, and it took several attempts for
US troops and the German police to locate and arrest him for questioning.
Which was pretty standard of arms designers, other countries wanted to know what he'd been working on.
So anyway, it wasn't until 1946 that he was finally found and interrogated about the
various work that he had done during the war.
So that's the story of the man, August Coenders. And now let's go ahead and take a closer look at this gun.
Before we take this apart, there are a couple things that we need to cover.
So there is only one example of this gun extant. There may only have been one ever built.
And when this was captured by US troops, it was actually missing the barrel and the top cover assembly.
However, we actually have an original archived German photo showing it with its
original barrel and top cover assembly and there are some differences.
So the original barrel actually has a ventilated shroud here,
and it has a front sight on the front of the barrel that flips up.
The original top cover is not of this type of design. This is basically copied from the MG42
because this gun was completed by technicians at Aberdeen Proving Grounds
in order to do testing, and the German belt-fed gun that they were familiar with
was the 42, and so they they basically copied the same style of top cover for it.
On the original gun, the Coenders design, we don't know how it worked,
because we only have basically the one picture from the side.
But ... it's a cylindrical assembly and it has a larger cylindrical assembly right here
over the feedway, which would suggest that it had some sort of rotary sprocket
or something like that. Not the same, well, I can just show you this right here, not the same style
of MG42 type ... feed system like this has now.
So there are three versions of pictures you will see of this gun.
One of them is in this configuration,
one of them has the original top cover and
there is a book that was put out by Aberdeen
covering their gun collection at the end of the war, or in the '50s or '60s,
that shows it as it was captured, without a barrel and without any top cover.
Now having covered that, there are some features here that we can point out. It is 9mm Parabellum.
It used a non-disintegrating metallic belt for feeding, looks
fairly similar to the MG34 / MG42 belts, but obviously not exactly the same.
There was a belt with this gun. Unfortunately several years ago
the belt itself was actually stolen, and remained missing to this day, very sadly.
However, it is a simple blowback mechanism. So it's got a fixed firing pin, it fires from an open bolt,
there is no locking system, there's no delaying system. It's just mass and a spring,
which is all you would need for 9mm.
This is the bolt handle.
You do actually have to have it cocked
You've got a little stud here on the bolt, which runs in this
spring-loaded track. Of course, ... that top cover is Aberdeen's, not Coenders'.
So, fires from an open-bolt like so.
Belt comes out here, and the empty cases come out here. So we have this bent piece of sheet metal
which ensures that the belt doesn't interfere with the ejection,
so you don't get cases bouncing back into the ejection port.
The trigger is a very simple open bolt style of sear, there's really nothing fancy to it at all.
There is a major question of why would you want a gun like this? Like, what's the point?
And the most likely answer to that seems to be for a vehicular mount.
If ... you think of ... not necessarily a coaxial gun,
but a gun port firing weapon in an armoured vehicle that's not typically going to be used at long distance.
It's largely going to be used for point defence for the vehicle.
And at that sort of range one can understand how a 9mm Parabellum could be potent enough
to be considered acceptable. And you get the nice benefit of having a much smaller gun,
a lighter gun, smaller ammunition. You could carry more ammunition,
or you could carry the same amount of ammunition in a smaller space.
And space is valuable on the inside of an armoured vehicle.
They are cramped and something like this could be justifiable.
So that seems to be the most likely explanation for the gun.
Now to take it apart is actually really quite simple because, of course, it is just a simple blowback action.
Our barrel is held on with a spring catch right here. I push that down. It's really quite tight.
There we go. We rotate the barrel 90 degrees and then the barrel comes off.
Just two lugs holding the barrel on. Once again, I have to point out this is the Aberdeen made barrel,
this is not the original Coenders barrel. So we can't necessarily infer anything from this particular barrel.
We can then take the bolt out through the rear, because the butt-stock assembly
is simply threaded onto the end of the receiver tube.
Take this off ...
That comes out, we have a guide rod in the butt-stock.
A very simple recoil spring. To take the bolt out, we have to open the top cover.
Pull this back, I can pull out this guide pin and then the bolt.
The slot for the bolt handle goes all the way to the very back,
so the bolt comes out there.
And then we have one more bit of disassembly. You'll notice there's a pin across here.
This actually has a recoil buffer built into the back end of the bolt. That's a little guide rod.
So a really heavy spring here on this plunger. That is simply to give a little bit of
absorption, of padding basically, so that when the bolt hits the rear end of travel in the receiver
in the butt-stock, it's not transmitting a violent impact into the bolt assembly every time.
That heavy spring just absorbs a little bit of whatever recoil is left at that point.
And this spring comes off, like so.
You can see the fixed firing pin there,
extractor, slot for the ejector, and just a big spoon handle, sort of a blade style, of bolt handle.
There's not a whole lot else to show you on the receiver.
We do know that the original top cover would have assembled in basically the same way,
because this latch ... was originally Coenders. They didn't change that.
We have our feed mechanism right here. So a belt comes in and this hole,
right there,
is where the bolt is going to pick up a cartridge and push it down into the barrel out of the belt.
This rib on the top of the bolt is what does that.
So, right there, that rib comes through, hits the back end of a cartridge case,
pushes it in. This is going to act, right here, as a downward-sloping feed ramp.
Pushes it into the chamber and then immediately fires it with the fixed firing pin.
There's the view from the front. And, of course, the original top cover did have a rear sight on it,
where the Aberdeen one doesn't, because of course they were only interested in
looking into its functionality, not actually trying to use it.
The firing mechanism is extremely simple. You can just barely see it down there in the bottom of the tube.
It's just a sear that drops when I pull the trigger.
There doesn't appear to be any special safety in there
like you might expect for a more thoroughly developed submachine gun.
So, that's it.
There we go. That is pretty much everything we know about August Coenders'
9mm, belt-fed, probably made for a vehicle, machine gun.
Interestingly for such a small scale, independent sort of operation we have this Coenders 9mm gun that exists.
We don't know if any of his light machine guns exist, but one of his last-ditch
Volkssturm rifles also exists and sold recently, I believe in an Amoskeag action.
So that one's still out there. And there are some good trials reports,
or good intelligence reports on his artillery shells that include some
biographical information, which, by the way, is the reference material which I used for this video.
So it's kind of cool that so much of the stuff about this guy does still survive to this day.
I'd like to give a big thanks to the Maltese collector who let me bring this one out
to take apart and show to you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
If you did, please do consider supporting me directly through ForgottenWeapons.com or via Patreon.
It is your support there that makes it possible for me to travel to places like Malta and bring you guns like this one.
Thanks for watching.