Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company taking a look at a fantastically rare,
transferrable, US World War Two submachine gun. This is actually an M2 submachine gun.
If you've ever wondered why the US went from the M1 to the M3, the Thompson to the Grease Gun,
well, they actually didn't. There was an M2 in the middle. It's just very, very scarce.
So, the deal is this was designed by a guy named George Hyde,
who ... was a very talented, but very much unrecognised today, firearms designer.
He had actually worked before the war working on some submachine gun designs.
In fact, I have a previous video on his 1933 pattern,
so if you're interested I'll link that from the end of this video, you can take a look at that one.
That kind of gives you an idea where he's coming from on this.
At any rate, during World War Two he was working for GM, specifically the Inland Division,
which of course did a tremendous amount of production of M1 carbines,
and he put together a submachine gun design for the US military.
The thing is, the US went into World War Two with the Thompson gun, which was
a pretty darn good submachine gun in 1920, and it was kind of a totally obsolete submachine gun in 1940.
It was way too heavy, and way too expensive.
And the US government saw what the British were doing with the Sten gun and said,
"We don't want a Sten gun, but that gives us some ideas."
They wanted something that was gonna be a lot lighter and a lot cheaper, and that's what Hyde put together here.
So this is about 2 pounds lighter than the Thompson gun, still uses Thompson mags, was a lot cheaper to manufacture.
And this went into its initial trials in April of 1942. They put it through about a 6,000 round endurance test,
which it did either really well or kind of mediocre, depending on how you look at it.
In 6,000 rounds it had 20 malfunctions, which is a lot more than it ought to.
However, 18 of those 20 were simply a failure of the bolt hold-open to lock open on an empty magazine.
Not exactly a critical thing.
They also ... put it through an accuracy test, a comparison to the Thompson.
They put up a 6 foot square target at 50 yards, a piece of cloth, and fired 100 rounds at it, all in full-auto.
And the Hyde put 99 out of 100 rounds on that target, compared to 50 out of 100 rounds from the M1 Thompson,
and 49 out of 100 from the 1928 A1 Thompson. So this was substantially more controllable.
That's one of the real shortcomings of the Thompson, in addition to its weight and its cost.
They look at that whole trial, things look really good.
... Hyde takes the gun back, does a few tweaks to improve the performance of the hold-open,
brings it back in June of '42, they do some more testing. They put it through another like 2,800 round endurance test.
Passes really well that time, and this thing is formally recommended for adoption.
Now we have the problem of who's gonna make it. So actually before we get to that,
let's take a look at how it actually works, because it's got some unusual design elements to it.
There's a fair amount to go through with this, and there are a lot of cool design elements to it.
So let's start (gonna pull the magazine here first), this does by the way use standard Thompson magazines,
that was what was available. Now the Grease Gun that came later would use its own different magazine, but not yet.
Now if we look at the top of this, this is a remarkably wide gun.
In fact, it's kind of a hugely wide gun, and that is to limit the length of the receiver.
If you need a certain amount of mass for a simple open-bolt blowback action,
which this is, and if you have a narrow diameter tube you need a long bolt to get that mass.
Well if you make the tube larger in diameter you can make the bolt shorter,
and then it can still have the same amount of travel with a shorter overall receiver.
We have a nice big protected front sight.
We have a rear sight with two different options for you, there is an aperture in the centre, and there is an open notch at the top.
The notch would probably be for your very immediate short-range shooting,
and the aperture is probably for 50 or 100 yards, although I don't know specifically which.
The magazine release button just slides backwards and the mag comes out.
It has a lug right here that locks into (there we go), the hole in the back of the magazine, right there.
The controls are actually kind of reminiscent of the Thompson, sort of. This is your fire selector and this is your safety.
So this is fire, that is safe. And then this is ... full-auto, sorry, and
flipping it rearward is semi-auto, and you can tell that easily enough
with the click of the disconnector resetting in semi-auto. In full-auto it's just .. nothing.
The markings are on the left side rear of the receiver tube.
So this is submachine gun, calibre .45, M2, made by Marlin in New Haven, Connecticut.
And this one is serial number 386. Spoiler - they only made 400, so this is right at the very end of production.
There's a neat feature in the butt plate. This is not a button that does something, this is actually an oil bottle.
And if you rotate it 90 degrees, it has two little lugs that unlock and this comes out.
So it looks very much like an M1 carbine oil bottle, but fits into the buttstock
That little rod is just sort of an applicator.
And then we have a fixed sling bar on the left side on the back, and a sling bar on the front barrel band.
Now for disassembly we're actually going to start by taking off this barrel band.
It's held on by a spring clip here,
pull that off,
then the upper handguard slides right off.
And then we have a very cool disassembly method.
There are some screws that you can see here, we don't have to mess with any of those.
Instead we just have this latch (and this actually covers the front trigger guard screw),
just take that, ... rotate it 90 degrees over, and then
the whole barrelled action pivots out of the stock.
So there's my stock and fire control group. At this point if I want to take the fire control group out,
then I can take out these two screws to remove it, but there's really no need.
You can see the sear functioning here. This is full-auto which stays in the downward position until I release the trigger.
Now if I switch that to semi-auto
it pops back up so it catches the bolt on each shot, and fires in semi-auto.
Now there are two elements that actually lock the action into the stock. One of them is here at the back with this little...
Well, there's a hook that goes in there,
this hook on the rear end cap of the receiver. That locks into
that little recess.
And then at the front this lever rotates that plug,
which locks into this recess at the front. So a very simple, but nice and secure, takedown method.
Now once we've got the action out, in order to take the bolt out
we're gonna take this end cap and rotate it, something that can't happen when it's in the gun because of this lug.
I'm just gonna pivot that around,
and there it goes. It has a remarkably small recoil spring, but this is actually two recoil springs.
There is a guide rod in the plunger here and then you'll notice there's actually (and it's stuck inside this tube),
but there's actually a second small diameter recoil spring inside that guide rod extension.
So as this compresses, you're actually at the end of travel, getting a second recoil spring coming into play right there.
Now we can just pull the bolt out.
That is a chunky big bolt with a little narrow thing at the front.
The charging handle then also comes out, you slide it all the way back and it drops into the receiver.
That's pretty simple right there.
And then you're left with just a receiver. You've got your magazine well.
There's a little screw right there, that simply holds the ejector in place. You've got a barrel screwed into the front of it.
There is nothing fancy about this bolt. It is just a great big chunk of metal to act as mass and inertia.
You can see there's only the small diameter hole for the recoil spring.
The front extension of the bolt of course has the firing pin, extractor, a track for the ejector.
This is a fixed firing pin, so nothing fancy going on there.
However, we do have an interesting subject for manufacturing processes here in the receiver assembly.
So the back end of this is a tube, that's simple enough, that's cheap.
The front end is a barrel, there's not really a super cheap way to make a barrel because it has to be rifled.
So that's a fixed cost, we can't cheap in that.
However in the centre we have what is a fairly complex shape.
How do we make that in the most efficient manner possible?
Notice the rough surface here. The answer that George Hyde came up with was, well
the first answer would be you forge it. That allows you to get the general shape pretty quickly.
You can leave the top here unfinished because it doesn't matter, it's just aesthetic.
And then you machine out the specific surfaces in the bottom that you need.
Well forging is an expensive process, and what Hyde came up with was to actually use metal sintering.
This is the process of using powdered metal, poured into a mould
and then apply a tremendous amount of heat and pressure and you will basically melt the powder
and effectively cast it, or forge it, well cast it, into a finished solid part.
This is something that we do today, ... sintering is in a way the basis of today's additive 3D printing technology,
although done one small particle at a time, instead of done ... in a single mould all at once.
This is the most innovative thing about the M2 submachine gun, and it's ultimately what would cause problems in its production.
We'll get to that in a moment.
Well there you have a complete field-stripped Hyde, or GM, or Inland, M2 submachine gun.
A couple extra little things I can show you here.
With the receiver assembly put together, that is the body of the bolt, and then that is the sear surface
that our sear, right here, locks into.
And then I can show you when I go to reassemble this, what I'm gonna do is just hook that in there,
and then the whole thing pivots down nicely into the stock.
I come up here and just rotate this back
into place and, presto, the gun is reassembled. I just have to put the handguard back on.
So we're back at June of 1942, the Hyde gun looks great, we'll adopt it, put it into production.
Inland will p... No, no Inland's not gonna produce this because Inland is building
a whole lot of other stuff already, and they don't have the production capacity available to spare.
So instead the government looks around and they find the Marlin company.
Marlin is willing to take on a new contract for a new gun, so they sign a deal with Marlin.
The problem is Marlin doesn't really have any institutional expertise with sintered metal.
And there were substantial delays in getting this gun tooled up for actual production.
Even once they did have it set up and they started producing guns,
they ran into problems with the production versions of the guns.
That's always a potential roadblock, when you ... go from prototypes to mass production.
The prototype guns worked great, they were all hand-built and hand-fitted.
When they started getting the first guns off the production line they had new and different problems,
and that took them some time to resolve as well.
Ultimately, it would take a year to get the very first deliveries of these. So they showed up in May of 1943.
June of 1943 they go ahead and cancel the contract with a grand total of about 400 actually delivered.
Now, why would they cancel it just when they start getting guns?
Well, the reason is almost as soon as this was approved for production Hyde and some of his counterparts
went back to designing to come up with something that was actually better still,
cheaper and easier to produce than that M2, and that of course would be the M3 submachine gun.
So, right about the time the M2 starts getting delivered the M3 is also on the line.
This fits the US government's needs better, we don't need the M2, we'll just cancel it, cut our losses and move on.
So, there are something like a half a dozen of these guns that still survive today.
They're extremely rare, and it's really cool to get a chance to take a look at one here.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed taking a look at it. If you want to see more about this or a bunch of other cool
machine guns and other assorted firearms, make sure to check out Morphy's auction catalogue.
They've always got something cool in there to take a look at.
Thanks for watching.