Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
Royal Army Museum in Brussels,
part of the Belgian War Heritage Institute.
And we are taking a look at some of the
really interesting and unusual firearms
from the museum's reference collection.
Specifically today we have a Model of 1933 Darne infantry machine gun.
So the story behind Darne is pretty interesting, I think.
This is one of the unfortunate civilian firearms manufacturers in French history
that kind of bit the dust by World War Two.
So this started with Regis Darne ... and his son Pierre who ran the company.
They started before World War One, but during World War One
they took on manufacture of the Lewis gun.
And Darne made a couple of thousand licensed ... Lewis guns for the French Air Force.
By 1916 the Darne family was looking at their own designs.
They wanted to expand into doing their own thing, and they came up with essentially this machine gun.
They came up with their own belt-fed, gas operated, tilting-bolt machine gun design.
They worked on it into 1917, they presented it to the French military in 1917.
It was formally approved, and there was actually a fairly large order for an infantry version
of the Darne gun ordered for the spring offensives of 1919.
Of course the war ended in November of 1918, kind of against most people's expectations.
And like so many of the next generation secret weapons,
the giant order for Darne machine guns was cancelled.
They didn't need them, the war was over.
So into the 1920s the Darne Company, they are kind of doing two things at the same time.
They are making shotguns, they're well known for a couple of different patterns
of sporting shotguns and also nice rifles.
They're making these for the civilian market to actually
generate capital and run the business and make some profit.
But they are taking a lot of those profits and investing them into R&D in military machine guns.
They thought that they really had a good thing going with this pattern
of machine gun, and they wanted to continue developing it.
And they hoped for eventual French, if not someone else's, military adoption.
Now the gun was primarily actually built and sold as an aircraft machine gun.
The vast majority of their sales were aircraft guns.
But the system was intentionally very modular, and really in many ways ahead of its time.
In other ways kind of questionable, but a very modular system.
So they made light infantry versions, heavy infantry versions.
Most of the guns that were actually produced were belt fed,
but they also did box-magazine feed versions.
For aircraft use these could be left-side feed or right-side feed.
They had trigger mechanisms like this for like an observer's mount,
they also had synchroniser mechanisms. And in fact a substantial number of these guns
were actually used by the French in aircraft after World War One.
... Well, by 1931 they had sold a total of 11,000 guns.
And probably 1,000 more in the couple of years after 1931.
But about half of their sales did in fact go to the French military,
and those were almost all aircraft guns.
Well, what we have here is the infantry configuration.
This is specifically a light infantry configuration with a bipod.
It's not meant to be tripod mounted. But it's not box-mag fed, it is belt fed.
So let's take a closer look at how all of this stuff goes together.
Although I'll give you a little spoiler, I've got no explanation for that pistol grip.
Let's start by taking a look at the markings. On the top rear of the receiver here
we have Darne Type 33. This helpfully gives us a model designation.
Which is really nice on the Darne guns, because they are all
very similar iterations on the same basic design.
Serial number on this is 11,847.
This is right at the end of Darne gun production.
These things really didn't make it into World War Two.
I am actually not sure what the D.4500 indicates,
... yeah, I'm not sure exactly what that is there for.
Now the receiver here is totally standard Darne gun.
This section right here. This was the same for all the different patterns.
And that's the core of the modular setup that Darne had.
What we have up here ... actually helps feed, it's part of the feed system.
There's a spring in here to push bullets down into the chamber.
But this is also a cover plate over a hole in the receiver
that was used for the ... fire control mechanism for the synchronised guns.
Same with some of these detail features back here.
So for this one as an infantry gun, they have instead dovetailed in a pistol grip.
These were also used for the observer-type mounts on aircraft guns.
And then they've replaced the standard plain end cap of the gun
with ... an end cap that has a buffer in it with a shoulder stock.
The belt-feed mechanism here is again, totally standard.
These were used on the aircraft versions primarily,
and also on some of the infantry versions.
I should point out that here on the right side of the receiver we have the calibre marking.
... The Darne guns ... were available in basically any cartridge that you wanted.
Kind of like the Vickers and Maxim guns, Darne was happy to adapt their mechanism
to whatever cartridge a foreign military might want.
In this case this is calibre 7.5, which would be French.
Model 29, so that's 7.5x54.
As opposed to the 7.5x58mm earlier, the Model 24 French cartridge.
This makes sense in the context of it being a 1933 gun,
that would have been the standard French Army cartridge at the time.
And as for that feed mechanism, these would have used their own proprietary belts or links.
There wasn't a standard belt-fed French 7.5 gun at the time.
So there was no obvious military belt to use, Darne made their own.
A quick thing here, this is actually your belt release.
So that ... raises actually the feed pawl that holds the belt in place.
So if you want to take a partial belt out, that's how you do it.
The sight on this is kind of crudely done.
You can see there's just a bracket that's been screwed in place onto the receiver,
and it is fitted with essentially a Lebel or Berthier
- at this point it would have been a Berthier M16 rifle rear sight.
That's literally the rear sight leaf off of a Lebel or Berthier.
And it is paired with a nice square front blade sight.
The barrel here is a bit heavier profile than the aircraft guns had.
Obviously an aircraft gun has a lot of airflow over it, it doesn't need a lot of material.
The infantry gun, especially belt feed, is ... not going to dissipate as much heat as quickly,
and so it needs to have a heavier barrel for some sustained fire capability.
Note that they've just pinned the front sight assembly on.
The aircraft guns obviously didn't have fixed sights on them.
And then they've also attached what is essentially ... a Châtellerault 24/29 bipod.
That certainly makes sense, it's a widely available bipod at the time
that would have been in use by other French machine guns.
So it folds up and locks into place nicely for transportation.
I said I've got no explanation for this pistol grip, that's mostly true.
Like I said, these grips were used on some of the aircraft observer guns,
and so they did have to be a bit oversized for gloves.
And I think they just ... used the existing grip design they had,
along with the gigantic trigger guard which is ideal for, again, gloves.
But it's kind of a weird one where you kind of don't put all three fingers down here.
It's kind of a two finger trigger guard, but just a single finger trigger.
... While we're here, we have a safety lever.
But it can only be engaged when the bolt is locked open.
And then you can engage the safety like that and it locks the system.
Alright, to disassemble this what we're going to do is pull this tab forward.
This is the mainspring, and once that's forward
we can slide the buttstock down out of its dovetail.
Like I said, this has a lot of mainspring tensioned up inside it.
So, the mainspring comes out along with its guide rod.
And there's our buttstock, you can see there is a buffer built into the buttstock.
But otherwise it's a pretty simplistic sort of thing.
It is in fact just the standard Darne rear end cap, with a couple of side plates attached
that can be screwed into a simple wooden buttstock.
Now we can pull the internals out.
So we've got our gas piston, operating rod.
We've got a series of lugs up here that operate the belt feed device.
And then we have our rather complex feed system here.
What this essentially is doing is pulling a cartridge out of a belt relatively low.
And by the way, the design here is not terrible in that it's pulling the ... cartridge out of the belt
on the recoil stroke of the gun when it's being actively powered by a long-stroke gas piston.
So that's when it should have the most reserve power available.
It's going to pull that cartridge out with this front thing, front carrier, depressed down.
And then the cartridge is going to come onto this carrier.
And then as the bolt carrier and the op rod come backwards
this lifts up, it's going to position the cartridge sitting like this.
So that when it goes forward again, the cartridge is being held
in this position to be pushed up into the chamber.
The bolt locks by tipping, so it lifts up like so.
We can see the locking recess in the receiver if we take out ... this top cover.
That pin holds it in place. So we can pull this out.
So this is an extra spring to help make sure the cartridges don't go too high,
this pushes them down into the barrel.
And then the locking shoulder is that one right above my finger, right there.
The bolt lifts up and lit and locks into that recess in the receiver.
So again, that's the locked position, that's the unlocked position.
I can then lift the bolt off.
The firing pin is locked into the bolt carrier here, but so that it can rotate out.
... This is a good example of Darne's manufacturing.
The firing pin has to be a specific material and hardness.
It doesn't necessarily apply to the other parts around it,
and so by making it removable you can have the minimum
necessary amount of special steel and special heat treating.
And that just sits right there.
So this does fire from an open bolt, fixed firing pin.
Darne really liked these sort of wire pin connectors.
Obviously we had that one for the top cover, but you can see right here
the front half of the gas piston is attached by a U-shaped pin.
We've got a similar one right here, holding several of these components together.
Now the pistol grip is dovetailed in place here in the bottom of the receiver.
And so if I lift up the safety.
This, again, sort of pin wire connector is - oops - there we go.
When it's down in this position it locks the pistol grip in place.
When I lift it up like that ...
and presto, there is our trigger assembly.
So a very simple dropping sear (when we have the safety in fire position).
That's all that's involved there.
And you can see they simply cut out a slot here in the bottom
with a pair of grooves to hold that trigger assembly in place.
So there it is field stripped.
And I still don't quite have the confidence to fully pull apart the belt feed mechanism yet,
but we'll get there on a Darne video at some point.
I should point out, of the Darne guns that were actually sold prior to 1931,
they were virtually all aircraft guns, not infantry ones like this.
And they ... sold 2,500 to Serbia, 1,000 to Italy, 1,200 to Spain, 150 to Brazil,
and the remainder, a little over half of them, went to the French. Specifically the French Air Force.
Overall the Darne is a really interesting gun that has been largely, well, forgotten by history.
It is a gun that had a bunch of pros to it, as well as some cons.
This was intentionally a very inexpensive gun.
In 1931 these things cost 700 francs, depending on the configuration.
It's a little complicated to translate 1931 French francs into 2022 dollars or euros,
but the best estimates, combining methodologies,
this is something on the order of about 1,000 to 1,500 dollars or [euros].
And by machine gun standards, that's really cheap.
This was intentional, there are no seriously forged parts in the gun.
You'll notice the receiver is not a complex forging, it's a relatively simple milled part.
There are a lot of complicated small parts, but they are relatively easy ones to make.
That leaves a mechanism that ... would have had issues as an infantry gun
with dirt and mud getting into this giant exposed mechanism.
But as an aircraft gun, that wasn't a problem.
And the mechanism, for all of its sketchy appearance, was actually really quite reliable.
The gun certainly could have benefited from some maturation, some further development.
Had it ever been adopted by someone in an infantry form,
it would have got some of that development.
But as an aircraft gun it did get a little bit.
I mean, these were produced for some ... 20+ years,
and they were continually iterating and improving
different pieces of the gun, although the general design remained the same.
So, the infantry versions are by far the scarcest of these.
... These were all basically sample, prototype, experimental sorts of guns.
They didn't sell a major contract of the infantry guns to anybody.
And that of course makes them very difficult to find today.
So a big thanks to the Belgian Army Museum for giving me
the opportunity to pull this one out so that you guys can see it.
If you are ever in Brussels I would highly recommend taking some time to stop by and see the museum.
It has a fantastic display ... across several different galleries of infantry small arms,
heavy equipment, artillery, vehicles, uniforms.
Really good exhibitions of, well, the stuff that gun people really like to see.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.