Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Kessler Auction House in Switzerland
taking a look at, naturally, a Swiss submachine gun.
This is an MP-41/44,
and it represents Switzerland's attempt to get
a submachine gun at the beginning of World War Two.
In the summer of 1940 it became very apparent that
one might need to watch out for a German invasion perhaps.
It was pretty obvious that the Germans had a contingency plan for conquering Switzerland.
And so the Swiss naturally put together a defensive plan
to resist the Wehrmacht as best they could.
And it became very clear at this point that they really ought to have a good submachine gun.
Now SIG had been making a series of submachine guns,
the MK series, for a number of years in the 1930s.
So there was a commercial submachine gun available.
And there was really only one other major arms producer in the country,
that being Waffenfabrik Bern.
So in 1940 the Swiss government issued a request for a military submachine gun.
And ... of course ... they really needed them like right now.
So the two companies that were in a position to respond were SIG and Bern.
Of course the Swiss normally might have looked to other countries and
foreign contractors to build this sort of thing.
But pretty much everybody on Switzerland's borders was also
busy with some of the repercussions of Germany at the time.
So, because of the time frame, the government requested
basically that prototypes be immediately submitted for trial.
And so SIG submitted the 1937 version of their MK submachine gun,
which was actually a very nice submachine gun.
I have not fired one of them myself, but I have fired one of the MK-48s.
... You know what, they shoot fairly fast, 850 to 1,000 rounds a minute,
but they're very controllable.
They are cheap, they're easy to make, they are really nice submachine guns.
So that's what SIG submitted.
Bern didn't have a submachine gun at the time, because they'd really never made one before.
So in order for them to come up with one they had to design one on the fly.
Well, the superintendent of W+F Bern was a guy named Adolph Furrer,
and he had previously designed a ... couple of successful firearms
that were being used by the Swiss military, most notably the Lmg 25.
And if there's one thing to know about Furrer, it was that he really liked toggle locks.
Pretty much everything he designed was a toggle locking action.
And the submachine gun he came up with is this one, and it's no different.
This thing has a toggle lock, rather like a Luger pistol.
Now, it seems odd that Bern's gun would have been chosen when SIG had one already
available and ready to put into immediate production, when Bern had nothing.
However, Furrer was kind of a politically connected, well-respected guy,
and he kind of went on a marketing blitz in support of his own submachine gun.
He said it was going to be lighter, and more accurate, and easier to maintain,
and just better in every way than SIG's gun.
In fact the funniest one to me is he said that SIG's gun was ugly,
and apparently his would look good. Well I think really what he came up with
is probably the ugliest submachine gun ever made.
And in fact it would turn out that he would be wrong on every single one of his claims about this gun.
... I mean, this thing is a short-recoil, toggle-locked action in 9mm Parabellum,
which is massively more than is actually necessary for this type of firearm.
What he should have done is exactly what SIG did, which was make a blowback submachine gun.
Instead we have this very expensive to manufacture,
very finely tuned, and precisely made contraption.
And it would turn out to take way longer to make.
If you adjust for inflation between both the Swiss francs and the American dollars,
these things cost the Swiss government over $5,000 apiece in today's money brand-new.
And the idea that you'd spend that much on a submachine gun is crazy.
This was a huge boondoggle for the Swiss.
So why don't we go ahead and take this apart, and I'll show you how it works.
Because the more of a boondoggle it is for the military,
the more interesting it probably is to take a look at the internals.
We should take a look at some of the external features first.
And well, the most distinctive thing on here is this aluminium ribbed vertical front grip.
This does actually fold up, there's a spring catch in there, so you can get that out of the way.
Although you can't do anything about this grip.
Now this gun is in general quite heavy, with a magazine it's about 11.5 pounds.
We have a charging handle back here, and a selector switch on the top.
The only notable marking here is this, that's the W+F Bern circular logo.
And then the selector switch here is ... S is safe, "Sicher",
M is full-auto for "Maschinengewehr", and F is "Feuer" for semi-auto or fire.
And interesting to note that there is actually a channel cut between safe and full-auto,
so it's easy to switch it to full-auto.
And to go to semi-auto you actually have to push the lever a little bit harder to lift it up
out of that channel and over to (there we go), over to the semi-auto position.
Magazine catch is here.
This uses a 40 round, double-stack single-feed magazine.
Snaps in like so. It's a very long magazine.
And one of the elements that was unpopular about this gun in service
is that it's on the right side, so it was a bit awkward
for most soldiers, being right-handed, to change the magazine on.
It would have been great for me, being left-handed,
but I don't represent the majority of Swiss servicemen.
The sights are ... just an open notch type, a flip sight with 100 and 200 metre [notches].
The front sight then is very similar to that of the Swiss bolt-action rifles.
You'll notice that the front sight is actually on a diagonal.
So you can adjust windage by tapping the front sight forward and back,
and get a much finer adjustment than you would trying to move something side-to-side only.
These did have a bayonet lug.
... Well, I suppose in case it malfunctioned, or in case it was just not heavy enough to begin with.
And now we get to the important part. We have the ejection port here.
This is just a sheet metal cover.
Because this is a toggle lock, it is a knee joint that is going to break as it travels back and forth.
And so that's going to come out the side of this tubular receiver, and needs a place to move.
This cover is there to protect it when that happens.
And that charging handle is over there, this is a pretty stiff charging handle.
See if we can ... so there we go. There it is charged, cocked, and ready to fire.
Like most submachine guns it does fire from an open bolt,
and when you pull the trigger, it drops like so.
Now in order to disassemble it, the first thing we have to do is what I just did.
You set it to semi-auto and dry fire the weapon.
And then we can take this pin out.
This pin actually performs a very important mechanical function in the gun,
this locks one leg of the toggle to the receiver.
This is unusual in toggle-locked guns in that
... basically the barrel and the entire toggle assembly are mechanically fixed together.
So on a Luger, for example, once the barrel recoils the toggle then is going to cycle back
and extract, eject, and chamber a new round independent of the barrel's movement.
On the Furrer submachine gun, those are all permanently locked together.
So you'll see ... what that does when we get inside. So we pull that pin out.
Then we can take this rear plug, rotate it so that these two lines line up.
And you'll notice there's only that much spring tension on it,
because that is the whole mainspring of the gun.
Because it is a locked-breech toggle mechanism, it doesn't have to have the very long sort of spring
that you would normally get in an open-bolt submachine gun.
Once we pull that out,
then we can use the charging handle and pull out the whole operating assembly,
barrel, barrel extension, and bolt.
So when this cycles (there we go, I have to cock it first),
now the firing pin is cocked,
kind of like a Luger, at this point when I push this down it tries to pop back up.
... Well, on a Luger pistol, which is probably the toggle lock people are most familiar with,
this point in the toggle is connected to the recoil spring, which is going to force this forward.
On the Furrer, this link connects to this guy,
and that has this pin going through it, and this is permanently linked into the receiver.
So what it's going to do is force the bolt and the barrel to work together.
This makes the gun more reliable in that ... there's less variability involved in its functioning.
On the other hand, it has to be made exactly correct.
The tolerances on manufacture of this gun were extremely precise,
or else it just flat-out wouldn't work.
So this is normally in this position, like so.
When you fire ... the whole barrel and breech assembly starts to move backward,
but this right here is fixed in place on the receiver.
So it's going to be held in place, and it's going to force the toggle to cycle open like that.
When the toggle opens the empty case gets ejected.
And then once this has come all the way backward, it's compressing this spring right in here.
And it is then going to be pushed forward again, like so.
That's going to chamber a new round from the magazine,
lock, and when it's in this locked position ... it acts like a knee joint.
Where direct pressure on the bolt face can't open it - until it starts moving backwards.
And (it doesn't want to stay in there because it's cocked)
once it starts moving, this pin pulls down, which breaks the toggle, and thus allows it to cycle.
This trip right here is the firing sear.
So if I push that down, now the firing pin has dropped.
We no longer have spring tension on the bolt.
But if I move it more than this, it picks up the spring to re-cock the striker.
So now you can see the purpose of this sheet metal housing,
because that housing is where this toggle goes when it's cycling.
So this system isn't entirely worthless, it does offer some advantages.
Primarily it has a very short receiver.
Because it is a locked breech gun and has this compact toggle system,
It doesn't have to allow this much extra space
in the back of the receiver for the bolt to cycle back into.
Now the gun overall is a little bit short,
but it's really not that much handier than many other submachine guns.
So they didn't really exploit that advantage.
Ultimately what the Swiss would do is
in '44 they kind of got tired of waiting so long for these guns to be produced,
and ... to supplement them they went over to Finland
and they got a production licence for the Suomi submachine gun.
Which they then ... had Hispano-Suiza manufacture as the MP-43/44.
And they would end up manufacturing and issuing more of those than the Furrer guns overall.
Now I should also point out a couple of details of the magazine pouches
that were issued with the guns, because they're kind of unique as well.
Each soldier got a pair of these metal 3 magazine holders.
And you'll notice they have this strap on them, these were to be worn around the neck.
So they sit actually very high on the chest.
They would be hooked into your web belt right here.
And something to keep in mind is with many nationalities at the time
the equipment belt that was worn over the field tunic was actually worn very high.
Not like the belt on one's pants, but much higher up on the abdomen.
So that's where the belt sat on these.
Then you'll notice these don't make any noise, and that's really cool.
They came up with a great way to avoid that issue of submachine gun magazines rattling.
Well how do they do that?
The answer is they put flat springs in each of these containers,
you can just barely see them there.
And yes, that prevents them from rattling,
but it also makes them really quite stiff and slow to extract from the magazine pouch.
So you are not going to be doing any speed loads out of these things.
Especially not with the leather cover and the nice button closure strap.
These are great for being quiet and they are super secure.
... You could probably go swimming in this thing and not have any problems with the magazines.
But you're not getting anything out of those quickly.
Ultimately, by the end of 1941 they'd only manufactured 150 of these guns.
And by the end of '41 most of the danger of an imminent German invasion was pretty much over.
But of course they'd made a contract, so production would continue.
And by the end of 1943 they had like 2,700 of them built, this is still going extremely slowly.
By the summer of '44 they had 5,200 of them made, and at that point
they finally got [more] tired of this ... and made some changes, and came up with a
slightly less expensive and complicated version, which was designated the MP-41/44.
Now that's what we have here, and virtually all of the production guns
were ... updated to this model after being produced.
So it's very rare to encounter ... a Swiss MP-41 in its original configuration.
The changes were actually not all that huge, they improved the sights,
they used this aluminium forward grip
instead of having a canvas-wrapped grip which had been originally the situation.
The toggle cover was welded on instead of riveted.
None of these were really fundamental improvements to the gun,
they were just small elements that they could make better.
In total by 1946 they'd made something like 9,700 of these, and that was it.
This would go on to stay in the Swiss military until 1970, when it was finally declared obsolete.
But after World War Two these were relegated pretty much
to being issued to troops who were manning fortifications.
This had, no surprise, proven to be fairly unreliable in dirty conditions.
And so they figured the best place to use them is going to be in indoor controlled spaces
where there's not going to be so much mud and flying dirt, and that sort of thing,
where hopefully the guns would remain reliable.
In 1970 they were declared obsolete.
In 1971 and '74 basically the whole Swiss stockpile of these guns were destroyed.
They tried to sell them internationally in the '40s,
and of course nobody wanted this.
Nobody wanted to pay ... the amount that would be required for this gun.
So especially in ... the circumstances of post-World War Two surplus arms
flooding every market, no one was buying that.
So that's pretty much the story of Adolf Furrer's MP-41/44.
Not a good decision in retrospect for the Swiss military,
but boy, it sure is an interesting mechanism, and a neat gun to look at today.
As long as you're not being issued one to actually have to fight with.
A big thanks to the Kessler Auction House for letting me take a look at this one.
If you are in the market for interesting collectible firearms and machine guns,
and in particular if you're in Europe, definitely check them out.
They serve customers worldwide, and they always have a lot of cool stuff.
Thanks for watching.