Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at Finland's first domestic light machine gun.
This is the LS-26, the Lahti-Saloranta Model 26.
It was actually designed ... and built by Aimo Lahti.
But it has two names associated with it because ... well, let's start a little ways back.
Finland's first military light machine gun was the Madsen gun,
they purchased about 700 of them from Denmark in I believe it was 1920.
But they weren't entirely happy, they wanted to have a domestically built light machine gun.
So Aimo Lahti presented a design in 1924 that was given military support.
However, Aimo Lahti was a self-taught gun designer.
He had been an armourer in the Civil Guard, but when it came to like
engineering design, he didn't have a formal education.
And so for this light machine gun project the military assigned him a supervisor.
And that was (at the time) Lieutenant Saloranta.
Saloranta would go on to be promoted to the rank of, I believe, Major-General.
But he had just returned from studying engineering at the Royal Academy in Denmark.
And they figured like, "Let's give this guy some professional supervision,
he seems like he's got some natural talent, but better to have a proper engineer on the job."
Well, the two men really didn't get along all that well,
and frankly Lahti didn't really need the help so much.
And so he ended up doing pretty much all of the design work himself.
Saloranta would still be involved, and was actually fairly instrumental
in basically helping the gun navigate the military bureaucracy
and getting it accepted and put into production.
Which, by the way, would happen in 1926.
The first prototypes of the gun were in 8mm, it then obviously was ... redesigned
for 7.62x54 rimmed, because that was Finland's standard calibre.
It was tested against basically all of the other light machine guns
that were available in the world in the mid-1920s.
So it was tested against the BAR, against the ... light Hotchkiss,
the Vickers-Berthier, the Swiss Lmg 25.
Which is interesting because the Lmg 25 doesn't show up in a lot of other
international trials that I've found, but it was tested against the LS-26.
And the LS-26 came out on top.
Now this gun has a fairly poor reputation today,
and one might wonder how did it end up winning this competition?
Well, if you compare it to the guns that it was actually being tested against,
it really does have a lot going for it.
None of what would become the really dominant light machine guns
... were in production at this point, they were still a few years away.
So there was no Degtyarev, there was no ZB pattern gun, no ZB 26 or ZB 30.
And the ZB in particular would be the base for things like the Bren,
and a lot of very effective, very popular light machine guns.
But like I said, those didn't exist at the time.
So it is a little surprising that this beat the BAR,
but I know there was a bit of a Finnish prejudice towards recoil-operated guns
because of their successful use of the Maxim heavy machine guns.
Anyway, the gun was formally accepted in 1926
but it would take until 1930 for it to actually go into production.
And that is largely because of some administrative and technical issues at VKT,
which is the State Rifle Factory, where the gun was being manufactured.
And it was actually Saloranta who was running the factory at the time.
There was a little bit of political brouhaha and scandal involved in that,
but the gun finally went into production in 1930.
And became the standard light machine gun for the Finnish Defence Forces,
or the Finnish Army at the time.
So let's pull this apart, and let me show you how it actually works.
So this is a bit of a boxy gun on the outside, but we can go through the controls pretty easily.
We have a magazine release here. This is a 20 round ... double-stack single-feed magazine,
and it is a bear to load if you don't have a loading tool.
So there was an automated loading machine,
basically think of it like a belt loader except that it took magazines, that's a really good tool.
There were also loading tools that were basically just follower depressors,
a box that you push down on to help load.
Really important. I had the chance to shoot one of these once ... and we had no loading tools,
and I don't think we were ever able to get more than like 5 rounds into the 20 round magazine.
As for the other controls, we have a safety in the rear here, and this
when it's engaged it protrudes into the trigger guard.
Pop that forward to disengage.
And then there is a selector lever here,
the rearward position is semi-auto, and the forward position is full-auto.
This is for disassembly, which we'll get to in a moment.
On the side of the gun here is the full spelling of State Rifle Factory, VKT.
And the town that it is located in, so that's where the guns were actually manufactured.
And we have the model designation and the serial number on top, LS-26,
and this is just under 3,000, so midway through production.
... Both the sights are offset slightly to the left, it's not entirely clear to me why
because the magazine is on the bottom and doesn't get in the way. But there it is, the sight's offset.
It is a U notch style of sight, similar to what the Finns were using on their Mosin-Nagants.
The front sight is a nice big square post, also slightly offset to the left to match the rear sight.
We have a rather spindly sort of loose bipod here,
it's held in place by a little spring clip when not in use, we can pull that out and it extends.
This is fairly similar to a French Châtellerault 24/29 bipod.
There is quite a lot of movement in it, it would not be the ideal bipod, but it does work.
And then on top we have the charging handle.
So this is a short-recoil action, with a sort of a pivoting locking block to lock the breech.
Which we can go ahead and take a look at right now.
Disassembly involves rotating this lever forward.
You can then pull the lower assembly off the gun.
And at this point I want to stop and mention something.
We have the recoil spring assembly here which goes backwards into the stock.
The machining on these guns is quite good and ... it has very close clearances,
there's not a lot of extra space inside the gun
to accommodate dirt, grit, condensed congealed grease, that sort of thing.
So in the field it was strictly forbidden for soldiers
to disassemble the back end of the gun any further.
You could field strip it for cleaning, but this stayed as a solid unit
because it was difficult to reassemble and difficult to keep perfectly clean in the field.
Now one of the potential reasons for the poor reputation of the gun in service
was that when they were first issued, the guns,
including the back end here, were packed in a preservative grease.
And I think as part of this policy of "Don't take apart the back end of the gun",
troops in the field didn't actually realise that they had to clean out
the preservative grease from the back end.
When that grease got cold in the winter, because it was Finland and the Winter War,
the guns became incredibly unreliable very quickly.
Which was not necessarily a fault of the action itself,
but certainly didn't ... give good confidence to troops who were using these.
So we'll leave this as it is.
We have a top cover here that can be opened.
Actually I should have shown you, a spring-loaded button here
that allows you to open the top cover when the gun is assembled.
And then we have our ... whole bolt and bolt carrier assembly that just pull out
(there we go), along with the barrel.
So the rest of this receiver is a fairly complex,
and probably fairly expensive piece to manufacture.
But it is basically just a box that holds all the bits that we have taken out.
The one element to note is this track right here on the left side of the receiver.
That track is where this round lug runs.
And so when this lug is in the downward position, which is when it's fully in battery,
the bolt is locked in place right there inside this barrel extension, and can't come out.
When the lug goes up,
(and in this case, because it's outside of the gun, it's just held in place by this flat spring),
when the lug goes up it releases the bolt, which I can now pull out the back of the extension.
So this is the lug that's going to pick up a cartridge from the magazine.
We have the extractor here. We have a slot for the ejector there.
And we have the actual locking surface right here.
Not a whole lot else going on there.
The firing pin is spring loaded.
If we look at this from the top, you can see the locking lug right there.
So when that lug goes down it's going to lock into this surface, this cutout in the bolt.
That locks the bolt and the barrel extension together,
so that when it fires they both recoil together without opening,
so that chamber pressure can drop.
... Until the bolt passes this little step, where the bolt unlocks from the ... barrel extension.
And at that point it can cycle backwards to open.
In addition Lahti did like his accelerators, so we have an accelerator here.
And what that's going to do is travel in a recess in the top cover, right there.
When the barrel extension has travelled ... its full distance back,
this pivoting lever is going to hit the end of that recess on the top cover.
It's going to stop the barrel extension from moving,
and you can see the bottom half of it right there,
... at the same time that the bolt is unlocked,
it is going to kick the bolt backwards to give it that push to open separately.
I think there's quite a lot of misunderstanding, or lack of understanding
about how the LS-26 works, and how it actually performed in the Winter War
because these are such scarce guns to actually find.
Not just in the United States, but kind of everywhere on the collectors market.
Not that many of them made their way out of Finland,
and there were very few of them made in the first place. ...
Fundamentally, ... I think it's not as bad of a gun as a lot of people think that it is.
It certainly had reliability issues.
I think it's important to take into account when you're judging this design,
both how early it was in Aimo Lahti's career that he designed it,
and also the general state of light machine gun design around the world at the time.
1924-25, when this was being developed, there were not a lot of really good guns out there.
There was the BAR, there was the Châtellerault which is fundamentally a BAR, and not a lot else.
So there are some additional elements, like the little whoopsie of
not cleaning the packing grease out of these when they were first issued,
that certainly helped contribute to a poor reputation.
Not a fundamentally fantastic gun, despite perhaps being good for the time when it was developed.
And replacing these in service with Degtyarevs
was an outstanding idea that is obvious in retrospect.
There would be a few other iterations of the gun.
In 1931 ... there was an aircraft version developed that was fed by a 71 round ...
71? 75? A 70-something round drum that fit down here,
and extended forward, kind of a distinctive drum magazine.
That was originally intended for aircraft. They revised the design slightly in 1932
so that ... that pattern of gun could take either the drum magazines,
or these standard 20 round box magazines.
They never really went into significant production.
They were tested by the Finnish military, but not actually adopted.
The one foreign contract that VKT was able to get was actually with Nationalist China,
who ordered some 40,000 of the guns.
However, only 1,200 were actually able to be delivered, and this is in 1937,
before the contract was cancelled basically under diplomatic pressure from Japan.
Who was getting into a war with China at the time,
and didn't want the Chinese warlords getting their hands on more advanced European weaponry.
So a small number of these in 8mm Mauser were actually exported to China,
but that was the only export contract.
A total of about 4,700 of these would be manufactured by 1942 for the Finnish military.
At that point production was shut down
because frankly the gun didn't have all that good of a reputation in the field,
and the Finnish Army had been capturing significant numbers of Russian Degtyarev light machine guns.
Those were more reliable, had a larger magazine capacity,
were kind of in every way better light machine guns.
And so they took the place of the LS-26 in military service,
to the extent that they didn't have to actually keep making LS-26s.
Still the gun would remain formally in service until the 1960s,
when it was officially replaced by the belt-fed Kvkk 60 and 62 pattern guns.
Which, by the way, I also have a video on, which you should check out
if you're interested in the development of Finnish light machine guns.
These remain of course pretty scarce today.
... A small number of them survive in Finland like this one,
but outside of Finland they're a pretty rare sight to see.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.