Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at, well, one of the anti-tank rifles that they're going to be selling in their upcoming May of 2017 Premiere auction. This is a Swedish m/42, I'm going to mess this up, but it's going to be something like ... Pansarvärnsgevär. It's an anti-tank rifle. And it's a really interesting hybrid style of system. So it is a solid 20mm projectile, and quite
the potent one too, that is a ... 108 gram projectile traveling at 950 metres per second. For us Americans, that's like a 1,650
grain bullet going at 3,150 feet per second. So that's heavy and fast, and it's a
tungsten cored armour-piercing bullet. But it's a recoilless rifle, in name,
if not strictly speaking in practice. What we're looking at here is the first
development, or one of the very early developments, getting away from the idea of
just a standard anti-tank rifle. Now this began in World War One, when the Germans
needed something to counter the emerging British tank threat. And they basically scaled up the Mauser bolt-action
rifle to 13mm, big armour-piercing projectile, going nice and fast. And that worked
pretty well on British tanks in World War One. Then during the interwar period,
pretty much all the major military powers in the world would work on
developing that sort of thing. So the British had the Boys
anti-tank rifle in .55 calibre. The ... Germans and the Poles both developed
8mm, but very high velocity, anti-tank rifles. The Finns had the 20mm Lahti, ... the
Swiss developed the 20mm Solothurn S1000. Everyone was building bigger
and bigger anti-tank rifles, and these were all on the same
principle as a rifle: a locked breech, and powder explodes, and all of the force pushes
the bullet down the barrel into the tank. The problem was by the time
World War Two really got going, these were kind of reaching the point of
diminishing returns, tank armour was getting heavier, and it was getting past the point
where you could actually have a reasonably portable rifle that
could actually penetrate the armour. So, some of the better ones were
these 20mm Swiss and Finnish guns, but you're looking at, like, a 120 pound gun at that
point. That starts to really push the limits of portability, and at that point, like you know, maybe
we should just step it up a little bit to, like, a 37mm or a 50mm gun and make it
an artillery piece, because we're losing the portability of a rifle already anyway. Well,
what would eventually develop were shaped-charge projectiles, where ... instead of depending
on a hardened armour-piercing bullet core to just power through the armour based on its
velocity, instead you'd get an explosive charge that was shaped in such a way that it would
create a very thin stream of molten metal that could cut through armour using
thermal properties instead of just velocity. And this is a hybrid between those two.
So the thing is with a shaped charge, you've got a relatively large diameter projectile,
and you can't just fire that through a rifle. This is one of the early recoilless guns,
which is the technology that was developed to allow shaped-charge projectiles to be used
effectively. Now one way to do that is a rocket, which is, say, what the US did with the Bazooka. The
other way is a recoilless rifle. Now the idea behind ... First of all, recoilless doesn't actually mean there's
no recoil, it just means there's substantially less. And the reason for that is it's firing both directions at
the same time. This concept goes, frankly, back to the US Civil War where there was a development of a gun
that fired a ... charge in both directions simultaneously, and the idea was ... the recoil of the one
going backward counteracted the recoil of the one going forward. So, yes, you're
losing half of the energy of the cartridge, but ... you can make that cartridge
very large and still be man portable because you're not trying to contain it all.
And so it's worthwhile. That's what this did. So we'll take a look at this up close in
a minute, but the base of this cartridge, instead of being totally sealed,
actually has like a little fibreboard pad that is deliberately intended
to blow out when you fire. And the propellant gases go
shooting out the back of the gun. You don't try to contain them
like in a locked breech rifle. So, you're wasting a lot of the
energy, but you're able to get what is effectively a more powerful round
than something like the Lahti or the Solothurn, in an 11 kilo (or just under 25 pounds),
single-man portable weapon, and that was a really interesting concept. Now this
was developed by the Carl Gustav company from basically between 1940 and 1942. It was
adopted into Swedish military service in '42. It's interesting, the Swedes had a lot of,
kind of, stuff a little bit ahead of the game in World War Two, despite being not a substantially
combatant nation. They had a 1942 pattern semi-automatic rifle as well, which was
actually a really good rifle, the Ljungman. Anyway, they would order like 3,000 - 3,200 of
these, although only about a 1,000 of them had been actually delivered by the time the war
ended, and they, of course, never really saw combat. What they really did was help lead to ... the
1946 to '48 development of the 84mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, which is a
fantastically long-serving weapon. Versions of that weapon are
still in military service today. And this is really what what
sparked the development of that rifle. We'll start with the ammo, and this
should give you a decent size comparison. There's a nice full clip of 30-06 for
an M1 compared to a single cartridge for the m/42 anti-tank rifle.
Now this is a 180mm long cartridge, which is just ludicrously huge, but
remember that this is not a locked breech. So ... all the powder is being vented out the
back of the gun, which means you're losing a lot of the potential thrust to the
bullet, so the amount of powder is oversized to compensate for that in the first place. Looking at the back of the case, you
can see a standard primer right there, but then we have this brown area in the
middle. Now when we look at a fired case, you'll see that primer is dimpled, and
this is blown out in these two areas. And again, that's deliberate.
That's what makes this recoilless, ... there's a solid bullet going forward, there is a
lot of a powder and debris going backwards. And that's what balances the recoil and makes this a practical gun to actually fire from the shoulder. It is loaded from the back (and this
would be operated by a team of course, so you'd have a gunner and a loader), what the loader is going to do is push this lever
forward, which is going to unlock the breech, and then allow it to pivot open, (actually on
... this side), push that forward, then it pivots open like this. Got a little bit of extra kick at the
end which operates the extractor. Alright, and then we have the chamber.
Our extractor is right here, it's spring-loaded so you have to push it in in order to
close the breech, and then when you open, if the spring pressure itself isn't enough to push the case
out, you can kick it open a bit like that to push the case. This is our venturi nozzle, so powder blast is going to come
out of there. You do not want to stand behind this thing. We have a trigger up here at the front with a safety
switch. So it's currently on fire, when I pull the trigger (it's a really simple mechanism, there's just a long
transfer bar that goes all the way down this tube until it reaches the back, right here), and when I
pull the trigger it's just going to push that bar back, and that bar connects to this, right there,
which trips a striker and releases the firing pin. So this is our actual breech block. It has
the same pattern of openings right there that you see very obviously burned
into the empty fired cartridge case, right there. Now this plate does very
quickly erode as you might expect. It's getting a lot of very high
pressure gas on it when you fire. Apparently this plate lasts about 20
rounds of armour-piercing ammunition or about 40 rounds of
practice or high-explosive. Unlike a lot of anti-tank rifles, this thing was
actually made with, or shipped with, or equipped with both solid armour-piercing and high-explosive
projectiles. And the high-explosive, because it wasn't velocity dependent,
was a little bit lower pressure and thus less damaging to the gun to fire. There's a carry handle right here pretty much at
the balance point of the gun, just for general transit. But then, when you're actually firing, this is your
shoulder rest. You have a nice padded cheek rest here. And then the front end contains your
firing grip, firing mechanism, and sights. There are two different types of sights on
here. We have a set of folding iron sights, these are calibrated to 300 metres,
just a little front post like that. And then we also have an optical sight. Interestingly this is a Meopta, made in
Czechoslovakia, and it is basically a ZF-4 optic. Which is pretty cool, in fact, it is a ZF-4. It is detachable, like so. This also comes out, it's a
little bit loose at the moment, but you could take the optical sight
mount off if you didn't want to use it. And if you did, this is your scope unit. Right there, Meopta, and then it's a 4x power scope,
4.5 degree field of view, and a serial number. And then it is on this externally adjusted
mount, so there are standard ZF-4 elevation and windage adjustments,
which you would use for zeroing. But then once it's on, once the scope's zeroed,
your range adjustments are all done using this dial, which moves the mount, pivots it quite a lot. Because the trajectory of that 20mm is
going to be substantially different than, say, an 8mm rifle bullet that this
scope was originally designed around. There's also a windage adjustment here,
it's going to slide the scope in its mount. And the BDC is calibrated out to a 1,000 metres. Now the reticle on this is pretty much
a standard ZF-4 with a German post, but it does also have a couple
of additional stadia lines, kind of box shaped stadia lines in there,
which I believe are for tracking a moving target. So this does balance pretty well, they've got the
grip and the shoulder rest at the the proper point. And, yeah, it weighs about 25 pounds. It does have recoil but not like a rifle,
or an anti-tank cannon kind of recoil. Armour penetration on this was better
than most of the equivalent calibre guns. This could go through about 40mm of tank
armour, flat on, 90 degrees at a 100 metres distance. So that's really above most of the comparable
guns, that's more than a Lahti or a Solothurn could do. And doing that in a light and portable
package like this is really a neat trick. Now even this thing's capabilities ... by the
middle of World War Two were not really sufficient, and that's why what this really led to was
development of the 84mm recoilless Carl Gustav. So to open this thing, this would
normally be done with a two-man crew, but pull the lever, rotate it open. This last little bit of spring tension pushes
on the extractor, pops the empty cartridge out, put a new one in and a push on the
extractor there to release ... the breech block, pop it down, lock it in place, and you're
ready to fire. You would not want to stand where the camera is now because
this jets out a whole lot of flaming debris. So ... there are a couple of pieces of
footage out there that you can find on YouTube of people actually shooting these. In
fact, I don't know for sure, but I suspect at least one of those may be this exact same
gun, and it's pretty cool. You can see, first off, there's a tremendous amount of back
blast that you do not want to stand behind. And you can see that there is in fact
recoil, these make a huge amount of noise, and a large concussion, and they
absolutely do recoil, but nowhere near the amount of recoil you would have from one of
these actually firing from a locked sealed breech. If you would be interested in owning this
one, it comes with all the stuff up here. plus some other things. There's a carry case,
sling, transit bags, all sorts of extra goodies. And you can take a look at pictures of
all of those on Rock Island's website. You'll find a link to the catalogue page for
this piece in the description text below, and you can place a bid right
there on-line if you're interested. This is a NFA transferable destructive device,
so it does have to go through an NFA transfer. But fully transferable, so anyone who can pass the background
check can own this, and have a lot of fun with it. Thanks for watching.
