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.
