[ Aussie "B*tch" ] Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Bear Arms reference collection in Scottsdale, Arizona, taking a look at a reproduction of a Vietnam-era Australian FAL. This is a reproduction of a modification to the FAL. One of, well, a family of such modifications that were done by Australian and
New Zealand Special Forces units like the Australian SAS, in Vietnam. Of course the Vietnam War
was fought mostly in jungles. And most of the equipment that
forces other than the Vietnamese took into Vietnam was not
really designed for jungle combat. It was designed for open
Western European mobile warfare. A lot of long barrel stuff going on, and not too
super-handy in a tight enclosed jungle environment. And so there was a lot of
interest in shortening down guns. Particularly, mostly, among
Special Forces units who had the volition to do that sort of thing,
to make their own customised weapons. To have their own unit armourers
who could tinker with stuff in a way that would get you
court-martialled by the regular army forces. And we see this with a wide variety of guns,
so one of the more common ones that people will probably have seen
pictures of are shortened versions of the RPD. American and other Anglo troops
who would capture RPDs and chop them down at the ... gas block and have an ... actually really cool short little
hand-held hip-fire belt-fed automatic weapon. By the way, if I can ever get my hands on an
authentic one of those I would love to do a video on it. But you see the same thing with the M14, there were like the "guerrilla"
experimental versions of the M14. Everything got shortened,
and so it shouldn't be a surprise that the Australian troops would be
shortening some of their FALs as well. So cover your delicate ears, I try to keep this
channel as pretty clean language-wise as possible, but the Australians, bless their
hearts, called this thing "the Bitch". And the idea was take a FAL,
either an L1A1 rifle like this or an L2A1 which was the
light automatic weapon version, heavier barrel, ... bipod
built into the handguard, chop it down, make it
full-auto if it wasn't already. The Australian L1A1 rifles
were semi-auto only, but no SAS unit armourer worth
his salt can't very easily change that. Fit them out with ... the full length
magazines from the L2s or the Bren guns. And carry this thing as basically a
break-contact weapon by the point man on a patrol. The idea being if you get
into a firefight as a small unit Special Forces patrol in the jungle in Vietnam,
well first off something's already gone wrong. Because you are supposed to be ambushing
the Vietnamese, not the other way around. So if you get into a firefight,
theoretically good tactic is dump an incredible amount of
fire power to throw the ambusher off guard and cover your unit's escape
from the kill-zone of the ambush. And what better way to do that
than to have a very short, full-auto, .308 calibre flash and blast
concussion inducing Bitch. So what is this exactly? Well it is a
7.62mm L1A1 Australian pattern rifle. Now unfortunately this is not an
authentic one, this is as I've said, a replica. And this is made on a DSA
American-made receiver. While it has the original
three position selector switch, it does not actually fire full-auto,
this is just a semi-auto rifle. The selector moves around but it doesn't
actually have a working fun switch, sadly. Now the original ones in
Vietnam would, if they were L2A1s which is the squad automatic rifle version,
they would have been full-auto to begin with. If they were L1A1s, this is not that difficult to modify
into full-auto if you are a Special Forces armourer. So that's an easy fix for the troops. This replica has been built ... using
an actual set of Australian parts. So we've got all the standard
Australian L1A1 type of elements. We've got the wooden stock, got a butt plate
there with a trapdoor for some cleaning supplies. We've got our standard rear sight,
we have the wooden pistol grip that has the winter trigger element
here so you can open this up and fold the trigger guard down so
that you can better use it with gloves. We've got a non-reciprocating
folding charging handle there. In order to maximise firepower,
the magazines from either the L2A1 automatic rifle or the
L4A1 Bren gun were used. These straight magazines
are from the L2A1s. It is worth pointing out here, if you're not
already familiar with the Australian FALs, that they took the automatic
bolt hold-opens out. So I can open the bolt here but it's not going to lock open, and that
is by design for the Australians. They also had carry
handles on the guns. Then here we go, the ... visually distinctive
element is the addition of a vertical front grip. This was not the only thing that was
done to this type of weapon for Vietnam. Some of them had front grips added, some
of them had the handguards removed entirely and American XM-148 under-barrel grenade
launchers grafted on, again by skilled unit armourers. A lot of them had the barrels shortened. So it'll hurt your reliability a bit, but you can shorten
the barrel basically down to the gas block here. Yes, that gives you less gas to work with,
but these are guns that are designed to work from tropical
up to Arctic environments. And you've got a lot more leeway
in warm weather environments to deal with reduced gas in
the system than you do in cold weather. So that's something you
can get away with in Vietnam, but it's something that would never be done
as a standard element on a rifle like this because it will compromise the rifle's reliability
in ... particular in cold weather environments. Now on this particular one, the
guy who put the ... rifle together, which by the way ... was Mark Graham
of Arizona Response Systems, opted to leave the barrel full length
and just cut down the flash hider, because he didn't want to damage a good intact
Australian L1A1 barrel, which I can certainly respect. So this isn't quite indicative
of what you would normally see. It is actually also worth pointing out
that the Australians actually had a slightly shortened version
of the flash hider that was used. It was a sub-variant of their rifle
specifically for Papua New Guinea. ... It was a slightly shorter muzzle device
and a slightly shorter buttstock. That is sometimes confused with cut
down elements on Vietnam-era guns. Anyway, barrels would be
cut down typically around here. Sometimes a conical flash
hider added, sometimes not. These were all one off conversions done, and
so there's not any specific formal pattern to them. Let me pull the handguard off and
let me show you how this was done. Alright, there we go. Take off the
... right side of the handguard, and <i>voilà</i>, we have basically a slotted tube
bolted onto the front pistol grip here. This front pistol grip is exactly
the same as the rear pistol grip. It's just taking an extra one of these
that you had lying around, add it onto a tube,
fit that over the barrel, and presto, you've got a really good
controllable vertical front grip. It's I think important on a gun
like this that the vertical front grip be connected up to the barrel, not just
screwed into this wooden handguard. The handguard is pretty thin,
if you screw a front grip onto this and then try to use it to control
a full-auto FAL from the hip, and you're very quickly
going to rip the screws out and have a very uncontrollable
full-auto FAL at the hip. By giving it this sort of attachment,
it's something that will actually allow you to maintain control of
the gun much better. And so the end result is one of those cool customised
hybridised sort of guerrilla-warfare inspired guns. I can tell you if I'm hiding in the
jungle and I have some crazy Aussie jump out of the bush and dump 30 rounds out
of this thing full-auto at me out of a short barrel, I don't know that I'd want to
hang around very much longer. So reports are scanty but generally
positive about this sort of thing, that it was done, it was liked. And of course some guys opted for a grenade
launcher rather than a vertical front grip, and that's certainly understandable as well. Normally this is the sort of thing that
I would try to film an authentic example of, but I'm not sure that there are any
surviving authentic examples around. These were customised guns that
were done by troops in the field. And my understanding is the vast
majority of them stayed in the field. If troops rotated out, they would just
hand this thing off to their replacements. The guns stayed in Vietnam and never really
came back to Australia or New Zealand, and so there aren't really
good examples around. If I'm wrong about that, please do
let me know down in the comments. I'd love to do a follow-up video
sometime when I'm able to visit Australia or New Zealand
on an authentic example. But I didn't want to pass up
the opportunity to show you guys this really nicely done
replica here at Bear Arms. So a big thanks to Bear Arms for giving me the
opportunity to pull this out and film it for you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
