"Jungle Carbine" - the Lee Enfield No5 MkI Rifle

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and today we're going to look at rifle number five mark 1 aka the jungle carbine jungle carbine is not really the best name for it but that's the one that has stuck so we'll acknowledge it at least now it's gonna be a really cool video because i have everything here from one of the very first batch of converted number four trials rifles all the way through rifles exhibiting all of the different characteristics different stocks different sites um and at least one or two cool experimental pieces so um all the way through the number five mark ii which didn't actually exist so the basic story here is in 1943 the british military undertook a study to determine what kind of new equipment would serve better particularly in a jungle environment they're doing a lot of fighting in southeast asia against the japanese and well one of the things that came out of this study was the number four rifles kind of long and kind of heavy and if we had something that was shorter lighter and handier that would be nice now there'd been work on how to lighten the number four previous to this but this study really kind of focuses uh development on okay let's actually do it let's build a separate uh lightened shortened carbine version of the no the number four and that's essentially what they did they started with number fours made a number of modifications and ultimately came up with the number five the first prototypes were developed late 1943 testing was done through early 1944 it was type classified and formally adopted in september of 1944 as rifle number five mark one they had fifty thousand of them already produced by the end of that year because this is largely the same as the number four in terms of the important mechanical bits and uh the two factories that manufactured these which were fazakerley and bsa shirley were both already making number fours and they were allowed to produce number fives to fulfill number four rifle contracts so that's an easy way to get production started now let's go ahead and take a look at all the little details here including some of the developmental changes through the life of the number five which is fairly short because this is probably about the shortest lived service rifle in british military history once we're done with that then we'll talk about the the wandering zero issue that is one of the most recognized things about this rifle we are going to start here with one of the actual trials guns which is super cool to be able to show you so what we have fundamentally is a number four action same magazine same sight same stripper clip same bolt system what has been changed right in here is simply a matter of lightning so lightning cuts have been put predominantly in two specific places we can see this more easily if we flip up the rear sights but right here the top of the receiver is milled flat and there's a scalloped cut into the back of the receiver which is not on the original number four back there so you can see that lightning cut there is basically a matching cut on the left side of the receiver right here which is not present on the number four if we take the hand guard off and this is a different rifle that i pulled the handguard off to show you with there are a couple of scalloped cuts on either side of the nox form on the barrel those are again there just to remove weight and the bolt knob has been cut out hollow that that's pretty much it for the mechanical cuts on on the gun to reduce its weight however there are some additional places where weight is saved the butt stock is just a little bit narrower a little skinnier than the originals the barrel has been shortened the rifle is about five inches shorter than a standard number four and so that saves weight in addition the stock and the hand guards have both been cut back so this looks like it's sporterized but this is in fact an authentic legitimate uh version of the rifle it's not the only version we'll look at the other pattern in a minute but cutting back on the barrel save weight and cutting back on the stock saved more weight now a couple of the changes that were made at the same time one is the addition of this device on the front this is a front sight block it is also a conical flash hider because the same ammunition was being used as any longer barrel number four because the barrel was shorter the powder didn't burn quite completely through the number five barrel and so they wanted something to prevent flash and this works this was after trials this was determined to have basically the same amount of muzzle flash as a number four it then also has a bayonet lug on it rather than use the same socket style of spike bayonet that the number four rifle used they went back to a sort of a field knife style of bayonet it's basically the same length it's about eight inches long this is the very early pattern that has a single grip screw on it and this just snaps on like a standard sort of bayonet this would be adopted as the number five mark one bayonet which is actually remarkably easy to remember because it's the same designation as the rifle and the same thing was true when they first adopted the number four mark one bayonet anyway there would be a slight revision to the bayonet and virtually all the ones you find will be like this with two grip screws to better hold on the wooden grip panels so this didn't change the designation still a number five mark one bayonet now moving to the buttstock a couple things here it was determined or decided that the sling on the number five would only be used for carrying the rifle on the number four the sling swivel is down here and you could actually use the the sling as a field expedient shooting aid wrap it around your arm and get some extra stability you can't really do that so well when the sling is on the side of the rifle and that was a conscious decision made on the part of the designers that they would rather have the gun easier to carry with a side sling than to be able to use that as a shooting aid in addition they stuck a rubber butt pad on the gun this one uh is heavily worn but this is again a trials rifle that's been through quite a lot it's a metal butt plate with a rubber uh a slightly smaller rubber butt plate uh rubber butt pad centered in it and that's in acknowledgment to the fact that this is a lighter rifle it's about a pound and a half lighter than number four and it will kick a little bit more than the standard pattern if we take a look at the markings on the receiver here it's what distinguishes this as a trials rifle is first off the serial number so this is notable as a trials rifle in part because of the serial number which we know that fe prefix is the first thousand rifles that were produced but in addition if we look at the receiver markings here it's actually double marked because it was originally a number four mark one uh f made in december of 1943 there and then it has been marked over again uh to the left number five mark one f uh with a production date that is we can't really make out the month but it's a 1944 trials gun so 44 is when the field trials were done and that that all fits now once we get into production there are going to be a couple variations on these guns but really not many so one of them is the rear sight this is still the very fine nicely made this is the equivalent of the the early war pattern of number four site however note that there is a little a notch cut here and that's just to improve light transmission into the rear sight there so that's one pattern note that all of these while the body of the site is the same as the number four they're only graduated up to 800 yards instead of the 1300 yards of the full length rifle they were expecting this rifle the number five to have an effective range of about 400 yards so the sights going out to eight was plenty you don't need to try and mess with it going farther you will also find the sites like this virtually identical except we have a larger rear aperture cut here and you don't have the extra machine cutaway to give a little better light transmission so virtually identical here still the the big fancy milled site primary difference is a larger aperture those were the mark one and this is the mark ii style of sight which is all stamped so this is roughly equivalent to the mark iii or mark iv on the standard number four lien fields instead of being milled this is all sheet metal stamped it's cheaper to make it's quicker to make uh it has this much simplified style of battle site on it however it is still graduated up to 800. so that's probably your biggest functional difference in the during the course of production and even that's not particularly important they all shoot the same way for the user the other difference you will see is in the front end of the stock and probably the majority of them the the preferred pattern appears to have been this where the wood was just kind of rounded to a stop it looks like it's just been sporterized by someone but it's not the end of the grain was sealed and it was just left alone like that the alternative was to actually have a squared off metal end cap like this you will see both they're both equally accurate or equally appropriate and they were both done in military service this is a quite late example uh manufactured in february of 1947. uh 47 would be the last year of production we'll cover that in a minute this is produced by physakoli and this is standard sort of typical markings number five mark one f means physically we have a date of production and then we have a serial number with a one letter and eventually uh they did keep going after this they went to a two letter prefix so they'll be a through z and then a a a b and so on these were also manufactured by bsa surely and the markings on those are going to be totally different they still say number five mark one up on the top of the receiver but the rest of the markings are down here on the socket and i mean it makes perfect sense that bsa would be indicated by m47c or charlie see if we can get the light on that a little better m47 was the a factory code assigned to bsa and then bsa had five or six different uh factories making various things and so each factory got a letter suffix so c happens to be the shirley plant uh for bsa so that's why it's m47c and then we have a date and a serial number they also used uh prefix uh two letter prefixes in this case um in fact here for all the the work they went to with m47 as a a code for bsa the b the first letter of the serial number is b for bsa uh then follows the uh this like the batch number which started at a and went sequentially so that's what a bsa gun looks like now i've got one other really cool one here that i want to show you you can see the receiver marks are totally different here just number five and then it's got some experimental nomenclature on it and that by the way this is also a bsa gun you can see how crude those markings are that's that's typical and appropriate uh this happens to be a 1945. yeah it's a 1945 production gun and you may notice it has this screw in the side of the wood instead of having the sort of little sheet metal tab right there this is actually a prototype of the number five mark ii which would have been the same modification as the number 4 mark ii namely the trigger was bolted to the receiver instead of bolted to the trigger guard we'll touch on that when we talk about in a future episode the number 4 mark ii but i wanted to point it out here they made a few experimental examples to try the idea out and then ultimately didn't end up adopting it they never made this as a production gun because frankly by the time this the mark ii system was adopted for the number four rifle the number five rifle was out of production so uh very rare example here to take a look at and i should point out beyond that bolt and this little internal modification this is otherwise a standard number five rifle it's a really nice condition one but it is a normal standard number five lastly there's a vestigial little bit of metal a boss down here on the original number four that has been milled off on this example but on an actual number four you can see it right there that was originally there to provide material for mounting the magazine cutoff the cutoff itself had been removed when the number four mark one was adopted and for the number five that was just a little extra bit of metal that was available to be removed it's worth noting that this being our converted trials rifle the stock still has a cutout for that little bit that little metal boss but the boss itself has been milled off to save weight all right so wandering zero this is the big thing uh the specter kind of hanging over the number five rifle it was discovered or determined or collated really in 1945 that these guns apparently had some problems with zero and we're not talking about every individual rifle being a problem we're talking about a problem on a statistical level like there are way too many reports from armorers who say that they can't get the rifles to properly zero or that the zeros change over time and so the british start investigating this and at first naturally they think maybe this is an issue with the stocking up or how the wood is fitted to the metal and if you know things are too tight or too loose if the wood is swelling and applying pressure to the barrels maybe there's some systemic issues with that they do a bunch of testing they actually build some rifles that they stock all the way out to the muzzle to test comes out inconclusive they're still getting issues some armorers come to the conclusion or discover that the accuracy problems that are being reported are basically the same as the problems that were found with number four rifles where the bolt wasn't perfectly square the bolt face wasn't perfectly square with the back of the chamber and the suspicion becomes that the lightning cuts on the back of the number five receiver which are just behind the locking recesses the locking lugs are in fact making the receiver just a little too weak and it is sometimes flexing upon firing which is causing the accuracy issues the ultimate conclusion by the british government is the accuracy problems are a are inherent to the rifle design and they cannot be easily remedied and this is late 1940s and you know what we already know that we really want a self-loading rifle this is clearly what's going to be the future so there had been some calls early on some suggestion that this should replace the number four overall and this should be the new british standard infantry rifle but that really doesn't make sense if you already know you're going to go to a self-loading rifle why you know it's pointless it's a waste of money at this point so ultimately in july of 1947 the rifle number five is declared obsolescent and production ceases by the end of 1947. now it's not pulled out of service it's still a valuable useful gun adoption of the slr the fn foul is still a number of years away and so these rifles would in fact see substantial use by the british military they would see a lot of combat use in the the malayan emergency 1948-1960 they would be used in kenya between 1952 and 1960 and they really kind of did earn that name the jungle carbine because they are quite well suited to a jungle environment more so than the number four rifle so ultimately like from adoption to obsolescence three years is all that the rifle number five lasted but it is still one of i think one of the coolest looking nicest handling versions of the lee enfield so um if you are interested in more of a hands-on uh discussion of this rifle i would suggest you check out the british muzzleloaders channel over there they have a video on a comparison between the number four and the number five with a bunch of practical shooting and some really cool period uniforms so check that out if you haven't seen it hopefully you enjoyed this look at the number five thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 202,041

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, lee, enfield, no5, no5 mki, Jungle Carbine, bolt action, 303, britain, british, ww2, series, no4, smle, rifle, wandering zero, flash hider, collector, collectible, malaya, paratrooper, carbine, sights, sling, stock, stocking up

Id: tyK9IYskCH0

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021