Post-War Paris Police MAS 38 Variation

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and today courtesy of the French Ministry of the Interior we have a very cool French just post-world war ii submachine gun to take a look at this is a MAS 38 that has been modified specifically for the use of the Paris police the prefecture the police are protected apparently which is a kind of like a separate quasi independent entity in the the French police system so they had a couple submachine guns of their own design and they put these together presumably to better reflect the specific needs of the police as opposed to the military now what's interesting is the first one that they do which is a version of the MAS 38 they modify it to make it handy or smaller I would say more concealable but in a police role isn't really concealed so this is the standard mas 38 and they would go ahead and actually make a substantial number of changes to it these were developed after world war ii although i don't have an exact date when they were introduced and then they would be used until about 1955 when they were replaced with a different version that will be the subject for a different video so let's dig right in and take a look at what they changed on the police version so up here we have our standard mas 38 and down here the modified police version these were all modified from pre-existing standard military mas 38 submachine guns and take a look at what they changed on the markings so this is all standard what you would expect on a mas 38 caliber is 765 French long made at manufacture designed a sonnet en model of 1938 so we have our serial number then F block just typical and then this is actually a pretty pretty early one just under 13,000 and then these markings were added this is Prefecture de police and it is the only the two hundred and sixtieth one like I said they didn't make all that many of these now starting at the back they went ahead and well they made a number of changes to this submachine gun kind of reflect what the army would do a little later on with the map 49 so they gave it a collapsing wireframe stock there's a locking button here if we can pull that out you can see the soft bars there it extends out like that now what's interesting about this is that if we line this up against the regular rifle when the stock is collapsed it comes to here and so this only makes the gun maybe three inches shorter which is not all that significant however line that up it substantially extends the length of pole and the mass 38 had a pretty short length of pole so this oath makes it a little more convenient to carry and also frankly a bit more convenient to shoot now the end of this stock is a little bit funky this is just a buffer tube basically for the recoil spring kind of like you would have in an AR on the original guns the recoil spring goes all the way back into the wooden stock so you can only make it so compact because you have to have a place for the recoil spring to go and then there is a threaded on rubber pad at the end it just comes off and this one's nicely hardened now that it's about 75 years old and it's got a rather unusual kind of interesting cheek weld idea namely you put your cheek on this and this rubber pad actually rests on the front of your cheek bone so it's probably a good thing that 765 long isn't a particularly powerful cartridge but is interesting it's a style of cheek well that I have not actually run into anywhere else now moving forward to the firing mechanism on the standard guns it is full auto only there's no semi-auto mechanism semi-auto selector and the safety is actually you push the trigger Ford which means you can't pull the trigger because it's pushed forward and this also locks the bolt in position which prevents any sort of unintentional accidental discharge just flip it back and then you're ready to fire the police version changes this up in a couple of ways so the trigger longer moves it's locked in place instead there is a grip safety kind of stiff grip safety on the back of the grip and there is also now a selector switch we have two positions here CC which is coupe Park coupe or shot-by-shot that's semi-auto and up here is how fed full auto rapid so it's just rotates back and forth now this actually makes disassembly of the gun a little bit more difficult on the standard mas 38 once you take the buttstock off the whole trigger group and pistol grip just slides off as an assembly it's simply held in place being a couple of rails and locked in by the buttstock on this one because you have this selector switch cross pin you actually have to take this out and I'm not entirely sure how to do that and I'm not going to take that bit apart here because I don't want to get it apart to not be able to put it back together so everything is a compromise in gun design and especially in after-the-fact modifications and that's a good example of it now moving out to the front end of the gun again we have actually a lot of fairly substantive changes so a barrel shroud has been added one of the elements one of the issues with the original mas 38 is that it's just got a bear barrel out there and there's actually not that much to hold on to other than the magazine itself by the way this is a cutaway mas 38 that's why you're seeing perhaps little bits there anyway the barrel shroud I think is a pretty handy nice idea they also took the sling rings and they got rid of it so you can see the little plug right there where they filled in the hole and then sling attachment has been moved to the front sight this is also very much like the way the map 49 would carry its sling there is a latch here on the front of the barrel shroud that is meant to lock the folding magazine well in place now unfortunately we don't have the correct magazine for the police version of the gun this is a standard mas 38 magazine and has a an over travel stop right here that will lock it properly into a mas of regular military boss 38 what they did here was add this folding section of magazine well so this was the original magazine release they've added a secondary one down here and what they did to the magazines was move this over travel bar down to about this far so like the actually this is more like the Hotchkiss Universal than the matte 49 but like those guns you can have the magazine out here put it and flip it into position and then push the magazine up so that it's in a position to feed this standard magazine won't go far enough in those police modified mags also had a catch on the front of the magazine here that would lock into this latch on the front of the barrel to lock them in this stowage sort of position now I suppose what this probably was best for for the police was allowing them to carry the guns with magazines in them in a nice compact storage rack probably in a vehicle that's a if there is a shortcoming to this design in the mas 38 it is without that folding magazine wealth the gun kind of sticks out a lot if you have a magazine so if you want to have a more compact way to stow it you have to take a magazine out now mechanically basically nothing changed so the trigger groups a little bit different with the semi-auto option and the grip safety but this is still in in both versions here these are still open bolt full auto simple blowback submachine guns the one the closest thing to a mechanical change which i think is kind of interesting is on the military guttin the recoil spring goes all the way back to the butt plate which conveniently you can see here because it's a cutaway on the police version they add this spring tube on the back but it's just barely over half as long as the stock so the recoil spring in this is it's the same length when it's you know fully relaxed but when it's in the gun its compressed several inches already and I'm curious that would have affected the rate of fire probably made the rate of fire higher I don't expect that would have been something that the police did deliberately I guess maybe they did but it's an interesting change when when people change stocks like this usually they will go to some lengths to make sure that the spring configuration is the same in the new version and they did not do that here now if you're curious about some of the the mechanical elements of these guns like why the receiver and the barrel look like they're bent well I would direct you to my previous video on the standard military pattern lost 38 so it was really cool to get a chance to take a look at these obviously only a very small number of them were made only specifically for the Paris Police and only for less than a 10-year time frame so a big thanks to the Ministry of the Interior for giving me access to take a look at this one and bring it to you guys hopefully you enjoyed the video thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 160,401

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, mas 38, mat 49, Paris, police, prefecture de police, gendarmerie, garde mobile, crs, smg, sub gun, submachine gun, wire stock, folding magazine, Hotchkiss, tulle, st Etienne, police model, ministry of the interior, france, French, specialty, police smg, Beretta pm12, 7.65 French long

Id: hzq3anOv93w

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020