Small Arms of WWI Primer 142: Siamese RS 121 Type 46

[Music] hi i'm matthias and this is yet another foreign name that i am going to butcher but let's try it anyway oh i am attempting to say the rs 121 the siamese mauser so before you get to complaining in the comments let's get it over to the light box with an overall length of 49 and 1 8 inch and weighing in at 8.4 pounds this is definitely what you would think of as a traditional infantry rifle the magazine capacity is five staggered cartridges fed from a stripper clip and that is of course the 8 by 50 millimeter rimmed siamese cartridge otherwise known as the type 45. this is a very unique situation because we do not really see modern mausers with rimmed cartridges this is your friendly neighborhood may reminding you to please like comment and subscribe to our channel if you really enjoy our content and want to directly contribute please consider supporting us over at patreon or subscribe star or you can buy some swag from rc an arsenal shop thank you all before we get too deep into the history of this particular gun i need to clarify a bit about the research around it you see the siamese or more recently known as thai mauser made its way into the u.s collector's market back in the 1960s at a time that little information was available and a great many attempts at explaining this gun have resulted in a number of variant histories now i actually don't mean to disparage any of these as collector-driven data and speculation can often be the heart of this sort of oddity research arena right now as time has passed many previous assumptions have been thankfully able to be dismissed but others have been more reinforced so what i'm about to tell you today is currently the best vetted information available but the research is still often held together by somewhat more tenuous threads than we're used to so this is another grain of salt episode where hopefully more data will emerge in years to come all right good let's go ahead and dig in this is siam or rather it was since the middle 1800s it had been losing more and more territory to british and french colonial aggression siam's independence however was secured precisely because of these two powers poor relationship both empires prefer to leave the little kingdom as a buffer state between their claims unfortunately they weren't really leaving it in one piece over the long run siamese political strategies mostly involved balancing cautiously between the two foreign powers but their monarchs knew this situation couldn't go on forever so while placating both france and britain they quietly attempted to modernize the country which is really no small feat catching up technologically economically and militarily with the west was a huge endeavor and it was especially hampered when you couldn't really do it in full view or at least without making both feuding powers feel that they needed to have equal access to what you were doing and how you were improving these attempts to remain independent and grow resulted in a number of unequal treaties where foreign politicians and businessmen were not really subject to siamese law nor was siam able to effectively tariff imports still slow progress was made most of it under the oversight of largely one single king chulalongkorn born in september of 1853 son of king mongkut and queen deb serendra he was raised with as much western education as possible through the use of tutors chief among which was an indian-born woman whose memoirs would be fictionalized into the novel anna and the king of siam and the musical the king and i in 1867 king mongkut would lead an expedition into the melee peninsula this was part of his own experiment to confirm calculations about what would be the solar eclipse of august 1868 while on the journey both he and his son would contract malaria though only the younger would survive so at age 15 chulalongkorn would ascend to the throne although this is a photo from his second coronation in 1873. sorry but it was during this event that he took the title rama 5 the fifth of the rama dynasty even before the title was in place however our new king was busy from 1870 through his second coronation he actually toured as many british administered colonies as possible and took careful notes as to how they were run he would prove to be an energetic reformer and one of his first acts was to overhaul the tax policy removing corruption and streamlining the flow of funds so that the kingdom could afford to modernize now many of you will know that you can't just change the order of things without a reaction and so rama v would face a wild array of internal confrontations i won't be going into those details today because we need to sort of fast forward what we care about is firearms now siam's first old muzzleloaders would actually have come from portugal but they soon fell in line with the british enfield rifles snyder breech loaders followed of course by the martini and then curiously the winchester 1873 and the german mauser 1871. hold up something's different here you see thanks that weird balancing act between france and britain siam was finding it harder to get any significant arms contracts at least not for you know really advanced guns so they had to start turning to countries that didn't have a stake in their own future uh the us briefly and then germany and as we'll see austria because in 1890 they would adopt the montlick 1888 with records showing 4 000 shipped from steyer another 6010 montlicker 1890 infantry rifles would follow along with 1 000 1890 carbines unfortunately those 11 000 modern shoulder arms would not be enough to put themselves toe to toe with the french well mostly not enough in 1893 the french third republic would take offense at siamese officials ousting opium smugglers i mean honest french merchants the situation spiraled which was probably the french hope from the start this devolved into a series of skirmishes and from there the french sent three infantry columns into the siamese regions east of the mekong river claiming the lands belonged to vietnam which conveniently belonged to france i think you guys are seeing this right now the troops eventually met siamese resistance and unfortunately for siam one of its officers was extremely competent launching a successful raid against the enemy normally that would be a good thing but suddenly not feeling so secure on land the french navy would decide to get into the action sailing right on up to bangkok and honestly having your palace accessible to the sea when you don't really have a navy isn't a great idea when you're dealing with colonial powers in the end laos would be ceded to france and while we're looking at the map i'll point out the extra nibbles that would carry on until 1909 just so you can see siam is very interested obviously in staying both out of wars with french or the british but also desperately attempting to develop its own armed forces because one day they might really need them and on that front i have to be clear a lot of historians point out that siam may have been doing something akin to self-colonizing uh there's a theory out there that a large part of the support for colonization came from a feeling of being able to civilize the world we even see this when we talk about the craig jorgensen right if siam could show its own modernization to various nations of the world it reinforced its political capital that could be spent on remaining independent so while yes they wanted the best arms possible that doesn't mean that they thought of it as a core solution their problem in this sort of head-on-head combat idea it was actually more of a look we're modern too what are you doing we have our own rights now that said they still bought 1 616 more monlickers in 1899 these were now the model 1895 stutzen that seems to have been a bit of a stop gap because by 1900 siamese military officials were seriously looking for a new rifle design entirely they hadn't been exceptionally happy with the straight pulls notes say that they reviewed 18 different shoulder arms but i'm unsure of what all was seen i can say they ranged from the near obsolete japanese murada to the danish semi-automatic madsen rifle that's quite a spread technologically but they ultimately came up with three key points that they felt must be included in any firearm considered it must be a turn bolt bolt action rifle no straight pulls the bolt must lock open when the magazine is empty and there must be a hand guard particularly behind the rear sight for handling when the gun is warm honestly this really reads like the monlickers somehow wronged them while all that was cooking they actually got to looking for ammunition as well initially the only restriction was that it'd be between 6.5 and 8 millimeter in diameter but the larger bore size won in the end the result would be an 8 by 50 millimeter rimmed bottleneck case bottlenosed bullet smokeless powder wait a minute for all they hated the monlicker they absolutely ripped off its cartridge the dimensional differences between the type 45 cartridge and the original uh austrian 8 by 50 millimeter rimmed cartridge are nearly insignificant now that's probably for good reason because it appears that you can just feed eight millimeter austrian and eight millimeter uh siamese interchangeably at least the first cartridge um they can work so like the thai cartridge can work in the uh original austrian guns the austrian ammo can work in the new thai mausers uh it seems very likely that they were interchangeable in the guns which would be good because that would mean siam could keep using its monlickers or their old ammunition while taking on a new rifle however there is still a lot of confusion around the siamese cartridge documents from 1913 seem to suggest a higher muzzle velocity one almost identical to the austrian cartridge which would make sense especially if you wanted to keep the rifles cited as was except pulling the ball and powder from exid examples of this cartridge we find a bullet of identical weight to the japanese mirada and a similar powder weight as well it would make sense that japan wanted to reuse existing components and data but it would also suggest a lower velocity which we also find in period records like those from dwm so the history on this cartridge is a bit muddy now i'm finally certain that the cartridge was decided before the final rifle choice which ultimately came down to two considerations the japanese arisaka type 30 rifle was available from a power with a vested interest in exporting to siam japan had been courting a relationship with the nation as a means to provide itself a market for finnish goods and an ally against western encroachment japan had rapidly modernized however in this period just before the russo-japanese war it was hard to say if they could actually stand toe-to-toe with the foreign powers the other interesting rifle was the swedish model 1894 or at least that's how it's recorded in the one source that i have the length feels a bit suspect considering argon today but maybe that's what they had on hand and started the pursuit i find it more likely that siam ultimately saw an early version of one of the mauser export rifles like the later 1907 that would be sold to china the features line up much better with the final product anyway siam ultimately favored the mauser system japan would make one last bid by offering up their very latest type 35 rifle a gun still being spun up for production they even sent over an example in the siamese cartridge but it was no use the mauser was the ticket now if only siam could buy any you see mauser obendorf had its hands full with military contracts at home and was taking on more ottoman orders to boot shopping around europe for other producers likely resulted in more concerns you have shipping costs security of the shipments integration of siamese inspectors but above all else you have this deep concern for secrecy and that would be very hard to ensure in europe most western powers had a lot of leaky talk around their arms factories especially whenever export markets were involved salesmen really liked to panic one power with threats of another power arming up so just look at south america for examples of that right siam wisely negotiated solution a way to have their cake and eat it too they would have japan produce their mauser license rifle the deal would actually be struck with mitsui busan kaisha a venture capital firm founded in 1876 which actually remains in business today mitsui shipped a lot of product and had their own ships as a matter of fact they would be liable for the deliveries but also collected one-third of the contract price up front the rest being paid on receipt of the rifles production would be carried out at the tokyo artillery arsenal which is also where some hybridization seems to have occurred features from the then brand new and still in production japanese type 35 naval rifle would be grafted onto the mauser i'd list them all here but i think it's more fun to show you them in person now this is not our gun for today but i really wanted you to see it first this is the 1907 mauser one that we actually covered in a previous episode but mauser 98 locking action the usual sort of like floor plate semi-pistol grip stock rear stock coming forward to a nice big old hand guard that stops midway up that sort of notched barrel band spring retaining it coming on forward spring retained front barrel band with the mauser style of locking log for the bayonet uh cleaning rod unprotected front sight you get the idea right at the rear we've got a tangent uh rear sight with a push button slide adjustment all right usual stuff this this is so bread and butter you guys are completely used to it but this is the export mauser this is what mauser was selling to a lot of countries around the world as the out of the box military rifle all right so siam comes up with this which if we really look at it all right metal butt plate all right semi pistol grip stock lower sling swivel here coming into a nice even grip right and then plane features finger groove trigger guard although the magazine releases change more on that in a moment tangent rear leaf sight with push button hand guard halfway up that even the little crease in the barrel band right spring retention on the barrel bands flat style barrel band with the lug uh this is a reproduction cleaning rod but cleaning rod here and then unprotected front sight right all right so yeah it's a mauser 1907 export i mean just on the face of it 98 action uh this one's a straight bolt most of the mauser 1907's were the one i have happens to be turn bolt um but yeah perfectly straightforward okay uh when it comes to those sights by the way uh just so that i don't skip past it these guys uh had a zero of 200 meters and can be adjustable up to 2 000 and of course we have that beautiful thai marking on the side and let me see if i can show you the top look at that gorgeous writing i can't read a lick of it but gorgeous running and then where does this thing really start to differ the most notable change is here this dust cover which is taken straight off the japanese type 35 rifle it has a thumb latch here and then you just push and as you push i don't know if you saw that it will naturally expand away which frees it from this little hole here and there's a spot on there and it just slides forward very naturally all the way up and exposes the action so uh you can't really shoot it with this cover closed i mean you fire one but you can't extract because it's gonna get stuck in there but this does allow you to seal up the gun when you're not in combat and you know in southeast asia yeah it's it's a pretty important feature that's why japan went for it that's why they'd carry on something that was more like this but more automatic in the type 38 and it's probably the same reason that siam was interested now you can see the relief by the way for that feature right up here while i've got you at the top of the gun i want to cover some markings we have a royal seal an rs-121 i'll show you those in more detail and explain them in a bit in the back this is where your serial number would be written and another piece of japanese influence is this plum-shaped bolt handle instead of a round one like we're used to on the usual german mausers this is very japanese looking and pretty comfortable to the hand otherwise this is a bog standard 98 mauser action so i'm not going to spend a lot of time on it uh let's see if i can however show you another interesting feature get the bolt out of here and while i still have this particular camera angle you're probably going to notice something very interesting which is that the receiver comes back to a point and then there's a separation and then an added tang that's because not all of the rs-121s have this tang most do because it was a later edition and we're going to talk about why in a moment but that is another japanese edition this is very much from the arizoka lineage of rifles deep tang top and bottom another japanese feature is here the floor plate release which hey that's much easier than shoving in the bullet tip and moving it back or forth this comes right away although it's not hinged so this is something you want to keep an eye on obviously just like the mauser and the other socket we've got the v-flat spring with the follower here this is an interrupting follower so this gun does lock open on empty locked open and depress the follower and we're back in there so pretty cool that of course being a mauser feature this particular one being japanese another japanese feature is one that you might not be able to see unless you're paying attention to the grain boundaries on this particular rifle there's a seam here this is a two-piece stock not all of them will be again it sort of depends on certain factors that i'm gonna talk about in a moment but two-piece stocks can be found on the rs-121s again the japanese edition also not really maos are not really japanese at this time let me get to the back we have a butt trap now most researchers believe that because this is so shallow that it was designed specifically for the muzzle cover and not much else now we usually don't get this deep but i've gone ahead and taken out the floor plate on this gun because i want you to see the steep rake on this magazine and that exists because of the rimmed cartridge we don't see rimmed ammunition in export mausers in modern mausers you know that's something we think of in the black powder guns but here we are in this case they solved the problem grimlock by just making sure that as you fed cartridges into the magazine the first ones in go to the rear because they're going to be the last ones fed so the rims are always set in the right position i've never suffered rimlock on this gun but admittedly i've put very few rounds through it given the sort of oddness of the ammo but apparently it worked well i haven't seen any reports of deep complaints and it's a fairly simple geometric solution although boy it seems to take up some extra space i mean look at that overhang that's it's pretty wild to look at and it allows for the follower to have to kind of travel in this really catty corner position and at the top you'll find that these have a fair bit of waggle room more so than other export mouses that you might see i should also point out that i am not going to be doing a full bolt disassembly or any of that because it's exactly the same as the 98 however siamese mousers do not share parts compatibility with german mausers because these were made in japan they were not sort of done on the exact same equipment they were not as religious to the interchangeability with other countries because why would they this is this is siam's rifle it only needs to be interchangeable with itself all right let's take a look and see how this thing works on the inside while generally a mauser 1898 action the first unique feature of the siamese rs 121 is its sliding dust cover which we must press open before loading while hidden from the outside the steeply raked double stack magazine well is the second major change from a standard mouser this shape forces each cartridge significantly rearward as it enters the magazine that way the next cartridge's rim always stacks to the front preventing rim lock when feeding otherwise this really is a bog standard mauser 1898 although none of the parts will interchange with german production the gun is locked by two symmetrical lugs at the front of the bolt body which must be turned manually before you can withdraw the bolt here we have the firing pin which is constantly being pressed forward by a concentric coil spring butt is held back by the affixed cocking piece which is in turn held by the tipping sear pulling the trigger causes it to first brace both of its upper bumps on the underside of the receiver this is the first stage of the pull any further and it leverages the seer downward releasing the cocking piece and firing the rifle this action is [ __ ] on open which means the conking piece is camped back as we open the bolt the mechanism is simple a set of opposing diagonal planes one on the cocking piece and one on the bolt body when we bolt home the conking piece again snags the sear coming back just a little bit further the conking piece rides inside a larger cockney shroud which also carries a safety flag manually turning the safety 180 degrees rotates a semi-circular plate into the path of the cocking piece this plate has a sloped surface which presses the cocking piece slightly rearward disengaging it from the sear the tip of the safety is half cut and when on safe it turns into the bolt body preventing it from rotating and therefore locking the bolt shut rotating the safety back frees the bolt body to move and rests the cocking piece back on the sear readying the gun to be fired again the rs-121 uses the long mauser extractor which pulls the spin casing into the spring-loaded ejector flicking the spent shell from the action the magazine feed is powered by a simple flat spring which presses upwards on the milled follower when empty the follower rises high enough to block the bolt from being pressed forward indicating to the shooter the need to reload this time let's go back to with ice now normally we'd be handing this right over to may for some shooting but i have to tell you that this isn't the original siamese mauser no this is actually the second one and this has caused a lot of confusion for collectors along the way the first contract with japan called for 20 000 rifles production was started in may of 1902 and finished in november the rifles costs i am 65 000 pounds sterling now that 1902 date is critical to understanding something you could call this rifle the model 1902 right that's what we would do in the west well in siam they use the uh ratanakoskin calendar which takes its year one from the session of rama the first founder of the chakri dynasty and the founding of bangkok this was however in april so there is some offset from the gregorian calendar so the first contract would be in the siamese rs year of 121 making this the rs-121 rifle but it doesn't stop there siam had a religious calendar based on the death of the guatama buddha and without getting into too much detail it would become the official state calendar in 1913. that put the 1902 contract in the buddhist year of 2445 which would be abbreviated to type 45. okay got it good because i'm going to ruin this further like i said earlier this is not the first rifle so therefore not the model 1902 or the type 45 but this is an rs-121 because history hates you actually this is one of those springfield 1903 things recall the us had adopted the springfield 1903 short rifle with its spike bayonet and 30 ott3 cartridge in 1903. then they modified it in 1905 and changed the cartridge in 1906 forcing a major overhaul and rechamber program what did they call the new 1906 model they springfield 1903 of course so much less severe but a very similar issue here you see having received the first contract siam noticed some issues and japan was happy to help resolve them in the second contract started in may of 1903 and finishing in november these 20 000 additional rifles now made for a total of 40 000 this time siam only paid 60 thousand british sterling pounds so what were the changes well you've technically seen them all because the gun i have here is from the second contract but let's review being that this is a second contract gun it has all of the features thankfully because some vanish due to rear-sealing but looks like we're all original here so let's take a look we've got just like i showed you before the addition of these tang extensions all right so they gave us a stronger wrist for the lighter wood which is probably the same reason why we got the two piece stock again a feature i showed you but specific to the second contract however you may find second contract guns that were later refurbished to have single peace stocks or vice versa so don't get too worried these guns again re-arsenal a lot while i'm at the back of the gun a unique feature to the second contract is actually here at the top of the butt plate original guns had a more normal export mauser flat butt plate with a slight curve at the top that came in at this sort of 45-ish degree angle that was found to be pretty weak especially probably during drill and so they changed it over to a 90 degree straight on in through the top with a deep tang on the butt so also stronger if we move up to the front of the gun as soon as we can get there a minor detail is that these little wing-a-dings on the side of the front sight once zeroed were uh milled down they were milled down as flush as possible in this case this one's been adjusted again and so it's it's a little proud but these should only on a type or a second contract gun they should only be a little bit in and out whereas on the original first contracts they stick out pretty far and then we're never sort of fitted after adjustment gave you a lot of room though for being able to fix your windage huh oh now there's also some evidence that the handguard's changed however my gun being a mismatch i don't know for sure uh the handguard does not match the stock does not match the bolt again rear shelling programs but supposedly some if not all of the second production run have reinforced metal tabs where they would be meeting up under here or up under here especially you may even see rivets to go with those i believe that's how they were fixed unfortunately i don't have an example to show you but that is a possibility okay so we have two slightly different rifles and like the us siam doesn't really change the name they're both marked effectively rs-121 this is written in tie on the receiver underneath a sort of royal seal the outer ring is a depiction of a flaming ring the chakra mythical throwing weapon which is actually the basis for the name of the chakri dynasty chakri meaning the holder of the chakra that pyramid looking thing with the sunbeams well that's the great crown of victory part of the regalia of siam so this is very much equivalent to the chrysanthemum seal on the artisaka so the two contract rifles had the same base markings carried on the same serial block as a matter of fact and were considered basically the same model despite their differences that's not too confusing until you get into that whole year change thing since the model 1902 moniker is really for collectors let's call the second contract the model 1903 just to keep our heads straight and that same reasoning would appear around 1913 in siam as with the adoption of the buddhist calendar so came the occasional reference to a type 46 rifle which by the way became the standard pattern for whenever guns saw significant repairs so many type 45s would turn into type 46s at least under our current understanding so there you go years of collector's arguments probably solved because who knows what will turn up next you may have a type 45 you may have a type 46 you may have a type 4546 and it's going to get worse from here anyway now because i know some of you are going to ask there is a way to tell whether or not your gun was in the first or second contract just check the serial number over 20 000 and you started with a type 46 under 20 000 and you started with a type 45. are you having some trouble reading that maybe don't want to translate those numbers well check the side wall of the receiver under the dust cover here you'll find an inspection mark probably there are only two for the rs-121 this is from the first contract and this is from the second and they actually seem to tell us a little more about the rifle's history that first mark well it comes from the first letter of the name of one prince bowende the second is likely a stylized symbol for the siamese army so not sure who got to do the second contract but back to the prince because his story is fairly interesting i'm not even gonna try butchering this guy's full name all you need to know is that this noble of siam was recently promoted to lieutenant colonel like right as the first contract started apparently bowen day was sent along with another lieutenant colonel chi today to the tokyo artillery arsenal in japan in order to inspect the mausers under production the route they took was circuitous and anonymous they traveled dressed as civilians avoided conspicuous hotel stays and once in japan they favored renting a small house uh way out of the way of prying eyes and even came and went from the arsenal without a stitch of official dress both men were apparently english speakers which came in handy since one of the lead japanese engineers also knew the language kijito nambu who had been the driving force behind the type 35 rifle and likely had been involved in the siamese mauser as a matter of fact it's a personal theory of mine that nambu drew inspiration from the siamese contract especially given the number of mauser features that found their way into the type 38 rifle i mean the tooling was basically already there for him to tinker with not returning to the point of secrecy all that effort was expended so that the british and the french couldn't find some excuse to get their dander up and interfere with the rifle deliveries either power would not like the other players helping siam enforce its own sovereignty once completed each delivery of rifles was essentially smuggled into siam again this was made easier with the involvement of the mitsui company as a front alright both rifles are in hand and now we can let may finally shoot this particular one this rifle normally uses a stripper clip however we were sadly unable to find one so it's single loading for me [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] what an absolutely beautiful gun and thankfully the differences between this one and the earlier type 45 are so low that we really didn't need both to do this episode there's going to be almost no handling differences however we did miss out on something because there was a third original siamese mauser starting in february of 1904 and finishing in july 10 000 carbines would be cranked out by the tokyo artillery arsenal these cost the siamese government 25 500 pounds sterling because of the clear difference from the rifle these were designated rs-123 which was later converted to the buddhist year type 47. it's interesting to note these were apparently called short rifles in siam as they didn't have a dedicated word for carbine now the photo i'm showing you is actually a mock-up an estimation i've made with available images and a description of the original carbine which sported a 20 and one-quarter inch barrel lacked a bayonet entirely and had a unique magazine release in front of the floor plate and a rear sight zeroed for 300 meters that could be dialed up to only 1500 meters these guns have the same chamber markings as the rifles however the numbers below spell out rs123 all right we have discovered two long rifles and a carbine 50 000 guns in total and apparently millions of rounds of ammunition which was initially made in japan but german machinery was purchased for domestic manufacture making siam fairly independent on this front a very wise investment now despite the new arm siam still ceded territory to the british and french through 1907 on into 1909 really as we saw earlier the two colonial powers had actually managed to reasonably settle their differences however in 1904 with the untaunt core gel that had mixed implications for siam in october of 1910 king chulalongkorn succumbed to kidney disease leaving the throne to his son educated in britain and having been enrolled in the royal military college sandhurst he was briefly commissioned in the durham light infantry studying law and history at christchurch oxford he did fail to graduate due to appendicitis complications but chiravo traveled europe extensively and then on to the us and japan before returning to siam in 1903 rising to king in 1910 he would prove to be a military reformer introducing the rank of general in field martial from here i'll skip the details but it's obvious that the new king would introduce a number of british-styled institutions and practices to siam most notable for our story he would form a paramilitary corps one independent from the established siamese army this started as a ceremonial guard but given his experience in the british army it quickly took on a role of its own it was even augmented with an equivalent boy scout subsidiary as further proof of british influence he would arm his new wild tiger core with the short magazine lee enfield rifle this would become the type 62 in siamese service while neat still not exactly making friends actually even before the rifles showed up vaccino would experience his first but not last coup in 1911 the wu-chang uprise in china led to the fall of the qing dynasty and emboldened radical elements in siam this combined with the snubbing of the army led to many young officers planning an end to the monarchy unfortunately they chose their assassin by lottery and the short straw guy decided it might be better to just snitch on the rest rather than go through with it despite dodging the coup the new king learned a lesson and put a lot of work into further integrating the wild tiger core with the regular army once world war one began however this force was largely put to home guard and support work with the army doing army things now speaking of the war siam was not in it at least not at first instead the siamese government was largely frozen they had spent so many years navigating neutrality it became the standard go-to political philosophy but the king and other officials were getting impatient they clearly favored the untaunt but many of the younger officers had been german trained or otherwise had sympathies to germany or the central powers best to just ride this one out if they could didn't need to turn the entire internal government upside down over it that is until german unrestricted submarine warfare were declared well actually no even this didn't initially get siam to move at first instead the king wisely started to ready his nation into accepting entering the war propaganda was prepared and the king himself even wrote some detective stories that made the germans out as the baddies this brought the public around and helped buffer and quiet those small number of young officers so when the u.s declared war siam was able to follow along with their own declaration on july 22nd of 1917. thanks to planning german businesses and most importantly ships which had been hiding in neutral siamese waters since 1914 were now quickly seized notably the friendship british would come along after to demand anything that floated belongs to them honestly seizing the germans in siam was probably the only real use of this rifle during those war years as for the actual battles in europe well siam actually would send in an expeditionary force this is actually weirdly a whole other story really just know that's because they would use french equipment and therefore this aspect of siamese history doesn't really directly touch on our story today and the whole endeavor didn't really do a lot for siamese french relations either however there was one glaring success siam sent over several hundred pilots which is actually really impressive for the time despite having almost no navy siam boasted a small air force as the king along with prince cheera and prince chang grabose were all absolutely enamored with flight so siam had an air base and some planes before the war even broke out and one more however the siamese pilots training was fairly elementary especially since they had not received any experience from combat pilots so on arrival to france they were sent for months of retraining which ultimately meant that they did not see any active duty before the end of the war like they're grounded brethren actually did now for siam though that training was exceedingly valuable and they would continue to pour resources into aviation which actually does have a bit to do with our story today specifically the siamese ammunition that's because in 1923 siamese military officials would adopt an improved spitzer round which while nice for infantry was an even greater boon to aviation allowing their machine guns to shoot straighter and therefore more predictably in flight the new cartridge appears to have been designed to require minimum work on the available firearms and to permit use of previous ammunition inside of the rechambered guns the type 66 shoulder is much further up with a shorter neck that means you could not chamber it into a type 45 board rifle or machine gun however you could put the old type 45 ammo into a type 66 board rifle or machine gun you'd just blow out the neck a little bit the other dimensions of the case were increased slightly just enough so that when reaming for the new ammo each rifle would get a freshly recut chamber faster flatter shooting ammo however meant changing the sights or you could just trim down the sight base i guess so much so that the original numerals were cut through so at a glance you should be able to tell which chambering you have on hand although i'm unsure if any of these sites were missed later on they do not appear to have redone the receiver markings at all so checking that site base is key for understanding what cartridge should be chambered in your gun now the new cartridge wasn't just adopted for improving the mausers it was actually part of another rifle contract for a whole new rifle the artisaka type 38 derived siamese type 66 rifle which is actually fairly cool i mean it's a type 38 with a tangent rear sight 50 000 would be ordered from the japanese pacific union and export firm again made by the tokyo artillery arsenal now i do not have one here and it's not even the gun for our show today sorry folks but that 1923 adoption date coincided with something quite terrible the great kanto earthquake this incredible quake all but leveled tokyo and severely disrupted japanese rifle production actually it would result in the reform of the arsenal system as a whole but for siam it meant their rifle was delayed a few years delivery stretched from 1924 to 1928 versus the original very quick deliveries of the mausers just a note here king wachido would fall ill and pass away in 1925. he left only a daughter just a few hours old also a metric ton of debt so the crown would have to pass through his brother and this guy saw a lot of tribulation but it actually has a lot less to do with our story today as we're finally sort of decoupling from the imperial family returning to the shoulder arms it's interesting to note that there was never a type 66 carbine instead it appears that every single one of the type 47 mauser carbines were converted to the new type 66 spitzer cartridge these became the 4766 carbines which in addition to the new chambering and shortened rear sight also received a new forward barrel band as they were adding bayonets this band is now based on the arisaka pattern and takes a japanese 1903 style of bayonet although the point is a little different an additional purchase of 5 000 extra bayonets in 1928 seems to bear this claim out this program was likely due to the financial crisis that was enveloping siam and honestly much of the world at that time all right so siam has a new rifle old rifles are likely getting slowly updated to type 66 pattern uh not all of them ever would though as you can tell the carbines though they really got overhauled like all of them would any of these guns all of them combined see any actual service well none in the revolution of 1932 which was a bloodless coup that introduced a constitutional monarchy to siam this was actually something the king was already kind of planning on so he just kind of rolled with it however the very next year our friend and former rifle inspector prince bolandis would lead another albeit unsuccessful coup known as the bowen dej rebellion rallying aid in the provinces the prince would demand the return of some powers to the crown neither the rebels nor the government really wanted to square off and the situation remained precarious until blows finally started to be struck interestingly the king remained neutral as did the entire siamese navy ultimately the fighting did have to start and this meant that the mousers in later arisaka would finally see some direct action in addition to machine guns armored vehicles and especially artillery in the end bolende would be defeated although not before sending an empty train smashing into another being sent down the tracks with government reinforcements on board wow ultimately his forces would scatter in prince bolandae would flee to vietnam and then cambodia he returned home in 1948 however and died in 1953 at the age of 76. through all of this it appears more and more carbines and rifles were being converted to the new type 66 cartridge and it appears around 1936 they ran out of carbines especially again in more modern armies short rifles are favored over long it's estimated 3 000 siamese type 4766 carbines were therefore made new in bangkok which appeared to have continued production into 1940. these will have a unique crest with a simplified chakra and now feature four rings instead of the crown these rings are said to represent the four traditional armies of siam the characters now spell out chor sor 4766 at least a handful of new made rifles have also been noted these being marked similarly as type 46 with no addition of 66 i'm not sure why now it's a pretty curious thing but the 4766 carbines are actually almost overwhelmingly the only ones you will see in the u.s market i'm unsure why the original or their converted versions never really made it over here now while all of that was being produced siam underwent some changes plec fibon songkrum mostly known as fibon thankfully for my horrible pronunciation had been one of the leaders behind the 1932 revolution in december of 1938 he rose to prime minister of siam and established a military dictatorship dang it in june of 1939 he would officially change the name of the country from siam to thailand land of the thais this was part of a broader nationalist program and carried a somewhat anti-chinese sentiment at the time after the outbreak of world war ii phoenix saw france crippled militarily by the successful invasion of germany this was thailand's chance to reclaim some territory and with the japanese invasion of french indochina in september of 1940 anti-french rallies were held in bangkok and several border skirmishes erupted along the mekong frontier these eventually evolved into an air war which again goes back to that earlier investment that thailand had made into dominating the sky in its region in january of 1941 thailand launched proper ground offenses into laos and cambodia the former went well and the latter bogged down for a fair bit however french counter-attacks in both failed and so they turned to their old secret weapon the navy after decisive french victories at sea the empire of japan stepped in to mediate the matter negotiating an end to hostilities i mean technically france was vichy france at that point and they were sort of an ally anyway uh later on japan would overwhelmingly invade thailand and made it a de facto puppet state for the rest of the war from here thai soldiers and their rifles would be fielded into burma and malaya since japan ultimately lost the war fibun would be ousted and thailand briefly returned to being siam before he returned in 1948 and made it thailand again in 1949. now from there the story of our rifle actually falls right off the cliff because post-war thailand would adopt the 30oz 6 cartridge and while it has been said a few of these might have been converted to it it probably was very difficult given the rimmed nature of the original gun uh thailand was much happier with us surplus and the more easily converted artisaka so in the 1960s these guns would be surplus make their way to our collectors market where they continue to baffle and confuse american collectors today now just a couple of notes while we're on the topic of the collector's market one it's almost impossible to find an all-matching siamese mauser they underwent a lot of rebuilding programs thanks to serving in hot wet conditions two many guns were converted to 4570 in the us thanks to its similar rim size and more available ammunition be careful and always cast the bore on any of these guns before firing there could be any number of wildcats as well three a number of shortened rifles have shown up in the market there doesn't appear to be a consistent pattern with these and they are likely not an original military design although we are not entirely sure siamese mausers have been very popular for sporterization so modification is practically the norm when it comes to this particular rifle in the market all right i think that's got us covered so let's go ahead and put this in mae's hands and see how she feels about shooting one of the most beautiful mousers i've ever seen all right gang we've made room for one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen in this world in may yeah i knew that wasn't me i already knew how do you feel uh handling the siamese rs 121 second contract making it the type 46 mouse boy this is a lot isn't it yeah it's a title in itself actually this one we have kind of had around the house for a while but i can't say i've handled it a lot didn't you pick this guy up personally i think i found that before i ever met you no yeah oh yeah you had a few guns before you met me yeah but this is an early one for me so this is my rs-121 yeah i bought it easily in the first five guns that i ever bought did you know what it was when you got it yes ish as much as anybody could at that time okay um i believe the reason i knew anything about it was because of bolt-action military rifles of the world i was a very early collector then and that was a pretty good first book to start on yeah and all i know is i bumped into it for low price uh at a gun show and i noticed that the rear sight was intact which uh at the time i did know that that meant that it was not updated to the new cartridge and that that was a less common thing to find this long tangent site down here yeah well the rails for it so you could see the full characters so that made me uh grab it and then i've just sort of had it since then and i don't know i've just always found it to be a beautiful gun and actually i never even got to shoot it until this episode uh it had some light surface cracking in the woods so uh that had been i mean i did my best to glue and patch that and it looks like it didn't separate at all so yeah it looks like they held all right uh but this one on a few occasions where i get to you know shoot my own gun uh it's been a long-term project because these are so poorly understood uh for those of you who just watched the episode and never heard of them congratulations you skipped a lot of suffering because i was your part having to try to find that information yeah it used to be the whole thing was like well the gun's the type 46 but the ammo is the type 45 but no there is a type 45 gun but no there's not and there's 46 right right so um that hopefully it's a lot clearer now that there's a 45 46 47 and then 45 got upgraded to 46 and then all of them got upgraded to 66. and then you don't even get into the part of like well is it siam or thailand and like just so hard to just name a gun whenever you see the long gun if unless you've accidentally wandered into one of the very very rare long rifles that were produced in bangkok in the 40s right right like in 1940 essentially okay uh unless it's that one weird gun you're probably dealing with the rs-121 that's the safest way to talk about them but uh let's talk uh let's go with the may route uh why don't you describe this gun for us so all right hear me out on this one we've got effectively a long yeah i think it's 50 inches or so yeah long rifle balance is pretty decent just in front of the mag we got a semi-pistol grip pretty decent long finger groove not a full stock but at least a decent size hand guard on this guy um and then we've got this gever 90 action i'm not going to lie if you take off the dust cover this kind of just looks like an export mauser yeah it's it's it's definitely yeah it's like the 1907. it really is in a lot of ways you can tell that siam went to the international market and tried to purchase a rifle and they were and it's interesting because the history that's available to me is that they started with the swedish 94 which might tell us it may come out that they were researching their guns a little sooner than we thought um because it is you cannot tell me that they did not just go out and purchase an export mouse or license pretty much uh the problem is they couldn't get them made overseas so they had to have japan make them so none of the parts that i know of are interchangeable between these two guns despite how similar they are um here let me set this down and actually tell you what i was holding was a 1907 this came a little before that but they were already trying to sell those that early on yeah um it's just that took a few years for these to start actually selling so uh you have what is essentially very early export mouser styling with a dust cover yeah but before we get to that really tell us what's on it because some people might not have seen the export mauser episode we've got a semi-final stock mostly full-length stock half-length handguard what's up with the rear sight um yeah we've got this tangent rear sight with a barley corn front sight which that's a pretty clean reit to me because it's a decent v-notch um like opposite not ideal but great yeah it's okay it's not bad flat it's not interrupting your aim no and it's definitely not going to get easily damaged like this feels pretty pretty stout like it's pretty resilient i think and this is a [ __ ] on open mauser 98 action yep with a flag safety in the back all things that we're quite used to no this isn't going to happen i'm sorry i just just because you're talking about safety sure this is a gun that underwent a lot of refurbishment over the years and that usually means something when you deal with mouser flag safeties really turn that safety let's see oh like butter okay because you see the spanish guns go through the same thing right and the mauser flag safeties on those and the argentines and all the other stuff they're usually horrible because they're worn down so siam apparently paid close attention to their tolerance yeah they're not bad it really isn't and there's a nice thumb relief here for thumbing in your rounds pretty easily yeah if only we had some sort of stripper clip apparatus that would have been nice unfortunately they're like stupid rare and expensive i tried getting a hold of one uh i tried getting a hold of at least what i thought would work because this is probably the first time you've ever like it's just come up that we did you just ran out of time we're eating no i couldn't do it i couldn't do it no we got a uh someone was claiming to have one i knew it wasn't one on looks but i thought dimensionally it would work and the problem is even when i got it sort of modified to work it desperately needed to have the little bubbles on the side in the right place to keep it from tipping because the rimmed round when you try to stripper a rimmed round there's a lot of energy that gets pulled forward and so that clip has to be anchored so that it can't tip and so i just could not make a replica that worked yeah i think i know somebody's gonna offer me one now but we already did the episode yeah you can get like two emails at least but like yeah i've got some of those okay that's how that works all right so i guess now we can get to the most daring thing about this gun yeah just the dust cover it's just so unique i mean we've experienced dust covers before i mean usually they've been integrated though in such a way that they follow the bolts yes but we've had the advantage of working from the future to the past this is true because into the future we know what it can be this gun came out before the type 38 a couple years right uh and then at the same time as the type 35 which is a gun we're actually hoping to cover we've had one on offer yeah it looks like a type 30 with some differences to the safety quadrant rear sight and this sliding dust cover is really what you see um so this steals that from the type 35 okay and then after this and the type 35 japan goes we need it to stay with the bolt because it's a separate hand motion it really is so i could see and it doesn't take much to operate it barely takes any force to actually unlock it and then be able to pull it up and down like it really does it does click into place too like it's a little tiny lever that obviously has a small notch that you can easily lift out in order to push it up and down and settle it in i found for closing it i have to kind of consciously elaborate and pull it back but for opening i just put my thumb on there and push forward oh really is that just because oh yeah because if you think about it the motion of the push forward it automatically will rise much easier no i get that that's fair so which would be fantastic for needing to get off in a hurry right they're not going to accidentally fight with it it's just gonna go right uh it could cause some confusion though the fact that it's not attached to the bolt itself just because you think in a hurry someone could go to open or try to manipulate the action then oh no you've only got your one shot yeah there's nothing about that dust cover that locks the action no so you can cycle the bolts i mean in this case your follower is going to get in the way if you go all the way back oh yeah but if you had rounds in there you could in theory cause a big old jam because you could you could fire one eject the spent casing into the cover and then try to feed forward not realizing it and it's not gonna i don't i don't see that rim hiding anywhere up in here it's definitely gonna get stuck in the action right so you could get a mess um it's almost a liability in that sense which is why you see japan go to the sliding dust cover that stays with the bolts and then we've seen a couple of sliding dust covers that were then they were basically adaptations of the japanese system yeah like the 98 did one yes that one was very complicated to integrate yeah uh we also saw remnants of one on the later bertiers where they were designed to have one but then it was never really issued actually to play with that but i saw ian had one at one point right so those are much smarter because they stay with the gun but this one it's a separate hand motion so i could see that coming into or being an issue like in the heat of the moment kind of thing where it's like they might forget to take it off but if you're needing to transition between areas that can be really convenient just to have it here and right not have to worry about taking manually taking it off and putting anywhere it's always here there you go so that's this is something we've never really talked about on our show which is action covers because i guess we're so used to the sliding dust cover from the audi socket perspective that we think of it as an integrated rifle component but actually this sliding dust cover is taking the place of something that is usually with the rifle but with it not on it so with you it just comes with the rifle and you're responsible for holding on to the separate thing right and if you look at action covers from the world war one era a lot of them are canvas or leather with buckles like one or more maybe three buckles right yeah yeah and that could be complicated and take time to take off right so you have a rifle with you that you can't put into action without removing this leather cover like and i mean like buckling a pair of boots like trying to get in there yep so that means that once you're up at the front or in somewhere that's a dangerous area which are usually the areas where you have the least cleanliness the most dirt mud yeah water whatever the case may be the worst conditions are also often the conditions in which you're actually fighting and you have to make a decision to uncover your gun yeah that can be very hard to know when you're supposed to take because imagine you're sitting because it's always when you feel safest that you have the worst defeat right and so you're sitting around with your dust cover on and somebody else shows up well imagine having a gun that you can't use because you're fighting these straps right what do you do with this gun well at least with this one yeah versus fighting straps all right mate surprise well it would be nice about that and then one moment i was planning on using it but apparently i'm the one person that's going to do that it's me with the with the freaking mind like you're 93. as slow and awful as that was it was still better than taking three buckles off of something even don't even i'm gonna get so much crap for that which would you choose though i would still pick this yeah i'm frankly surprised this isn't a more common feature at that time it could be really convenient and on top of that just considering some of the conditions that you know a lot of the players are in making your troops feel safe using protective equipment for their gun is also going to preserve the gun better yeah so smart all the way around i actually rather like this for how uncomplicated of an addition it is yeah effectively all i'm looking at is covering that up if i've got a strap i just strap this onto my back i'm already ready to go yeah that's it i'm done it's one one little training point and otherwise not a very dangerous thing to add to the gun it's not causing a lot of confusion i like it a lot yeah okay straightforward i guess we talked about the cover enough but we don't need to talk about the gun at all to be fair we did pretty much talk about because it is effectively what we said it's it's an export mauser and aside from the fact the only other difference really is that it's got a rimmed cartridge it's a rimmed eight millimeter cartridge which it's in terms of recoil and experience it's not unlike that eight by fifty austrian that we shot before i mean this is almost identically the same cartridge yeah the recoil on this feels a lot like an 1895 monolinker yeah the only thing i thought was that i expected the rim on the cartridge to give me a little more grief and that i thought maybe it might cause a jam or anything like that but the only issue we really had was just the fact that with um with this one in particular we had one issue with it but it was even because of the cartridge that was with it was because of an issue with this we had hand loads yes and in doing the hand loads um we found out you have to be extremely tight on the thickness of the rim yeah because of the angled feed and the fact that the follower can walk back and forth when you get to that last round you can get into a situation where it doesn't like to pick up the last round unless you have the correct dimensions on that rim uh and so we found that to be a potential issue and we had to put our best rims towards the bottom of the magazine yep uh but if you had normal ammo that was issued with it it would have worked fine exactly but that was because that's then right now we're having to deal with what we can so overall how would you rate a gun like this i mean it's a really ingenious design it truly is it's it's an export mauser and don't get me wrong it's a bit long and cumbersome and i could see myself wearing out with it a little bit but the cartridge is still decent i didn't really experience any issues with it and it comes with a dust cover that's pretty secure it's pretty solid for a rifle yeah i wish we'd gotten a hold of one of the carbines because i feel like i would like to try i'm curious if the siamese carbine would have been enough to be in your top 10 top five you know because then you're dealing with the [ __ ] on open mouths are nineteen off the top of your head it's a 20 inch in some change barrel that's not bad yeah no it's gonna feel a lot better but the problem is you're gonna have more recoil true and you're gonna have that again i think the rim cartridge is a little awkward in terms of like there's just something a little awkward about loading it from the stripper clip um i know we didn't get to do on air but i was tinkering with one and just the fact that it wants to pull and flop around weird i'd be curious to see how the originals did with it if it actually did hold it really tight the interesting thing is you take this dust cover and you put it on say a seven millimeter export carbine and i would call it probably one of the best versions of the mauser you could have yeah but nobody did that no surprisingly not yeah well if you've got a bubba at home i guess go nuts because it's a bubba but don't ruin a good gun there i did my duty good job all right well any other final comments on the siamese uh no i'm actually happy that this one's staying around and hopefully um we'll be up you'll be able to play with it some more since now yeah i actually finally got to shoot the thing yeah how do you feel about that you got how did you actually enjoy it i was working i was just glad to see it shoot yeah it's fair uh i don't know i just enjoyed it it's to me it's just one of the most beautiful guns i have because there's something about being able to take all this sort of busyness of the mauser and just tuck it calmly away and you get this smooth space age i can't throw it over yeah apparently you're having a hard time well it's because you mucked it up it's all jammed down what'd you do i didn't do anything there we go you just got to deal with some force perfectly smooth no problems they can ruin anything i mean maybe that's like way away there's very space age there with that on there it's very spelt i like it all right well that's gonna have us wrapped up um i don't get to have to thank anybody i own a gun i own one gun ah take that internet i managed to own a gun by buying it before i did the episode on it years ago yeah when i had some money okay well if you like to help out with that don't forget we have ways you can do that which you can find at the end of the show yeah also any updates after the credits anything else mate i think that's pretty much it i think we covered it okay bye-bye later everybody [Music] special thanks for research on this episode goes out to our own space cowboy who has conveniently been keeping an updated article on surplus so if you're watching this later on maybe check in and see if there have been any new discoveries also special thanks to francis c allen for his years of work on this topic he's definitely been an inspiration to niche researchers thanks to his articles through bonsai maybe we can bully him into a proper book on siamese small arms

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 91,753

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, worldwar1, documentary, Siam, Saim, Siamese, Mauser, Japan, Japanese, Thailand, Thai, Type 46, Type 47, rifle, bolt-action, bolt action, dust cover, 8x50mmR

Id: YRrV8sUMhPs

Length: 66min 57sec (4017 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021