Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the British Royal Armouries with the final segment in our series about development of the Sten gun. Today we have the Sten Mark V. Now if you're coming here from the Sten Mark III video and you are wondering what happened to the IV, well the answer is the Sten Mark IV
... never went into production. It was a series of experimental developments
... that never went into production. So there are elements of the
Sten Mark IV that we do see here, with the trigger group being moved a bit. There were some suppressed
versions of the Mark IV. I actually have a video on
a suppressed Sten Mark IV. So if you are interested in that
I'll link to it in the description below, along with the prior ... videos in this series. But in terms of actual production issued
firearms the Sten Mark IV is a non-entity, and they went specifically directly
from the Mark III to the Sten Mark V. Now fundamentally the Sten Mark V is the
really high quality, nice version of the Sten gun. And it was developed in 1943,
which is a little bit odd. In hindsight we look at 1943 and we think
the Allies are going to win at this point, the tide has turned, things
are ... basically secure. But at the time that would not
have been obvious or evident. Like, the outcome of the war was still kind
of in question in 1943 - to those in 1943. And so the idea of going back
and making a higher quality version of the Sten gun is not as
obvious as we might think of it today. It's possible that they were
looking at this as a gun that was going to be with the British
military for years after the war, and they wanted to have a nicer
version of it to keep on hand. There may have been some
concern that the reports out there criticising the Sten for being total
garbage were perhaps somewhat true. Ultimately the Sten had some issues,
but it was a reliable and effective firearm and it worked well ... for the troops. A very crude gun, awkward to handle,
but reliable and effective. But perhaps there was some concern
that it wasn't reliable and effective enough. Now by 1943 as well, demand for
submachine guns in the British army, ... production had caught up to demand. And so there wasn't quite as
much urgency to crank the guns out by the millions as there had
been the year before, 1942. At any rate, whatever the specific impetus
the Sten Mark V is developed in '43. The plans are finalised in December, and the guns
... are issued into service in February of 1944. They will see their first
combat use actually on D-Day. British glider-borne paratroops of the
6th Airborne Division had Sten Mark Vs, and you can see pictures of them from some of
the historical fighting in the Normandy landings. Now from a practical perspective, you
can kind of see most of the changes here. What they did to make the Sten better were
give it a real pistol grip and a real stock, which are fantastically
more comfortable to use than the tube stocks and the sheet-metal
welded stocks of the earlier variations. They went ahead and gave it essentially
the nose of a Number 4 Mark 1 Enfield rifle. The front sight of the Enfield and also
the attachment for an Enfield bayonet. So this was the first practical way
to put a bayonet on a Sten gun. ... Not experimental, there was a version
of a bayonet made for the Mark II Sten, but it saw very limited production
and almost no service use. So the Mark V gives us the bayonet. It also gives us a vertical front grip,
but that was a very short-lived thing. So let's take a closer look, let me show you
a few of the other elements of the Mark V. Let's just start at the front of the Mark V
here and move our way backwards. We have a Number 4 Mark 1 Enfield bayonet. This is just very simple,
basically a screwdriver spike. And it locks on ... with these
two lugs on the front of the barrel. So the bayonet itself just fits on like
that, push in, rotate, locks in place. And then has this release
button on the bottom. Along with that of course you get the
Number 4 Enfield front sight assembly, the protective wings, and the front sight
itself which is adjustable for windage. The first time ever you have actual
adjustable sights on a Sten gun. The next feature we come to is the vertical front
grip, and this is a little bit of a controversial one. The very first drawings of the Sten
Mark V actually do not include this grip. And in fact none of the official drawings
of the Mark V include this grip. We know they were produced, you
see them in pictures from combat use, and ... these grips were
in military inventory. But they were in inventory
and they were used for really a pretty short time, because
they caused a couple of problems. So first off, the grip is attached
to the barrel shroud here, which as you may recall
doubles as the barrel locking nut. And ... when you are shooting
a Mark II holding onto this grip, you're not really putting any
torque on that barrel nut. But with this vertical grip you can be. And you can cause problems like that where you can pop the ratchet loose. This can cause wear on the ratchet
teeth that lock the barrel in place. And it's entirely theoretically possible to
... like drop onto the ground wrong on this, have it pop loose, spin half a
revolution, your barrel comes loose. That's a really bad problem
to have, especially in combat. In addition to that, you can
see there's a screw inside there. And that locks the wooden part of the hand grip
onto this wrap that attaches it to the barrel nut. The grips under ... extended
firing would come loose. And if you tried to tighten them up,
you could tighten them a little bit but then you would end up
cracking the grip and breaking it. So ultimately you had a
front grip that was convenient, but also often either broken, or loose,
or causing problems to your barrel. And for all of those reasons combined, these
things got scrapped actually really quite quickly. You'll notice we have Sten Mark V
markings on the magazine well. Now mechanically this is
basically a modified Sten Mark II. So the barrel nut is the
same system as the Mark II. The ratchet here, the spring-loaded catch,
the folding magazine well, that's all the same. We have the push-through safety ...
(there we go) we mentioned this on the Mark II. This was a development that was figured out and
in place by the time the Mark V was being produced, so all the Mark Vs will have
that push-through bolt safety. That prevents the bolt
from bouncing open and firing unintentionally if the
back end of the gun gets jarred. Rear sight is the same.
The bolt, the spring, all the internals are the same
as the earlier patterns of Sten. Now what they have done
to the fire control group is essentially the fire control group is
unmodified, but it's been shifted forward. So if we compare this
to a regular Sten Mark II, it's a little hard to see because of
the camera perspective here, but if I line up the triggers,
everything else lines up in place. (Well, not the screw, because
this is just a friction attachment.) But what they essentially did was
take the fire control group here and shift it forward
so that you have space to put this pistol grip right here
at the back of the receiver. In practical production terms, that means
that your fire control group cover here is going to have to be a different
component because it has to be shorter. So you can see they both pretty
much go out to the magazine well, but that's a shorter distance because
of the space of the pistol grip here. The buttstock is the
same style of attachment. So we have a hook on the bottom of
what is essentially a Lee-Enfield buttstock. Brass butt plate even, butt trap,
sling swivel on the top of the buttstock. The ... Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield made
an experimental batch of 500 of these Mark V Stens. But aside from that,
all of the production was done at the other Royal Ordnance
Factories, Fazakerley and Theale. None of the commercial contractors made
these, and they weren't made overseas by the Australians or the
Canadians or anybody else. Total production was 527,428 Mark V Sten guns. They were by far the best fit and
finished, most comfortable to use, most practical and effective
of the whole Sten gun family. There was also a silenced version of
the Sten V that was produced and used. Ultimately in field service the
Sten Mark V was the official standard submachine gun for the
British military until 1957, when the Sterling was
adopted as the L2A3 I believe. But the Stens actually remained
in service side-by-side with Sterlings until
at least the late 1960s. It's not clear to me exactly
when they were fully phased out, but they were good reliable guns,
and if ... it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's not as desirable as a Sterling, but if it's
what you have it's a perfectly effective gun and substantially nicer than
any of the other Sten variants. So it is a fitting conclusion
to the Sten gun story. I do anticipate having future videos on
some of the oddball versions of the Sten. But I thought it would be good to
finish off a series on the basic patterns, so that you have something to
compare back to when we do go ahead and look at some of the oddballs
and the foreign production Stens. Hopefully you guys enjoyed
this video and the whole series. If you haven't seen the previous
videos on the Marks I, II and III I'll link to them down in the description text,
you should definitely go and check those out. A big thanks to the British Royal Armouries for
giving me access to these guns to film for you. Thanks for watching.
