Suppressed OSS M3 Grease Gun and Bushmaster Booby Trap Trigger

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and today I have the chance to take a look at a really cool piece of world war ii history this is an american m3 submachine gun with an OSS manufactured silencer on or suppressor these were it was actually originally the maxim silencer company that suggested to the US government that perhaps they'd like to suppress the m3 submachine gun as it came into production although Maxim didn't end up making these suppressors the manufacturing was done by high standard and they were prototyped in the fall of 1943 put some development into it these these are the suppressors were basically the exact same way as high standards pistol suppressors from the same era they don't use baffles they actually use wire mesh so we'll pull this apart in just a moment however so prototyping was done by the fall of 1943 production started early in 44 the first units were actually being shipped in August of 1944 and it's a bit unclear exactly how often or how many of these were used in the field but apparently they were really quite popular and being a product for the OSS they were often used for clandestine operations in fact there's a really cool story about this specific one which is why it is still here it was actually dropped to a European resistance fighter he got this and he got a welrod and he got orders and this was right at the end of World War two he got orders to cross the border into Germany and assassinate a particular german politician and was all set to do this got his guns and then had his orders revoked this was right at the end of the war and well nobody ever asked for the guns back so they stayed in his possession and now belong to a private collector let me take a look at this in addition to the suppressor we also have a little OSS booby-trap device to take a look at this is called a Bushmaster and this was a way to set up a wire booby trap that would fire an m3 submachine gun let's take a closer look at both that and how this suppressor actually works so part of the reason that these were apparently quite popular is that the extra weight on the end did even more to help reduce the felt recoil of what was already a very controllable submachine gun now because the m3 has a detachable barrel here's the standard barrel the silencer was made as simply an optional accessory when high standard shipped these or sold them and shipped them they were shipped as a just the suppressor with its end cap and guide rod and handle you had to actually get the m3 submachine gun elsewhere so there is our suppressor barrel and we can take this end and unscrew it it's a two part thing here this end is very much like a small pistol suppressor it's hollow all the way down 45 caliber in diameter and uses mesh screens screens like these were used instead of apples the whole suppressor tube here is just filled with these little screens and what they do is they provide air space but with a lot of interference so gas pressure will build up in that suppressor tube and then release much more slowly than if it were just a hollow tube thus reducing the sound when it comes out the end now you can imagine the potential problems of trying to stack this quantity of little thin mesh screens into the suppressor to clean it and then reassemble it and for that reason a guide rod was provided with a suppressor so that you can keep the whole thing indexed together like that now the more substantial portion of the unit is the rear end and this has the actual barrel in it and so we have a threaded front cap here that comes on there and then we can pull the sleeve off of this and we have a heavily perforated barrel that is rifled inside though and this role of wire mesh this is used in place of baffles pretty interesting this is not how suppressors are typically made anymore today see rightfully in there now what they're these holes would serve two purposes typically one of them is to vent gas to reduce the speed of the bullet below the sound barrier so the bullet doesn't create a supersonic crack when it travels downrange however 45 ACP is a subsonic cartridge in all standard forms so it wasn't necessary to reduce the velocity however the other purpose of these holes is to vent gas into this mesh screen and that's done so that the gas fills up this larger volume before it exits out the bore thus reducing the noise it makes is the same length as a standard m3 or m3a1 barrel and totally interchangeable between the two models of gun the regular or the a1 variant so there is the complete m3 suppressed barrel assembly now as for how quiet these really are that's a question that kind of has has a couple of different answers the one actual number I found was 89 decibels however that's from an old older document and there's no description of how it was measured and you can get widely varying results on noise level depending on how far away noise is measured how the duration of the noise that is measured it's a difficult it's a very difficult subject so I don't want to take 89 decibels specifically as as a definite number what's more important on a practical matter is what this did is absolutely reduce the sound of the shot below the the noise level of the gun actually cycling so with an m3 you you have the bolt cycling back and forth like that and that makes quite a lot of noise as you can hear just dry cycling it that rubber worth noise was greater than what you got from the gunshot and so at that point the suppressor is done as good of a job as it possibly can there's not much point to making the bullet even quieter if you don't have a way to make the gun itself quieter at any rate in order to reassemble this and I go ahead and put put that back on under its sleeve screw the front cap on and we can use this guide rod to keep all of those little metal mesh screens in place tighten that down and then these were issued with a protective end cap on that end and then there's a threaded end on the guide rod here which would go to an aluminum handle which unfortunately is missing on this particular one but that is the complete assembly now this is a really cool piece of little OSS evil trickery this is called a Bushmaster device and this is designed to remotely fire a gun so you can set up a gun as part of a booby trap and that hook rests around the trigger and this machined surface clamps on to the trigger guard of an m3 so trigger this clamps on so it clamps onto the gun like the Hat we have this tube at just a slightly oblique angle to the gun and the hook at the end here securely holds on to the trigger and then we have two types of threading on this end we have a large OSS American pattern thread and we have a smaller British SOE pattern thread so both organizations made their own devices and this particular one was designed to be interchangeable the idea here is that you could actually have a variety of trigger mechanisms so the OSS and SOE were really quite clever and methodical and what they built and put a lot of thought into it well the devices are all very simple which is part of what makes them valuable they had modularity was was one of the prime considerations so you've had action stuff like this so this is designed to fire a gun you could also have things like tripmines or various types of explosives and then go along with those you had a whole bunch of modular triggering mechanisms this is a pull type trigger meaning that when you pull on this pin it's going to release a spring and fire a striker you would also have delay types you had push types so you had some where when you put weight on the device it would fire a striker but they were all or virtually all used the same thread pitch and diameter so you could attach for example a delay time pencil which was a chemically delayed fuse you could screw that on to this firing mechanism or you could screw this pull type trigger on to this firing mechanism or you could have used this with a variety of explosives it was a very clever in modular catalog so the way this worked there is there a pair of springs in here there is basically there's one heavy spring with a striker that's held by a little tap and a smaller spring so it takes a little bit of pressure pulling on this ring which releases the first spring and then the second firing spring is a little complicated to describe this pin is just the safety you can see sort of down in there it prevents the striker from actually going all the way forward should this get pulled so when you are assembling your booby trap device you would put it all together this gets threaded on to here this is an American one so it fits the larger american thread and then you'd set up your booby trap with the trip wire you tie the trip wire to that then the last thing you did before you left the scene would be to pull the safety pin out and that leaves the whole trap live and as soon as something pulls on this the striker shoots forward what happens is because there's a large spring in there it's going to keep pressure on this trigger device so it's not just going to fire one shot the mainspring in here is going to hold pressure down on this device and keep the trigger depress and it will empty the entire magazine so you want to make sure you have the gun well well secured to a tree or or whatever other position you're putting it in and then there you go 1 m3 grease gun booby travel it's really cool not just to see one of what is really a quite rare modification to the m3 but in fact one that has very specific provenance from World War two so if you're interested in the mechanics of the gun itself I have a previous video I did on the m3 and the m3a1 submachine guns but definitely enjoy the opportunity here to take a look at the suppressor and the booby trap device it's always cool seeing OSS gear from World War two so if you enjoy seeing this sort of thing online please do consider checking out my patreon page it is contributions from folks there that make it possible for me to find guns like this and bring them to you guys thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 481,850

Rating: 4.9677224 out of 5

Keywords: m3, grease gun, m3a1, oss, silenced, suppressed, suppressor, silencer, silenced grease gun, vietnam, soe, covert ops, cia, bell labs silencer, submachine gun, silent submachine gun, spy gun, m3 grease gun, oss m3, cia gun, oss gun, occupied Europe, resistance, booby trap, trigger mechanism, time pencil, tripwire, resistance fighter, suppressor design, clandestine use, baffles, wipes, wire mesh, forgotten weapons, mccollum, kasarda, history, development, inrange, inrangetv, forgottenweapons

Id: -hNLrDbw8nc

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/BrianPurkiss]

That booby trap device was awesome. So simple.

[u/Polder]

How simple and cheap, in keeping with the M3 itself. Just some rolled up wire cloth and some 'washers' punched out of some wire screen. I'm guessing it would be pretty noisy but wouldn't exactly sound like a gun, especially if you could keep the brass from falling on a hard surface.

So Ian is in France?