Furrer submachine guns
Colonel Adolf Furrer was a Swiss military officer and engineer who worked as the chief designer for Switzerland’s largest state-owned arms manufacturer, Waffenfabrik Bern. Furrer designed his first submachine gun in 1919. It was a stocked automatic carbine that used a side-mounted toggle-lock mechanism. Although it was met with no success, it marked the beginning of a recurring feature of Furrer’s designs - the unconventional use of the toggle-lock, a system which Furrer was insistent upon.
In the inter-war years, Furrer designed a toggle-lock 7.5×55mm machine gun, similar to his submachine gun, which was accepted into Swiss Army service in 1925. It fed from the right side and ejected out the left. It was not until 1939 that he would work on a new submachine gun. He developed a prototype of a pistol-calibre machine gun that used a left-facing Luger toggle lock, designed to be used as a fixed weapon for aircraft. In 1940 he abandoned this prototype to develop a new twin-barreled aircraft machine gun that seemed to be inspired by the Italian Villar Perosa. Named the Fliegerbeobachter-Doppelpistole, it used two separate firing mechanism, each employed downward-facing toggle locks located on the underside of the weapon. Two 40-round magazines were inserted into the top of the receiver. Unlike the Villar Perosa, the Doppelpistole could not fire both barrels at once, as the firing mechanisms were linked to a single trigger. Thus, the firer used a selector switch to determine which barrel they wanted to fire from.
The Doppelpistole received little interest from the Swiss Air Force, who were upgrading to modern planes that eliminated the role of the observation gunner. The Army, on the other hand, accepted small quantities of Doppelpistoles into service with wooden stock attachments.
The 1939 prototype.
The Flieger-Doppelpistole.
When the war in Europe broke out in 1939, Switzerland, as it had done in 1914, remained neutral. However, it quickly became obvious that Germany might not respect that neutrality and thus steps were taken to bolster the Army in the event of an invasion. The Kriegs Technische Abteilung (War Technology Department) sent out an ordnance survey in May 1940 to review the Army’s equipment; they found that they had less than 500 submachine guns in issue. Steps were immediately taken to remedy the problem. The Army sent out a commission to both W+F Bern and SIG to develop a new submachine gun for military trials.
Furrer was placed in charge of designing W+F Bern’s entrant. He conceived a recoil-operated, 9×19mm weapon that utilized a modified toggle-lock mechanism. The toggle joint consisted of two arms and a rear link, all on pivots. The first arm was attached to the bolt, and the second arm acted as a bridge between the first arm and the rotating link. The link attached to the body of the gun. Both of the toggle joint arms would lie straight in their default position. When the gun was fired, the blowback pressure would force the bolt backward, pushing the arms back and causing the link to pivot. The bolt would drag the barrel back about a quarter of an inch, and then release it. The link would then hit a stop and would not be able to rotate backward any further, causing the arms to swing into a curved fold and drag the bolt back with them until the bolt reached the return spring and could not recoil any further. At this point the empty casing would be ejected and a new cartridge chambered. The force of the return spring would then force the bolt forward, with the link pushing the arms back into their straight position to accelerate the bolt’s return. The bolt would push the new cartridge into the chamber and lock the barrel back into place, then the firing pin would strike the primer and the process would repeat.
Furrer was so sure of the superiority of his design that he launched a gloating marketing campaign that ridiculed SIG’s rival prototype, designed by Josef Gaetzi and Gotthard End. When he pitched his weapon to the Army in December 1940, they ordered a test batch of 100 prototypes; by comparison, they ordered half that number for SIG’s prototype. This marked the beginning of obvious favoritism towards Furrer’s entrant, due to his affiliation with the Swiss Army and the government ownership of the factory he worked at.
Trials were hastily arranged in late 1940 and early 1941, and it was decided from the outset which weapon would be adopted. There were no comparative tests between Furrer and SIG’s designs and the SIG gun was not given a fair hearing. Without a domestic buyer, it languished in the face of Switzerland’s neutrality laws, which prevented it from being sold abroad. Ultimately only 200 SIG prototypes were ever made. Furrer’s gun was adopted as the Leichtes Maschinengewehr Pistole 41, or Lmg-Pist 41, but is commonly referred to as simply the MP41.
The Furrer MP41.
The SIG MP41.
In July 1941, the Army ordered the first production batch of MP41s, which did not reach troops until February 1942. Production was much slower than anticipated due to the incredibly complex nature of the weapon and the impossibly high standard it was built to. It was anything but cheap and efficient, and by the beginning of 1943, only 2,000 MP41s had been delivered. Production was so slow and costly that in November 1942, the KTA decided to turn to Finland for a solution. Tikkakoski Arsenal provided the Swiss Army with 5,000 Suomi submachine guns, and later in February 1943, Finland granted Switzerland production rights to the weapon. It was hastily manufactured by Hispano-Suiza as the MP43/44, and it served in the Swiss Army as a stand-in for the thousands of undelivered Furrer MP41s.
In the Autumn of 1943, the decision was finally made to simplify the MP41 for cheaper and quicker production. The new version, which featured bakelite furniture, a folding foregrip, and a new cocking handle, was designated the MP41/44. It cut back on the luxuries of the standard MP41, such as the tangent sights and the bayonet fittings, which were now deemed unnecessary. However, the changes to the design did little to satisfy the Army, and production remained slow - a problem inherent with the sheer amount of internal components required. In addition, the bakelite furniture was of reportedly poor quality.
The Hispano-Suiza MP43/44.
The Furrer MP41/44.
When World War II ended in September 1945, the Swiss Army had barely over 9,000 MP41s in their inventory, despite a 4-year production run. The whole debacle was very embarrassing for them and the decision to adopt the Furrer MP41 remains a textbook example of a military ordnance disaster. Had Switzerland actually been invaded during the war, there is no chance that the MP41 could have even come close to the sheer volume in which the German MP40 was being produced at, and the Swiss troops would have been left sorely under-prepared.
After the war, W+F Bern’s reputation in Switzerland was irreversibly damaged and the Army turned to SIG to provide their small arms. The MP41 remained in limited service until 1959, and most of the guns were scrapped in 1970. Only a few hundred survived unscathed and are now very rare pieces.
