He apparently got the RoF wrong on the early Type 100 SMG.
That’s the thing that usually comes to mind for me, first.
Huh…? I thought they were used in WW2. Mechanically and construction wise, the 30 rounders and the 40 rounders are almost identical, what differs is that the 30 round ones have a buffer on the inside, preventing you from loading the last 10 rounds, to preserve spring tension.
All you need to turn a 40 round mag into a 30 round mag and vice versa is to add or remove this easily removeable internal buffer.
At least, as far as I understand it, these buffers existed during WW2. It’s just that after WW2 the 30-round mags saw continued wide production, which muddies the waters quite a bit.
Last time I looked into that, I found that the buffer is a post-war thing, I got no sources on me at this time though and Im basically just talking from memory here, so you could be right.
It’s got all of the worst factors imagienable for accurately determining wether 30 rounders existed during WW2 or not.
I just remembered that I recently did an hours research in the past got me a firm “maybe…? Possibly…?”.
Anyway, this isn’t the point of the discussion, my bad. All this is to say… Gun Jesus is not the final authroity of firearms history. He summerizes from available material to him, often provided by the people he visited when making that video, and those materials can at times be incorrect.
Most people check his videos to see him take apart the gun and assemble it again. He is probably one of the best in this regard based on how many guns he had seen and took apart in his life.
However he never really focused on historical details like production numbers, deployment history etc. He is a surprisingly bad source in that.
“Sacre bleu, the factory is ruined, all the workers are hungry, the Germans stole all the pencils, enginner Jan-Jaques is on the front with Free French, let’s try to make at least 1 rifle this month and 2 next month”
Then, after the war is over “Ok now everyone is here and safe, now we can make as many as we want”.
In any case, evidently no one knows how many (if any) were made during WW2.
wait the lee is a semi auto and not a bolt action crazy me i thought it was the other way, if the garand moves to br4 it has to be as good not worse than the g43 or zh29
The weapon was used in Indochina, not World War II according to Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons (see 16:49 in the video). The Indochina conflict began in December of 1946 as a result of other conflict and tension in the reason, which is the more likely reason for an urgent manufacturing of 6200 rifles.
Edit: I missed the discussion above regarding Gun Jesus specifically, I should have done so and included that in my synopsis. Sorry about that. I’ll repeat what others have said and take his info with a grain of salt.
Thanks for sharing, but we already discussed the issues with the claim so I will only give a quick recap.
The book only claims that no rifle was made before the end of the war in Europe, that was in May 1945.
The war still went on for almost 4 months.
But then again, its easier to explain that a rifle was not made on time than explain that a perfectly good gun in times of war was not adopted due to political pressure.
The Mas-36 was already back in production and the Mas-44 is not drastically different enough that it would need months to start production so the idea that it was not made before May 1945 most likely originates from the fact that it did not see combat in WW2 which is true, but there were actually other reasons it was not deployed.
Production of the MAS-44 rifle until September 1945
By the end of World War II, approximately 2,000 units had been produced.
The production breakdown was as follows:
January - March 1945: Preparation of production facilities, assembly of the first prototypes and pre-production samples.
April - August 1945: Start of serial production. The rate was approximately 400-500 units per month.
Result: By the official end of the war (September 1945), the factory had assembled just over 2,000 rifles out of a total order of 6,200.
