The ZB37 began in 1930 as a design by none other than classic Czech arms designer Vaclav Holek. The Czechoslovakian military was still using the Schwarzlose heavy MG, and wanted something to replace it. To fill all the roles intended, there would eventually be three different models of the ZB37 – one for infantry, one for fortresses, and one for vehicle mounting.
Note that the factory designation for this gun at Brno began as the ZB50, and iterated to the final version being the ZB50. However, it was identified by the military as the ZB37 (for 1937, the year of adoption).
After a series of redesigns, an early version of the gun is finally adopted in 1935 as the ZB35. A series of improvements leads to the final ZB37 model. About 500 of the early ZB35s were produced, and most of these were used to fill export sale contracts. By the time World War Two begins, the Czechoslovak military has about 5,000 of the guns in its possession.
Interestingly, the gun uses a hybrid recoil and gas operating system, with a tilting bolt. It has two rates of fire that can be chosen, and uses the rear spade grips as the charging handle. It is belt fed, using continuous 100- and 200-round metallic belts and chambered for the 8x57mm Mauser cartridge.
During the war, both German and British forces made substantial use of the ZB37. The Germans purchased ongoing production from Brno, and the British had actually purchased a production license before the war began. For the British, the gun was called the BESA and used in several armored vehicles (still in 8mm Mauser) – with about 57,000 being made during the war. A number of export sales were also made, including Romania, Persia, China, and several others. In 1946 another 3,000 were ordered and manufactured for fortress use in the Czech Republic, serving until the end of Communist control of the country.
Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this example to film for you!
An unusually astute choice for the Elbonian military, it must be said.
As for Britain, clearly there was a good relationship with ZB, and it is to the credit of the British that they did not let any sense of nationalism stop them from buying rights to the best guns available. This would never happen with the French.
BESA did evolved further, it seems that British were unsure about Rate-of-Fire https://www.militaryfactory.com/smallarms/detail.php?smallarms_id=221 claims that
Mk II has selector, 500 or 800 rpm
Mk III no selector, 750 rpm
Mk III* no selector, 450 rpm
I know it is a crazy MG, but I loved it. Unfortunatelly I am old enough to tell that I was sitting in a fortress waiting for western imperialist a watching ond the boarder line throught the sight of this monster. BUT how I liked the training, this monster was amazing. btw It was still in a service many years after WW II.
So when you were supposed to use LOW Rate-of-Fire and when HIGH Rate-of-Fire?
at the command of the commander. like in a tank. btw, some older instalation were funny. you can not watch sight directly. but you paper “monitor” where was a picture of a landscape (trees, water streams…) and big moving crosshair was moving on this picture of “a land”. Literally you was not seeing enemy, but you have to move MG according the picture and orders of your commander. it is hardly to describe for me. for example, comander said 30 degrees left and you move the cross to the left and I was watching on the picture of a a gate in a barber wire. In the theoretical case of a real fire I would be never see who I would had been killing on my own eyes. like a PC game on paper. sorry for my english. I started with EN as and old guy.
i forgot: the commander had a periscope and the paper landscape was excatly the copy of the real landscape. two mode of fire: suppres fire and obtaining fire. if you needed just to make a lead wall and when you needed to convince enemy: do not go there
It’s always fascinating to hear how another military culture conceives of and thinks about things.
I imagine that “suppressive fire” means about the same as it does in American practice, but “obtaining fire” strikes me as something derived from how the Czech language and military practice think about these things. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that maybe a better translation of the actual Czech term might be “objective” or “targeted” fires? Something where there’s a specific target, rather than a desire to deny terrain/movement?
I have long waited to see a BESA on this channel; thanks for this adequate substitute. I have read that the combination of gas and recoil gave this gun excellent accuracy and durability — that the next round chambered and fired while the mechanism was still moving backwards from the gas impulse. The British were unable to convert this gun to .303 rimmed and simply set up a tank corps supply line in 7.92 Mauser, incidentally allowing the use of captured German ammunition. This is how the Sten wound up chambered in 9 x 19, with the capture of enormous stocks of the stuff in North
Africa.
Sorry, I misremembered: The subsequent rounds fired while the barrel/breech was still moving forward under spring tension. This apparently reduced recoil forces on gunner/mounting/internal surfaces by “floating” the assembly between gas impulse and recoil spring during full-auto fire.
I think that the captured 9mm came from the Italians in Italian Somalia and Ethiopia.
Gwyn
The Italians didn’t use the 9mm Para.
They used the 9M38, a very hot variant, for the MAB38, and the 9mm Glisenti.
Both would have been present in very limited quantities in Somalia and Ethiopia, since the MAB38 was not that diffused in 1940, and the weapons in 9mm Glisenti had already been phased out.
This is supposition but I seem to remember that 9 Para and 9 Glisenti have the same external dimensions, and I have read that subsequent British 9 mm smg round (Mk IIZ, I think) was so hot that it was used as a proof round for P35 Hi-Powers. Wikipedia tells me that the Beretta 38 was specifically chambered for 9 x 19, hotness not mentioned. George Orwell (issued a Sten in the Home Guard) in his diaries wrote that the British had captured a million rounds of German 9mm, made for the Italians, in Libya, which makes sense knowing the 8th Army destroyed the Italian 10th Army there in February 1941. Having been given time to tool up for a new caliber, the Sten was made in 9mm. Subsequently the UK bought enormous stocks of 9 x 19 from the US, and also some place in South America (Bolivia?) which ironically had originally come from Germany. So, not to completely contradict you, I respectfully opine that the distinction is not that important. It’s fascinating that logistics will dictate such details in weapon design.
History of Modern Small Arms Ammo, Vol 2 lists the 9mm Ball Cartridge M1 as being procured by the Ordnance Dept. primarily for OSS. It was made by Winchester and Western. Total production during WW2 exceeded 500 million rounds mostly for the British. It was loaded with 6 grs of SR4898 and gave a 116 grain bullet a mv of 1400 fps in the M3 smg. Some were made with steel cases and gilding metal clad steel jackets.
Just to clarify, Libya is not East Africa. In Libya there were more MAB38, and so more rounds for them.
But I higly doubt the British had captured a million rounds of German 9mm, made for the Italians in Libya in february 1941. More probably they mistook the 9M38 round for German 9mm. Germans were generally unwilling to provide the allies with anything, and Italians would have not requested, among all the things, 9mm ammo, since the German ones would have had a different ballistic than the Italian ones, and the MAB38 was considered more a carbine that could fire in full auto than a SMG.
A million rounds were also not that much in the general scale of WWII. To make a comparison, in 1917 Italy ordered 10 million 9mm Glisenti rounds to Western Cartridge Company, NY, and that was only a small fraction of the total production of that round during the war (that practically only served for the Villar Perosa SMG). You don’t select a new general issue firearm for the Army counting on one million captured rounds. Also the first ever STEN had ben assembled, already in 9mm, between December 1940 and January 1941. Only of the Sten Mk I, one of the least produced variants, 100.000 had been made. One million rounds were not enough to provide a single loaded magazine per gun.
I don’t have the citations for it, but I recall reading somewhere that there was a lot more to the British standardization on the 9X19 Parabellum than just “captured ammunition stocks”.
The things that played more into it than anything else was that the STEN was intended from the beginning to be something they could airdrop into Occupied Europe, and they wanted ammunition compatibility across Europe for that. As well, (supposedly…) the ammunition manufacturers had the specifications and equipment already on hand for contracts they’d gotten from the Belgians and others, before the Battle of France. The use of 9mm just slotted nicely and neatly in with all the other things, and the capture of compatible stocks of Italian ammo were just one of the factors, and not all that great of one.
I forget where the hell I ran into that discussion. I want to say it was in a book discussing WWII logistics? Maybe?
Anyway, the Italian captures played a role, but less of one than many would think. The 9mm “thing” stemmed more from a collision of various interests than anything else, including the Royal Navy taking up the Lanchester and ordering stocks of 9mm from (maybe…?) Kynoch or one of the other major ammunition manufacturers. I think that was the one of the factors cited, anyway…
Italian captures have always been a bit of a red herring, one of those “Just So” stories that circulate. Who the hell would predicate their entire procurement process on a one-time capture of fungible material? It’d be one thing if they got their hands on a few million Beretta Model 38 SMGs, and had to produce ammo for them, but it’s entirely another when they get their hands on the ammo stocks alone. Most of that could have been used up in training alone, for the wartime British Army…
I also do not believe in captured ammo BS story.
Erm, actually it was ZB53 (factory name) and TK vz.37 (military name), not some combo of these two. And super-heavy? Really? What would you then call the ZB60 (Besa 15 mm)? Just a machine gun, and very good at that. Here in Poland we call it the Kaloryfer (Radiator) because of those crazy bbl cooling fins
All I can think of, looking at all the machining on this MG, is that it’s a testimony to the Czech workforce that produced it. That receiver is a work of art, from a machinist’s perspective.
Not to mention, hellaciously expensive. I can’t help but think that they’d have been better off going to FN for a license on the Browning .30 caliber, the way the Swedes did.
There’s wisdom in looking in at yourself, your choices and saying “Mmmmm… Do we really need to play to our need to indulge our love of fine machinery?”, especially when it comes to weapons you mean to use in war. As opposed to leave hanging on a wall, somewhere, as decorations.
Czechs have made all the best guns I think, Jan Hus and those wagons or something.
Almost every individual part of that gun is still heavy enough to beat someone to death with!
I’d totally throw any part of that at an Ethiopian, if I was Itallian; and expect it… To do the job.
Elbonian. Live aid or something…
Bet you could swing that barrel round your head and take out, loads… Infact. “You know with, them… Not weighing much.” Baadaadun tish. No… Meh.
Maybe try it, with Niti rings… Behind the other rings, perhaps they’d take heat; transfer it somewhat “In order to expand or whatever… Eon seem to remember you once mentioning heat transfer “Science” should, I stick to throwing it at them, he he. Looks quite efficient, in this case.
You know nitinol, niti; does it not absorb heat in order to expand or whatever it does. 1/4 past 5am here no idea; it might, usually shit does, equal, opposite reaction etc… Nowt? Tut. BB’s eh, quite like those lately…
“(…)Nowt(…)”
What is this?
Nothing; it means.
Play that every Christmas here, does my box in; honestly, could swing for them with that… Trigger group, throw it like a good twenty yards.
If we put a sleeve over this barrel, two… The inner with holes in it… And the outer was airtight, could all those barrel rings not be niti; and thus bend to let cold Co2 in or something via wee ports, then reform and do it again “Something” must be something…
Wee magic metal thing… Guns; must be something.
It’s not bah humbug but the last thing starving africans must need is George Michael telling them about snow the mofo.
Anyhoo, feck knows.
I mean every year, c’mon. Since.
Not one, has ever built a snowman; ever.
“(…)Not one, has ever built a snowman; ever.(…)”
Please provide source to support said claim.
monkey see no evil hear no evil speak no evil; was an emoji.
A breathing barrel… Like wee lungs, so to speak. Something, lots of things even… Stuff. Niti.
It moves! Must be something.
Aye a breathing barrel, be something to that, as that hydrogen barrel projectile thing robots might use will get hot probbly. See robots will use everything anyone has ever said online to make a gun, etc. Aye they will, and we don’t want to be stuck trying to throw bits of this at them. Anyway, thats what I think.
But just like the arcade game, I reckon we could at least give them a unforseen shock as they will “Think” they are well ace… Errrr! Error. You are pretty good.
“(…)hydrogen barrel projectile(…)”
Please be more lucid in description of said solution, preferably providing example of existing prior art.
Er… Farts, repeated around the barrel; wee ones, in a spiral fashion… Fart, ignite, fart, ignite… Cooling… Probably, wee bangs… Bang!! Suck (Hydrogen) I really like flintlock shotguns, would you not prefer to just go out into the fields with one of those.
“(…)Fart, ignite, fart, ignite(…)”
I presume, this is not-standard way of describing REGENERATIVE LIQUID
PROPELLANT GUN then please read and comprehend https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA187173.pdf in order to be able determine what could be achieved using such solution.
“(…)wee lungs(…)”
What is this?
Breathe you know like lungs, you are rubbish robo’bot still… Fancy an online relationship; I love your obscure gun references. “We’d be more in love, than most folk.” I’d totally do the dishes; tell me of the Ak42 in Russian…
The cooing is intergral to the farts. I am that good, see… Better than a robot.
Apart from it is going to be difficult for anyone other than a robot to carry. Meh… Be ways. Oxen. Stuff.