The Mk II was one of the most prevalent versions and included such niceties as a rotating magazine well that could be turned to occlude the ejection port for storage in dirty environments. The different Marks of the Sten gun were generally driven by their relative austerity. Five million copies were made at nine different production facilities. How straight the gun shot was a function of how conscientious the welder was on the day the gun was built. Sights were fixed and steel, both front and rear.
An estimated 5,000,000 Sten guns were produced before the end of World War II. The Sten was an open-bolt design that fired via advanced primer ignition at a sedate cyclic rate of around 500 rpm. All Sten guns were formed as cheaply as possible from stamped steel components and fed from the left via a double column, single feed 32-round magazine. The Sten was ultimately produced in six different Marks encompassing seven different major variants. In its simplest form the Sten gun had a mere 59 parts and cost $10 to build ($160 today, or about one seventh the cost of a wartime Thompson). The word Sten was a portmanteau combining the last names of the gun’s designers, Major Reginald Shepherd and Harold Turpin, along with EN for the Enfield factory where it was designed. The solution to this existential crisis was the Sten gun. Simple to build, the Sten gun could arm British troops at a fraction of the cost of a Thompson SMG. While the British Army arrived in England relatively intact, they lost most of their weapons in France. It was the timely evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the continent that helped dissuade Hitler from launching Operation Sea Lion, his proposed invasion of the British Isles. Over nine short days and against all odds, Royal Navy vessels supplemented by countless smaller civilian craft removed some 338,226 Allied soldiers to safety in Great Britain. Operation Dynamo, the miraculous rescue of Allied forces from Dunkirk in 1940, was the most successful military evacuation in human history.
0 kommentar(er)
