So my lovely wife bought me a copy of your book; "The Sten Machine Carbine" and while I enjoyed it a lot and am now thinking I need a L50A1 to go with my L59A1, a few questions arise that I have had for a quite some time:

Most significant is the production quantity. Something "seems" not right about the official figures of over 4,300,000 made. I know the official contact /serial number ranges indicate this, but the use history and photos do not as evidenced by the following:

1) There are supposed to be 300,000 MK I and MK I *. They are simply not shown anywhere in any pictures of troops from 1944 and 1945. MK I* pictures simply do not exist, except for museum shots, yet 100,000 were supposed to be made.

If they made so many starting in 1941, why was it not a standard item in the list of changes until 1943? if they made 300,000, and they had virtually no issue history, why would they have made them obsolete in 1947? Now compare that to the 79,000 known made Lancaster's (from "The Guns of Dagenham"), of which a lot of pictures exist and they have a service history to the 1970s.Seems to me the production quantity was very small of that variant.

2) The supposed 2.6 million (plus) MK II versions: how is they made that many were they short on these guns in November of 1952? It boggles the imagination.

The US made 1 million M3/M3A1 MP and there was no shortage of them even when they were put out to pasture in 1994, the standard unit armorers solution to any major issue was to torch the old one an get a new one (or so I have been told by a few folks in the us system from 1984 to 1994). Yet they were not only used in WWII (very late, but Korea, Vietnam and were the standard A army MP from 1946 to 1960. If the UK had 2.5 times the number they should have still had massive numbers of guns available at the end of the cold war.

3) the issue rate: So the UK had around 1.3 million SMLE MKIII rifles, and build/recovered around 235,000 in WWII, with around 2 million No 4 made and another 1.5 million coming in from North America that indicates a total first line quantity of 5 million SMLE rifles. Stens should have been issued on the order of 4 to 1 at most, so 4 million Stens would have been sufficed for around 17.2 million rifles, or said another way , they really only needed around 1~1.25 million submachine guns. Yet there is another 1.3 million MK III/MK V Stens made on top of the 2.6 million MK II and 300,000 MK I (which appear nowhere as previously stated)

lets look at german production ratios: 13 million rifles, 1.075 million MP38/40 made, 100,000 MP 28/EMP/MP34/MP38/42 plus 425,000 MP 44 or a ratio of 8.66 rifles to MP

The US: 14 million rifles made/in stores (4 million M1icon, 2.0 million M1903/03/, 1,900,000 M1917/6 million M1 carbine) around 2.9 million M1928/M1/M3 made (of which 200,000 ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic) or a ratio of 4.8

4) The post war disposition: So if the UK had had 4 million left over in 1945, one would expect the distribution of these to foreign armies, especially NATO in the 1949 to 1960 time frame to be more large spread, but there seems to be a distinct lack of same. Yes there was the 75,000 Interarms exchange with Finlandicon in the late 1950s, yes a lot were sent to India I am sure, but the extent to which the Stens issue history ends in 1963 does not make sense if there were 4.3 million of them, compare that the M1, of which a total of 6 million were made and its wide NATO/CENTO/SEATO issue up until the 1970s. If there were so many made, where did they end up? India/Pakistan is the obvious answer, but the records do not seem to support several million being sent out to India

In particular the Britishicon sense of never throwing anything useful away. Of course there were the dumping at sea of obsolete ordnance in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but there is not discussion of this with Stens, unlike the P14 rifles.



In any case I am wondering your thoughts on this. It was one aspect of the Sten story I still wonder about. I was hoping I would read more about in your most excellent book. perhaps I read it in my first read, there was so much to read that I might have missed it. If they really were made, what happened to all of them?
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