Sten Gun Use

[Peter Laidler]

I got my info by asking people that were there. They came to Italy from the supply dumps in N Africa. I should imagine that they were widely used in the same way that Bedford trucks were widely used - because there were just sooooooooooo many of them! 4 million between December 1940 and August 1945. I remember that we were still using wartime Bedfords until the early 70's

[browningautorifle]

Most of mine come from soldiers I knew personally. I've been asking these questions since I was very young. Even as a kid I knew which weapon was which so their stories meant something to me.

[55recce]

A colleague at work had a father who served as a medic with the Canadians in Italy. He tells a story of them running out of grenades during house to house fighting in Ortona. The solution was to throw a loaded and cocked sten in through the window. The impact with the floor would set it off spraying a full mag of ammo around the room

[Claven2]

This is one of those "mythbusters" or "urban legands" stories. I can assure you that a WW2 era Sten would NOT spontaneously dump the mag by being tossed into a room unless the soldier first disassembled the trigger mechanism and completely removed the sear, meaning letting the cocking handle out of the safety notch and allowing hte bolt to fly forward would dump the mag. Even if you did that, the thrower would be as likely to get shot as anyone in a room during the 3.84 seconds it takes to dump a Sten mag.

The average Sten fires at 500 rounds per minute, hance 8.3 rounds per second, 32 round mag = 3.84 seconds. Just cocking and throwing the gun would take one or two seconds of that.

[Thunderbox]

It seems Stens were not commonly available to Allied troops serving in Sicily/Italy until about mid-1944, although the reason is not completely clear. If you do a google search it seems that the internet has become infected with some story along the lines that "the Sten was not issued because of the difficulty of supplying 9mm ammo alongside existing.45ACP for the Thompsons". This seems to be a typically fallacious story, for a number of reasons:

1. Stens had already been used in North Africa by British airborne troops; hence the 1st & 8th Army supply systems would have already contained 9mm;

2. As there were already many small-arms ammo types being used by Allied forces, 9mm hardly created an extra problem; the British-equipped troops (including Polish, French, Italian, Greek and other non-Commonwealth contingents) were already using a .45ACP and .38 mix;

3. Small-arms ammo for pistols and SMGs is a tiny fraction of an army's logistic chain - the overwhelming part being artillery ammunition, bulk fuel and rations.

Stens do appear with allied troops in Italy in the later stages of the campaign, and they were also dropped in large numbers to Italian partisans from early 1944 onwards. I expect that the relative scarcity early on was more to do with the fact that, during the 1943 re-equipping of Commonwealth armies in UK and North Africa (after the defeat of the Afrika Korps), it appears that Thompsons were replaced in UK by Stens, and that the surplus Thompsons were then concentrated in North Africa (1st and 8th Armies) and the Far East (14th Army). A similar thing seems to have happened with N04/No1 rifles, and other types of equipments - e.g. that there was just a process of arms rationalisation in preparation for the final phase of the war.

[stencollector]

I regularly sell deactivated stens at some of the local gun shows, and get the sten/hand grenade story all the time. I usually stop the guys telling the story in the first sentence and give them the list of reasons why it would not work. Claven has mentioned the biggest reason, and that is that while a sten may go off once if it did happen to land on it's butt, but on firing it would cock itself fully and that would be the end of it. And even if it were mechanically possible for it to empty it's mag, where does the rotational force come from that is going to make a sten spin round and round?

The most likely scenario of such an attempt is that one of your party would now be unarmed, while an opposing soldier would now have a spare. Besides, one would expect that the basic military training a soldier would have received generally ingrained upon him the importance of protecting his weapon.

I have also heard the same story modernized to include the C1 (sterling) SMG.

[Combover]

I just think that people don't like the Sten and don't want to have a reputation as even a decent weapon. THe worst I heard was a re-enactor who told me that a sten would fall apart if fired from the shoulder! When I went through the reasons why it would not be mechanically possible he just laughed and told another in the party that 'theres someone who doesn't know how to fire his sten guns'.

Ridiculous.

My argument for the Sten being used was that if the US army was willing to transport spare parts, magazines etc for the Johnson rifle, 9mm ammo would be no problem to them.

I have heard that the New Zealand troops had their Stens taken off them when they set off for Sicily, having been given Thompsons as a substitute. How wide spread this practice was, I've no idea.

[Beerhunter]

One of the problems is that there are less and less of us around who have actually used Stens and we often get shouted down by those whose only knowledge is received wisdom.

[Thunderbox]

I have heard that the New Zealand troops had their Stens taken off them when they set off for Sicily, having been given Thompsons as a substitute. How wide spread this practice was, I've no idea.

That would be in line with accounts I've read, and the evidence that the 1st and 8th armies were awash with Thompsons at this stage. I'm actively researching the huge re-equipment and reorganisation programme that occurred between the surrender of the Afrika Korps on 13th May 1943 and the invasion of Sicily on 9th July 1943. The key data I'd like to find out is the information about the first issue of No4 rifles to the 8th Army - these rifles must have been distributed in Tunis during this time frame, as they first appear in large numbers during the Sicily invasion. Unfortunately, information is thin, and personal anecdotes are not always reliable.

[Peter Laidler]

Might I make a suggestion chaps............ For those who regularly encounter these buffoons (and sorry to say it, but the re-enactors seem to be the worst offenders.....) who STILL try to pass on this sheer bull manure about the Sten gun, then please feel free to copy the few pages from the Sten Gun book by that what's 'is name bloke. Just pages 303 to 310 should suffice.

As for falling apart, my son who was a little shortarsed skinny 9 year old at the time fired many thousands of rounds through a Mk2 Sten for a high speed video shoot (that we slowed down for students) and we're still using it today! We also spent an afternoon testing and broke about 13 Stens/butts, trying to get them to fire a round after being dropped from greater and greater heights with the cocking handle in the safety slot or in the forward SAFE (pushed through) position. We broke many but couldn't fire ONE.

Some clown even told me (a former paratrooper too.....) that the inertia of the static line snapping would cock and fire the gun that was tucked into the upright risers of the harness, just as you rolled backwards slightly to catch your breath.................. Have you ever heard such pure horse manure?

Ask the man who told you about the gun being used as a 'grenade/scattergun' to phone me up 55-recce and I'll give him a 4th year physics lesson as he must have been asleep in his class the first time around.

I hear what you're saying about the demographics of Sten users Beery, but MK5's were still in service in the early days of my service and STILL in service in 1968 (Yes, the RAF still had Mk2's in Malaya too) and the very LAST Sten guns didn't leave UK MoD service until 1972 (and the last Navy Lanchesters in 1978)