The S.T.EN. Gun

“We will never surrender !”

France fell to the German Blitzkrieg in May 1940 . The retreating British Army ended up being rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk by a flotilla of little ships leaving behind much of their equipment .

A German invasion was expected !

Winston Churchill the British prime minister made his famous “ we will fight them on the beaches – we will never surrender ! “ speech and the Battle of Britain was on !

The UK desperately needed submachineguns . The Government ordered well made expensive Thompsons from the still neutral United States but there was never enough available .

In order to rapidly equip a sufficient fighting force to counter the threat of invasion , the Royal Small Arms Factory , Enfield ( North London ) was commissioned to produce an alternative quickly and in large numbers .

Whats in a name S.T.En.

There Major R. V. Shepherd OBE and Mr. Harold John Turpin came up with the Design which became known as the STEN from Shepherd Turpin Enfield (or England – sources differ )

The Sten shared design features, such as its side-mounted magazine configuration, with the Royal Navy's Lanchester submachine gun . This was based on the Bergman , the first true submachinegun or trench broom which proved its worth in the final German offensive of World War One . The big difference was quality and therefore cost .

It weighed seven pounds empty, nine pounds with a loaded magazine of 28 to 30 rounds. If kept clean and well-maintained it could be an excellent weapon capable of devastating fire with a cyclic rate of 500 rounds per minute emptying the magazine in under 4 seconds .

Ode to a Sten Gun
By Gunner. S.N. Teed

You wicked piece of vicious tin!
Call you a gun? Don’t make me grin. 


You’re just a bloated piece of pipe. 

You couldn’t hit a hunk of tripe.

But when you’re with me in the night,

I’ll tell you pal, you’re just alright!

Each day I wipe you free of dirt.
Your dratted corners tear my shirt.

I cuss at you and call you names. 

You’re much more trouble than my dames.

But boy, do I love to hear you yammer,
when you spit lead in a business manner.

You conceited pile of salvage junk,
I think this prowess talk is bunk. 


Yet, if I want a wall of lead

thrown at some Jerry’s head,

it is to you I raise my hat.

You’re a damn good pal, you silly gat!

Quantity before Quality !

The Sten was often quickly welded together from basic parts , the slag knocked off and the completed gun thrown in a pile with others of its kind.

It took about five man-hours to make one weapon and the Sten cost about two pounds to produce less than eighty in today's money .

By comparison the Thompson was beautifully made but exceptionally expensive costing over fifteen times as much as the home produced Stens

“The Woolworth Special ”

“The Plumbers Delight ”

“The Stench Gun.”

You couldn’t blame Tommy Atkins – Tommy for short , ( the ordinary British soldier ) for calling it names . It looked like it was assembled from bits and pieces found in a hardware store―in fact, most of the Sten’s essential parts in early models such as springs were obtained from hardware manufacturers rather than from gunsmiths.

Early versions also had two annoying habits. Jamming―common when the magazine lips were damaged or the weapon was dirty―or firing uncontrollably in full auto when simply bumped or jostled.

However, the Sten improved with age, particularly after the British invasion panic subsided and weapons were made with more care . It also gained a deadly reputation. Lightweight, compact and even concealable, it was a favorite of British airborne and glider-borne forces.

“A blowback-operated sub-machinegun “

It was a very simple design - a blowback-operated sub-machinegun, firing from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin on the face of the bolt. This means that the bolt remains to the rear when the weapon is cocked .

On pulling the trigger , in automatic mode :-

1. The bolt is released and flies forward under pressure from the spring .

2. bolt picks up a round from the magazine and pushes it into the chamber .

3. The round comes to rest and is struck by the fixed firing pin .

4. Primer explodes detonating propellant , bullet exits barrel .

5. The recoil causes the bolt to fly back bouncing against the spring .

6. Bolt flies forward under pressure from the spring .

The cyclic sequence continues from 2.

“spray and prey “

Production Stens had a simple selector pin which interrupted this sequence holding the bolt rearwards until the trigger is released and pressed again to allow single shots to be fired more easily . Many “ resistance or home made “ guns did not have this feature making them full auto only and hence even easier to make .

The use of the open bolt assisted cooling of the weapon but together with its use of very common 9mm Luger pistol ammunition limited its effective range to about 100 yards . Definitely not a “one shot one kill “ weapon to take single aimed shots more of a “spray and prey “ bullet hose .

“ Four Million Made ! “

The first prototypes had wooden “furniture” but after production started, the Mk. 1* emerged, this being the first simplification, with the foregrip, the wooden furniture and the flash hider being deleted to ease production . About 300,000 Mk 1 and Mk 1* units were made , primarily for airfield security and defensive duties .

The next most common version , the Mk. 2 was initially produced to equip the airborne units . They were quickly made available to the growing resistance movements that were forming in Europe , with over 2.6 million being made during the war . The barrel was removable and projected several inches out of the barrel sleeve. The magazine housing on the Mk, 2 could be swung 90 degrees and the butt removed to help its storage in a container , being hidden when not in use or being worn underneath a parachute harness.

The Mk. 3 was a even simpler version and had a production run of over 876,000 weapons . It was made of pressed steel had a non removable barrel and a fixed magazine housing

The Mk. 5 , produced from 1944 when the tide of the war had turned was easily the best of the series with an overall high quality of manufacture and finish . Previous versions of the Sten had been 'chemically stained' using cyanide which has health and safety implications . For the Mk. 5, a new process was invented that saw the components cleaned to bare metal, dipped in phosphate to form a deep gray rustproof finish and then painted with a hard, deep sating black paint. It is this finish that is still in use today for most military firearms .

'Silent Stens ! '

A silenced version of the Mk, 2, the Mk. 2(S) was produced for clandestine operations and had a shortened barrel enclosed in an integral silencer, which was extremely effective, reducing the ambient noise to very low levels and had a ported barrel to reduce velocity to just below the speed of sound to eliminate the crack caused by the bullet breaking the sound barrier . They had a leather sleeve to protect the shooters hand from burns and were instructed to be used for single shots or short bursts as they heated up damagingly very quickly otherwise .

“DIY Stens “

While tens of thousands of Stens were airdropped into Nazi-occupied Europe by the Allies, underground movements actually set up secret workshops to manufacture their own copies of the weapon. Danish, French and Norwegian partisans built hundreds of domestic duplicates, while the Polish engineered their own variants right under the Nazis noses.

“Hitler's Sten Gun”

It wasn't just underground armies that built copies of the Sten. The Nazis were so impressed with the weapon, they built their own. They produced 28,000 Mk. IIs for infiltration and espionage purposes . By the wars end, armaments factories throughout the shrinking Third Reich turned out modified copies of the dirt-cheap SMG for the Volkssturm . This organisation was the German “home guard” which desperatly fought the vengeful invading Red Army . The MP 3008 was virtually identical to the Mk II, save for a vertical magazine configuration.

 

“The battle of the Caen Canal (Pegasus) Bridge”

On the night of 5 June 1944, a force of 181 men, led by Major John Howard were towed into the sky in six Horsa Gliders . Their mission was to capture two adjacent bridges over the Orne River to firstly prevent German reinforcements from reaching the allied forces landing on the D-Day beaches and secondly to secure a crossing for the planned Allied advance .

Five of the flimsy gliders landed as close as 50 yards from their objectives just after midnight which was later described as the "most outstanding flying achievements of the war" . The mainly Sten gun armed attackers poured out of their battered gliders completely surprising the 50 second rate German defenders, and took the bridges within 10 minutes. They lost two men in the process one drowning in a nearby pond under the heavy weight of his equipment and one becoming the first member of the invading Allied armies to die as a result of enemy fire on D-Day . 

 

Throughout the night and the early morning they successfully and heroically defended the bridge against tank, gun boat and infantry counter-attacks mounted by thousands of battle hardened veterans of the 21st Panzer and the the 125^th Panzergrenadier Division .

They were finally reinforced after the landings by elements of the Sten armed 7^th parachute battalion . These included the actor Richard Todd who would twenty years later, play Major Howard in the famous film about D-Day - “ The Longest Day”. Eventually they linked up with the beach landing forces with the arrival of commandos equipped with Stens and Thompsons .

The Caen Canal bridge was later renamed “Pegasus Bridge” after the emblem of the British airborne forces who had fought so bravely and determinedly to captured it and prevent its destruction by the Germans .

“ Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich “

The Sten gun’s habit of jamming led to one of the messiest covert operations of the war. Czech agents trained and supported by the British Special Operations Executive carried Stens as their weapons during Operation Anthropoid, the mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.

The “Butcher of Prague” was ambushed whilst traveling in an open-top Mercedes. A Czech SOE agent leveled his Sten gun at the Nazi at point-blank range and pulled the trigger . The gun jammed without firing ! Thankfully the agent's counterpart then tossed a grenade into the vehicle, horribly wounding Heydrich who died a few days later .