Beretta BM59 Rifle

Origins

Under the Marshall Plan and the NATO standardization that followed, Pietro Beretta of Gardone Val Trompia received tooling from Winchester and built the M1 Garand for the Italian Army and for Denmark and Indonesia from 1952. When NATO adopted the 7.62x51mm cartridge, Italy faced the same choice as everyone else — buy the FN FAL, buy the M14 Rifle, or make something of its own — and Beretta's engineers, led by Domenico Salza, took the third road, converting the Garand with such thoroughness that the result was a new rifle. Adopted in 1959 as the BM59, it went into production on the Garand line and largely from Garand parts.

Design & Construction

The BM59 keeps the Garand's long-stroke gas piston and rotating bolt but shortens the barrel to 19.3 inches and modifies the receiver to accept a detachable twenty-round magazine that can also be charged with stripper clips through the open action. A selector on the left of the receiver gives semi- and full-automatic fire at about 750 rounds per minute; a gas cutoff and a tri-compensator muzzle device — flash hider, compensator and grenade launcher in one — with a flip-up grenade sight complete the conversion. The standard Ital rifle has a wooden stock and bipod; the Ital TA, made for the Alpini, has a pistol grip, folding stock and a winter trigger for gloved hands; the Para has a shorter barrel and folding stock for airborne troops, and the Mark IV a heavy barrel for the squad automatic role. At 9.4 pounds it is a little lighter than an M14.

Combat Use

Italy carried the BM59 through the Cold War as the rifle of its NATO forces, its Alpini mountain troops and its Carabinieri, and it saw action with the Italian contingent in Lebanon in 1982-84. Its overseas career was longer. Indonesia built it under license at Pindad as the SP-1 and used it in the Konfrontasi and East Timor; Argentina built and fielded it, and BM59s were carried by Argentine troops in the Falklands in 1982; Morocco and Nigeria bought it, and Nigerian BM59s fought the Biafran War. Full-automatic fire from a rifle this light was, as with the M14, more effective on paper than in the hands.

Legacy

The BM59 was replaced in Italian service by the 5.56mm Beretta AR70/90 from 1990 and withdrawn through that decade. Semi-automatic versions were sold in the United States in small numbers in the 1960s and 1980s, and rifles assembled from Italian parts kits on new receivers by Springfield Armory, Inc. and others have kept the type alive among collectors, for whom the BM59 is the Garand's most interesting relative and one of the harder ones to find.