Sterling Submachine Gun

Origins

The Sterling Armaments Company of Dagenham, Essex, spent the early war years building the Lanchester submachine gun for the Royal Navy. Its chief designer, George William Patchett, thought he could do better. His Patchett Machine Carbine was patented in 1942 and a small batch was ready for trials in 1944. Reports say a few went to Arnhem with the 1st Airborne Division that September, though the number was tiny. The Army was in no hurry to replace the Sten Gun, which it had in millions, so trials against designs from BSA, Enfield and others dragged on from 1947 to 1951. The Patchett won on reliability in mud, sand and cold. It was adopted in 1953 as the Sub-Machine Gun 9mm L2A1, modified as the L2A2 in 1955 and settled as the L2A3, the Sterling Mk 4, in 1956.

Design & Construction

The Sterling is a straight blowback weapon firing from an open bolt. Its receiver is a steel tube with a perforated barrel jacket and a folding stock that swings under the body. The bolt has four helical ribs machined into its surface; as it moves, they scrape grit and fouling out through the receiver slots, which is why the gun kept running when a Sten would have jammed. The magazine fits into the left side, as on the Sten, but is a far better piece of work: a curved double-column box for 34 rounds with a follower that runs on rollers. The trigger group gives semi- and full-automatic fire at about 550 rounds a minute. The barrel is 7.8 inches long, the gun measures 28 inches with the stock open and 19 folded, and it weighs about 6 pounds empty. It takes the standard rifle bayonet. Sterling built guns for the British Army alongside the Royal Ordnance Factory at Fazakerley, and it sold its own Mk 4 to more than 90 countries. Canadian Arsenals at Long Branch made the C1 from 1958 with a 30-round magazine, and India's ordnance factories built the 1A under license for decades. The L34A1, the Sterling-Patchett Mk 5, is a suppressed model with a ported barrel that slows the bullet below the speed of sound; it served with special forces into the 1990s.

Combat Use

The Sterling arrived as the Malayan Emergency was ending and went on to Suez in 1956, Aden, Borneo and Cyprus. It was the weapon of drivers, signalers, tank crews, officers and military police rather than of the rifle section, but that still put it in every theater. In The Troubles it was carried on patrol in Belfast and Londonderry, where the short gun suited work in vehicles and doorways. It went south with the Task Force in 1982 and was used at close quarters in the Falklands night attacks. It was still in vehicle racks in the Gulf in 1991. Abroad, Sterlings and C1s served Commonwealth armies in Africa and Asia and Argentine marines in the Falklands. Its main rival among Western submachine guns after 1970 was the closed-bolt HK MP5, which took over police and counter-terrorist roles while the Sterling stayed a soldier's gun.

Legacy

The L85A1 began to replace the Sterling from 1985, since a short bullpup rifle could do the submachine gun's job with a rifle cartridge, and the last British Sterlings were withdrawn in 1994. Sterling Armaments was sold and closed in 1989. Around 400,000 guns of all marks were built in Britain, Canada and India, and many remain in service. Among Submachine Guns it stands as the best of the simple open-bolt tube guns, a design that needed no improvement for forty years. It also has a second life on film: the E-11 blaster carried by stormtroopers in Star Wars in 1977 was a Sterling L2A3 with a scope and a few fittings bolted on.