Ian McCollum Unpacks the Rare Armaguerra OG-44 Prototype SMG

Ian McCollum got rare access to Beretta's in-house reference collection for the company's 500th anniversary, and he used it to show off a submachine gun most collectors have only seen in old photos. In a video from Forgotten Weapons, he walks through the Armaguerra OG-44, a late-war Italian SMG built in a factory that otherwise had nothing to produce.

Snapshot

McCollum traces the OG-44 from its awkward 1942 milled-steel ancestor, the OG-42, to the reworked 1944 stamped-steel version built by Armaguerra in Cremona. He argues the gun was years ahead of its time mechanically, even though only 14 were ever made.

Key points

• Origin story: designer Giovanni Oleani's initials spell out "OG," and the gun grew out of a factory left idle after the Italian army rejected Armaguerra's 1939 semi-auto rifle design.
• Smart redesign: the 1944 version dropped a proprietary 25-round magazine for widely available Beretta Model 38 mags in 10, 20, 30 and 40-round sizes, per McCollum.
• Forward-weighted bolt: the 1.9-pound, 860-gram bolt slows the rate of fire to roughly 500 rounds per minute and helps tame muzzle climb, a concept McCollum says predates the Uzi and CZ Vz. 23 by years.
• Clever details: features include a folding stock with a padded cheek weld, a removable hardened ejector set into soft stamped steel, and a recoil spring and guide rod that doubles as the cleaning rod.
• Build quality: McCollum calls the stampings surprisingly sophisticated for a prototype, down to a charging handle more elaborate than it needed to be.

Quick take

McCollum makes the case that the OG-44 deserves more respect than history has given it, since Armaguerra folded before it could compete in the postwar SMG market that guns like the Walther MPK and Franchi LF-57 later filled. For anyone interested in overlooked WWII engineering, this is a close, hands-on look at a gun almost nobody gets to see.

Watch the full video: Forgotten Weapons