SAR 18#6

self-loading rifle for the Polish Army. The
requirements were: weapon chambered
in the service caliber (7.9mm Mauser),
not heavier than 4.5 kg, with a magazine
capacity of 10 rounds, barrel length
equal to the service wz.29 carbine (600
mm), easy to operate, simple in design,
reasonable number of parts and manufactured
with simple production methods.
The deadline was 31 December,
1934. Nine rifles were proposed, but unfortunately
most are only known by the
codenames: 14895, ABC-34, BK, Celer,
ES, Gajos, Samopał, SKS and Turniej.
The jury, under ITU commander
Lt. Col. Czesław Kunart, selected on 8
January, 1935 three rifles for further development:
SKS by Engineer Stefański
(unfortunately the given name is absent
from all correspondence), ES by Edward
Szteke and Turniej by Józef Maroszek.
The Stefański SKS rifle was a
gas-operated weapon with the gas cylinder
on top of the barrel. During development
the original SKS got ‘thoroughly
redesigned’ into kb.sp. wz.34 but the
details are missing. In 1938 due to no
progress evident in subsequent testing
it was discontinued.
Edward Szteke’s ES rifle was a lever-retarded
blowback recoil-operated
weapon, with fixed barrel; somewhat
along the lines of the HK G3, but with
kidney-shaped levers instead of rollers.
It was patented in Poland, Europe and
the U.S. in 1933-1937. Mr. Chinn may
be right on many things in his monumental
series of books The Machine
Gun, but how he managed to find in it
a predecessor of the MG 42 is a mystery.
Perhaps he mistook MG 42 (short
recoil gun, roller locked with recoiling
barrel) with MG 42V, Vereinfacht, or
Simplified, prepared to be introduced
into the Wehrmacht’s inventory as the
MG 45 – a retarded blowback with fixed
barrel, like the ES...
Maroszek Rifle
The Maroszek ‘Turniej’ was a
gas-operated weapon, but the details of
his original design, especially the lock,
we cannot ascertain for lack of documents.
Polish ordnance archives were
pretty thoroughly sieved, vetted and dispersed,
first by the capturing Germans
and Soviets in 1939, then by Germans
re-capturing them from the Soviets, and
then in 1945 by the British, American,
French and Soviets, capturing them
once again from the Germans.
Szteke’s rifle was judged
the best while Maroszek placed third.
Regardless, he was too busy designing
his AT rifle, which was given
much higher priority, and so he was
given a respite, while ES and SKS
were toiled upon.
In 1936 the rifles were progressing
steadily, but as the AT rifle was then
ready for production, the SLR board
requested Maroszek to submit a prototype.
Meanwhile, he had an epiphany
as to the locking system of his rifle,
and instead of starting to build his original
rifle, he turned it inside out to accommodate
his new idea of tilt-locking
the bolt into the ejection opening of the
receiver – what we now call a Browning-Petter
locking, generally associated
with handguns. The new receiver was
much shorter, with no need for barrel
extension. The return spring is similar to
the BAR – but the original M1918, not
the wz.28 Polish one – being stored inside
the bolt-carrier and gas piston. The
new ideas seemed plausible enough
to grant him six weeks deadline extension
in which to redesign the rifle from
scratch. In mid-1936 at the No.2 Armory
at 2/4 Szwedzka Str. in Warsaw’s Praga
district, a three-man team which last
year cooperated with Maroszek in preparing
the AT Rifle production set to
manufacturing parts for his second
SAR Vol. 18, No. 6 78 Nov., Dec. 2014