SAR: When you say the cocking handle is wrong, what do you mean?

Visser: In the end we made it underneath, so that the left or right handed person could use it easily. Anyway, Gene got interested in other things, and I hired Hans Sturtz, a German who worked for Gene Stoner. He was fantastic at making things….he worked for us in Holland, and we changed the Stoner rifle in various ways, small things, but important, like a good folding stock – one that locks. We made a good bipod too, a sturdy bipod, one that locks on the gun. I kept all of the documentation about what we did. We made a barrel with flutes, a thicker barrel, and we arranged for the sling swivels on the right place.

SAR: This is the Stoner 63 we are discussing? Let me go get some examples from the vault. (Dan gets some Stoner 63 and 63As to put on the table for Henk to point out things.)

Visser: Actually the 63A but improved. We did several things for the 63A. This was now the 63A1 when we were done with it. As I said, we improved the bipod and made it mount on the rifle, which was my idea. In the beginning, Gene Stoner didn’t have a flash hider with the right dimensions for the international rifle grenade launching requirements. The original CETME was even missing that by design. They just had a barrel sticking out making a hell of a flash, and noise. I designed the flashhider for the CETME (G3). We changed the Stoner 63A to be able to fire Rifle Launched Grenades (RLG), a very important feature even today in many armies. We changed location of the charging handle, the bipod, the stock, and many other minor changes.

SAR (Dolf): Henk, I thought that originally you were involved with the AR-10, with the 7.62 Stoner rifle?

Visser: No, Dolf, I have heard this before but I had nothing to do with that. The AR-10 was our competitor, the government plant Artillerie Inrichtingen (AI) at Hembrug, in Holland. They got so upset that we had the Stoner 63A license – first we had the CETME rifle then the Stoner – that when the Director of AI read in TIME Magazine about this lightweight rifle from ArmaLite, he and his secretary got on a plane and flew to Costa Mesa to make a deal on the AR-10. He was not liked by the Dutch generals because of the way he treated them. In reality, the AR-10 was a fantastic rifle for 7.62 NATO. Director Jungeling invited all the top generals to his plant and they were getting coffee and cake, and while they were eating he reached next to his chair and holds up an AR-10 and announces, “Gentlemen, this is your new rifle! This will be the future!” Those generals decided at that moment in their minds that nobody was going to adopt the AR-10. They didn’t want to be told by a civilian what would be the new Army rifle. He killed it with that. It’s a very sad story because it was a good rifle. They wanted to do their own testing and make their own decision and like most generals, they do not like anyone telling them what they will have for weapons.

SAR: You had the rights to the Stoner 63 outside of the United States?

Visser: Outside of United States and Canada. We had a very optimistic view of our opportunities because we and Cadillac Gage thought that the US Marines would adopt the system. We took the Stoner Rifle to Ecuador, Chile, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and, Israel. I went everywhere. We spent millions, and I told the top people in my company, “This is it. This is what the soldiers want.” I never told the customers that – I simply showed them the quality and let them test the rifle. Standardization, a cheap machine gun…the main parts are all the same. Maybe I overdid it a little bit at times. We had the Inspector General of all of the forces in Holland and his Royal Highness Prince Bernard; he had seen it and liked it, and he tried to push it in NATO. Again, I think maybe there was too much support in this way, these guys all wanted to do it themselves and make their own decisions. I was instrumental in the standardization of the rifle grenades as well. Because of me, all of the rifles have the flash hider with the 22mm diameter. I was close with MECAR in Belgium, and we developed a whole series of rifle grenades, including a new small hollow charge which would puncture a 5cm hole in a steel plate at 160 meters.

SAR: So this was a shaped charge system. What was the launching platform – bullet trap, bullet through or launching blank?

Visser: It was a special blank cartridge at the beginning. We had, even for the Stoner, a short magazine that was colored green that could be loaded with this gas cartridge, so that there would be no mistake of putting a live cartridge in the gun.

SAR: Did you get any sales of the Stoner 63A1 in the countries you just mentioned?

Visser: The biggest thing was that the United States Marines were going to adopt it. I was at Quantico almost weekly, and they wanted these, so after the first lots of prototypes they ordered 3,000 or so from Cadillac Gage and shipped the Stoners to Vietnam. They wanted a live combat environment to test them. The Stoner was very successful and the Marines liked it. Then the U.S. Army stepped in and said, “No. We will all have the same weapons. You take the M16.” The Marines got mad, and talked about bent barrels and this and that, and the cocking handle they did not like and the rifles needed a heavier barrel, etc. We were offering this gun that we demonstrated as the future U.S. Marine weapon. We really pushed that, you know? Because who was this tiny little company in Holland, and Cadillac Gage was not known either: they made a few armored cars. Nothing to show manufacturing ability with small arms, but the Marines with Stoners, that was another story and it was our sales pitch to our customers.

Gene Stoner was very bitter about many of the issues that occurred then. In the Stoner 63 rifle he had tried to fix what he saw as the problems in the M16, which was also his design originally.

The big blow was when the decision came that the U.S. Marines were not going to take the Stoner system. This made it difficult for us, because the people we were trying to sell it to thought something must be defective with the guns since the U.S. was not adopting it. I had sold 12 to Singapore after a demonstration and sold some to Thailand, Japan and South Korea. We were a nice company, we didn’t bribe anybody. The same in the Philippines. I still remember the offer for the Philippines. We had trained them so that they could work on the guns themselves. It was a $35 million deal. Then Colt got in and they got the order instead for $58 million. Their agent had better “contacts” – almost $20 million extra above what our program was. I was with the top man there, the commissioner, and if I had said that we could raise it to $55 million or whatever, we would have had that deal. But that would have never occurred to me. The same thing happened on the deal in South Korea.

The Stoner is an excellent weapon, and the only complaint I ever had was that if the soldiers have the rifle, and then they give the company armorer some cigarettes or something, they’ll quickly have a belt-fed and a heavier barrel, and before you know it everyone in the whole group has a machine gun. (Visser laughs.)

SAR: That’s a complaint? If they trained a platoon with all belt fed Stoners, it would have been pretty formidable.

Visser: Yes, but these armies aren’t trained that way. Riflemen should be riflemen, and the machine gun is restricted to certain personnel with specific machine gun jobs. It would have been very simple to make things so that you couldn’t make a machine gun out of a rifle, but that would get rid of one of the beautiful things about the Stoner – the adaptability. The only complaint I ever received was that it was too easy to make a machine gun out of it.

SAR: Henk, you were involved in many of the post World War II arms deals. What about the surplus deals?

Visser: I got some surplus 20mm ammo from our Air Force and I sold it to Israel. I worked with Tom Nelson’s company and went on some trips with him, but we were not very successful in obtaining surplus guns.

SAR: Was there any surplus in your time in Vietnam?

Visser: Only the RPGs and other items we discussed earlier. Of course there were much more US military leftovers from Vietnam that were surplused out, but not through our company. I should tell you that I was given the rank of Colonel in the US Army so that I had an ID card. If you got captured by the North Vietnamese, the US Army figured that an officer would be treated better. I still have the ID today. (Henk shows us a Vietnam era US Military ID card with his picture and the rank of Colonel.) We wanted to know how the testing went with the 3,000 guns for Vietnam, but secondly we had to be involved in the MECAR rifle grenades. The Marines were very interested in these rifle grenades, the shaped charges that punched 5cm holes. There was one demonstration where the armored plate was at 160 meters, and as I was a good shot, I could stand there and whop it, and they could see the hole was there. I came upon the idea of mini hand grenades then. In Vietnam, I saw the soldiers go out with only two hand grenades, and if the grenades got wet then they had to be destroyed. With the help of MECAR, we made very small hand grenades and the inside was ribbed in little squares. We used RDX instead of the normal high-explosive. I designed a special short ring that you couldn’t pull, you had to twist it, and then you could get it out. This prevented a lot of accidents. I had a special detonator made by Dynamit Nobel and we sealed the grenades in plastic so you’d have a bandolier with ten mini hand grenades. This weighed as much as two standard hand grenades giving the soldiers a lot of waterproof hand grenades for their missions. I also had them make an aluminum tail with an old-type beer bottle closer; you could stick the hand grenade on there and close that. There was a thin wire, so when you fired it from the rifle, the wire would break and the lever would jump off and at 200 meters you had an explosion.

Then MECAR said, “Nice, but let’s make a rifle grenade that’s just the same in arming, but the standard size.” We also had parachute flares. Then there was a request from the Americans and they said, “Listen, we have had cases where we bombed our own people in the deep jungle cover. We want a flare that goes through the canopy and explodes at 100 meters with a big flash and a brown cloud.” They wanted a test quantity of 200 or so, and three weeks later they were on a plane from Germany to Vietnam for testing. It was really successful; there was a big flash and a bang after it exited the jungle canopy. We were working to design a bullet trap in the grenade tail so you could fire with live rounds. Around that time the owners of MECAR decided to sell the whole shebang to an American company. I had a contract with them that said I received a commission on everything that was sold, regarding the rifle grenades and such. They tried to talk me out of it, and I said, “Gentlemen. You’ve just told me that I am going to make millions from these mini-grenades, but give me one hundred thousand dollars and it’s yours.” I wanted out of the company and the new owners. A lot of yak-yak and I got my hundred thousand dollars.

SAR: But not the millions in the future…

Visser: No, I would get none of that. The Marines bought a lot of those rifle grenades, and they tested them and decided to adopt them. Again the same thing happened. The U.S. Army was working on the 40mm launchers and they didn’t want the Marines to have something else. The Marines adopted the 40mm, not our multi-purpose hand and rifle grenades.

SAR: That sounds like the end of the Stoner 63 and MECAR projects. Where did you go from there?

Visser: We were into developing a “breakup” training round. It was an idea that I had in Germany after seeing how they had to have tremendous ranges when they were shooting at air targets. We had a plastic bullet with compressed iron powder parts in it that gave the same recoil – everything the same as a ball round, but it caught the rifling and because of the plastic jacket, after 50 meters or so, it would burst and there was just a cloud of powder. What they also wanted to test was putting a round that wouldn’t function in the magazines; something which would cause a stoppage. It was for the soldiers learning to fix the stoppage. We sold millions to the Germans. Really, many millions in numerous calibers as it turned out. This ammo functioned perfectly in the German 20mm gun and the twin 20mm AA guns.

They had thousands of these twin-barreled 20mm guns used for AA defense and the troops had to train with them. For training purposes, a plane came flying past with the target sack. They had to aim and they fired like mad and it was really something exciting to see: a whole row of twenty twin 20mm guns. From there we went to the 40mm Bofors round 40 l 60 and 70, also with the break up projectile.

One problem occurred when the Dutch Navy wanted the 40mm Bofors too. They went out and shot it at sea, but there was so much wind out there that the powder would blow back and immediately started rusting the ship. “Oh my God, our beautiful ship! You are ruining our beautiful ships” they cried. (Laughter.) For land based use, though, we sold a lot of these.

Around that time the Swiss company Oerlikon asked me to come and work for them. Singapore asked me to get them 120 20mm cannons for the armored cars they bought from Cadillac Gage. I just walked in to Oerlikon and said, “They want an order from you for 120 cannons.” Oerlikon couldn’t believe it. They had never done much business in the Far East, only Japan. I got the offer and flew out to Singapore. They looked at the prices and thought it was ok, and they went up to the boss, who had a Dutch name, and he signed the contract. I was amazed. I came back and walked into Oerlikon and said, “Here’s your contract.” They almost fell over. After the war they hadn’t had any big contracts like that, 120 20mm guns. The big boss said to me, “What do you want as a commission?” I hadn’t even thought about it. I thought, “Maybe one percent? Do I have the guts to ask for two percent?” Then the boss says, “Is six percent enough?” I got a million Swiss francs commission, and that was the first time I’d ever done anything like that. I started working for them and became the boss for the whole Far East. I sold the South Koreans all of their 35mm AA guns, and also sold to Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. That made me a rich man, you know, because besides the big salary they paid me a two percent commission as well. When you get a $900 million order, that’s really something. (Laughter). I was with Oerlikon for about fifteen years, from 1975 until around 1990.

SAR: Not bad for a little Dutch kid who started his cannon ammunition career making 20mm detonators while a slave laborer in a German prison.

Visser: Yes, a very, very, long way from that.

SAR: What are you working on today?

Visser: I spend most of my time working on restoration of historical firearms, major projects to save many of these works of art. There was a big restoration project in Russia. I came to Russian in 1988 with Dr. Arne Hoff, the director of the Tojhuseet museum in Copenhagen. Even before the war, it was known there were many historical Dutch guns in the Kremlin Armory. We went there, and we were received well but they didn’t even want to give us their last names. It was forbidden to give your last name to a foreigner. I liked them, and they liked me, and we got off on good footing. Each time I came there, I brought them suitcases full of Dutch specialties of coffee, “cup-a-soup” packets, an electric water heater, and 200w light bulbs. They had 40w light bulbs in the depot and you couldn’t see anything. I brought them nice mugs to drink from, and we had a very good relationship.

I knew all the guns they had, and they had about 350 beautiful guns, of which 120 needed serious care. Pieces were broken off, pieces to be repaired, and I asked, “Why don’t you restore them? You have a lot of wonderful pieces here.” They said, “We have no money to do this, Russian things must come first.” I said I would do it and would pay for it. It took two years of negotiation, and I became friends with the Minister of Culture, who must have studied at an American university because he spoke fluent English. They eventually let 120 guns go to Holland where I could have them restored. We had the best restorer in the world for antique arms, Herman Prummel, he can do anything. I thought it would be half-year project, but it took two and a half years to finish. In the meantime, a good friend of mine, Helena Yablonskaya, wrote up all the Dutch guns in Russia; about 120 at the Kremlin Armory, some at the Historical Museum, some at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, 350 in all. In the series of my books, there is one book about all of those.

SAR: It sounds like you are very dedicated now to restoring these historical Dutch firearms.

Visser: Yes, very much so. I am full of crazy stories on this. When I was younger, before the war, our high school made day trips to different places. One of the trips was to Emden in North Germany and there was an armory in the Rathouse with lots of suits of armor and guns and pistols. The first battle with the Spaniards in our Eighty Years War was in 1568 in ‘t Heiligerlee, a village near Groningen. There was a wooden case closed with mesh steel wire, and inside it were musket balls from the first battle to get rid of the Spaniards. We had a Nazi guard with us in a black uniform, and when he wasn’t looking I took my pocketknife and lifted up the steel wire and stole one musket ball. I still have it today. (Laughter.)

Emden was flattened during the war and I always wanted to go back. I went to the Meppen Army testing grounds nearby, but I never got to go back to Emden. Finally, about a year and a half ago I go with Herman Prummel who told me that a lot of pistols were rotting away in the depot. I went over there….and it was horrible. There were the most beautiful Dutch wheellock pistols full of wormholes, half the stock gone, and the metal cleaned with emery paper. My big mistake was not to take the whole pile for an offer of 50,000 euros because they’re never going to show this stuff, but I said, “Why don’t you restore them?” They said they had no money, so I said I’d do it. They said, “Why don’t you take them? We’ll talk to the director, and come back in two weeks.” So I came back in two weeks and instead of having 10 ready, they had 50. We took all 50, and it took more than a year for Herman Prummel to restore them. They are in fantastic condition now. Fortunately, they had saved all the metal parts that had fallen off. If the buttstock had been eaten, they still had the metal ring. Those Dutch wheellock pistols were very light and elegant. These are at my house right now, waiting for the museum to open. We are now working on a catalogue with pictures of them.

I guess that my passion today is the works of art that are in these old firearms. I have spent a lot of time making them whole again.

SAR: Henk, I want to thank you for sharing these stories with SAR’s readers.

Visser: Yes, I have enjoyed this, and I hope to come to the SHOT show and see old friends.

We discussed many more stories of the old days and the arms trade, as well as current restoration projects that Henk Visser is involved in, but those must wait for another day. – Dan

Hinderikus (Henk) Lucas Visser was born in the City of Groningen, the capital of Groningen Province in the northeast of the Netherlands, on 5 August 1923. Henk was very involved in the CETME rifle project, the original HK G3, Stoner’s projects (most notably the Stoner 63A1), Oerlikon, Mauser, and many other historical events that impact on the small arms community today. Smallarmsreview.com is pleased to bring this lengthy and comprehensive interview to our readers from our 2006 issue and will be presented in two parts. – Dan Shea, SAR Editor-in-Chief

SAR: Thanks for joining us, Henk. I guess the readers would like to know what got you started with firearms – what was your first gun?

Visser: My first gun was an old pinfire revolver, which you could buy for about two bucks in those days. I was maybe fifteen years old. Pinfire ammunition was very rare so I just collected these and enjoyed looking at them and I would hide them from my mother who did not approve. My father had died when I was ten years old. Later in life my mother would complain about my gun collecting habits, but I would say, “Mother, it’s your own fault. You never bought me an air rifle.”

SAR: And your interest in military firearms?

Visser: I had wanted to be in the military, so as soon as I could ride my bicycle, I was always around the barracks in Groningen and the nearby airfield. After the German occupation of Holland, May 10, 1940, there wasn’t much hope for me to join the Dutch army. I was still in high school, and was definitely not a Nazi sympathizer. With friends, we harassed the occupying military units, and I was arrested by the Germans but managed to talk my way out of it several times. I was eighteen years old when the SD (German Sicherheitsdienst) finally arrested me.

SAR: What were the charges? And, I suppose, were you actually guilty?

Visser: Guilty as charged. Sabotage, gun possession, those were the main charges. It was May 5th, 1942 when the German SD arrested me. It was in the classroom, in front of all the other kids. (Laughs) It was quite something! On one occasion I had broken into the German barracks and put a match to a wooden building that the Germans were setting up for storing radio transmitters. It was at the airfield next to our town that the Germans had expanded and made into a bigger airfield. They held me, because the last thing I did was to break into the Navy officers’ mess, and I stole a K98, a machine pistol, a pistol, ammo and some of their papers. We had a small group of people that had gotten together to do this, and there was one man who was a traitor, he tried to blackmail me. Anyway, the Dutch police got involved, and I got arrested. Then in July I had a Navy court-martial in the town of Utrecht.

SAR: So, your first machine gun involved getting a Navy court-martial from the Germans while you were in high school?

Visser: (Laughs) Yes, and they condemned me to death and also three years for another break-in in a Dutch Nazi gunsmith shop in town.

SAR: An additional three years?

Visser: With the Germans, you were condemned separately for each crime and punished that way as well. I had a friend in jail, a cadet from the Dutch military academy, who was condemned separately to death three times, plus ten years, and four months. His father was very rich, and he started paying people off, so the Germans took off two of the death sentences and shot him for the third. My uncle, who was a director of the Dutch Philips electronic company, knew one of the German supervisors of the factory and tried to get me off. He told the supervisor, “You have to go and see if you can get the boy pardoned since his mother is a widow and only has one other younger son.” The supervisor went to see Seis Inquart, the German ruler of Holland, who said that this was a job only for the military. He suggested that my uncle should talk to General Christiansen, who was the military commander in Holland…but he also said no, and he said that Dutch high school boys who think that they can make a joke out of the German Army will be shot. So my mother was quite desperate, and she went with our lawyer to see the German Navy commander herself. Just to let you know how these Germans were; he lived in a big villa…my mother and our lawyer passed the guards at the gate, rang the bell, and a Navy sailor opened the door. He took the letter that my mother had brought asking for a pardon, and left my mother and the lawyer standing outside in the rain for half an hour. Then the door opened again and the same sailor gave the letter back to my mother, torn in half.

My mother was very desperate at this point. Her father had a butcher shop in town, and next to that was a vegetable shop…our two families were good friends. One of the children of the vegetable shop owner, Kees Veening, had gone to live in Berlin to be a speech therapist, teaching them how to breathe, etc. Kees Veening had a neighbor, and they became good friends. The neighbor was a historian, a reservist in the German army and was called up for duty in 1938. He had become a general and was responsible for the daily historical facts in Hitler’s headquarters, the “Wolfschanze.” This man had an idea: if he could get a hold of my file from the Dutch prison and keep it, the Germans in Holland would not be able to shoot me. So I sat for three months in the section of the prison where they kept the prisoners who were condemned to die, and oftentimes at 5 in the morning you would hear the Germans with the steel-toed boots coming up to take one or two of us out to be shot. So the question was always, “Who’s next?” I was there for three months.

SAR: On a German death row cellblock for three months, waiting to be shot every day?

Visser: Yes. You had to take all of your clothes off at night, so that if you escaped during the night you’d be naked. One night, there was a tremendous row and shouting and a group of drunken German guards came knocking on my door. I was sleeping on a straw bale, so I got up and ran to the window, stood at attention, reported myself and my punishment. The Germans shouted “Visser, who was condemned to death…You swine, our Führer has pardoned you!” After repeating this several times they threw my door closed, and I thought, “Oh, this is wonderful,” and went back to sleep on my straw bale. The next morning I realized that I had made it, and had gotten 15 years in a German prison instead. Later I learned that the German historian had waited until the Germans were throwing a party for their successes in Russia. They had taken over a million prisoners at that occasion and were celebrating. They were extremely pleased and were drinking champagne in Hitler’s headquarters. As Hitler was sitting at the table, the historian, General Scherff, approached with the letter from my mother and explained the story. Hitler looked up and said, “A friend of yours, eh?” and Hitler himself crossed out “Death Penalty” and wrote “15 years Zuchthaus” instead. When the people at my prison got the telex message from the Wolfschanze, they got drunk and came to my door at 2 or 3 in the morning to tell me that I had made it.

SAR: Well, there’s a project for some of our better connected readers. Somewhere, there is a piece of paper with Adolf Hitler’s handwriting on it that freed Henk Visser from a death sentence.

Visser: Yes, yes, I would pay $10,000 for that piece of paper! I was then transported to prison in Germany, a prison with small factories inside. There I had to work very hard, we had to make little aluminum cylinders. After the war, while taking apart a 20mm shell, I found one of those little cylinders. It was an aluminum detonator. We had to fashion them and drill a hole through them and of course thread them. We would make 5,000 of these per day and if you didn’t make 5,000 then you only got a liter of cabbage soup instead of 1.5 liters. Cabbage soup may not sound very special, but in the prison, an extra 0.5 liter of soup was important! So we made 5,000 per day.

We were in a very old prison called Zuchthaus Reinbach, near Bonn. Then I was moved to another prison called Zuchthaus Siegburg, on the other side of Bonn, and there I also worked for my dinner. I repaired military uniforms, and worked in a tool making shop. We worked about twelve hours a day in shifts, sometimes during the day and sometimes during the night. I must say I was lucky; in a concentration camp I would have died. In these prisons you had a roof over your head. It was a big building with thick walls, and if it was 20 degrees below zero outside it was only just freezing inside, which was cold but you didn’t freeze to death. We had guards who had been guards for all of their lives, they were professionals and so there were not many beatings or much abuse. We had some new guards who came in from the Eastern front missing an arm or something, and since they really couldn’t do a good job they would sometimes beat us to take revenge.

Anyway, I got very ill. I had tuberculosis in my lungs, intestines, on my vocal cords, and on a heart valve. I was dying and my weight was 100 pounds. Still, I was always treated a little differently from the other prisoners.

SAR: You must have had some pull from somewhere.

Visser: They knew I had received a pardon from Hitler himself, and the General Scherff sometimes inquired about how I was doing, so yes, they were careful with me. I was taken to the prison hospital. It was unbelievable, there were 3,000 prisoners with half of them sick and there were only 14 beds in the hospital. I got one of those beds, and I was dying. My uncle, who’s company Philips also owned a lot of factories in Germany, started inquiring about how I was doing. He was told that I was ill, but treated very well, and that I was cared for by nuns and that every day I would get an egg, but my uncle didn’t trust them. He sent someone who talked to the director of the Zuchthaus who reported that I couldn’t talk anymore and that I was dying. So he had his lawyers look over the German law regarding prisoners, and they found an old law that said if you were incarcerated and dying, you could go home to die. All of the judges that condemned me would have to sign off for my release, so my uncle went to see all five of the judges, at that time they were dispersed all over Germany because of fear for an invasion in Holland. When all of them signed I was sent home, but because of my contagious disease, I wasn’t allowed to go back by train. They didn’t want me infecting anybody else. The Phillips people had an ambulance that ran on propane, but since the gas stations were so far apart in Germany, they put the ambulance on top of a truck and trailer which ran on a wood burning gas generator. They came with a nurse to the prison, and through my uncle managed to rescue my hospital cellmate as well, another Dutch student from Groningen. We drove back through Germany and I was very happy to see buildings still on fire from Allied bombings. We got back to Holland and they hid me in a Roman Catholic sanatorium in Bilthoven. I was there for two and a half years, recovering.

SAR: Was that the end of the war?

Visser: On the 18th of May, 1944 I got out of Germany. The liberation of Europe happened while I was convalescing, and at the end of 1946 I went home.

SAR: It must have taken a long time to build your strength back.

Visser: I felt ok, I did what I had to do, and I could even bicycle a little bit. My mother made me go back to high school; she said I needed a high school diploma. (laughs) Of course the military was out of the question for me, because of my weak lungs. I wanted to go to the police academy, but was offered a job as a sales inspector in Java, in the East Indies – formerly the Dutch East Indies – and I accepted. The company had me tested to make sure that my health was alright, it was, and I was approved to go and work in the tropics.

SAR: Was this a firearms related job you were looking for in the tropics?

Visser: No, it was in the tobacco industry. I was in Java for five years where I worked and hunted; wild boar, mostly. I had a German 7mm rifle with a 12 gauge shotgun barrel. My job was inspecting the cigarettes sold by our company in Java. We manufactured the cigarettes, and wanted to make sure that the cigarettes weren’t being sold or bought on the black market. There were many Chinese sales outlets all over Indonesia and the islands that needed to be inspected. I traveled a lot, all over Java, and for a while I lived in Jakarta, Malang and Semarang. There were about five Europeans running the factory, and for a year and a half I was the chief purchasing agent. This was from 1950 until 1955. (Dolf mentions that he was there at the same time, too bad they hadn’t met at that point.) It was a fantastic time; the company was really well run. The Dutch people who were running it were no-nonsense and everything was always ok. Holland had given up Indonesia in December of 1949, and the bad thing was (and I’m very pro-American) that under American pressure, they pushed the Dutch out and threatened to stop the Marshall Plan for Holland. There were millions of dollars going into rebuilding the Netherlands. So you can understand that our government gave in.

SAR: (Dolf) The Americans pushed the Dutch into giving up the country. My father was very bitter about that, too.

Visser: Yes, yes, the Americans had the idea of instituting liberty and democracy and everything Western, but we were not ready for it! Our Queen Wilhelmina had already said in 1942 that Indonesia would be a free country in the future; the process would have only taken about 15 years to complete.

SAR (Dan): In America we tend to think that there’s a magic wand for those who’ve been under colonial control or subjugation or despotic control, that they can suddenly handle freedom. I don’t want to get too far off the subject, but I’ve seen it too many times in too many places. Often we think we can touch a country and suddenly it’s free. It’s certainly not that simple. Henk, you lived right through the middle of the Jakarta incidents? Is this the point where you started to develop more of an interest in machine guns?

Visser: No, Dan, I have always been crazy about weapons. But going through the war years changed my perception of the world. When the Germans first “arrived,” they acted nice and very friendly. Holland was very wealthy and a rich booty. When it came to food I saw German soldiers go into Dutch shops to buy and eat an entire stick of butter, they hadn’t seen real butter in so long. Other things too, pastries, breads, all sorts of foods, they took them back home to their families. So in the beginning there wasn’t any ill treatment, but as every good Dutchman, I hated them from the very first moment. It wasn’t until later that the Germans showed their real character. They cleaned out the whole country. I actually started my collecting interest with military weapons when I got home from prison and the sanatorium. There was a gun in almost every home, taken from the Germans when they fled. I had friends at the police department, so if they had a really nice machine gun I was able to shoot it or buy it if they didn’t require it.

SAR: This was before your journey to Indonesia? Were you able to pick up many rare guns?

Visser: Yes, this was from 1947 to 1949. My interest in collecting military firearms was very intense, starting then. In those days it was all the common guns, also French guns that the Germans used. For instance, the first French machine gun that I got was a Hotchkiss 1914. It was a great big machine gun with cooling fins and a huge tripod. I was very interested in German sniper rifles at the time. When I went to Indonesia, I had to hide my collection in my mother’s house, since I had no license for these guns.

SAR: Are we seeing a pattern of youthful disregard for gun laws here?

Visser: (laughs) Yes, yes, and they were all cleaned very well before I left, so that when I returned there wasn’t a spot of rust on any of them.

SAR: When did you get involved in arms trading?

Visser: On my way to an appointment I stopped at a gun shop in a small street in Groningen. The guy that owned the shop had also spent some time in a German prison, as well as a concentration camp. In the shop I met a gentleman who was on the board of an ammunition factory in the south of Holland, he invited me to come and see the operation. I went there; it was a small factory that had just received an order for .30 carbine ammo from the Americans. The factory itself was a mess. I was told that the chairman of the board from the factory would like to talk to me; he offered me a job as director. He told me that the founder of the factory had died and that his younger brother wasn’t doing a good job running things. I said no, I didn’t want that job; I wanted to go back to Indonesia.

My boss back in Indonesia was a colonialist. He worked us to death, we never got enough salary, but we still led a wonderful life. He would always say, “Do this and I’ll give you a raise and a promotion.” I learned that even if I got a promotion, there would be no raise for me. He told me to go to Jakarta for a year and if I did a good job there, I would get a raise and a promotion, but when my review came up, I got a good promotion but no raise, as usual. He always had another task for me but I never got a raise. After five years, I got 8 months furlough. Usually when people went on furlough they would go straight home to Holland, but I asked if I could go to America. My boss agreed to pay for it, saying that I wasn’t such a bad guy. I flew to the Cocos Islands, Australia, lots of other small islands, Samoa, and then on to Hawaii, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Boston to visit a friend, and down to Washington D.C.

SAR: That doesn’t explain your start in the arms trade…

Visser: I am getting to it, Dan, patience. Before I went on vacation my boss in Indonesia began to worry about the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, which was getting more and more attention in America. He asked me to see how the American tobacco companies were dealing with it. I went to Philip Morris, and they told me that more and more people were buying mentholated and filtered cigarettes because the public thought that they were not as bad. I wrote back to my boss what the Americans had told me, and he quickly started ordering the machinery to manufacture filtered cigarettes. These of course are more dangerous than unfiltered cigarettes because it allows you to smoke the cigarette all the way to the filter. You end up inhaling far more tar, etc. than you would get from smoking a cigarette without filter.

My boss had told me that upon my return from furlough I would become the Inspector for the Island of Sumatra. And so again I asked him if I would get my raise, he said that we would discuss it when I returned. He was in Holland at the same time, so I traveled to Eindhoven where he was with his family and had dinner with him. I asked him during dinner if I would finally get the position I wanted, with a higher salary and the ability to sign for the company as a representative. (Editor’s note: In Europe, the right to sign documents in the name of the company puts you in a much higher level socially. You generally get a much better salary.) He said that if I did a good job working in Sumatra that I would get the position I wanted. At that moment I realized he was lying, and the next morning I started talking to the people from the ammunition factory again. I asked for what was at that time a fantastic salary, not at all contingent on how the company did at the end of the year. They accepted!

SAR: So your international weapons career started in the ammunition factory in Hertogenbosch in Holland.

Visser: You might say it started when I was making those fuzes in a German prison (Laughs). But, I’ll tell you, my first day as director there, I almost cried. There were two secretaries, and neither one could write or type a letter without mistakes. Everything looked horrible and unprofessional from that office on down to the factory. I had to fight to straighten out that company. When I arrived, there were 63 people working there, and when I left there were over a 1,000.

SAR: Did this job lead to you becoming a member of the 7.62 NATO council?

Visser: After the cigarette factory in Indonesia, I think this was a really big start for me. I got a call one day from an American friend at the Pentagon who said, “Henk, we know you’re working on blanks with a lengthened case so that they feed automatically. We don’t have that, and this morning during a mock battle in Panama the American side had to shout “Poof! Poof!” because they had no blanks that would function automatically in their weapons. The general who was responsible for Panama got mad and demanded immediate delivery of the special blanks.”

I said to my friend that I could get some of my guys and some of our new blanks, cases, powder, tools and the necessary weapons, and fly over to see what we could do. We flew to Washington and went from there to Frankfurt Arsenal, where testing began on our ammo. Whether fired from a gun that had been in a freezer or not, our blanks worked perfectly! The guys from Frankfurt Arsenal wanted to inspect our blanks and see how they could copy them, but they didn’t have the time. The Pentagon wanted 45 million blank rounds in cal. 7.62 NATO, and we would get one-third of the order, which for us was a very, very big order. We were very excited until one day I got a call from them with sad news. They said that Congress refused to release the money needed for that big order and instead specified that only 30 million rounds would be purchased, with the order going to Frankfurt Arsenal, so we lost out. This was a big blow to our company, but there was also good news. They told me that they understood that we wanted to make 20mm aircraft ammo. They offered me a 20mm ammunition factory for free, with new machinery and everything, in St. Louis, that had been used to manufacture .60 caliber ammo and later 20mm aircraft ammo. It had been “mothballed” for use in an emergency.

SAR: The early M39 revolver cannon series, the T161s, were T130E3 .60 caliber machine guns before they were moved into the 20mm range.

Visser: Yes, it was the plant for that ammunition. We went to St. Louis to look at it, and we were flabbergasted. Everything, the machines, the tools, etc. was brand new, and just for us. I went back to Holland to arrange for transport. I came back to the Pentagon (which was very easy to just walk into in those days) to talk to Colonel Moor and a couple of other officials, but they had sad news again. “We cannot give you the plant,” they said. They saw my reaction…and after a long pause continued, “But we can sell you the plant for a $1,000.” We paid the thousand dollars and brought all of the machinery back to Holland. The end result was that once we got operational we supplied every NATO Air Force with the 20mm rounds: the Brits, the Norwegians, the Germans, the Dutch, everybody. Later, when the Vietnam War began, the US Air Force realized that they did not have enough 20mm rounds. They requested an order for 10 million 20mm rounds. Our Holland plant could fill that order so a meeting took place at the pentagon. One of the officials said, “This is crazy! Lake City is not the only ammunition plant we have. Don’t we have one in the South?” Colonel Moor pointed at me and said, “Yes, and HE has that plant.” (Visser laughs) So we used the plant from St. Louis to fill a 23 million dollar order for 10 million rounds.

SAR: Like all good arms dealers, I love a story where you get a plant for surplus and then get to sell the product back to your source (laughter). Henk, that probably would have been 1967 or 1968 and jumps us too far ahead in this story. When did you first get involved with Armalite?

Visser: Ah, patience, Dan, patience. First we must address the CETME (Centro de Estudios Technicales de Materiales Especiales) program. When I started to work in Holland for NWM in 1955, they had an advisor that was a retired Dutch rear admiral who became a very good friend of mine. He had been in Spain recently (he spoke fluent Spanish), where some Spanish and Germans had been working on a new gun made from sheet steel. I knew of some of the developments that had been done in Germany with the Sturmgewehr, and I flew to Madrid. The operations there were very isolated from the outside world. The main operation was on the CETME rifle. They showed me the whole factory, and pointed out some of the small tools and things that they were missing which I could supply, so I told them I’d help out. I became very friendly with them, and pretty soon I had my own CETME rifle to take back with me to Holland. That rifle…that’s a whole other story.

It was made for special ammunition, an aluminum bullet with a copper jacket…a very long bullet with a short case. The man who designed this ammunition was Dr. Voss, and he was the German Air Force ballistician, and he was also the ballistician for the CETME group. He was very knowledgeable about recoil and automatic fire and the physics of holding a gun. During that time, the first German armed forces were the Bundesgrenzschutz who were supposed to guard the German boarders. There were 20,000 soldiers armed with German K98’s and the MG42’s, as well as 100 new 20mm Hispano guns and of course the P38 pistol, and nothing else. The boss was Colonel Naujokat, and he had been in charge of the two flat cars before and behind Hitler’s quarters on his train (during WWII). These open cars had 4-barreled 20mm automatic cannons on them.

The Spanish went to the Colonel and demonstrated for him in Bonn. The Colonel liked the new Sturmgewehr and the ammo very much, but told them they had the wrong caliber. The standard caliber was cal. 7.62, but this new Spanish ammunition was cal. 7.92. So they went back to Spain and changed the gun, the magazine, and, of course, they had to make new ammunition. They also made new firing tables, it took a year. After which they had their new CETME ammunition in cal. 7.62.

SAR: This was not yet 7.62 NATO ammunition, correct?

Visser: Correct. After the Spanish finished their new ammo, they brought it and the guns back to the German Colonel, who turned white and said, “Oh my God. I should have told you that 7.62 also requires a new case: the T65 case.” The Spanish group was beside itself, returned to Madrid and decided that it was all over. The gun was mathematically designed for a low powered cartridge and the 7.62 NATO had much more power, so it needed a totally new gun. But one of the bosses at the Madrid factory pointed out that the factory had good relations with the American military attaché, since they had just received an order to develop caseless rifle ammunition and caseless 20mm. The boss said, “Go and get a barrel and 1,000 7.62 NATO rounds.” Which they got from the U.S. The CETME with that barrel fired 600 7.62 rounds before the gun fell apart. The cartridge was far too powerful, since the gun was designed for a lighter round. The German engineers rebuilt and strengthened the housing as the German army wanted to arm their soldiers with them.

They had contact with the Heckler & Koch people, who were all old Mauser people working in two wooden barracks, making tools for pressings and so forth, and that’s how I came into contact with Heckler & Koch. The Germans at the Weapons Department in Bonn were always making changes in the gun, and it was Heckler & Koch who made the changes on the CETME. I told the CETME people, “You guys have no sales organization….let NWM have the rights to act for you all over the world.” They told me I had to pay for the right, which was no problem for NWM. They gave me the world rights for the CETME rifle, excluding Spain, Portugal and Germany. The rest of the world was ours. They also said that if I wanted to set up production elsewhere, they would help us get started.

In the meantime they were still working on the guns…making a new grip and so on…they had spent millions making the guns and making the changes. I went to the Dutch army, who agreed to test out the gun with all kinds of different ammo, including French steelcased ammo. They fired the steel ammo. When the trigger was pulled, there was a BIG noise, the rate of fire was 1,800 rounds per minute, and about half of the empty steelcases got stuck in the wooden wall. I told the Colonel to stop the test…it was a hopeless case. As it turned out, they never actually manufactured the steel ammo, but it was a hopeless case nonetheless.

To make the gun work, they had added grooves in the chamber, so that some of the gas would press on the exterior of the case to release it. The main fault of the CETME rifle is that as soon as the climate gets moist, firing the gun without immediately cleaning it results in sticky cases. This design of the roller locking system is only good for lightly-powered ammunition. We had a very fortunate thing happen; the Germans had improved the gun enough so that it functioned, but later on I learned that Heckler & Koch had a trick up their sleeves. All of the guns were tested, and they had seven different-sized sets of rollers, so that if there was a problem they would put other rollers on the locking mechanism. They would change the rollers until everything worked properly!

SAR: Very pragmatic from the point of view of a demonstrator. What year was that?

Visser: 1958 as I remember. Because the Germans had changed the rollers and had gotten the first order for 400,000 rifles, the whole world wanted the CETME rifle in the form of the G3. They had to say no to worldwide orders, because they didn’t have the rights to sell outside of Spain, Portugal and Germany, I did! We did have plans to make the rifle outside of Spain, but I stopped those plans because I felt the design was not good. I got a call from Bonn, it was my good friend from the Ministry who said, “Henk, we cannot have this. Here we are, a great nation, and we cannot sell our own rifle. I’ll offer you a deal: I know you want to make 20mm ammo for those thousand Starfighters we have bought.” They were so far back, they bought 1,000 Starfighters and they didn’t know what gun was in it! He said, “You’ll get 33% of all orders for 20mm ammo if you relinquish the rights to sell the CETME rifle.” I said, “OK.” He immediately went and got his secretary to type up a document saying that I would forever get 33% of all the 20mm orders for the Germans. ANY 20mm ammo. It saved our neck. It was one of the best days of my life…I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the end of our CETME involvement.

SAR: You were the link between CETME and Heckler & Koch?

Visser: Partly, yes. Heckler & Koch were not big shots. Their company wasn’t large enough at that time to make the big deals. They grew because of all these orders that came in from everywhere. Later they designed many important weapon systems. It was really something to see.

SAR: Henk, I would like to come back to the rifle design programs in more depth, later. If you share your experience as a collector with our readers, I am sure they would be interested. This may seem somewhat insensitive, but to obtain your collection must have cost a fortune; far above the income of a young Dutch boy who was on the Nazi death row.

Visser: Yeah, that’s about right. I have been very fortunate in my business decisions and made some very nice commissions. We can come back to that business later.

SAR: So, what was your passion?

Visser: Collecting guns. Well…really the military guns. That was the start, anything military I could get. Later it was the Dutch firearms and I sold my military collection to Bonn, it was the beginning of the museum they have now in Koblenz. 849 of my guns are still there – even my Gatling gun – the beautiful brand-new Gatling gun with the carriage and the ammunition car.

SAR: What was the Gatling, a British one?

Visser: No, an American one. The Colt 1883 model with the jacket around the barrel, and the tripod. One day in a military base, somewhere in America, near Picatinny I believe, a sergeant was cleaning up the attic, and he found this Gatling gun. It was brand new but completely taken apart, no one had ever looked at it. He went to his Colonel who said to get rid of it. And there, magically, was Val! (laughs) And who do you think bought it on the spot?

SAR:(Dolf) Yes, Val would certainly have been there! (We are discussing the late Val Forgette of Navy Arms, another international arms dealer of the good old days.)

Visser: I knew Val very well and he sold the gun to me. Very cheap, I might add. It was really a big affair, and when I left NWM they wanted to take it, but instead I sold it to Bonn, and the Gatling is in their museum today. Two of the magazines disappeared, it is sad that there are always people in museums stealing things. There were many rare guns in the military collection. One that I thought was very rare was a 7.62 NATO Gatling gun from GE. I was the only private guy in the world who had a brand-new one.

SAR: Gatling Gun, you mean an M134 Minigun?

Visser: Yes, I got it out of Vietnam…I had so much stuff there….I was working for Dutch intelligence at the time, so they arranged for a Shell tanker to haul all the stuff I had gotten to Singapore. I had 10 RPG-7 anti-tank launchers, with 200 rounds of HE grenades. The Dutch and the Germans wanted to test them.

SAR: And how about the testing?

Visser: Well, we finally got the shipment and it had to go on the deck of a Dutch destroyer in Singapore. They loaded it from the tanker onto the warship. I had managed to get a lot of interesting items for the collection during my time in Vietnam. With the RPG-7, we had to do some testing for the government. They decided that this test they wanted to run was too big for them and they made a deal with the Germans, who did a tremendously detailed testing. They even tested the glue on the wooden cases, they checked the labels to see where they were made, in Russia or East Germany. I still have one RPG-7 and an inert rocket at home. I was very interested in the American M72 LAW. I once owned six LAWS.

SAR: When did you get into the antique guns?

Visser: Slowly I got more and more interested in the antique guns…I had always hated them, so crazy and ugly they seemed to me…but then, because of my historical interests, I decided to get rid of anything that was non-Dutch. I had the best automatic pistol collection in the world, all the early Mausers, Bittners, Schonbergers, Borschards, Gabbit Fairfaxes, etc, etc. I sold them all in one lot to Dr. Sturgess, a good friend of mine. He came to my place the first time and I opened drawers for him, and he started sweating, he was going crazy. He was…really, I’ve never seen anybody so excited by my collection.

SAR: (Dolf) Even the Maxim automatic pistols came from you? I have them in my latest book.

Visser: Yes, Dolf, the Maxims as well! I was collecting automatic pistols when nobody was interested. I went to every gun shop in Switzerland where they hadn’t had the German occupiers to take everything, and there were a hell of a lot of people saying, “That old gun there, 150 francs and you can take it, with ammo too.” Those days are gone, you know. There was a gunsmith who I was talking about Lugers with, about how the prices of the Lugers had started going up, and he said, “You know, I have Luger serial number 0001, which was presented to my neighbor, an officer, in front of the troops.” It was the first Luger that the Swiss Army officially adopted. I said “That’s interesting, can I see it?” and he brought it to me in the holster. He said, “The normal price for this is 225 francs, but if you give me 275 then it’s yours.” Those were better days, you know? You would go into a gunshop and there would be a Mondragon rifle with special bayonet. It just doesn’t happen like that anymore.

SAR: Basically Henk, all the money you made you put into collecting guns?

Visser: Everything. I had no capital, no shares; I only had substantial commissions from sales. Eventually I sold my pistols and all my special ammo to Geoff Sturgess…but…it’s like a sickness, you know? I was at the Las Vegas Antique Show and there was a very rare Dutch gun there. It looks like a single-shot pistol, but it’s a three-shot pistol with a little channel where the powder goes for the first, second and third shot, and there is a Maastricht mark under the barrel. It was from the Funderburg Collection, a very famous collection. It’s in a catalog. I bought it for a lot of money! It’s crazy!

SAR: You’re preaching to the choir when you talk to Class 3 owners in the United States. You did a series of books on your collection of Dutch guns….

Visser: Yes, they are available commercially, but are out of print at the moment. The set weighs 22 kilos. Now I’m writing more books, one with the names of all of the Dutch gun makers, about 1,400 of them. Another book project that I was working on with two technicians, both specialists with Master’s degrees in History Drs. Martens en Drs. de Vries, was to write the story of Dutch weapons starting at the Napoleonic era. As these books were written in Dutch they will be translated into English and the 3 volumes will be condensed into one. There is another book in English, almost finished, about a very special German – who later became an American – Otto von Lossnitzer, the father of the modern aircraft revolving guns.

Look for a link to the second half of our smallarmsreview.com interview with Henk Visser in an upcoming SAR newsletter when we look at Vietnam, Oerlikon, the changes to the Stoner 63 system and the innovative Mecar rifle grenade programs, as well as Visser’s work to restore Dutch firearms in Russian museums. – Dan Shea

Hitler’s Germany in 1941 was heady with success. The war was going well on all fronts and the German Wehrmacht was rolling across Europe, Asia, and Africa like a juggernaut. Faced with a military buildup unprecedented in the history of the planet, German industry responded with a combination of spectacular Teutonic engineering and frenetic enthusiasm.

For all their depraved politics and hopelessly corrupt morality, the Nazis exhibited a degree of military innovation the ramifications of which are still resonating today. Across the spectrum of battlespace the German war machine transformed the way war was fought. From combat aircraft and U-boats to armored vehicles and small arms the wartime German industrial complex taught the world how to think outside the box. Nowhere was this more typified than in their belt-fed machineguns.

The MG 34 was the world’s first truly general-purpose machine gun. Capable of being fired on the move during an assault and serviced in a pinch by a single soldier, the MG 34 was the world’s first effort at filling the need for an anti-aircraft weapon, a tripod-mounted crew served support gun, a tank MG, and a man-portable weapon capable of accompanying troops on an assault in a single small arms platform. While it came close to being all those things, the gun hearkened back to an interwar period when building guns out of big blocks of steel was still a luxury a modern military might enjoy. Faced with a demand that hopelessly outstripped supply, German industry went back to the drawing board.

The wartime firm of Johannes Grossfuss Metall Fabrik designed and produced the MG 42 as an eventual successor to the MG 34. Development began in early 1937 and eventually culminated in troop trials in 1941. Before the war ended 400,000 guns were produced. Curiously, Johannes Grossfuss Metall Fabrik had never designed a firearm before. As such, they started literally with a blank page and brought a fresh perspective to the art of gun design that many of their gun-building forebears lacked. The resulting delayed roller blowback action incorporated into a package comprised primarily of sheet metal stampings was both ingenious and ideally suited for mass production. In the MG 42, locking was accomplished by means of a pair of rollers that settled into a corresponding pair of recesses in the breech face. These rollers forced the bolt to remain in battery until chamber pressures had dropped to levels sufficiently benign to facilitate safe extraction. The resulting machine gun was reliable, supremely lethal, and relatively cheap. In the last months of the war German engineers began adapting this recoil system to a shoulder-fired, magazine-fed platform.

As the war wound to a close, the roller-locked assault rifle chambered for the then-revolutionary 7.92x33mm cartridge was in prototype stage. In the disorder and chaos that was post-war Europe the designers of this new weapon took their design to Spain. They subsequently perfected the system and produced the gun as the Spanish CETME battle rifle chambered in 7.62x51mm. In an odd turn of events, the design was then purchased and brought back to Germany where it was tweaked here and there and then mass-produced by Heckler and Koch as the G 3. The G 3 was successfully marketed and sold around the world.

As military technology advanced, the H&K engineers adapted their platform to new missions and applications. The MP 5 represented the basic G 3 action chambered for the 9mm Parabellum cartridge while the HK 33 incorporated the same action chambered in 5.56x45mm. While relatively widely distributed, the HK 33 never quite found the commercial legs as did its larger and smaller brethren.

During the golden years of black rifle collecting in the late seventies and early eighties it was a buyer’s market. There were not very many commercial offerings and a relatively small pool of committed American enthusiasts willing to put money on semiautomatic versions of contemporary military small arms. The basic selection at the time consisted of the AR-15 (made at the time solely by Colt), the ArmaLite AR-180, the Israeli Galil, the Steyr AUG, a smattering of Valmet Kalashnikov clones, and the H&K 91, 93, and 94 in .308, .223, and 9mm respectively.

An HK 93 could be picked up in the early eighties for about $600. The import ban under the first President Bush restricted foreign made “assault weapons” and served to drive the prices of these early imports up to a point where it was just not fun to buy and shoot them any more.

Now fast forward twenty-five years and the most amazing thing has happened. A hybrid clone of that very HK 93 is back on the U.S. market and it sports about the same price tag it did a quarter century ago, not even adjusted for inflation.

Century Arms has carved out a niche market by taking de-milled military weapons from overseas stores and resurrecting them on U.S. made receivers. The list of guns of this sort that they offer is long and this author recently had opportunity to pick up one of their HK 93 clones and was very pleasantly surprised at the product.

There have been some legitimate concerns about the quality of domestically produced HK clones from a variety of manufacturers as well as some specific complaints about Century products in the past. While addressing those issues is beyond the scope of this article, rest assured that this author’s C93 clone is the cat’s pajamas.

The fit and finish are fairly nice. There is a set of markings on the side of the magazine well that looks like it was removed with a Dremel tool and my particular rifle has a tiny aesthetic welding flaw where the sight meets the receiver. There is also an equally esoteric nick in the sheet metal around the ejection port. That having been said, c’mon, I got an HK 93 clone for $600 bucks. So long at it is reliable and effective I’ll cut them some slack.

The guts and furniture are original H&K dated in the mid to late seventies and are in nicely serviceable condition with some scant finish wear. The magazine is of the lightweight aluminum forty-round variety and sports an ingenious dual spring design that gives the mag a little extra boost when fully loaded. After more than a thousand rounds I have yet to have a problem with mine.

The icing on the cake is that the rifle comes stock with an original factory full auto bolt carrier. What that means is that you can take this low-end $600 clone rifle, drop in a registered trigger pack, and enjoy some classic full auto sweetness without having to dump more than two grand on a new 5.56mm host. The cyclic rate on full auto is a sedate 600 rounds per minute or so right out of the box.

Accuracy in semiautomatic is about what you would expect. It’s based on an assault rifle. It carries a lot of rounds and hits reasonable-sized targets out to reasonable distances. If you want to hit a dime at a hundred meters, invest in a decent bolt action sniper system. If you want to while away an afternoon turning bulk .223 into noise, this is your plaything.

The basic H&K chassis is a generation behind the M4 as regards ergonomics. The sex appeal of jacking the bolt back via the left-sided charging handle for every single magazine change grows tiresome on about the third mag and you have my pity if you have to manage this task for any extended period left-handed. The stock C93 lacks the flapper magazine release but anyone who has managed an AR or M4 does just fine with the same right-sided button on the magazine well. Original magazines are spendy and at times tough to find. However, there are already aftermarket synthetic versions showing up that even sport those nifty locking lugs from the G 36 mags that allow you to hook multiple units together if desired. The U.S. gun market is awash in innovation and a little Google Fu will turn up more ditzels to hang onto your new C93 than any of us might ever seriously need.

The original H&K roller locked rifles are legacy systems these days. The guts are made of steel rather than aluminum or plastic and the practical tactical stuff is a little slower than what you might find with a tricked out M4. However, it is still a very cool black rifle currently available at a very reasonable price. If you are fortunate enough to own a registered sear or trigger pack and you want to add a whole new dimension to your full auto shooting experience without having to hock the car or sell a kidney, then the Century Arms C93 Sporter is the new black rifle toy for you. It is well worth the money.

By Jean Huon

Before and during WW II, Germany developed several programs of assault rifles using conventional or intermediate cartridges:

• Mauser prototype in 7x39mm, with gas action at the mouth of the barrel like the G41.
• FG 42/I and FG 42/II used by airborne troops and shooting 7.92mm Mauser ammunition. But most of the other models used a single intermediate ammunition: 7.92mm Kurz.
• MKb or Maschinenkarabiner (automatic rifle) developed by Walther and Haënel, which produced the MKb 42(W) and MKb 42(H). After some improvements, the last was used as the MP 43, MP 44 and StG 44,
• other prototypes developed by Gustloff and Erma,
• StG 45(H) created by Haënel that looks like a StG 44 whose mechanism is reversed (cylinder below the barrel).
• StG 45(M), initially called Gerät 06H, this assault rifle was developed by Mauser. Its progress report would certainly have allowed its production during the summer 1945 if the war had continued.

But in April 1945, the allied Armies penetrated deeply in Germany and the hours of the Third Reich are counted.

An intact factory

General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division penetrates deep in the Black Forest and arrives on April 20th, 1945 at Oberndorf, a small town of the Wurttemberg area at the edge of Neckar. It is there that is established since 1872, the Mauser company. On their arrival, the French note that the production equipment is practically intact, although a certain number of machines, plans and prototypes were evacuated towards the Austrian Alps in a railway train that the Allies captured on June 1, 1945.

The war is completed in Europe, but the French Army must be rebuilt and be reequipped. Although France profits from the American assistance, it has lost much at a great cost and headquarters looks about the Mauser factory who could ensure assembly of weapons which are lacking to French troops; especially as the war continues in Asia and Indo-China should be reconquered.

The factory is then managed by a French officer, Major Michon, who supervises a German director, Doctor Harnisch. The French gave orders to Mauser to assemble under their control a variety of small arms from spare parts held in stock:

• 51,000 P38 pistols
• 18,000 to 20,000 HSc pistols,
• 1,000 W.T.P. pistols,
• 3,000 Lüger P08 pistols,
• 48,115 K98 k carbines.

The research department is also reactivated and develops a .22 Long Rifle rim fire repeating carbine for training. It was adopted as the Mauser Modèle 45 and later became the MAS 45. Other prototypes were also developed.

But the use of Mauser factory by the French is not well appreciated by the Soviets who protest and order the destruction of the factory.

Before the factory buildings were destroyed in July 1946, the French took care to recover many prototypes, drawings and machines that were dispersed to various factories in France. The DEFA (Direction des Etudes et Fabrications d’Armement) now managed all research. The German research department from Mauser (138 engineers and technicians “under contract”) was invited to follow the tools to France.

Transfer to Mulhouse

In Mulhouse (Alsace), a team of German technicians placed under the direction of MM. Vörgrimmler, Löffler and Kunert continue the research.

The establishment where they work is installed in a former artillery shell factory. It becomes the FOMHAR and its activities are divided into two specific branches: the stamping of artillery shell and the study of prototypes of small arms.

In 1947 or 1948, the company name of the establishment is modified and it becomes the Centre d’Etudes d’Armement de Mulhouse (CEAM), and is then changed again in 1952 to Atelier de Fabrication de Mulhouse (AME).

The small arms branch of the Mulhouse establishment concentrated their work on several projects that included pistol, submachine gun, automatic carbine, semiautomatic rifle, assault rifle, light machine gun, big bore machine gun and automatic cannons (20 and 30 mm) until the closing of the establishment in 1967.

It is interesting to note that the preponderance of the documents examined in the files of the AME (technical notes, correspondence, drawings, etc.) are very often written in German.

The majority of the produced light weapons use a mechanism derived from that of StG 45(M), with a mobile breech with delayed opening and semi-rigid locking by side rollers. This mechanism appears on a 7.92mm Mauser semiautomatic rifle resembling the G 43, a carbine in .30 M1 and particularly an assault rifle which precedes already what will become the CETME rifle.

The weapon is fitted with a collapsible stock whose design is close to that of the MP 40. The cylindrical frame is lengthened with a perforated cooling jacket that contains the barrel and a tube that receives the bolt carrier. The cocking handle is located on the left and it is directed upward at a 45 degree angle. The operating parts comprise a bolt carrier, a mobile head with two locking rollers and a striker carrier. The barrel is screwed in a ring where it also locks the bolt. A box contains the trigger mechanism and receives the pistol grip. The weapon is fitted with a bipod and is fed by a detachable curved magazine introduced through the bottom.

The first model is completed in November 1948, and fires an intermediate cartridge of the 7.65mm Model 1948 (7.65×35). It is followed a short time later by other versions in .30 M1: carbines CEAM Type 1950 A and B. A report/ratio of test dated May 3, 1950 shows that these versions functioned normally, but that one had not been able to cure a problem of bolt bounce at the time of closing. On the following models, a braking pawl solved the problem.

The rifles/machine guns in .30 M1 are developed until 1950. Then the French Army changed direction and is interested in assault rifles firing a conventional cartridge. Although the program officially appears on July 10, 1952, the first prototypes were developed in 1951.

Spanish Recruitment

Meanwhile, the Spanish military authorities created in 1949 the Centro de Estudios Tecnicos de Materiales Especiales or CETME, placed under the direction of General Cantero and they seek to enlist the services of German technicians. Ludwig Vorgrimmler is contacted but the French refuse to deliver a passport to him and he leaves France clandestinely for Spain. He arrives at CETME in Madrid on June 1, 1950 and it is there that he finds fellow engineers that worked in all of the German armament industry, including engineer Heynen.

To answer a military requirement program, CETME was charged to study and develop an assault rifle having the following characteristics: maximum weight 4.5 kg, possibility of selective fire and a shooting range of 800 to 1,000 meters. The need was a rifle having the same weight and recoil as the StG 44 but shooting at double the range.

The first prototype is made but encounters numerous problems. Many parts are hand made with makeshift solutions. For example, the magazines are hand made with sheet metal recovered from oil barrels.

One year later, the prototype is finally ready and it is presented to General Franco. It is followed of a preproduction run of 30 weapons and new ammunition was developed by the Palencia cartridge factory. These special ammunitions have an extraordinarily long projectile. The stability of the bullet (very light for speed), is obtained by the use of an aluminum core and a copper jacket. This ammunition was made in two versions and was developed by Dr. Voss and his collaborators: 7.92×40 and 7.62×40.

CETME developed the Modelo 1, an experimental rifle, which employed the 7.92×40 cartridge. This rifle resembled much of the weapons developed in Mulhouse. The French establishment will continue on its side the development of assault rifles based on the same principle until 1960. Modelo 1 functions with gas action. Its mechanism is thickset and it is fed by a curved 30-round magazine.

The Modelo 2 in 1952, again in 7.92×40, with a refined silhouette, finds an operation similar to the CEAM Type 1950 rifle, with a delayed opening bolt and semi-rigid locking by side rollers.

CETME now relied on several subcontractors and coordinated the production and the final assembly of the weapons for testing. To conclude the project, they called upon other arsenals and specialized companies in mechanics, stamping and aeronautics for assistance.

The Spanish tests revealed a very good performance with light recoil, flat trajectory, good precision and an excellent capacity of penetration with a helmet being pierced at 1,000 meters. Some of the results equaled those obtained by a machine gun: a good shot would have a 50% chance to achieve a hit placed at 1,000 meters with a one-second burst of 9 shots.

Other countries were interested in the CETME rifle, particularly the Federal Republic of Germany. The German Ministry of the Interior was very interested in the CETME rifle to equip its police forces. However, a condition that had to be met was in regard to the ammunition: the 7.62mm NATO cartridge had to be used.

The bolt mechanism of the new rifle allows the use of ammunition with variable power by varying the angle of the bearing surfaces of the locking rollers.

The Spaniards then developed a rifle known as the Modelo A as an alternative of the Modelo 2; supplied with a slightly curved magazine. The rifle now has a carrying handle and preserves the folding hand-shield being able to be used as bipod. The weapon fires from now on a 7.62×51 cartridge with a reduced load called 7.62mm CETME-NATO, associated with a light bullet fitted with a mixed core (plastic and lead).

The firm of Madrid yields the production license of its assault rifle to the Dutch company NWM, which then undertakes to carry out demonstrations abroad. Tests take place in Germany, Chile, United States, France, Netherlands, Philippines and Portugal.

After a short time, the CETME rifle is again presented in Germany. At this time the Defense Ministry is interested in order to equip the new German Army because the FN refused to yield to them the license to produce the FAL (G1). Several rifles were tested: SIG SG 510-4 (G2), CETME (G3) and AR-10 (G4).

Altered, the CETME Modelo A became Modelo B, which was adopted in Spain in 1958. The weapon is fitted with a perforated jacket which extends the frame, a bipod and a tangent sight. The magazine is slightly curved and there exist two types of magazines of 20 or 30-round capacity. The pistol grip is metal with plastic inserts. From now on, it functions with a closed breech, both for single shot or burst fire, which was not the case of its predecessor.

Come Back Over the Rhine River

Germany, which was interested in work of CETME since 1954, adopted this version in 1959 under the name of G3. The license for commercial sales held by NWM (a Dutch firm) for all the countries except Spain, Portugal and Germany is repurchased in 1960 by the German government. Manufacture is entrusted to a group of German industrialists and the final assembly and the control of work of the program are assured by the company Heckler & Koch; a young company of former employees of the Mauser Company that manufactured components for sewing machines.

The Germans improve the G3 by modifying the operating system, the recoil spring is reinforced and the weapon can now fire the 7.62mm NATO standard ammunition.

Collaboration between CETME and H&K (sealed by two agreements between the two governments in 1959 and 1962) continues and in 1964, CETME introduces Modelo C, which is practically identical to the G3 firing the 7.62mm NATO standard ammunition. The two weapons now have a wooden hand guard and the bipod disappeared. The Spanish weapon is equipped with a rear sight with four eyepieces on a rotary rise in the vertical plan, while the G3 has a formed rise of an oblique drum to a bead and three eyepieces, rotary in the horizontal plane.

The CETME was the link that ensured the connection between the prototypes developed in Mulhouse starting from the StG 45(M) to the G3. The Modelo C was produced until 1976.

CETME Modelo C

The CETME Modelo C is in 7.62mm caliber and the barrel has 4 right-hand grooves with a pitch of 305mm (against 240mm on the Modelo B) and a flash hider/grenade launcher is screwed on to the muzzle.

The receiver frame is made of sheet metal worked by successive passages in presses, then welded partly low in the median plane. Under the frame is a case joining together the trigger mechanism and the magazine well. The pistol grip is made of plastic, fixed with a longitudinal screw.

The selector switch is located at the upper part of the pistol grip, on the left and marked from the top downwards with T (single shot), S (safety) and R (burst).

These controls are different from those of the G3 which is marked from the top to downwards with S (safety), E (single shot) and F (burst).

The supply of ammunition takes place by means of magazines. For the CETME, there exist two types of magazines: one of 5-rounds for garrison service and one of 20-rounds for combat.

The cocking lever folds and is placed on the left side guide tube located above the gun.

The bolt group is made of several elements which are: the bolt body, locking piece, locking rollers and bolt-head. The recoil spring is at the back of the bolt body.

Sights are composed of a protected front sight and a rear sight with four revolving blades graduated for 100, 200, 300 and 400 meters. The blade for shooting at one hundred meters has a bead out of V to facilitate instinctive shooting. The other blades carry an eyepiece.

The forearm is made out of wood of poplar, but on request Modelo C could also receive a perforated metal jacket with a non-removable folding bipod like the Modelo B.

The stock is also made of poplar and is fixed at the back of the frame by a metal support and contains the buffer. The connection between the stock holder and the frame is ensured by two metal pins that also ensure the fixing of the trigger mechanism case.

Accessories

• Removable and folding bipod with telescopic legs, it is mounted on the ring holding the front sight. It makes the rifle able to shoot in a 17 degree horizontal sector and 7 degree vertical.
• Cleaning kit located at the front of the cocking lever guide tube. It is contained in an aluminum tube fitted with a screwed plug and is composed of a flue brush and a rag holder with string.
• Scope for day shooting.
• Philips infra-red night scope.
• Blank firing attachment
• Fabric protective cover.
• Plastic plug for the barrel mouth.
• Carrying sling.
• Magazine loader.
• Bayonet with 22.5 cm (8.86 inches) blade. The handle has squared black plastic platelets. The scabbard is of olive plastic with khaki nylon belt holder.

Disassembly

• Remove magazine and visually check the chamber make sure gun there is no cartridge in the chamber.
• Extract the two pins that affix the stock to the receiver and place them into the two tubular rivet receptacle holders in the stock.
• Remove the stock and the recoil spring.
• Hinge down the pistol grip assembly.
• Using the cocking lever, retract the bolt assembly.
• To remove mobile breech, bring the head of the breech forward and to make it swivel 180 degrees.
• Remove the head of the breech.
• Turn the striker holder and withdraw it.
• Extract the striker and its spring.
• The reassembly is carried out in the inverse order

CETME continued the development of individual weapons and created Modelo D and Modelo E rifles, which were improvements of the previous models but were not adopted. It then developed the Modelo L, a weapon firing 5.56×45 ammunition. The development of this weapon began in 1966 and was adopted in 1980 for the Spanish Army.

CETME also developed the AMELI, a mini MG 42 also shooting the 5.56×45 ammunition.

In 1996, the Spanish Army opened a contest for the adoption of a new 5.56mm assault rifle and tested the following weapons: HK G36 E (Germany), Steyr AUG 77 (Austria), FNC (Belgium), Diemaco C-7 (Canada), Galil (Israel) and SIG 550 (Switzerland). In 1999, the G36 E is chosen.

CETME Modelo C
Caliber: 7.62mm
Ammunition: 7.62mm NATO
Overall length: 1.015 m
Barrel length: 0.305 m
Weight unloaded: 4.200 kg
Magazine capacity: 5 and 20 rounds
Cyclic rate of fire: 550-650 rpm

Imagine standing on the Tee area of your favorite Par 4 hole and wishing you could get to the green in 1. (Putting for Eagle is something that most of us never have the chance do). You reach into your bag and select your 20-inch Colt H-Bar. As you drop your Top-Flite XL-3000 ball into the Bloom muzzle device, you read the wind and aim a little to the left to compensate for it. With a hollow sounding thump your ball takes flight and bounces just short of the green, rolling up beside the pin. It looks like another day of shooting under par.

We don’t know how your local golf course will feel about using the Bloom Automatic Golf Ball Launcher but we have yet to encounter a shooting range that doesn’t allow it.

The Bloom Automatic Golf Ball Launcher is a muzzle attachment designed to be used with several firearms. Rather than having a dedicated thread that must be matched to a particular firearm, this device will function with any standard 22mm flash hider or grenade launcher. It simply slides over the factory flash hider or grenade launcher and is secured with dog-point set screws in the corresponding grooves. Unlike cup-point set screws, there should be no scratching or marring of the original finish.

The firearms the Bloom device can be used with include, but are not limited to, the following unmodified firearms; Yugo SKS, AR-15, M16, FAL, Galil, CETME, G-3 and MAS 49/56. It will also function on the 1903 Springfield, M1 Garand and M1A / M14 when used in conjunction with their grenade launching attachments. They also recently added the correct flash hiders for an AK47 to use with this system.

After securing the launcher to the firearm, all that is necessary is a bucket of golf balls and a corresponding number of blanks. For obvious reasons this device should NEVER be used with live ammunition. A golf ball is dropped into the launcher and the blank round is loaded into the chamber. To fire, hold the rifle on your shoulder in a slightly elevated position so the ball will not roll out.

The distance the ball will travel depends entirely upon the caliber and the barrel length of the firearm used. With a 20-inch barrel on an AR-15 the balls can fly as far as 350 yards. When used with an 11.5-inch barrel, the distance was reduced to somewhere in the area of 100 – 150 yards. With an SKS they will fly in excess of 500 yards; almost completely out of sight. We can only assume that when used with the M1A or M1 Garand they will travel further. Standard blanks are used in conjunction with the Bloom Automatic Golf Ball Launcher and the use of grenade launching blanks is not recommended.

Something that has to be considered when firing golf balls is that they react unpredictably when they strike a hard surface. It would not be recommended to fire at a hard surface where there is the potential for the ball to bounce back towards the shooter or any spectators.

During our testing we found it fun to place several 5-gallon pails in a large area and try to see if we could drop any balls in the pails. Other suggested “sporting” options would be to use 55-gallon drums or paint large circles in the field or range in a bulls-eye fashion and, in a 21st Century version of “Jarts,” hits could be scored by their proximity to the target. While there is no tactical factor being sold with this attachment, the fun factor is certainly high, and with a little imagination several competitive and recreational uses can be discovered.

In support of this neat accessory, Bloom Automatic is going to offer blank crimp dies for sale. This will assist the reloaders who wish to manufacture their own loads instead of purchasing factory blanks, which at times can be elusive and expensive. Some factory blanks can be corrosive and reloading will solve that concern.

There has been a lot of discussion about specific launching accessories and their rulings within the Technology Branch of the ATF. As of this writing, ATF has ruled that the Bloom Automatic Golf Ball Launcher does not constitute a firearm or a destructive device. This conclusion followed a 6-month discussion period with the ATF legal department and they have even issued a ruling letter to this effect. A copy of this ruling is available at the Bloom Automatic website:

There are several new platforms for the launcher to be used on and they now include the 1911 pistol and some of the MAC family of firearms. All of this new information is available on their website as well. The price for the standard launcher, as tested in Small Arms Review magazine is $40 with an additional $5 shipping fee.

Bloom Automatic, LLC Dept. SAR 402 2nd Street Monongahela, PA 15063 E-Mail: bloomautomatic@yahoo.com Website: www.bloomautomatic.com

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