By Pierangelo Tendas

Unlike former fellow Axis powers Germany and Japan, Italy was never forced to disarm and disband its forces in the aftermath of World War II. The events of the late stages of the war and the location at the center of the Mediterranean Sea made the country, now a republic, a key ally in a new world whose climate was rapidly turning chilly as the Cold War mounted.

The post-WWII Italian military was largely equipped with U.S. handovers, specifically M1 Garand .30-06 caliber rifles, for which Winchester also donated manufacturing machinery to Beretta and Breda. When NATO adopted the new 7.62×51mm as its standard unified service rifle caliber in 1954, the Italian Army arsenal in Terni took up the job of converting existing Garand rifles to the new cartridge, while Beretta and Breda started the manufacture of 7.62mm caliber M1s for foreign sales, most notably for Denmark.

The lessons learned of WWII, however, ushered in a new era where bolt-action, semi-automatic rifles, and light automatic rifles would be replaced – at least tentatively – by select-fire individual weapons that would cover most if not all roles in modern infantry. If the Belgian FN FAL and the Spanish CETME – improved to become the Heckler & Koch G3 – would become by far the most successful in the category of individual weapons we today know as “battle rifles”, the U.S. would spend years and millions of dollars in an attempt to develop a totally new, totally domestic new service rifle that would still retain as many features of the beloved M1 Garand as possible; the result, the M14, is still controversial among historians and gun enthusiasts alike, and its tenure before replacement was very short if compared to its international counterparts.

Cash-strapped post-war Italy had to standardize doing what it could with what it had. A team of Beretta engineers headed by Domenico Salza and Vittorio Valle – both of whom had learned their trade from Tullio Marengoni, Beretta’s head engineer before and during WWII and the inventor of the MAB series of sub-machine guns – was tasked to create a new service rifle for the Italian military that could be produced with existing technologies.

The solution was simple: at first, existing M1 Garand rifles were modified to feed through detachable 20-round, double-stack, single-feed box magazines; the solution, known as the “Garand Type E”, would later be further modified into a select-fire rifle with a shorter handguard and a peculiar muzzle device. The Beretta Modello 1959, or BM59 for short, was born. It’s deployment in the Italian military started in 1962.

IF IT WORKS, DON’T CHANGE IT

The BM59 was designed to be built around an essentially unmodified Garand action and a slightly modified Garand gas system and sear. Taking cues from another firearm that the Italian government had received in droves by the U.S. after WWII – the M1 carbine, and more specifically its select-fire counterpart, the M2 – the Beretta engineering team installed a fire selector on the left side of the receiver which, when switched from “S” (“Semiautomatico”) to “A” (“Automatico”), would activate a U.S. M2 Carbine style disconnector lever assembly, allowing the BM59 to fire in full-automatic, at a cyclic rate of approximately 750 rounds per minute.

As anybody who has ever shoulder-fired 7.62×51mm NATO battle rifle in full-automatic, recoil was harsh… to say the least. In order to mitigate such a punishing factor, Beretta would issue every BM59 with a folding metal bipod, which allowed more accurate semi-automatic fire and provided a stable platform for full-automatic, sustained covering fire; note that back in the day, the standard support weapon for the Italian Armed Forces was the locally-built 7.62×51mm Beretta Mg.42/59 universal machine-gun, which required at least two men to carry and operate at squad level.

Additionally, all BM59 rifles would be equipped from the factory with a muzzle device called “Tri-Compensatore” (“tri-compensator”), which dubbed as a flash hider, muzzle brake, and rifle grenade launcher. Much like many other NATO armies at that time, the Italian military made extensive use of rifle grenades, particularly the 75mm Energa manufactured in Belgium by MECAR and known in the U.S. service as the M28 rifle grenade; the BM59 would, thus, also come equipped with a flip-up grenade leaf sight (“Alidada” in Italian) which, when raised, would also act as a cut-off valve, preventing any gas from reaching the piston.

The grenade sight was pre-set for target at 50, 75, and 100 meters, and marked specifically “Energa” at the bottom. The grenade sight and bipod were all in one assembly with the gas valve and front sight tower; when the Energa grenade was phased out in favor of the improved-capability Super Energa, the leaf sights were replaced with new ones, which were pre-sighted to 75-, 100-, and 120-meter increments.

Being based on the Garand action, the BM59 featured a charging handle on the right side of the receiver, a hold-open button to the left, and the same type of front and adjustable rear sight used on the U.S. M1 rifle. The front-in, rock-back magazine was held in place by a paddle catch to the rear of the magwell; the safety was located in front of the trigger guard, and consisted of a flat plate that could be pushed in and out with the shooter’s index finger. The safety plate was perforated, so that BM59 rifles could be secured with a chain or a metal rod when held on a rack – once again just like the Garand.

Additionally, the BM59 also featured a winter trigger in form of an up-folding lever that would normally lay flat against the bottom of the action, to the right of the trigger guard. When necessary, it could be folded down to allow the BM59 to be fired with mittens or heavy gloves.

THREE SUITS FOR THE SAME RIFLE

The Beretta BM59 rifle would be manufactured in three main variants, the most commonly available being the BM59 ITAL, known by the Italian military simply as the FAL, standing for “Fucile automatico leggero” (“Light automatic rifle”). The BM59 ITAL was the baseline model with a standard fixed stock, which hosted a cleaning and maintenance tool behind a trapdoor in the buttplate. An export version, known as the BM59 Mk.1, came without the distinctive “tri-compensator” device on the muzzle.

The second variant – less common in Italian arsenals, but by far the most popular among troops due to its lower weight and easier maneuverability – was the ITAL-TA, with TA standing for “Truppe Alpine” (“Alpine troops”), initially conceived for the Italian Army’s mountain regiments. The ITAL-TA variant came from factory with a vertical brown plastic pistol grip and a side-folding two-strut metal stock; a variant of the ITAL-TA, known in Italy as the ITAL-Para (from “Paracadutisti”) and marketed internationally as the Mk.3, came with a removable tri-compensator device, turning it into an even more compact package to be secured to a paratrooper’s harness before launch.

Finally, two squad automatic weapon variants were proposed, dubbed the Mk.2 and Mk.4 respectively, with the Mk.2 featuring a full wooden stock and the Mk.4 coming with a brown polymer pistol grip. Both were essentially a baseline BM59 ITAL rifle with a fixed stock and vertical pistol grip, not unlike what the U.S. had experimented with in the M14E2/M14A1 – and not unlike it, the Mk.2 and Mk.4 were lackluster in their intended function due to the limitations of the 20-round magazine. The Italian military never adopted the BM59 Mk.2 and Mk.4; export sales were however made to Indonesia and Nigeria, which later proceeded to manufacture them under license respectively as the SP.3 rifle at the Bandung Weapons Factory (now known as PT Pindad), and as the NR-2 rifle at the Kaduna plant (now known as the Defense Industries Corporation of Nigeria, or DICON), which is why this last pattern is known chiefly as the “Nigerian type.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the BM59 was never adapted or modified for sniper or designated marksman purposes. Being based on an unmodified M1 Garand action, the BM59 ejected spent cases from the top, which meant that it could be reloaded by topping off the magazine with 10-round stripper clips (and, indeed, all BM59 rifles came with a dedicated clip guide), but also that it could only be equipped with a side-mounted scope, much like the M1D Garand. By the 1960s, when the BM59 rifle was introduced in Italian service, this was already an outdated solution; while some pictures do exist of Italian Army paratroopers using side-mounted optics on their BM59 rifles, this was by no means a widely adopted solution, but rather a limited-scale concoction by the most elite frontline units of the Italian military to overcome the limitations of their service rifles.

For the same reason, and unlike the M14, no attempt to turn existing BM59s into DMRs was made after the Italian military switched to 5.56×45mm NATO. Other weapon systems had been adopted to fulfill that niche by that point, and now that the AR-70/90 has been phased out in favor of the ARX-160 and ARX-200, the problem can be officially considered as solved.

THE LAST OF ITS KIND

The Beretta BM59 rifle would go on to serve with the Italian military officially until 1990, being retained as a rear-line and reserve rifle for a few more years afterward, as its replacement with the new AR-70/90 5.56mm weapon system was gradual. This makes the BM59 arguably the longest-serving battle rifle having been based on a classic, pre-WWII stock and action design.

As of today, with the Beretta ARX-160 and ARX-200 being universally in service with the Italian military, and with tens of thousands of AR-70/90 rifles in reserve – so many, indeed, that upon their replacement, the Italian government donated many of them to Albania to facilitate the latter’s transition to NATO standards – the BM59 doesn’t fulfill any operational role in its motherland any longer, and like the M1 Garand, M1 Carbine, MAB sub-machine guns, and Carcano rifles, it is confined to ceremonial duties.

The BM59 also saw distribution on the civilian markets, both in Italy and abroad. In the 1960s, Beretta manufactured very small quantities – approximately 1,700 samples overall – of the BM62 semi-automatic rifle; chambered in 308 Winchester, it came from factory with a five-round magazine and lacked the “tri-compensator” and flip-up grenade sight/gas cutout.

As laws concerning modern sporting rifles relaxed in Italy, and with the country having nothing similar to the “once a machine-gun, always a machine-gun” rule that is in place in the U.S., the Nuova Jäger S.r.l. company would first launch a rifle called the M99 – essentially a Beretta BM62 assembled using old BM59 components – only to flood the Italian civilian market with a huge quantity of proper BM59 rifles from dismissed Italian military stocks, properly refurbished and converted to semi-automatic only. In the following years, other companies, such as Redolfi Armi, did the same. After so many years, the BM59 is no longer an impossible dream for European shooters.

At the same time, Nuova Jäger introduced a line of dedicated accessories for the BM59, including a specific Picatinny scope mount. A similar product is offered by Sadlak Industries in the U.S., providing plenty of clearance for the top-ejecting action while no longer requiring a scope to be side-mounted. Too late to allow the Italian military to convert their BM59s to designated marksman rifles, but welcome news for shooters in Italy and elsewhere that wants to get the best out of their rifle.

As far as American shooters are concerned, BM62 rifles are way more rare and collectable in the U.S. than they are in Europe. BERBEN (the first ever U.S.-based Beretta subsidiary) imported but a few in the 1980s; around the same time, Springfield Armory sold their own BM59-based semi-automatic rifles, assembling them in the U.S. with a mix of locally made and imported parts. Today, for American collectors, the best way to get their hands on a BM59 are the James River Armory build, and parts kits.

by Pierangelo Tendas

From 1969 to 1988, Italy bore the brunt of the wave of political terrorism that hit Europe as a whole: bombings, shootings, kidnappings, robberies, and attacks against law enforcement, politicians, and magistrates by both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing militant armed groups ended up killing over 400 people and wounding well over 1000. On top of this, the 1970s saw the rise of international terrorism, particularly by radical Middle Eastern groups; from 1973 to 1989, attacks by Palestinian terrorists against Italy and Italian assets all through the world killed 66 people and wounded more than 130.

Just like their counterparts more or less all over the world, the Italian firearms industry went on to study numerous solutions that could integrate the lessons learned from both the experience of law enforcement operators and that of the militaries in the recent conflicts around the globe – last but not least, the American experience in Vietnam – into practical solutions to tackle this kind of threat. Some would be more commercially successful than others, although, as in many other cases, more often than not, the most interesting products would be the brainchild of this or that underdog.

Headquartered in the city of Turin, the Società Italiana Tecnologie Speciali S.p.A. company (“Italian Company for Special Technologies, Ltd.”), best known by the acronym SITES, was established and led by two engineers – Roberto Teppa and Claudio Gritti, with a third engineer, Franco Manassero, acting as the CEO – spent some time evaluating the pros and cons of existing firearms in an attempt to create what would be the best all-round sub-machine gun for all law enforcement uses… from patrol (most law enforcement back in the day, and still today, relying on SMGs as their patrol long guns in lieu of the shotguns and semi-automatic carbines more popular in the U.S.) to close protection, from special operations to counter-insurgency.

The first iteration of their project, called the Spectre Model 2, was first showcased in 1983 and began production in 1985. By 1988, a few modifications concerning the manufacturing specs of certain components were implemented; the changes are detailed in our article by J.M. Ramos published on SAR V4N8 (May 2001), Volume 4. The result, dubbed the Model 4 – or SITES Spectre M4 for short – was manufactured by SITES from 1988 to 1998, with some variants still being assembled as late as in 2001.

Italian Innovation

In the highly competitive field of small arms manufacturing of the 1980s, the SITES Spectre was a blend of tradition and innovation. Built around a stamped steel receiver, with a trigger group assembly manufactured out of the same materials and very little synthetic components outside of the pistol grip and its foregrip, the Spectre wasn’t a featherweight by a long shot, weighing in at 2.9 kilograms (about 6.4 pounds) when empty.

What made it absolutely unique was its technical layout. Teppa and Gritti wanted the SITES Spectre to be ready to deploy and operate at a moment’s notice, without sacrificing performance, reliability, or safety. As strange as it seems, they did so by doing without a manual safety. The SITES Spectre was the world’s first sub-machine gun – and as of today, it remains the only mass-produced SMG – to employ a SA/DA trigger with no external safety, replaced by a decocker.

A half-moon selector, located right above the trigger guard on both sides and activated by the shooter’s index finger, only provided two positions – “S” for semi-automatic, and “F” for full-automatic. An ambidextrous lever located at thumb reach over the pistol grip could be activated to decock the gun, requiring a deliberate, long trigger pull to fire off the first shot, with all subsequent shots being fired in single-action. This made accidental or negligent discharges of the SITES Spectre basically impossible while still keeping the gun always ready for action.

The SITES Spectre was a hammer-fired, delayed-blowback, closed bolt design, with a peculiar two-part bolt and a dual recoil spring. When a round is chambered, the front portion of the bolt, which also houses the firing pin and the extractor, moves forward while the rear portion remains locked back, engaged to the sear, and acts as a hammer, to be released on the striker when the trigger is pulled. Both components travel rearwards together after the SMG is fired, but once the empty case is extracted and ejected, only the front portion slams back forward, loading a fresh round in chamber while the rear portion engages the sear and stays locked back until the trigger is pulled again. The timing of the interaction between these two separate masses creates the opening delay that makes the SITES Spectre safe for use in all calibers it was built for – but we’ll talk about those later.

Additionally, the two-part bolt was advertised as a “forced convection” device, a safety feature against overheating: the alternate movement of the two components would pump air around the chamber and the barrel, reducing the temperature of the system during sustained fire and thus the danger of a cook-off. That may seem redundant – a closed-bolt firearm is definitely more prone to cook-off than an open-bolt firearm, but a sub-machine gun is hardly the kind of weapon that will likely experience a cook-off – but, if anything, the bolt design also had the advantage of reducing moving masses at any given time, thus making the SITES Spectre extremely stable and controllable, with very low felt recoil and muzzle climb, and reliable even with high or very high-pressure ammunition (it was rated for 9mm Luger up to +P+ by the Italian military and government entities that procured it.)

Readily Ambidextrous, Suppressor-ready

Aside from the previously mentioned ambidextrous selector and decocker, the only other controls on the SITES Spectre are the non-reciprocating charging handle and the magazine release catch.

The former is located on top of the receiver and consists of a flat polymer lever with two serrated studs on both sides. An improvement from the first-iteration Model 2 (which featured an UZI-style cocking knob), the charging handle of the SITES Spectre M4 can be operated by the shooter’s index finger and thumb, with either hand, and doesn’t interfere with the sighting plan, nor with the position of the buttstock.

The magazine release is a flat button located within the trigger guard, just behind the magazine well, and by pushing it with their trigger finger, the shooter releases the hook that retains the magazine in place. Both controls can be operated by left-handed or right-handed shooters, making the SITES Spectre one of the very first fully ambidextrous firearms of modern times.

The SITES Spectre M4 fed through proprietary quad-stack, single-feed magazines manufactured out of sheet metal, inspired (at least in concept, if not officially) by the Finnish Suomi KP/31 “coffin” mags, and offered in two capacities – 30 and 50 rounds. The 30-round magazine was as tall as a pack of cigarettes, while the 50-round mag was as long as a standard 30- or 32-round mag used by any other SMG of the time. Reduced masses made the SITES Spectre more easily concealable – a plus for law enforcement operators working close protection details – while still packing enough ammunition to engage in sudden, high-intensity firefights and get the upper hand.

The SITES Spectre was fitted from factory with a 13 cm (5.11-inch) barrel, with a rather unusual sinusoidal rifling; similar in concept to the Sabatti MRR Multi-Radial Rifling pattern of modern manufacture, the SITES Spectre’s sinusoidal rifling consisted essentially of polygon rifling with softer edges between lands and grooves, which the bullet was thus allowed to fill better, acting as a gas seal as it traveled through the barrel, allowing very little (if any) gas to escape around the lands and maximizing propulsion efficiency.

Upon request, the SITES Spectre M4 could be obtained with a slightly longer, threaded barrel that would take a purpose-built silencer, manufactured entirely out of steel and dubbed the EM-F2. The sinusoidal rifling and the “gas seal effect” it achieved made the EM-F2 suppressor particularly effective, even with supersonic loads.

The SITES Spectre came from factory with an up-folding sheet metal stock, held in the closed position by a metal clamp that engaged the top ventilation holes of the barrel shroud and was thus very easy to deploy and not nearly as uncomfortable as other sheet metal stocks of sub-machine guns from the same era. The stock was cut on top – a reminiscence of the Model 2 pre-production model, where the stock had to have clearance for the UZI-style cocking knob – and even when closed, provides unobstructed view of the sights, specifically a fixed polymer rear sight and an elevation-adjustable front post, zeroed from factory for a 50-meter range (about 164 feet).

The SITES Spectre M4 strips very easily: with the chamber clear, hammer down, and magazine removed, the user only needs to open the stock and pull out the passing pin that integrates the rear sling swivel – which can be installed to the rear or left side, by the way – in order to remove the receiver end cap with the recoil springs and guide rods and slide the two-part bolt out. At this point, the entire trigger group assembly is removed from the bottom of the receiver. Additional stripping includes the removal of the barrel, which requires the use of a hex key to loosen the barrel retaining block nut.

Multicaliber… But Not Exactly

The SITES Spectre M4 was initially advertised as being available in three calibers: 9mm Luger, 45 ACP, and later, 40 Smith & Wesson. In reality, virtually all the select-fire Spectres still in existence are in 9mm Luger, and their recorded cyclic rate in full-automatic fire ranges between 850 and 900 rounds per minute, with the utmost level of reliability; the issues with the selector experienced by a well-known Guntuber with a full-automatic SITES Spectre in early August this year are to be attributed to the wear and tear and lack of maintenance of the individual firearm being tested rather than to inherent engineering or manufacturing issues.

The ergonomics of the SITES Spectre M4 were very reminiscent of those of the Beretta PM-12S, Italy’s main service sub-machine gun of the day. The Spectre might have been considered significantly superior due to the closed bolt operation and ambidextrous capabilities, but its lack of widespread acceptance and adoption among Italian government, military and law enforcement customers came down to the Italian authorities’ long-rooted reluctance in subjecting their personnel to extensive retraining. This, and in the fact that SITES was, after all, a small company, incapable of meeting the production volumes that a major government contract would entail.

This said, certain special units within the Italian military and law enforcement communities did procure significant quantities of the SITES Spectre M4, which was deployed as late as during the Italian participation to ISAF and the circa 2015 Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. Confirmed international customers include Switzerland, France, and in the early 1990s, the South African Defence Forces and the governments of the freshly independent Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

SITES also manufactured three semi-automatic variants of the Spectre M4 for international commercial sales to civilian shooters and private security personnel, dubbed respectively the “Falcon,” the “Spectre HC,” and the “Ranger.”

The SITES Falcon was the civilian version of the Spectre M4 as sold in Italy; chambered in 9×21 IMI but also available in 40 Smith & Wesson and 45 HP (45 ACP would remain banned for civilians in Italy until the year 2000 and 9mm Luger wouldn’t be made legal until the year 2022), the Falcon was an outright Spectre M4, with the lack of select-fire capabilities but retaining the original foregrip and upfolding sheet metal stock.

The Spectre HC was the version for the U.S. civilian market, available in 9mm Luger, 40 Smith & Wesson, and 45 ACP, and imported first by FIE Inc. of Hialeah, FL then by American Arms, Inc. of Garden Grove, CA.

In order to comply with the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1968 Gun Control Act, the Spectre HC came equipped with a manual safety located where the fire selector on the Spectre M4 would be, and of course didn’t feature either the upfolding stock and the foregrip of the original, which largely reduced its ergonomics. The Spectre HC was banned by name by the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and by similar state laws passed around the same time, in effect killing the presence of the SITES Spectre on the U.S. market.

Last, the SITES Ranger was a pistol-caliber carbine version for the Italian civilian market; manufactured in a handful of samples in 9×18mm Police, then solely in 9×21 IMI, the SITES Ranger was essentially the same as the Falcon, only with a slightly longer, unthreaded barrel. In order to comply with the Italian laws of the time, the stock of the SITES Ranger was locked in the open position and the 30-round magazine was pinned to a maximum capacity of 10 rounds (the same as the SITES Falcon, pistol, its magazine was similarly pinned to 15 rounds); but by “pinned” we mean literally, as the company used simple non-rebated passing pins that Italian shooters could, and often did, remove with a simple pin punch, returning the magazines to the original capacity and the stock to full function.

A 16-inch barrel PCC version of the Spectre was advertised briefly on the U.S. market, but, to our knowledge, not many were actually imported. FIE imported approximately 1,500 Spectre HC pistols, all in 9mm Luger, while American Arms imported a gross total of 4,000 samples, over 3,500 of which were in 9mm, only 300 in 40 Smith & Wesson, and less than 100 in 45 ACP.

When SITES closed permanently in 1998, the existing stock of parts for the Spectre M4 and its civilian counterparts was picked up by Claudio Gritti, who moved to Lugano, Switzerland, and established his own company – Greco Sport S.A. – which continued to assemble and sell them until 2001. The legacy of the Spectre M4 lives own, however, with BCM Europearms of Italy still working on the PM4 Storm pistol, which we wrote about on SmallArmsReview.com back in June.