The STEN submachine-gun, a British weapon of the Second World War, was designed in 1941 in order to replace stocks of weapons lost during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Produced during the Battle of Britain, in spite of Blitz conditions and severe material shortages, the STEN was built in vast quantities (over 4 million guns), to be used against an expected invasion of Britain by Germany, though this never occurred. The weapon was the standard British submachine-gun through WWII and the Korean war, and was replaced by the
Sterling SMG in the 1950s.
The STEN was a simple blowback-operated, open-bolt submachine-gun, so simple in fact that one variant, the Mark III, could be produced in as little as 5 man hours. The name is an acronym, coming from the names of the designers, Major Reginald V.
Shepherd and Harold
Turpin, and the largest manufacturer of the gun,
Enfield (
STEN).
Built originally as a measure to resist an expected German invasion of the British Isles, the STEN was chambered in 9x19mm
Parabellum, the same round as was used by the German
MP-40, meaning it could fire captured German ammunition if necessary. The STEN, while never seen as especially reliable by the soldiers who used it in battle, had a reputation for being easy to maintain and repair, and was used in numbers which negated most if not all shortcomings. The STEN was produced using a unique distributed manufacturing network, in which different parts of the gun were produced at small-scale locations throughout the country and assembled at various other places, making STEN production almost immune to the constant aerial bombardment of British industry during the Battle of Britain. In similar fashion, direct copies of the gun were manufactured by partisan forces across mainland Europe, including famously by the Polish resistance directly under the nose of German occupation forces, seeing use during the Warsaw Uprising. The Germans used many captured examples of the weapon themselves, and even manufactured their own copies: the MP 3008 (to equip the
Volksturm home defense units) and the
Gerat Potsdam or "Potsdam Device" (apparently intended for deception and sabotage, mimicking the real thing down to the British proofing marks).
After the war, the STEN continued to see service with British commonwealth forces, as well as serving with the newly formed Israeli army in the Israeli War of Independence. The gun continues to be produced unofficially, its simple design and extreme ease of construction making it a favorite of illicit arms manufacturers and garage hobbyists; examples of the weapon with essentially cosmetic upgrades have been seized by authorities in Australia and Brazil (where they are built to equip the gangsters of the drug trade), and in Chechnya, where they serve both sides in the prolonged conflict which ravages the region.
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