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Title:PISTOL -  BRITISH PISTOL MkII WELROD .32ACP SN# 3823
Maker/Manufacturer:BIRMINGHAM SMALL ARMS CO.
Date of Manufacture:C 1942
Eminent Figure:
Catalog Number:SPAR 1520
Measurements:OL: 30.7CM 12 1/8" BL: 21.5CM 8 1/2"

Object Description:

BRITISH PISTOL Mk II "WELROD" .32ACP SN# 3823
Manufactured by the Birmingham Small Arms Company, Birmingham, England - Silenced, manually-operated, bolt-action, pistol. Parkerized finish with smooth rubber grips which surrounds a .32 Colt magazine which is detachable and the manual recommends loading only five rounds. Silencer integral with weapon. 4-groove rifling, right hand twist. Muzzle velocity 700 fps. Weapon has an overall length of 12 1/8", a barrel length of 8 1/2" and weighs approximately 2 1/2 lbs. Developed by British during WWII for assassination or underground work. Production believed limited to several hundred but higher serial numbers would indicate more. Rubber grips in poor condition. AKA: MARK II HAND FIRING DEVICE

Markings:
Receiver: 3823 is stamped on cocking knob and under receiver. BSA marks of a star and square also under receiver.

Notes: "Welrod. This repeating pistol, with an integral silencer, fell into the class of strange weapons that creep out of the shadows during a war and disappear into obscurity once the affray is over. It was intended for the Speical Operations Executive (SOE), the British organization responsible for directing and fomenting underground warfare by resistance groups in German-occupied Europe but was ultimately adopted by other clandestine organizations and special forces. The 'Wel' prefix arose from the SOE workshop in Welwyn Garden City, north of the London, were developments took place; 'rod' was conferred from the contemporaneous popularity of the humorous short stories of Damon Runyon, whose gangsters habitually referred to their pistols in such a way.
The entire weapon was contained in cylinder about a foot long with a rotating bolt at the rear. Turning a knurled knob at the end of the cylinder released the bolt, which could then be drawn back to allow a cartridge to rise from the magazine into the feed-way. Pushing the bolt back cocked the striker and propelled the new round into the chamber. Several holes were drilled into the short barrel, which was concealed inside the mid-section of the cylinder, and there were circular baffles between the end of the barrel and the front end of the cylinder.
The magazine was contained in the pistol grip, though the entire grip unit had to be removed before the magazine could be reloaded. The trigger was a simple rod, a grip safety lay behind the pistol grip, an ejection port appeared on the top of the cylindrical breech and the fixed sights were regulated for a range of 25 yards.
When the Welrod was fired, the bullet set off down the barrel and some of the propellant gas escaped through the holes into the space between the barrel and cylinder. The bullet then left the barrel, passed through the central hole in the baffles and emerged from the muzzle. However, the gas that followed the bullet was delayed and re-dirrected by the baffles until it left the muzzle of the cylinder at a temperature and velocity low enough to give neither flash nor sound.
There were several versions, culminating in the Welrod Mark 2A, though the differences are minor. A .22 LR rimfire version is said to have been made in small numbers but has never been found." - Hogg & Walter

"Looking like some crude, garage-made zip-gun, the British Welrod Pistol was a silencer-equipped .32 pistol developed during World War II for assassinations and other nasty business. To maintain 'denyability,' it was not marked with a recognizable maker's name or trademark....
In the world of fiction, spies and some secret agents do their clandestine work with some very fancy, upscale weapons. In real life, however, much of the armament used by undercover operatives is quite mundane, and even grubby. The principal criterion for a product of this sort, after all, is that it be capable of doing the task at hand. Polished, machined surfaces are hardly necessary in a weapon that may have to be discarded or destroyed after use. And a prestige logo is not a great idea if your want the origin of the weapon (and its user) to remain anonymous.
The British Welrod The Welrod Pistol operated somewhat like a blowback semi-automatic, but it is manually operated. Made in both .32 ACP and .380 ACP, if features a large and very efficient conventional silencer built onto the barrel. Unlike any other pistol, the Welrod incorporates a magazine permanently built into the rubber-clad butt grip that is removed for loading. Unlike many of today's suppressed weapons, which simply muffle the sound of a shot, the Welrod is a true silenced pistol, relying on reduced velocity ammunition so there is no sonic boom created by the bullet's flight." - Atlas Editions, Inc.

"Thirty Years of Silent Death - The Welrod Story. It was the policy of the British S.O.E. to furnish their World War II agents with any weapon they desired for their missions into Festung Europa. Since it was a purely elective process, many agents chose to take no weapons whatsoever, lest the discovery of same jeopardize their cover. Once in Europe however, requests came back for the silenced weapons that had been used in training. That the Resistance cells had need of such items was quite obvious for the removal of quislings, the elimination of bridge guards and the killing of Germans.
There were a few silenced pistols at their disposal, of the Maxim and Parker-Hale type and they were predominantly in .22 cal. As .32 ACP and 9mm calibres were common in Europe, the logistical considerations indicated that weapons should be made to suit these cartridges.
The Welrod series of pistols were made in England at the Special Operations Executive research station located just outside London ('an hour's drive from Baker Street') at Welwyn, Herts. The prefix 'Wel' in Welrod is traced to these labs which also produced the Welbike (a miniature motorscooter for agents and parachutists) and the Welman, a unique one-man sub (also for agent insertion).
The labs were located at the Frythe estate in Welwyn, and Quonset Huts were erected around the house for use as workshops and barracks.
The pistols took shape under the direction of a Major Dolphin. The first Welrod was a true bolt-action affair modeled after a turning bolt rifle action. It had a vestigial handgrip which was an integral but removable magazine, holding three rounds. The weapon was fired by depressing a thumb lever on the left side of the receiver. The silencer was approximately a foot long and the device was .32 caliber.
The Welrod pistol was unique in that in its final stages the designers realized that it was senseless to make a pistol and then manufacture a silencer for it - rather, they designed a silencer first and then made the pistol mechanisms. (This was a novel approach and the only people who have use it in contemporary modern times are the Chinese in their PRC type 64 pistol.)
The production Welrod and the outgrowth of the research is known in the U.S. as 'Handfiring device, MKI' and credited, wrongly, to the U.S. Naval Gun Factory.
The bulk of the pistols - several hundred - were made at B.S.A. and can be traced to them through their receiver markings of star and square. In fact, when B.S.A. went into liquidation a few years back, many Welrods were among the stock that went into auction. Fortunately, a perspicacious employee noted the mistake and they were withdrawn from sale a bit quick.
The .32 cal. Welrod had an overall length of 12 3/16 inches. It weighed just under two and a half pounds. The exterior had a parkerized finish and the grip was coated with smooth rubber over a .32 auto (Colt) magazine. Barrel rifling was five groove-left twist. The sights had luminous features - the front a straight line, the rear two opposed lots.
Operation: With a loaded magazine inserted, the knurlWithdrawing the bolt extracts and ejects the fired case. Ejection is through an opening on the top of the receiver. Locking is effected by two lugs at the rear of the butt.
The bolt is removed by the take-down screw on the right of the breech. The silencer contains a cork end baffle, which may be replaced by removing the threaded end cap. The barrel is perforated to aid in silencing. On being fired, the weapon produces a report somewhat akin to that of a .22 short being fired from a rifle. The report is followed either by a prolonged hissing sound as gas escapes through the cork in the silencer or by a more rapid, duller hiss when the gas, under pressure, remains trapped in the silencer and escapes upon opening the bolt.
The B.S.A. went through a couple of model changes, mainly centering around the end cap and trigger bar assemblies. The end cap had an indented cone in some types and a recess in others. These modifications were for muzzle-to-skin contact firings and substantially aided in making the weapon totally silent for that use. The recess also had use, in that as a field expedient, paper or foil could be wadded into it assisting in suppressing the precursor sound wave coming from the weapon, in the event that the cork end baffle were shot out through many firings. In modern times, I've heard of this trick being done with chewing gum.
The claim that the weapon was of American origin is specious. Col. M. Chinn, U.S.M.C. of the Navy Department Bureau of Ordnance, was the originator of this report. He was instrumental in getting the weapon declassified and assumed that because the Navy Department had the blueprints for the thing, that it was one of their developments. Another misconception was that the weapon was in .45 cal. A.C.P., which it never was.
A highly efficient 9mm version was made toward the end of World War II and saw operational use in Korea and Malaya. It, too, was made at B.S.A., at the behest of S.O.E.
At the end of the war, the S.O.E. was disbanded and the special weapons were turned in. Many were given over to what is known now as the Defense Intelligence Service (D.I.S.), Britain's spy force, and it is a tribute to the weapon's designers that it is still 'on issue' with these people, as none better has come along to replace it.
The Sleeve pistol was a one shot version of the Welrod. It broadly resembles a flashlight, and had to be loaded in advance of use as there was little chance of getting a second round off. It was carried under the sleeve of an overcoat on an elastic lanyard looped around the shoulder, so that after firing it might be released and automatically drawn up the arm out of view. It was fired by means of a thumb trigger located near the muzzle. The trigger was bull-pupped to the striker release at the rear of the weapon. One must not lose sight of the weapon's effectiveness as a club and should the single shot only disable, then the weapons could be used in that mode.
An apocryphal story concerning the Frythe says that the staff were not above trying their weapons out on the pheasants in an adjoining estate. A number of the officers were invited to dinner by a well-known local landowner who apologized for the sparsity of the food offered to them because a most severe outbreak of poaching had removed all the pheasants.
The Welrods were to surface again in the Viet Nam era when Military Armament Corp. of Powder Springs, Georgia, under the aegis of Mitch Werbell,* came out with a version of it that used their sionics suppressor design and a plastic magazine grip.
Major George Nonte once had occasion to examine a Welrod which had the main body of the silencer removed and also had a wooden grip. Technically, it was no longer capable of silencing in that mode and was used as a simple pistol.
Current BritBritain entered World War II with a silent weapons armory, consisting of cross-bows and Parker-Hale varmint rifles, finished the conflict with the Welrod .32ACP 9mm, and thirty years later, it has stood the test of time in its deadly effectiveness." - John Minnery, Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 1, No. 3, Summer, 1976

"The...SOE (Special Operations Executive)...was a wartime improvisation based on secondary sections of the British War Office and Secret Service, extended to cover the enormous sphere of the Second World War and generally adapted to fit in with plans for economic and military warfare as they developed.
Its joint origins engendered dual capabilities: Phase 1 - the clandestine operations through agents, either singly or through networks known as 'reseaux;' and Phase 2 - the paramilitary operations through agents working under secrecy but more exposed and more apt to be in uniform. The former was required in the early stages for the formation of cells and the buildup of resistance among occupied populations, while the latter was more appropriate for close cooperation with invading troops in conjunction with the Special Air Service (SAS) and Operational Groups (OGs)." - Sir Robin Brook

"The single shot .32 and 9MM caliber British Welrod pistols were used by the OSS while development of a .380 High Standard pistol was initiated." - Pate

"Two of SOG's (Studies and Observations Group) other suppressed 'snatch' guns were British in origin, developed by England's World War II Special Operations Executive (SOE), which ran agents, resistance groups and saboteurs into Nazi-occupied Europe. One was the WELROD pistol, the first ever purpose-designed suppressed handgun; indeed, the WELROD was just a 14 3/8" tube, the front half a suppressor and the back half its rotary bolt action. The grip was simply a rubber-wrapped Colt .32 auto magazine. Since each round was chambered manually, the WELROD generated absolutely no sound from slide movement or escaping gas. It was so quiet that a World War II agent could sit behind his quarry in a darkened theater, fire a shot and walk away without anyone the wiser; the OSS found it 'most effective when used with the muzzle against the target.' While the SOG men thought it impressively quiet, it was not accurate beyond about ten paces, which, combined with its low rate of fire, made it more suited to assassinations than prisoner snatches. Nevertheless some teams employed WELRODs." - Plaster

According to information received from a reader the .32 ACP version is the MK II while the 9mm parabellum is a MK I.

References:
Hogg, Ian, & John Walter. PISTOL OF THE WORLD. 4th Ed. Rev. Krause Publications. Iola, Wi. 2004
Miller, David. THE ILLUSTRATED DIRECTORY OF 20TH CENTURY GUNS. Salamander Books, Ltd. London, England. 2001.
Pate, Charles. U.S. HANDGUNS OF WORLD WAR II: THE SECONDARY PISTOLS AND REVOLVERS. Andrew Mowbray Publishers. Lincoln, R.I. 1998.
Plaster, John L. SOG: THE SECRET WARS OF AMERICA'S COMMANDOS IN VIETNAM. An Onyx Book. N.Y., N.Y. 1998.

For a good read on Mitch Werbell, see Warren Hinckle & William Turner, DEADLY SECRETS: THE CIA-MAFIA WAR AGAINST CASTRO AND THE ASSASSINATION OF J.F.K. Thunder's Mouth Press. N.Y., N.Y. 1992.

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