Following the end of the war, Italy was among the 12 founding members of NATO, established in 1949. Needing to rebuild its armed forces, the country soon adopted the M1 Garand as a standard infantry rifle, and local firearms legend, Beretta, soon got in the business of both refurbishing old guns and producing thousands of new ones– including rifles sold to fellow NATO members such as Denmark.
By 1959, Beretta engineers Domenico Salza and Vittorio Valle had updated John Browning’s venerable design by replacing the fixed magazine– which was fed via a top-inserted 8-shot en bloc clip– with a more modern 20-round detachable box mag along with a stripper clip guide on the top of the receiver. Likewise, the caliber was 7.62 NATO rather than .30-06, the barrel length was shortened, it was made select-fire, the gas system was tweaked, a folding integral bipod was fitted, and a new muzzle device/ 22mm rifle grenade launcher with accompanying sight was installed. This new rifle still had a lot of M1 commonality but a more M14/FAL/HK G3 kind of flavor to it, and was promptly adopted by the Italian Army as the BM-59 in 1962.
These assorted BM-59 models, including Alpini and Paracadutisti variants, are seen under glass in the Beretta Museum in Italy. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
Beretta had a good deal of success with the BM-59, licensing the design for overseas production to Indonesian and Nigerian state arsenals as well as producing the gun in Italy in several variants for a quarter century.
While a precious few select-fire BM-59s were imported to the U.S. before the 1968 ban on overseas machine gun parts, the American consumer market was left hungry for this updated box-fed “spaghetti Garand.” That was until the semi-auto BM-62 and BM-69 sporters were introduced. Chambered in .308 Winchester, the commercial twin to the 7.62 NATO, these guns were not made in anywhere near the same quantity as the BM-59 or even Beretta’s M1s, making them highly collectible.
This excellent Beretta BM-62 includes a distinctive integral front gas cylinder assembly that functions as a flash hider but is sans the bayonet lug and grenade launcher sight of its more martial BM-59 big brother.
It also has a shorter ~20-inch barrel rather than the M1 Garand’s more typical 24-inch barrel, giving the rifle a “Tanker” feel to it.
In a nod to the lineage, many of the small parts on these rifles are marked “PB BM59” and the P. Beretta pedigree is unmistakable.
The rifle was one of around 2,000 imported by the Berben Corporation of New York in the early 1980s. The company, on Park Row in Manhattan, was the exclusive distributor in the U.S. of Beretta products for several years until the Italian gunmaker set up its own facility in Accokeek, Maryland in 1985.
