laststandonzombieisland

A Royal Navy patrol from the Battle-class fleet destroyer HMS Barrosa (D68), aboard a perau, on a coastal patrol in Brunei during the defense of that country from neighboring Indonesia.

Official caption: “Navy patrols hunt arms smugglers in Borneo. April 1964, off the coast of Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah. To assist the Royal Navy’s constant search for arms and ammunition smuggling, the sultan of Brunei provided specially built peraus, small craft that are particularly maneuverable in the narrow channels between mango swamps.”

The rating in the foreground is armed with a Lanchester “machine carbine,” that curious unlicenced British knockoff of the German C.G. Haenel MP28/II submachine gun. That design, attributed to the famous Hugo Schmeisser, was itself an improvement of the Great War-era Bergmann Maschinenpistole 18, a 9mm blowback-action open bolt burp gun that weighed a hefty 11 pounds, sans ammo.

In British service, the Lanchester– so named after the supervisor at the Sterling Armaments Company where it was initially produced during WWII– was a bit lighter (“only” 9.5 pounds) and could use either a purpose-made (though almost impossible to fully load) 50-round stick mag or the common 32-round Sten magazine.

Oh yeah, and it also accepted the outlandishly long 22-inch P07 bayonet. 

With a whopping 95,469 Lanchesters cranked out by Sterling, Greener (the famous shotgun folks), and Boss (another famous scattergun maker), most went to the Royal Navy and Commonwealth sister services, who kept them in service into the 1970s, when they were phased out in favor of the…Sterling.