The STEN (Shepherd, Turpin, ENfield/ENgland, usually written as Sten) was a British submachine gun (or, under British nomenclature, "machine carbine") designed at RSAF Enfield during World War II. Conceived as a cheap emergency measure to rectify Britain's lack of submachine guns early in the war, the Sten was manufactured in the millions and issued in great numbers to British troops and their allies. It is one of the most widely-produced and widely-copied guns in history.
History[]
In late 1939, shortly after the beginning of World War II, the British Expeditionary Force in France became concerned by reports that the Germans were arming their troops with large numbers of inexpensive MP38 submachine guns. Worried that they would have no equivalent weapon to match the German SMG, the BEF hastily arranged field trials for several submachine guns, quickly settling on the Thompson submachine gun. The British Ordnance Board proceeded to order quantities of Thompson guns from the United States.
However, after the BEF's retreat from France in 1940, the Army realized that a cost-efficient, domestically-produced SMG was required to match the MP38's production rate. Initially, the Lanchester, a copy of the German MP28 was developed and was adopted by the Navy and Air Force, but was declined by the Army, who desired a cheaper gun. The Army became invested in a design being developed at RSAF Enfield, commissioned by the head of the Small Arms Group, Major Reginald Vernon Shepherd, and designed by draftsman Harold John Turpin. This gun was subsequently named the "Sten", after Shepherd, Turpin, and Enfield.
In January 1941, the first prototype Stens were ready and were tested at Enfield on the 10th and Hythe on the 21st. The Army was quick to approve of the weapon and it was taken into service. This first iteration was known as the Mk.I and incorporated wooden furniture, a hinged foregrip, and a flash hider; these features were deemed to be inessential and in August 1941 a cheaper model, the Mk.II, was demonstrated at Pendine. The new Mk.II was proposed to cut back the production cost significantly by removing the inessential features of the Mk.I. Although the Mk.II Sten was even cruder and less reliable than its already very basic predecessor, it was nonetheless taken into service on account of its inexpensive cost and fast production rate.
The Mk.II Sten became the standard service SMG of the British Commonwealth forces during the war. It saw its first combat use by Canadian troops during the Dieppe Raid on the 19th of August 1942. Although the initial response in Britain to the Sten was optimistic, with some officers even anticipating that it could help turn the tide of the war, the feedback from the troops who were issued the gun was less enthusiastic. It earned a variety of derogatory nicknames, including the "Plumber's Nightmare", due to its unsophisticated appearance and relatively poor reliability.
However, the extremely cheap cost and basic design of the Mk.II Sten ensured that it saw incredibly widespread use, with over 2,000,000 models being produced in total. The Allies supplied anti-Nazi resistance networks in Europe with large quantities of Sten guns, and the simplicity of the design was ideal for untrained partisans. Workshop-built copies were also produced in large quantities in occupied territories like France, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. A suppressed version of the Mk.II Sten was commissioned for use by Commandos; this was developed at Enfield by a Polish engineer, Lt. Kulikowski. The silenced Sten was taken into service as the Mk.IIS and was the most widely-used suppressed weapon of the war.
In 1943, a toy manufacturer, Line Bros., was commissioned to produce an even simpler model of the Sten that was constructed from minimal components. The body of this gun was made from a single riveted tube of sheet metal, welded at the top. This was taken into service as the Mk.III Sten and was, along with the Mk.II version, produced in extremely large volumes, both in the UK and Canada. It was originally supposed to supersede the Mk.II, but production of the Mk.II continued to take priority, as production issues with the Mk.III were reported. The same year, two experimental models derived from the Mk.II, known as the Mk.IVA and Mk.IVB, were developed for the 1st Airborne Division; these were tried at Pendine but were never adopted.
The final two models of the Sten, the Mk.V and Mk.VI, were developed in late 1943 and entered service in 1944. Rather than simplifying the design, as previous models had done, the Mk.V was a more polished and expensive variant that incorporated wooden furniture, including a foregrip, and a slightly redesigned trigger group. It was built to a considerably higher standard than the Mk.II and was reportedly of much better reliability. The Mk.V was primarily issued to paratroopers, and saw extensive use during British operations in Normandy and Arnhem. The Mk.VI variant was simply a suppressed version of the Mk.V, built following the same principles as the Mk.IIS.
A highly-modified variant of the Sten, known as the ROFSTEN, was proposed by ROF Fazackerley in late 1944 as a potential post-war service model, but this version was never developed any further. In 1945, Nazi Germany began producing its own domestic copy of the Sten, the MP 3008, as a replacement for the MP40. In the post-war period, the Sten continued to see widespread circulation and copy, especially by guerrilla forces.
As early as 1942, the Ordnance Board were considering replacements for the Sten; it was never intended to have a long service life and was seen as a wartime stop-gap. When the war finally did end in 1945, arrangements were swiftly made to trial several new submachine guns. The Army finally settled on the Sterling submachine gun in 1951, and the Sten was taken out of general service in 1953.