Villar Perosa 9mm MOD.15 SMG
Sturmpistole M.18

by Renzo Barbieri and Peter Kempf

The 9mm double-barrelled Villar Perosa was was the world's first true sub-machine gun. (The name comes from the factory that made it: Officini de Villar Perosa.) Originally it was designed for use in aeroplanes as a flexible observer's gun. That's the reason for the SMG's high rate of fire: each barrel was theoretically capable of 1.200-1.500rpm or more. The 9mm Glisenti pistol cartridge of the gun - fed from two top-mounted 25-round magazines - was simply not powerful enough for this purpose. Also the range was soon deemed to be insufficient. (In 1914 aeroplanes were fragile machines, but they soon turned much tougher to shoot down, at the same time that the armament got heavier, and acapble of longer and longer ranges.) Instead the Villar Perosa was given to the ground troops. The Villar Perosa was first issued to infantry battalions in 1916, between May and November, with a section of 28 men with 2 guns. The number of section was increased at the end of May 1917 and became 3 sections some months after. At that point each section was integral assigned to each of the 3 companies of the battalion. It was first used in the 12th Battle of the Isonzo.

With its low weight (6.49kg), short length (53.34cm) and high rate of fire, it could be readily used in the trenches, but the Italian army initially saw it as a defensive weapons, giving it a heavy shield and a large crew (14 men per gun!). Later the infantry learned to use it as an assault weapon, but the pace of this evolution varied with the experience and the officers of each unit, since there was no regular training with this weapon at the infantry or machingun school: it's employment and training was instead left to the individual battalions.

Arditi units started using it aggressivly, as a true submachinegun, in 1917: they dropped the big shield and instead used it with a wooden stock. Each company had 3 of these weapons and they were used during assaults to suppress the enemy. The high rate of fire made it difficult to fire short burst on the move, so the preferred method was to fire all the magazine until emptied. In 1918 the number of Villar Perosa was augmented to 6 for each company of Arditi.

A lot of models were cannibalized later in 1918 to create the new Beretta submachinegun model 18, with a single barrel and wooden stock. This model was a true modern submachinegun. For this reason the number of surviving Villar Perosa is small compared with the number built.

The Austro-Hungarians were so impressed by this SMG that they made their own copy of it, called the Sturmpistole M.18. The main difference of the Austrian version were the magazines: straight instead of curved.