The Sten is a British designed submachine gun manufactured in a number of variants (know as Marks or simply Mks) during the Second World War. The official designation was "Carbine, Machine, Sten" which is due to the British term for what we would now call submachine guns being "Machine Carbine" at the start of the war (submachine gun was at the time regarded as an American term, as it had originated with the Thompson Submachine Gun). It was notable for its very simple design and consequently low production costs which made it an ideal weapon for supplying resistance groups: the relatively uncomplicated construction meant it could also be manufactured in occupied territories without specialised machine tools. In total approximately 4.5 million Stens were produced, over 2 million of which were the Mark II, which is the iconic Sten gun.
The suppressed version of the Mk II, the Mk II (S), hugely impressed SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who went to great lengths to acquire one. By his own account, the weapon was so quiet that he demonstrated it by leading a group of officers through an empty park at night, and having one of his men approach from behind and unload an entire magazine into the air, with the officers not believing a weapon had been fired until they were shown the shell casings on the ground. His substantial efforts to get the Nazi high command to start mass-producing the Sten proved fruitless, however.
Using the same magazines as the MP40, the Sten is subject to similar errors; the common habit in fiction of using the magazine as a sidegrip would in real life result in damage to the feed lips of the magazine (the correct part of the gun to grip is either the barrel shroud, the magwell, or the sloped section below the gun ahead of the trigger guard), and the videogame habit of fully loading the magazine would result in spring failures; like the MP40, soldiers experienced in using the Sten would typically load magazines with 30 or 28 rounds rather than 32. The 50 round Lanchester Mk. I magazine is compatible with the Sten.
The Sten Mk II(S) was a covert ops variant with an extremely effective integral suppressor developed at the request of the British Special Operations Executive by Major Hugh Reeves, who would go on to design the Welrod Pistol. The suppressor used a ported barrel and the recoil spring was shortened and the bolt lightened to ensure reliable function. The S stands for "special purpose" rather than "silenced" as one might expect. It was developed after the failure of attempts early in the war to produce a suppressed Thompson Submachine Gun, and was issued to Commando units and other special forces groups. It was first used by frontline SOE units in in Europe in 1943, and also saw use in the Far East.
While the suppressor became extremely hot with prolonged firing (hence the cloth grip) and would be effectively ruined by running a single magazine through it in full-auto, it was highly effective if fire was restricted to short bursts. As mentioned at the top of the page, SS officer Otto Skorzeny went to great lengths to acquire one, and is known to have stated "What splendid possibilities the use of these silencers offered. What losses they might save and what dangers they might avert! How wonderful, in case of an unexpected meeting with an enemy detachment, to be able to fire without the reports attracting the attention of other enemy groups!" In German use, captured Mk II(S) Stens received the designation "MP751(e)."
While it was officially declared obsolete by the British Army in 1945, the Mk II(S) and Mk VI(S) continued to be used, turning up during counter-insurgency operations in Malaya and Kenya during the 60s. The Mk II(S) was also used by both the Australian SAS and American MACV-SOG during the Vietnam War, and was not actually removed from British Special Forces inventories until suppressed variants of the Heckler & Koch MP5 were adopted in the 1980s.
The MP 3008, also knows as the "Volksmaschinenpistole" (people's machine pistol), was a German submachine gun developed towards the end of WWII. In was essentially a copy of the Sten Mk II, but with a vertical magazine. Due to the poor state of German manufacturing towards the end of the war and the fact that the MP 3008 was manufactured in various smaller factories and machine shops, there was a lot of variation in terms of the materials and design of the weapons furniture. It could be found with a skeleton wire stock, a strut stock, a strut stock with a wood pistol grip, and finally a fully wooden stock.
The Błyskawica ("Lightning") was an open-bolt submachine gun derived from the Sten and used by the Polish resistance in World War II. Despite some claims, however, it is NOT a direct copy of the Sten; it has mechanical elements from both the Sten and the MP40, as well as some concepts of its own mixed in as well.
