Finnish soldier with an LS-26 light machine gun, 1940.
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I’ve written a fair amount about the BAR, so I won’t belabor the point here – if you would like more to read, check out my general history of the BAR and comparison between the M1918 and M1918A2. What I’d like to add to that today is some video I took with an Ohio Ordnance [...] Is the beard an extension of the hat, or is the hat an extension of the beard? We will never know. Momčilo Đujić, Chetnik commander during WWII – armed with a Yugoslav-contract ZB-30J light machine gun. (photo from Last Stand on Zombie Island) [...] Chain mail appeared in a couple different forms during World War I – the most well-known is probably the mail facemasks developed for tank crews. These were intended to protect crew members from steel shards that would fragment off the interior of the tank’s armor plate when taking machine gun fire. There were also metal-lined [...] Congratulations on your status as French colony, Senegal! Now we’re going to take you to a freezing European forest to fight Germans. Senegalese Free French soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, armed with a British Bren and an American 1903 Springfield. The helmets are American ones, emblazoned with the anchor emblem [...] Since we just took a look at the final American iteration of the magazine-fed Johnson LMG (the system would live on briefly in Israeli service as the Dror), we should also take this time to consider the belt-fed variants of the Johnson as well. While the final round of testing was still being done on [...] In addition to his work on designing a basic infantry shoulder rifle, Melvin Maynard Johnson and put a lot of effort into creating a light machine gun for US military forces to use. In terms of US military usage, he was actually more successful with the LMG than the rifle – the Johnson M1941 LMG [...] Chauchats are better than nothing when Stalin is your neighbor Lots of Mosin-Nagant rifles, and we’re guessing also Swedish Mausers. Plus, of course, the two Chauchats and a Maxim 1910. Thanks to Dave for the photo! One would think that Germany, of all places, would have a logical and consistent system for identifying service machine guns. Any yet we see things like the WWI MG08/15 and the WWII MG15. What gives? The answer is that Germany didn’t have one logical naming system – they had several in sequence. So in order [...] |
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BAR Comparison: M1918 vs M1918A2
I was doing some reading up on the BAR, and some shooting with a semiauto Ohio Ordnance Works A3 model BAR recently, in addition to the recent 2-gun match we did with it. I got particularly interested in the improvements made between the original WWI version and the A2 version that was so heavily [...]