If you had to pick one, would you take a Valmet M78 (in 7.62mm NATO) or an FN-D (in .30-06)? Both are reliable and well-made machine guns and they use essentially the same caliber. The FN-D weighs twice as much, but has a heavier barrel and barrel quick-change capacity. The Valmet is lighter, but offers much less sustained fire capacity. Both have the same sights. The Valmet has a true semiauto selector setting, and also fires from a closed bolt while the FN-D fires form an open bolt and has only slow and fast automatic settings. So if you have to pick one, which would it be?
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My reaction to this discussion? “Which weapon would you choose…?”
Neither.
These are not “light machine guns”. They’re Automatic Rifles, and the problem with trying to do supporting fires with them boils down to the fact that a.) magazine changeout is a one-man affair, and b.) the magazines, at 20 rounds apiece, are too small to provide effective support fire.
These two problems are linked; the BREN has a top-mounted magazine, and it’s 30 rounds. You can get maybe two-three decent bursts out of the 20 round magazines, and then you have to change them out. This means, because the gunner is the guy doing the magazine change, that he has to take his attention off the targets downrange, reload, and then re-acquire the targets he was firing at. This is enormously damaging to the amount of fire that a gunner can deliver with these weapons, particularly when compared to a properly-designed LMG or a belt-fed design.
Bottom-mount magazines in these calibers pretty much preclude anything over 20 rounds, unless you go with a drum or something else. The ability to swap barrels is pretty much irrelevant; you’re almost never going to find a situation where you can or will be able to do the sustained fire that would require such a thing, and if I remember correctly, there’s zero provision for a tripod-mount on the FN D-model BAR.
I don’t think people understand enough about machineguns to be able to recognize the issues here; as I said, the fact that the gunner has to be the one changing out the magazines, and will have to remove his attention from what he’s shooting at downrange, load the fresh magazine, and then re-acquire situational awareness and then fire again…? All of that takes critical time away from his actual job, which is providing timely and effective fire support.
Give the gunner either one of these weapons, and expecting him to be able to do his job? That’s like strapping skis onto your horse, and expecting it to win races in the snow; yes, you can do it, but is that a rational approach to winter mobility?
These weapons exist mostly because people who aren’t actually familiar with what a machinegun team is supposed to be doing, and because the rest of the unit at the times they were actually adopted only had bolt-action rifles available to them. Once you got into the assault rifle era, nobody has ever looked twice at these things, and they absolutely do not make a damn bit of sense.
BREN? Totally sensible as an LMG; you can serve it with a crew, the gunner doesn’t have to distract himself loading it, and the magazine is right there on the borderline of “useful” at 30 rounds. There are reasons that everyone who ever used the FAL and converted their old BREN guns over did not just feed them from the 20 round FAL magazines; those are just too damn small to be of use to a machinegunner doing actual supporting fires.
So… The real question here is “Why would you want these in the first place…?”
To which, the answer would be “You would not…”, especially in the modern era. The BAR was obsolete nearly from the moment it was issued, both conceptually and practically. The US should have turned it over and added a belt feed, the way FN did to make the M240. If you really had to have a magazine-fed weapon, then turn it over and put a useful size of magazine on top, so that the AG can change the magazine without the gunner losing situational awareness of what he’s shooting at.
The real problem here is that people just don’t understand what the flying f*ck machinegunners are supposed to be doing down where the buttons meet the dirt in a tactical situation. If they did, such weapons would not exist in the first place; it’s no wonder that Valmet never sold any of these to the Finnish army, and their only real sales were to military forces without clues. And, the odd North American civilian type who wanted a cool-looking thing to keep in his gun safe…
Color me unimpressed with the entire genre of under-fed so-called “LMG-class” weapons. Not with those dinky magazines, and not with the gunner having to be intimately involved in changing them. Too much lost time, where milliseconds matter. Not to mention, lost situation awareness and lost opportunities to engage the enemy with effective fires.
I think any “people” who have fired such arms understand the problem well enough. The budget cutters allied to the “innovative” one-gun or one-cartridge types are the real problem. They dismiss a problem they will never personally be saddle with
I actually think that the real problem is more the continuing war going on between idealists and realists. The people who want the “One Cartridge to Rule Them All” are all well-meaning sorts who see advantages to the idea, but who are also so wedded to their “Good Idea” that they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that actual experience on the battlefield says that it doesn’t work. They’re like theoretical physicists that keep postulating the ideal spherical cow, ignoring the fact that cows are not actually spheroids and cannot be easily reduced to equations.
The idealists are not just confined to political or religious matters; they’re found everywhere in human activity. The minority of pragmatic realists who try to first understand everything before acting generally get shouted down by the latest “Good Idea” types, and then the usual sad reality ensues.
My own take on things is that while the idealists occasionally find worthwhile things in their monomaniacal approach to life, the usual reality is that we wind up stuck with crap like the 7.62X51 NATO round because of it. We’d have been far better off if some pragmatic type had been in charge, and started asking some pointed questions about the actual lived experience of WWII combat soldiers, instead of the insane ravings of a non-combat Ordnance Colonel who apparently thought that the National Matches at Camp Perry were the ultimate test of a combat weapon’s effectiveness.
Unfortunately, the sad fact is that common sense and pragmatism are rare enough to be classified as superpowers, and the majority of the people our systems throw up as decision-makers are utter f*cking idiots. I know this because I warned them, in copiously documented detail, about what was coming down the pike at us, and I was ignored. The reality is that the system doesn’t actually select or promote for pragmatic foresight. What’s more likely is that if you spend your career pointing out the follies of your superiors, your career will wind up going nowhere, and they’ll just keep right on being stupid until they run the whole sorry enterprise into a mountain somewhere. This is a universal reality, everywhere that human endeavor spreads.
What about the 6.5 Grendel? A 7.62X39mm in 6.5. Because of 6.5 mm better ballistic coefficient it has the same retained energy than 7.62×51 mm at long range. This seam to make it a candidate for universal cartridge
You miss the point entirely when you say “…a candidate for universal cartridge…”
There can be no such thing, and continually trying to make one happen in the face of reality telling us that the squad and platoon absolutely require a high/low mix of cartridges to be able to fight effectively in all environments is the height of irrational stupidity.
You can’t fill the needs with one cartridge. If it’s controllable on full auto for the close-in last ditch fight, then it isn’t powerful enough to engage at long ranges. If it’s capable of doing the long range work, then it’s too powerful to be fired effectively on full auto in a weapon that actually fits in the individual weapon space…
This is reality. Accept it.
Or, do like the ever-hopeful morons behind such disasters as the 7.62 NATO and NGSW excresences and just keep on trying. It won’t work; it’s physically impossible. Not with current technologies, and likely not affordably with anything that comes along. You’re better off fielding optimized individual weapons and cartridges for their realistic missions, and optimized cartridges and weapons for the support role. Trying to combine the two? By definition, insanity; trying to do the same thing over and over again, expectant of different results.
The 6.5 Grendel is a piss-poor implementation of an individual weapon cartridge, BTW. Restricting yourself to the size restrictions created by the 5.56mm M16 receiver is just nuts, on the face of it. What they’ve got there is an early iteration of the failed “Short Magnum” fad, and the cartridge case itself is just a short, fat failure. Not to mention, too many idiots have managed to mix them up with 5.56mm and blown up their weapons.
You want to replace the M16/M4? Do a clean-sheet design of a cartridge, then a clean-sheet design of the weapon. Actually design for the real mission, which is the close-in fight at under 300m. Optimize it for what amounts to wing-shooting, and make it light and handy enough that the infantryman can make those fleeting shots at the enemy or other threats that are presented. Train accordingly, and make sure that the support weapons are there in effective designs and quantities. Then, you’ll start winning small arms combat.
This moronic and, frankly, childish urge to deny reality and somehow make “One Cartridge to Rule Them All” is an artifact of irrational and immature monomaniacal focus on irrelevancies like “simplifying supply”. You can’t “simplify supply” when the individual weapons are magazine-fed and the crew-served weapons are beltfed: You will always have to provide two different ammunition types, and ain’t nobody going to be taking the time to delink crew-served weapon ammunition for the individual weapons. That ammo is far more effective in the crew-served weapons, being belt-fed. If you’ve somehow managed to find yourself in a situation wherein you actually need to perform this particular stupidity, odds are you’ve f*cked things up enough elsewhere in the situation that you are shortly doomed to irrelevancy anyway. It’s time to exfiltrate, learn your lessons, and fight again another day.
Tony Williams is a false prophet.
Overacheiveing id iots blew up 10,5mm sholdr crtgs that dosnet even chamber ina 9,5mm breach. With 11mm rim that cant’ touch F pin in the 9,5mm bolt?
Real solider here, who needs maths!
but i like them both!
As a soldier i would buy the FN D and sell it on the collector market. with the money i would then buy a pkm and a drone.
I like them both, too. I simply wouldn’t want to have them anywhere near me in combat, unless they were on the other side…
I, too, would sell whichever one I was gifted to buy a PKM and a drone. Maybe buy “all the drones”, and forget the machinegun… I have my doubts about where small arms are heading, what with all the low-level precision strike weapons proliferating. I have a nasty suspicion that we’re all going to be buying those little anti-mosquito laser turrets for our houses, and re-targeting them on drones flying over our personal airspace. It’s only going to be so long until some bright light decides to use a drone or two in order to eliminate a personal rival or whatever. I suspect that there will have been a high-profile murder or two using drones before the decade is out. There may have already been several we just haven’t noticed; imagine the possibilities for screwing with someone out on a hiking trail in the mountains. If you think the goats on the Olympic Peninsula are unlikely dangers, then consider the drone with someone looking to play high-mountain raptor with it. You wouldn’t even need to arm the damn thing, and could probably get away with claiming that it “…just got away from me…”
[sigh] Modern life looked so promising, when I was a kid back in the 1970s. All this cool stuff coming in, all the high-tech wonders. Now? I’m seriously considering going full-on Luddite Amish.
“(…)decides to use a drone(…)in order to eliminate(…)rival(…)I suspect that there will have been a high-profile murder(…)”
Not sure if it count as high, as U.S. law system is far too complicated to comprehend for me, so please consider this case yourself https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/02/12/blowback-as-russia-investigates-first-fpv-murder-case/
At the beginning of the year, an murder attempt was made on a large farmer in one of the Trans-Baikal regions. The businessman died on the spot from his injuries. The weapon of the crime was an FPV drone with explosives where victim is business competitor
Hey now dont get bringing my beloved WSM, RCM, and RSAUM hunting rounds into this. I love those things.
But. I’m pretty sure they got a picture of me hanging up in Anoaka outside the R&D/marketing shop.
Everyone here is forgetting something. The 1918A1 BAR came out in, you guessed it, 1918. Think about its fellow MGs. Most weighted from 106 lbs, (1914 Hotchkiss), to 154 lbs, (MG 08 maxim). The MG 08/15 was 43 lbs but could be handled by one soldier. Water cooled/belt fed it was portable sustained firepower. The Lewis was lighter, 33 lbs, but wasn’t being used in that role. The Canadians figured it out when they saw how the Germans were using the 08/15. At just over 16 lbs, the 1918A1 BAR was a game changer that got in right at the end of the war. And when the FN-D came out, it was still a very relevant design. As to spare barrels. Every M240 and M249 SAW gunner or AG will have their weapon’s spare barrel with them at all times. Iraq, Afghanistan, doesn’t matter. Spare barrels go with the weapon PIRIOD.
In WW1, the BAR was up against bolt-action rifles with a 5-shot capacity. (the 98 Mauser). Now every soldier has a selective-fire weapon, often with 30-round magazine (AK-47). The concept back of the BAR is facing a game that changed about 70 years ago. No one in this thread forgot anything. They just turned out of Nostalgia Lane
We’re not looking at these weapons in the context of WWI, where the powers-that-were in charge of everything weapons-related were mostly oblivious to the things going on out on the actual battlefields. We’re talking about using them in the current context.
Or, for that matter, any rational combat context where they’re likely to be used. Even on a WWI battlefield, the BAR was a deranged idea, being based on the extremely flawed “Marching Fire” concept… Which was what John M. Browning designed it for, perfectly providing what the inept knuckleheads at the War Department asked for. It wasn’t fit for purpose then, and wasn’t fit for purpose at any point in its service history, but it was what was asked for. If Browning had gotten it any “less right” than he did, we might not have been saddled with it going into WWII and into the post-war years, but there we were.
Analyzed on its own merits and ignoring the realities of low-level combat throughout the mid-20th Century, the BAR was a very good weapon. It just didn’t have much utility as an LMG… As a firepower supplement for small units armed with bolt-action rifles, it wasn’t the worst thing going, but it also wasn’t even close to being in the same class with the BREN.
A fact that boils down to poorly-conceived ergonomics and tactical doctrine.
To be fair, if you had the choice between all the weapons in this class there at the end of WWI, I’m afraid you’d have to place the BAR only slightly above the Chauchat, in terms of “does this thing work, tactically?” The sad reality is that the BAR was really more of an uber-rifle, an individual weapon, than a true support weapon. You can’t do sustained fire with it, you can’t serve it with a crew, and the ergonomics just don’t work for something that’s supposed to be a support weapon.
The modern-day version of the BAR is more what it should have been in the first place.
https://oowinc.com/product/hcar/
Fundamentally, a long-range rifle suitable for the spotter in a two-man sniper team.
Yes, they also make a semi-auto, closed-bolt-firing version of the Model 1918 for nostalgia buffs. One like it, in selective-fire and firing from a closed bolt, might have changed our entire concept of military sniping between the wars.
There is a fundamental difference between a “machine rifle” and a “light machine gun”, and very few people ever seem to have understood it.
Which may be why we ended up with several examples of the former in the 1920s and 1930s that were fundamentally screwed up in trying to turn them into the latter. As in M1918A1/A2 BAR, Kiraly KE7, etc.
Some people persisted in the confusion right into the 1940s. See Johnson M1941 LMG so-called, and FG42.
Today, in many ways we are still afflicted with this confusion. There is really no good reason for the STANAG magazine slot on the M249. Other than being something needing its springloaded cover spotwelded shut to keep the “environment” out of the feed system, as well as preventing it from flopping over and jamming in-between the mag well and the belt-feed entry, and tying up both, when the spring fails.
(You do not want to get a friend of mine who was stationed at Ft.Lewis when they were introduced started on that subject. Or indeed the subject of the “two-forty-nine”, period.)
The MG42 and its postwar iterations were probably the apotheosis of what a “Light Machine Gun” and/or “General Purpose Machine Gun” should be.
Where designers have strayed from that concept since then, they have ended up going up blind alleys. The M240 comes so close to getting it right; except that it just weighs too much.
The M60 could have been great, except that it ended up as the spawn of an unnatural mating between an FG42, a Lewis gun, and a clumsier version of a Bren’s barrel-change. All of which equal “No, don’t ever do that again”.
As for the 7.62x51mm round, it’s about right for a true GPMG. Although 7.9x57mm was, and probably always will be, better.
Along with 7.62x63mm aka .30-06, none of the three should ever have been in an infantryman’s rifle.
clear ether
eon
“(…)7.62x63mm(…)should ever have been in an infantryman’s rifle. (…)”
Moses was working at fire-arm firing .30-18 cartridge https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/181854733014/historicalfirearms-the-30-18-browning which was less powerful than mentioned, yet would be provide greater reach than .45 Auto, during Great War or shortly thereafter. It is delayed-blow-back (sloped axis), akin to later MAS-38. Externally it would resemble M1903 rifle, though I am not sure if it was planned to issue such weapon to every soldier in unit.
IIRC it was Vladimir Fyodorov (1874-1966) who commented that the “ideal” infantry rifle cartridge was the .25 Remington aka 6.5x52mm. Others have preferred the .250 Savage or .257 Roberts.
I’m partial to the .257 Ackley Improved Roberts, but maybe that’s just me.
Whichever you prefer, the “sweet spot” for an infantry rifle round is probably not the .277 Fury aka 6.8x51mm. Which is more of a .270 Winchester or .280 Remington “Short-Magnumed”.
SAW round? Maybe.
Rifle round? No, I don’t think so.
clear ether
eon
You forgot the MG42, eon.
The root problem here is that people fundamentally do not understand what the hell the machinegun’s role is, down in the squad/platoon. They have all these preconceived notions, and pay no attention to the realities of combat.
Case in point: Why’d the US experience “overmatch” in Afghanistan? Simple; they did not grasp that by allowing ROE to restrict the troops under fire, they’d created a situation where the then-current US tactical system simply did not work. That system was designed around copious hot-n-cold running firepower provided by the range of weapons going from the Bradley’s 25mm chain gun up to the B-52 doing Arc Light strikes. The US infantry was never meant to be fighting in a small-arms exclusive manner, wasn’t designed for it, wasn’t trained for it, and proved to be unable to learn how to do it in the event. They totally eschewed the only thing that would have answered the long-range MG ambush, which was by carrying along the tools to answer such fires effectively in a timely manner: To wit, an effective and adaptable tripod system coupled with proper training and observation tools.
Instead, they decided that the solution was to be a different cartridge, and zero improvement in the means of deploying it. The latest refinements of the NGSW abortion will remain as effective as the old 7.62mm M240 when fired off the bipod and shoulders of the usual run of ill-trained and poorly-equipped infantrymen. Most you can count on in that mode is, maybe, and on a good day…? 800m. That’s it. And, given that the enemy is usually just pissing away ammo at you to keep you pinned down and ineffective in the first damn place, you’re effectively ceding the battlespace to him and he’s not even delivering effective fires on your stupid ass.
I’ve limited to no respect for the average moron in our military’s management corps. It isn’t actually an “officer’s corps” because the majority of them would fail to qualify as effective officers at any other point in our history; they’re mostly just Walmart middle-management with guns, and they’re not all that good at middle management, either. Walmart would fire most of them, were their competencies translated to a retail sales/warehousing context. Mostly because they almost universally lack the ability to either learn, identify what needs to be learned, or be at all effective.
Jesus H. Christ… Look at the stories showing up about how the troops aren’t being fed, and the barracks are literally mouldering with black mold and other issues. That’s just basic crap, and our so-called “leadership” can’t even manage that. Why anyone would think they could figure out how combat works is a wonder…
I didn’t really “forget” the MG42, Kirk; see paragraph eight.
I just can’t think of anything its designers got noticeably wrong. As you’ve said in the past, others have tried to copy some of its features and not others, not understanding whythose features are there to begin with. (The springloaded pawls on the top cover, for instance.)
The MG42, MG 42/59, MG1/2/3, and etc. are pretty much what a GPMG should be. And they were the end result of a line of efforts going back all the way to 1910, if you count the Bergmann MG15 and MG15nA.
It says a lot that nobody who ever used either the MG34 or MG42 ever really found anything to complain about. Except maybe hauling belts to feed their appetite for ammunition.
😉
cheers
eon
@ eon
That introduces the problem “Do GPMGs even exist in first place?”
Because everything that weights more than 10kg can’t be really carried in action by a foot soldier. And if it can’t be carried in action by a foot soldier, it’s not a GPMG, it’s a vehicular/fixed position MMG. And, at that point, if it weights 11.5 kg like the MG3, or 19 like the Breda 37, doesn’t make any real difference.
The thing that led to the general adoption of the Minimi is the fact that the western countries adopted a weapon (MG3 or FN Mag), and then realised it was too heavy for part of the job it was supposed to do.
The competitors of the BAR were mostly the Chauchat and the Lewis Gun.
There was another one, made in neutral country and used by many sides https://modernfirearms.net/en/machineguns/denmark-machineguns/madsen-eng/
There was a newspaper (remember those?) photo of a Madsen LMG in use in early 80’s El Salvador. Complete with porcelain looking cocking handle knob. Had to research it in library books to find out what it was; very steam-punk looking.
They’ve been used more recently by Brazilian police, as recently as 2018 according to wikipedia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZBdE22P71s
It’s like finding an MP-44 in Africa somewhere. If it works, it works. Those old Madsens should’ve been allowed to die many decades ago, but they just keep on being useful in spite of themselves. They can’t help it
“(…)1918A1 BAR came out in, you guessed it, 1918(…)”
Comparison is between D which, according to https://modernfirearms.net/en/machineguns/belgium-machineguns/fn-model-d-eng/ …appeared in around 1932… so it would be apt for comparison with 1930s designs or interbellum designs.
That could be an apt comparison, but this comparison pits it against the M78 (presumably Model of 1978). The entire premise of the question precludes handicapping the discussion to 1918 or even 1932 standards.
Sell and buy a Colt Monitor.
The Model D is infinitely cooler than the industrial, soulless commie gun, but I think Mr. Keene’s answer would change around mile 11 of a 24-mile ruck march. We have to bow to practicality sometimes, regardless of loftier attributes like beauty and quality of manufacture.
I don’t think it would take eleven miles, myself…
Been there, done that, and I’m here to tell you that the MG is a bitch on any road march, no matter which one it is. After enough time underneath one, you start going through your gear and shaving weight wherever you can. I have memories of looking at my tooth brush, and thinking “Do I really need that handle…? Couldn’t I do like the civilian backpackers do, and cut that thing off?”
You also start loading up all the crap you can into the spare barrel bag and putting it on the AG’s back. Who learns to hate you, with the firey passion of a thousand suns, because you periodically have him carry the gun, along with the spare barrel, ‘cos it’s “…too much trouble to pull the barrel bag out…” of his ruck.
The average person has no idea of all the interpersonal drama and angst that goes on between the gun team members, especially during movements.
Although, after the first time your semi-delirious gunner loses track of what’s going on, and lights up the recon team coming back into the patrol base? You start to figure out that maybe, just maybe, letting said gunner walk himself into mental oblivion isn’t a good idea…
For the unenlightened and inexperienced, the management of the gun team includes careful monitoring and judicious spacing out of tasks, so as to ensure that there’s actually a functioning mind and body behind the trigger when the time comes. A gunner in the early stages of heat exhaustion is a risk to everyone, especially if said gunner is running a fever and coming down with something nasty that creates auditory and visual hallucinations…
Pray, do not ask me how I learned these things. That was a rather unpleasant exercise, and I really do not like remembering it. Let us leave it at “Much learning occurred…”
The one cartridge to rule them all thought baffles me. We supplied five, FIVE, different small arms cartridges across the world in WWII.
I think the modern U.S. military can deal with something like 5.56 for a carbine, a 6.8 something for a standard rifle, and 338 Norma Mag for support machine guns.
Which, out of curiosity?
I’d guess there were even more, considering our role as the arsenal of our allies, but I can only think of three for domestic consumption.
You had .30-06 in belts, five-round stripper clips, and the eight-round en-bloc Garand clips, then the .30 Carbine, .45 Colt, .38 (at least two varieties that I can think of, Special and S&W for some of the obsolete revolvers that were still on issue), plus all the various specialty cartridges in those calibers. Then, there were the General Officer pistols in .380 and .32 ACP.
Simplifying the ammo is overall a good thing, but like everything else in life, you have to exercise moderation where it is sensible.
You missed 45ACP in half-moon clips for the 1917 revolvers.
Thanks, and agreed. Knew Britain issued S&W as .38-200, but didn’t know we did.
Security guards at defense plants were generally issued H&R Defender (later Model 925) in .38 S&W;
https://www.northwestfirearms.com/attachments/8jpv2ap-jpg.524785/
https://www.northwestfirearms.com/attachments/1333233-img_9436-jpg.525297/
This was a five-shot .38 S&W built on the frame of the 9-shot .22 LR Model 999 “Sportsman” target and utility revolver.
Introduced in 1942 and manufactured until 1981(!),during the war it went a long way toward “freeing up” Colt and S&W .38 Special revolvers for issue to frontline personnel, mainly Navy and Marine Corps aviators.
cheers
eon
Eon,
Interesting! I’m skeptical of the the whole “substitute standard” idea. It made some sense in WW2, when we went from “He kept us out of war!” to all-in in, and for, a very short time.
In WW2, when we planned far in advance and knew how to manage IP, self-inflicting logistical complexity (instead of our usual sensible practice of paying A for plans and assigning them to B factory with spare capacity) made less sense.
Sorry, first sentence should say WW1.
Mike;
Trying again and hopefully avoiding any words Hyvor doesn’t like.
The Defender came about because our “prior planning” failed to foresee the need for serious armed security at defense plants, as well as both an expansion of domestic policing and people needing home defense arms.
Crime went up during the war years, not down; the criminals were for the most part not eligible for enlistment or Selective Service. And the able young men who otherwise would have been policemen, state troopers, and etc. were “Over There”, again.
My father was a police officer during the war, while all his brothers were in the military. Even the two who were older than he was (born 1904). He served from 1937 to 1951, and clear through it had his bought-in-1937 Colt Police Positive Special .38. But other officers had Defenders because one of the first things the War Department did in late 1941 was “appropriate” every .38 Special Colt Official Police and S&W Military & Police in local PD’s, SO’s and etc.’s “official” armories. Most of which went to aviators.
So, a replacement was needed. And H&R had this large-frame top-break 9-shot .22, the Model 999 “Sportsman”, they had stopped production on due to wartime contracts for subassemblies for things for the likes of Remington, US&S, and etc.
They determined that the 6″-barreled, 9-shot .22 design could be re-engineered into a 4″-barreled, 5-shot .38 S&W with minimal difficulties. The cylinder dimensions could handle the OAL of the shorter .38 S&W round but not the .38 Special.
As a bonus, .38 S&W aka 0.380in Revolver ammunition was available in the logistics pipeline due to manufacture for Lend-Lease.
Add it all up and the Defender made perfect sense in the situation. For that matter, it made good enough sense as a low-cost home defense revolver to remain in production for four decades.
cheers
eon
Eon,
Makes sense. Thanks for the further explanation and background.
.50 BMG, 30-06 Govt, .30 Carbine, 12 ga, 45 ACP, and 38 SPL were the five I was thinking about.
I didn’t even think about .32 ACP and .380 ACP like Kirk mentioned.
Plus U.S. factories were turning out a lot of .303 Enfield and 38/200 for our Commonwealth allies
Ah, OK. I thought about, but really wasn’t including, .50 (size), and missed 12ga. Ally-wise, we were probably making .455, 9×19, and 7.62x54R as well.
I was trying to restrict my list to the stuff that your average infantry formation quartermaster might need to provide their US line troops…
Somewhere, I had in my hands what amounted to a catalog of everything in the way of munitions that the US military had and/or could provide during WWII. Including specifications, it was a multi-volume affair, and covered everything that they made for issue to US troops, provided to allies, and had available for Lend-Lease. It was a staggering document to contemplate.
I stopped my list before .50 caliber, thinking that we were talking basic supply in the average combat formation of foot soldiers, but you are right: Even they had .50 caliber weapons, those being what amounted to the TOW of the 1920s and 1930s. The US didn’t really procure or issue an anti-tank rifle because the M2HB was there, and seen as being a hell of a lot more effective against armor than something like the Boy’s.
I think you could probably do a lot of work, documenting “What they actually did…” vs. “What the so-called “authorities” tell us they did…”
I know for a damn fact that if you take a then-current manual and show it to the guys who actually fought in that war, they’ll mostly laugh in a most disturbing and uproarious manner at you and your ideas that the books are at all accurate. It’s a lot like the way the pirates in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie talk about the Pirate’s Code: https://youtu.be/k9ojK9Q_ARE?si=-a4Ut9eNlKcFks4x
The manuals are more guidelines than actual rules, see…?
My uncles that were there remembered that everybody thought the original Bazooka (Rocket Launcher, Anti-Tank, 2.36 inch) was a great idea. Instead of a bigger (and heavier) “anti-tank gun”, it gave the infantry a theoretically better way of killing tanks.
Except that in Sicily, in the late summer of 1943, on hot days the propellant charge would split the rocket’s tail boom open, and the bomb would tend to wobble slowly out and hit the ground about forty feet (not yards) in front of the muzzle.
During the Battle of the (Belgian) Bulge, they found that it often wouldn’t fire at all. Because the cold killed the two D-cell flashlight batteries that were supposed to power the igniter.
Yes, they “appropriated” every captured German 8.8 cm Raketenpanzerbüchse 54 (“Rocket Anti-armor Rifle Model 54”, abbreviated to RPzB 54) aka “Panzerschreck” they could find. Not just because of its more powerful HEAT round, but because the built-in generator in the launcher (working a lot like a hand-crank flashlight or “Gibson Girl” radio) was a Hell of a lot more reliable in a Belgian winter.
cheers
eon
Yeah, the US military screwed up the 2.36 Bazooka design, but since it was a first effort, I think we can cut them some slack.
What I can’t forgive is still keeping that thing on issue as late as the Korean War. The handwriting was on the wall, there by the end of the Normandy campaign and definitely after the Battle of the Bulge: The German iteration of the idea was where they needed to go, and quickly.
I’ve actually talked to some of the survivors of Task Force Smith and the other units that were there in Korea when the situation was horrid. You had guys doing things that should have won them a Medal of Honor, trying to stop T-34s with the old assuredly-not-super Bazooka, and it was just… Tragic. Rockets wouldn’t ignite, warheads wouldn’t detonate, and even when everything worked perfectly, just the way it was supposed to… The T-34 usually shrugged off the hit. One of the old guys described watching the other Bazooka team from his platoon fire, hit the side of the T-34 perfectly, only to have the crew notice them, do a pivot steer and then crush their hasty fighting position into the ground. There had been three guys in that position, and when it was over, the largest part of them that they found were some bone fragments. Despite eye-witness accounts, those men were carried on the rolls for years as Missing In Action, and may still be listed that way. Betrayed because the authorities knew that the 2.36 was obsolescent, and they needed the Super Bazooka to deal with even late WWII tanks.
Honestly believe that there should have been trials and summary executions after the Korean War, especially on that specific issue alone.
@Kirk
One of my schoolmates (K-12) was the nephew of Lt. Edward G. Uhl, who along with Col. Leslie Skinner created the original prototype Bazooka at Aberdeen in 1941 pretty much from scratch.
Skinner and Uhl were prewar members of the American Rocket Society (ARS), and had been involved in their liquid-fuel rocket experiments along with the likes of SF writer Laurence Manning. They knew about Dr. Robert Goddard’s experiments with small solid-fuel rockets as trench warfare weapons in 1918. (Incidentally, those were also the origin of the “rocket guns” in Philip Francis Nowlan’s 1919 SF novel A*m*g*d*on 2419 A.D.; yes, the original “Buck Rogers” story.)
Skinner & Uhl did not design the “Bazooka” round. It was originally developed “in-house” by Ordnance as, BION, a rifle grenade. It just turned out to be too heavy to be launched that way.
Ordnance’s “solution”? Launch it off the M2 Browning .50 HMG. Which wouldn’t have worked too well, either, as tests at Aberdeen showed.
Then Skinner & Uhl noticed that the diameter of the warhead of the “grenade” was just a bit smaller than G.I. issue rain downspout. All it needed was a solid rocket motor and an ignition system.
Thinking of Dr. Goddard’s experiments two decades earlier, and being “rocket guys” anyway, they came up with the original launcher from bits and pieces over a weekend. (The shoulder stock and pistol grips came from the Thompson SMG, BTW.) Plus a dozen “rocket” rounds.
When the Ordnance heads were demonstrating their .50 MG launched version (and missing the target, a moving T1 Combat Car, predecessor of the M3 Stuart), Skinner & Uhl added themselves to the end of the firing line. When their turn came, they fired six “homemade” rocket propelled grenades and hit the moving target every time.
The generals observing (including General Marshall), hearing the unfamiliar sound of the rocket fire, ran over to look. They fired off the last half-dozen rounds Skinner & Uhl had made up, and nobody missed.
The “rocket gun” was ordered into production immediately. Early on, it was called the “Buck Rogers gun”- somebody had obviously read Nowlan’s book. The “Bazooka” name came from its physical resemblance to a long, homemade horn used by radio comedian and musician Bob Burns.
The original prototype ran on two 1.5V Eveready batteries; the big ones used to start off .019 and .049 “glow” engines for control-line model airplanes (remember those?). Somebody in Ord decided that those were too heavy; that’s how the production model ended up with two 1.5V Exide-brand D-cells instead, which were more temperature-sensitive and had much lower amperage.
At the same time, they substituted a different smokeless-powder formulation in the rocket motor grain, for “ease of production” reasons.
According to his nephew, you did not want to get Ed Uhl started on either of those two brainstorms.
Uhl, by 1945 a Captain, was largely responsible for the design of the 3.5in “Super-Bazooka”, and its projectile with its huge, powerful HEAT warhead. He wanted a round that could punch through the heaviest armor on a German Tiger I or Panther D. It was ready by mid-’45, but wasn’t produced then on the grounds that the 2.36in M1A1 launcher could handle Japanese tanks perfectly adequately.
And it could. Five years later, T34s were another story. Which was why the 3.5 was hastily put into full production and early lots were literally flown to Okinawa from Stateside. They weren’t in time to save Task Force Smith, but they helped hold the Pusan Perimeter.
I understand that Uhl & Skinner refrained from saying “I told you so”.
cheers
eon
I do remember those.
“Control-line model airplanes?”
Good times my friends.
Good times.