Browning automatic rifle5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() Patton was a great advocate of it), this new war was no longer dominated by massive trench systems to be assaulted and taken. ![]() Even though the concept of walking fire still existed (and, in fact, General George S. It came with a bipod and a buttstock rest to help the aim of prone gunners, and a rate-of-fire selector that allowed the user to switch between roughly 400 and 600 rounds per minute, at the cost of sacrificing semi-auto firing.īy the time World War II started, it was clear that the BAR was not going to be used in the role it was originally designed for. Meanwhile, in 1938, America also produced its own definitive version of the BAR, the M1918A2. 37, based on the BAR, mounted on an observation plane (Photo: ) Contemporary machine guns, however, were far too heavy and bulky to carry around on the attack, necessitating some sort of weapon that was more portable but still had enough firepower to suppress a trench's defenders. An assaulting infantry force equipped with nothing but rifles was at a great disadvantage. Enemy trenches, already fortified positions by nature, were defended with machine guns. The purpose of an automatic rifle (and, in a wider context, a light machine gun) was to overcome the firepower disparity between defense and offense in trench warfare. The demonstration was so successful that Browning was quickly awarded a contract for the rifle (the machine gun needed further testing before becoming another iconic American weapon). He organized a live-fire demonstration of the weapon to a 300-man public, many of them congressmen, senators and other political and military insiders. with two prototypes he wanted to offer to the government: one eventually became the M1917 Browning machine gun, the other the Browning Machine Rifle, the BAR's prototype. He personally traveled to Washington, D.C. With America's entry into the war on the doorstep, legendary gunmaker John M. Unfortunately, much of that was the French Chauchat light machine gun, a hastily designed and shoddily manufactured stopgap weapon that was so unreliable that it went down in history as likely the worst machine gun ever, nicknamed by the troops "the damned and the jammed" for a reason.įrench soldiers with a Chauchat machine gun in 1918 (Photo: Jacques Ridel) This was clearly insufficient, so American soldiers had to rely on whatever they could get from the British and the French. military had a total of 1,110 machine guns at the time. was about to enter World War I in early 1917, the military quickly realized that it had an inadequately small and obsolete selection of machine guns in a war that was pretty much all about machine guns. ![]() Like the Thompson submachine gun (SMG), the BAR was also originally designed for use in World War I, arrived late, and had to find a new purpose in the interwar years and World War II. Today, we'll continue our review of WWII-era firearms with another American staple: the Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR for short. soldier with a Browning Automatic Rifle (Photo: U.S. You can find out more about the BAR in this article.U.S. Rate of Fire: Approximately 350 or 550rpm It has a cylindrical flash suppressor fixed to the end of the barrel, a fixed wooden butt stock and closed-type iron sights, consisting of a forward post and rear leaf sight, adjustable to between 100 and 1,500 yards. ![]() The weapon feeds via a double-column 20-round magazine, although 40-round magazines were available when in the anti-aircraft role (up until 1927). The weapon's barrel is screwed into the receiver and not easily detachable. The bolt contains the extractor which is spring-powered while there is a fixed ejector in the trigger group. The bolt is locked by a rising bolt lock and the gun fires from an open bolt. The M1918 is a selective fire, air-cooled, gas-operated automatic rifle, being cycled by propellant gases that are bled off through a vent in the barrel. Over time however, the weapon gradually became to be used in a light machinegun role, especially when later variants came equipped with a bipod, although having a 20-round box was a major limitation. Originally designed to be an automatic rifle, carried by a sling over the shoulder and fired from the hip – a concept called 'walking fire'. 30-06 rifle cartridge and designed by John M Browning in 1917 as a replacement for the US Army's French-designed Chauchat and M1909 Benet-Mercie machineguns. The primary version was the M1918 and its variants, chambered for the. The Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) was a family of weapons used by the United States and a large number of other countries during the 20th Century. 30-06 cartridge, saw action all the way from the last months of the First World War to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Browning Automatic Rifle – a rifle capable of fully automatic fire, designed by the firearm maestro, John Moses Browning. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |