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: )
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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.
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