BREN Light Machine Gun: Technique and Doctrine

[Music] hello and welcome to bloke on the right I am again lucky enough to be here with the guys from machine gun store CH who have this lovely burn mark 3 that they've made available to me to film and show off now in a previous video I went through the mechanics of this so if you haven't seen that one link in the description link up in the corner go have a look at that now what we're going to talk about today is a bit of Bren doctrine particularly on how the British soldiers were taught to shoot the Bren compared to the rifle because it's actually very very different now contrary to internet legend the Bren gun was actually the main firepower of an infantry section an infantry section officially on paper varied between eight and ten eleven men was divided into a Bren gun group of two to three normally three and then a rifle group which had a section commander who had a submachine gun Thompson or later a Sten and everyone else now the the training pamphlets are quite insistent that the Brent was the main firepower of the section that everyone would be trained in its use it was not treated like a specialist weapon like the BA R in American service now just to give it an idea of actually how important this was in the 1942 range courses during the war which were fired at least once a year there were about 50 to 55 rounds on the rifle depending on how much zeroing had to be done and there were 100 rounds on the Bren for every infantryman the idea was that if there's one man left standing in the section and there's ammo remaining he's got this there were Bren proficiency badges for people trained further in it particularly for use on the tripod for firing all fixed lines at night and in fog and things like that but in the light roll everybody in the section was trained to to use the brim and in fact the ammunition allocation early war it was every rifleman had to bring her mags in his left universal pouch and then in the right he had grenades other stuff 50 rounds for his own rifle late war he had that plus a further 50 rounds in a bandolier on charges not faze own rifle but for refilling Bren magazines and this is this is something that is often entirely missed in these kinds of these kinds of discussions the Germans on the other hand concentrated all their ammunition in the gun group which was three men a the number one on the gun who carried it and fired it the number two who was soem buggered with ammunition that he didn't even get a rifle he had a pistol and the number three who had a rifle and was also in buggered with canisters of ammunition one of the advantages of magazines you've got to change them more often but you can distribute them throughout the whole section and that's what the Brits did everybody carried magazines with them and they got to and from the gun in utility pouches which are not often seen there were two of them in a section I've only got one set at the moment what I'm hoping to do in a later video is get some people together in a whole pile of magazines and we'll play what we'll do a dry run of what the job of the number two was and it was basically and that according to the late war come to the late war philosophy let's just go back a bit the early war philosophy had guys walking with the gun at the trail no mag on and the first thing they do in a contact is prepare the gun to fire take a magazine from a pouch load it and crack on late warmer number one have one mag on the gun four in his pouches which is about five kilos it's a significant weight the number to have four mags which he carried in utility pouches over a shoulder around his neck and coming into action the the number one would start with the magazine on the gun and you try and keep at least two of in reserve but the number two would would dump his four mags off to the right of the gunner so he had access to them we'll grab the second set of pouches which was either being carried by the the gun grip commander or by the gunner depending on how big the gun group was I mean a section was the smallest unit that could fight on its own be self-supporting and do farm maneuver and the smallest number of men that could work like this was five which is a gun group of two and a rifle group of three which is actually kind of small so anyway he'll be running backwards and forwards in in attack these will hold six magazines three in each and but that's far too much weight so the cons of the pamphlets men were not to carry more than four magazines for anything other than a really short distance I imagine people did fill them up that they're already pretty heavy just with four in and when we were shooting and we had the opportunity to shoot this and I'll insert some shooting footage it convenient points I filled four mags up on them 28 rounds each put it around my neck in the way that they you sometimes see them and you often see them carried like this around the neck it was substantially heavy so that's a bit of doctrine what I'm going to do first is just put the brain off to one side I'm going to get down behind the rifle and show how the rifle was taught to be shot so the rifle shooting position they taught was very angled and with the elbows quite splayed and if you could bring the camera up and and show it from above this is a very unmodern position these days would shoot more like this straight up behind the rifle and that was only ever encouraged for people who struggled to to work the bolt without hitting themselves in the face but the elbows were more spoke nowadays we trying to get the left arm left elbow more under the rifle there back in the day and they were teaching like this so the problem with a light machine gun if you lie down behind it like that is that when it when it vibrates and these don't really recoil much they they rock backwards and forwards if you weren't bleep like that it's gonna wobble over all over the place and this was a mistake I made the first couple of times I shot these things and I was wondering why is that the front sight jumping all over even even just firing the first round the front sight was nowhere near where it was supposed to be when the gun actually went bang luckily last time actually bothered to read the pamphlet and they taught something totally different which was to get right down behind the gun feet together and even to dip your toes in if you show this from above you see it's a very very in line position now with a rifle you you kind of bring the rifle to you here you plant the gun where you want it to be so the bipods not particularly pushed one way or the other and you bring yourself to it it's really is the opposite way around and then when you fire it it doesn't go wandering around all over the place which was a real revelation to me when I actually tried it so if you're behind it like this you put you push yourself into it you don't pull the gun backing into you you push yourself into it hold it and then even with that amount of of movement it's still roughly where it should be once it goes bang now the position of the left hand was over the top of the rest of the buck there and you put your face on it all or behind it and then again if we look closely when it goes off I'm picking apart on the water even though there's a great big slop of recoil from the working the gun will then just rock Dakka Dakka Dakka Dakka Dakka like that and the allegation of the breasts to a queue it was recognized that it was accurate the training was sort of we want to exploit this in a single shot they were taught to fire single shot whenever was appropriate to save ammunition because there's only a limited number of magazines in the section and it also hides the fact that you've got an automatic weapon as long as you not do 13 rounds a pound of gives the game away but if you shoot a bit irregularly you're less of a mortar and enemy machine-gun magnet now doctrine was at 30 well aimed shots in a minute were possible and a good shot from the bipod or the gun mounted on the tripod should in principle put five around groups of four inches at a hundred yards which is quite accurate now to exploit it in automatic fire some more the the service bursts were four to five rounds long which took a bit of practise on the range because I've not had that much show not had that much practice at it but some the idea being there that you're trying to get an optimum spread on the target I mean there's no such thing as too accurate I mean if it if too accurate was a thing they were being taught to hold it loosely because these things vibrate like crazy um you know I just if I just hold it loosely like that there's loads of vibration absolutely tons of vibration that you can manipulate that four to five rounds produce what they considered to be an optimal spread when employing automatic fire as here it is best to fire it in bursts of four or five rounds the necessary volume of fire is thereby produced accuracy can be maintained and excessive expenditure of ammunition is avoided the normal rate of fire is about a magazine a minute and it is important to remember that there are only twenty-four magazines in the section and that works out at 145 mm burst every ten seconds or so on average and actually quite insistent that the people just don't rely on the spread that they did have to aim properly and the rapid rate early war it was for magazines a minute which he looks at 112 rounds and the bursts were separated by as little time as possible required to observe the fall of shot Andrey aim so they weren't they just do more people for asking up the countryside they really wanted people going back a decade okay Dakka Dakka Dakka Dakka Dakka Dakka and so on late wall they reduced it to three magazines a minute which is 84 rounds and when you're operating on your own it's quite easy keep firing and so on so in defense or in a situation where the number two has got enough ammunition hanging around that he can assist the gunner I've got fill from machine gun store CH here who's gonna play the play the gunner for me and I'm going to load for him so he's going to be engaging a target and then once the guns it's very fast here and now we're out but as you can see you can keep up a really quite high rate of fire there and there's no there's no need to [ __ ] it because it because it holds open and it and it only takes a couple of seconds to change one of these out if we were with her with an mg42 or similar I will be fiddling with belts on the side feeding them in rather than rather than changing out magazines but that's how it worked in defense in defense each gun has its own tripod giving increased stability and enabling the gun to be fired on a fixed line in defense also the gunner has an assistant to help him now as I mentioned in early war training films you see you see the Bren gun is walking up like this and then they'd have to get into action by coming down cover pow like that whereas late-war they were ready to go now the other thing that changes is that that there's a very interesting training video which was platoon in the attack and I'll put a link to it in the in the description below when they get to the end of the platoon attack where they're going in with the bayonet they hold the bring Gunners back because they say well the Bren guns no use in the assault I'm steam machine guns are well forward and the brim which cannot really take part in the assault I'm following up slightly in real ready to cover the reorganization or to come into action should there be a need to check late war that changed late war they wore hip-firing became a thing either holding the gun like that on the bipod and giving it loads like this or alternatively that fold out the side handle there which was traditionally intended for anti-aircraft use from the family on the on the tripod and they give it loads like this so I hope that was at least vaguely interesting a lot to rambling and random and all over the place thanks so much for watching this far thank you so much the guys at machine gun store CH for helping and holding the camera and inviting me up here to film their beautiful for a mock three thanks also so much to Paul O'Neill for sorting out my webbing for me a also used in Canada thanks so much thank you so much to our patrons who have helped contribute to the ammunition you saw get expended in this video and if you haven't already become a patron please consider doing so we're very grateful for all support you can give us and see you again sometime right you

Channel: Bloke on the Range

Views: 101,652

Rating: 4.9621029 out of 5

Keywords: weapons (interest), shooting (sport), milsurp, 303, british, lmg, bren, technique, doctrine, light machine gun

Id: LLd0Px2Q8E0

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Cannonfodderbob]

Soon, before release I think

[u/GnomishKaiser]

I would like a map in the Italian campaign or Africa.

[u/BlackCow]

That would be neat. You would have to ask your team mates for mags lol.

[u/Oxu90]

Battle of Caen would be cool map

What about pacific theatre? That would be cool as well