Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today is the first in a several part video on the Bren gun. We're going to look at the origins of the Bren gun and its original early production today. And then in a follow-up video a little bit later, we'll talk about things that were done to it during World War Two, modifications and improvements. And we'll follow that up with a third part
on a 7.62 NATO conversion of the Bren. So, to begin with the first
(the nicest really) Bren gun. This goes back to the 1920s, not surprisingly. After World War One, the
British military was interested in finding a replacement for its
Vickers guns and its Lewis guns. And they kind of tinkered
around through the 1920s. They tested pretty much all of the
guns that came out in the '20s. But there was no real concerted
trials program, it was just, "Oh ... look ... there's a Châtellerault
machine gun, let's take a look at that. And then let's take a look at the BAR."
And by the way they really liked the BAR. ... In the years right after World War
One, everyone really liked the BAR, but it was never actually
adopted by the British. It wasn't until 1930 that there
was an actual formal push for, "OK, we are going to have a trial, and we
are going to find a new light machine gun." And in particular, this new light machine
gun was going to be tasked with replacing both the Lewis as a light machine gun,
and the Vickers as a heavy machine gun. And this is not an out of place requirement. This is exactly what the Germans would
do, creating a universal machine gun with both heavy and light employment methods. However, the British were going to
do it with a box-magazine fed gun. Incidentally, the third
part of the requirement is they also wanted the gun
to be mountable on vehicles, carriers or armoured fighting vehicles. What would eventually become the
Universal Carrier, aka the Bren gun carrier. A little tiny tracked utility vehicle
that you could mount a gun on. At any rate, in 1930 they start
this actual serious program. And they kind of test all
the usual suspects again. They try to test the Darne, but
they aren't able to get them in time. They test two versions of the
Browning, which is to say the BAR. They test the KE-7 from SIG. ... The control that they're
testing against is the Lewis gun. The Vickers wouldn't play a role in this. ... While they wanted the new gun to
... take over both heavy and light roles, they were really focusing on the light
here, at least in the testing program. And then they also tested this thing
out of Czechoslovakia, the ZB 26. Which, by the time they got them, was actually
a ZB 27, with a few little improved features. ... Oh, I should also [say], they also tested the
Madsen gun in .303, and the Vickers-Berthier. And the trials reports
are kind of interesting because you can almost
just see moustaches twitching in excitement through
some of these trials reports, because this Czech gun
did just magnificently well. Much to everyone's surprise, as far as I can tell. The initial trial was about 12,500 rounds between
everything that was done for the various guns. The ZB came through that with no
parts breakage and two malfunctions, both of which could be tied to magazines. Now at this point this is a
gun that is in 8mm Mauser. The British of course want a .303 calibre gun,
but 8mm is what the ZB was being made in. And ... in an early trial they were
perfectly happy to take a different calibre. So by the end of this first 1930 trial
they eliminate all but three guns. They are very excited by the ZB 26 (or 27), but they're also fairly happy with the
Vickers-Berthier, and also the Madsen gun. They don't like the handling of the
Madsen, but it ran fairly reliably. The Vickers-Berthier also
showed a lot of promise. So they decided to come back
a year later and do a new trial. And for that trial they specifically
wanted a .303 calibre gun. So, the Brno factory was willing to oblige
them, and in 1931 sent a .303 converted gun. So a .303 barrel, .303 magazine. And it should be noted at this point
that the ZB that they were working with was very much like a ZB 26,
it had a gas piston that came all the way out here to
the very end of the barrel. And they liked that feature, because
what it meant in the original guns was that the bullet has to
come all the way down to here before gas is tapped out of the
barrel and starts to move the action. Which means it's a fairly soft shooting gun. Because the action of ... cycling is delayed
until just about the time the bullet has left, it's delayed about as long as it can be. The M1 Garand is similar in this respect. However, what they
discovered in this 1931 trial is the gun actually didn't do quite so well. It had problems ejecting, which
they attributed to a relatively rushed conversion program to .303. It had problems with the magazine,
.303 is a rimmed cartridge, 8mm is rimless. ... This sort of conversion is going to
be one that's going to be a little difficult. They also discovered that the
gas port being way out here didn't work all that well with
specifically British ammunition. Because the British are using cordite
because they just have to be a little different. And it fouled a lot more than it
should have ... because of that. What's interesting to me is the
British ... ordnance testing board was so enamoured with the gun
that they kind of just didn't care. I mean obviously they cared, but normally
problems like that would be an easy cause for, "Alright, the gun's out of the trial, forget it.
Doesn't feed, fouls up, we don't like it, get rid of it." On this one they were willing to
give Brno quite a lot of slack, relative to what you would expect. ... They basically said, "Oh, well, we know
it was fantastic in the rimless 8mm version. Just take it back, spend a little
more time, tweak it a little more, and we'll look at it when
you've got it fixed up a little bit. Because, boy, we really want this gun." Is pretty much what you
can read in the reports. By the end of this trial they'd
pretty much ditched the Madsen. They weren't happy with it for a bunch of reasons,
and frankly it was a very old design by that point. 1932 comes around and they get
another revised version of the ZB. This is now the ZGB, Great Britain,
1932 or 32 pattern gun. The magazine's been improved. They've moved the gas
port back to about this point, where it would remain
in the final Bren version. They run another 19,000 rounds through the gun,
and they have something like 6 malfunctions. All of which could be cleared by
just hitting the charging handle. And like one of them
was just a rim lock issue. And they're thrilled, but there are
still a few things that they want better. They want a better tripod
setup, because remember, they still have this idea that it'll replace
the Vickers gun in service as well. And the way to do that is to mount the
thing on a tripod and have an optic on it, which, by the way, they
request an optics bracket. And we'll talk about that when
we look at the gun up close. So they want a better tripod, and
they also want 30 round magazines. Because at this point what Brno had
given them was a 20 round magazine, which kind of makes sense in 8mm. ... Basically in all of its other iterations the
ZB 26 family uses a 20 round magazine. But the Brits wanted 30, so OK. The ZGB 33 pattern gun arrives the next
year and ... basically it's the same gun, ... like literally the same test gun,
and they've just modified it back. It now has 30 round mags, it
now has tripod attachment points, which we'll also take a look at in a moment. And the British do some more testing
and like, this is pretty much good to go. They discover some problems with the Vickers-Berthier that they don't
like, so they chuck that out of the trials. And ... they've pretty much set themselves up
with what will become the Bren, the ZB gun. Just for kicks they take a
second example of the gun, not the one that's already been run
through all these trials and modified, but a second model, and they do a
150,000 round endurance test on it. Kind of just to see what breaks. And it broke a bunch of recoil
springs over the course of that. But they said they didn't even notice
until they'd stopped to do a routine cleaning on the gun as part of this trial.
And they'd pull it open and go, "Oh, the recoil spring broke, huh, we didn't
notice." Throw it out, put in a new one. At a little over 140,000 rounds
the ... kind of the lower receiver, if there is such a thing on this, it broke. Again, didn't stop the gun,
but it broke so they fixed that. And they added a little bit of
metal to that part in the schematic for when they started full scale production. And again, they were just really
pretty much beside themselves with how wonderful this
light machine gun was. So, in 1935 the British government
signs a contract with Brno to licence manufacture of what will
become known in 1935 as the Bren gun. That is "Br" for Brno, the factory in
Czechoslovakia where it was developed, and "en" for Enfield, the factory in England
where it's going to be manufactured. The licensing contract will run until 1949, and ... the first 17,000 guns they'll
pay a 3 pound licence fee on. That drops down to 2 pounds by
the time they've got to 40,000 guns. They are allowed to make them, ... according
to this licensing contract, in the UK, in its dominions and its
provinces, and also Sudan. They never did set up production in Sudan. And they are allowed to sell
them also to Sudan and Iraq, which is a British protectorate at that point. But they can't go selling these things
off on the commercial market elsewhere. Production would take
a little while to ramp up. The first thing they had to do was
convert all of the drawings to inch, because they had been done in
Czechoslovakia in metric dimensions. And there was a little bit of a flub there,
the original Enfield production gun turns out to be not quite interchangeable
because they kind of mess up the conversion. This leads to something
called the "Enfield inch", which is not quite a regular
standard inch. Hence the issues. That's a separate issue we can get into later. By 1938 production actually starts.
So they get the first official Bren Mark I, manufactured as basically a proof sample
in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1937. Enfield has production started
up by September ... of 1937, and in 1938 the first guns
actually come off the line. So ... now having spent a lot of time
going through the backstory of this thing, let's take it apart, let me show
you how this actually works. The Bren is widely,
and I think pretty rightfully, considered basically the best
light machine gun of this period. The best light machine gun of the light
machine guns that were made in this style. And by that I'm referring to guns
that are magazine fed, not belt fed, and fired off a bipod instead of off a tripod. ... There's kind of a heyday of these
guns from the 1920s through the 1940s before everyone decided to adopt the
German universal machine gun idea. The Mark I Bren is a rather fancy
and feature-rich sort of gun. So, we have a stabilisation handle back here. So your shooting hand, your strong
hand, goes on the pistol grip, and your support hand holds
this to help control the gun. It is mounted in what is
actually also a tripod mount. So this pin unlocks
(this one's pretty stiff here). With that lifted all the way up the
rear [support] handle comes out. ... You can see here the style of socket, so when you drop this onto a
tripod there's a lug right there. And then you push this pin
back through, lock it in place, and that locks the gun down onto the tripod. We also have a folding
shoulder rest up here. So you can flip that down. There's some question as to
how useful these really are, but it does give you something to pull the back
of the gun down onto while you're firing. This is marked Bren Mark I
right here on the side. And this is a very early example,
manufactured at Enfield. You've got the Royal cipher
there, and the date, 1939. This style of marking would
change a bit before too long. And the serial number is here
on the back end of the receiver. These were initially made in single-prefix
batches of 10,000, so A, B, and C. This gun was one that was actually ... (well
obviously, made in 1939) produced before Dunkirk. Obviously this one survived Dunkirk. We have of course a 30 round magazine. There ... are a pair of grooves
stamped into the magazine here. This one is to control the rims of the cartridges
to make sure that they don't cause rim lock. This one is of course
to control the shoulder, and keep the bullets
pointed in the right direction. There is a hold open tab here, this will
lock open when the magazine is empty. The gun fires from an open bolt,
which we'll get to in a moment. There is a folding, non-reciprocating
charging handle here on the Mark I pattern. There is also a dust cover
that goes over the magazine well. There's a little ball detent here that
holds it in the open or closed position. Pop, right there. There is also a sliding dust cover
on the bottom, if you push that. You have to open it up to actually shoot,
so that you have an ejection port. But if you're not actively using the gun, you can close that up and prevent
any dirt from getting in the bottom. The barrel change mechanism is extremely
simple, we have our locking lever here. There's a little spring-loaded
button on the inside. (Shielded by the way, so you
don't bump it accidentally.) Lift that up ... not quite 90 degrees. And then using the nice big handle, you
simply pull the barrel forward out of the gun. It uses an interrupted thread, and
that's what this lever actually is, it's the other half of
this interrupted thread. So lift it up, barrel slides out.
Lock down, barrel stays in place. We have a front pin here,
just like the one that held the rear stabilisation handle in place. This is the front attachment
point for the tripod. The bipod normally sits like this. You can rotate the bipod 90 degrees
over, slide it right off the gun. ... This one's got a little bit of grease in
it, but the legs can extend and retract. And of course when
this is mounted in the gun you can fold the legs ... together and then fold
them either back or forward, whichever you prefer. There's a lot to go over on this gun. On the other side we
have a selector switch here. This is marked "A", "S" and "R". And
that is automatic in the front position, safe in the middle position, and R for
repetition, which is semi-auto fire, in the back. There are two dovetail
mounts on the side of the gun. The rear one holds the iron sights,
which we'll look at in a sec. The front one was intended
for an indirect fire sight as well as a telescopic sight
that was in development. Now we'll talk about the
indirect fire sight separately, because a few of those do exist
and we have access to one. But that's a little beyond the scope of
this video, which is already getting long. The story on the magnified optic,
the telescopic sight for this, is that it was planned, and basically in the aftermath
of Dunkirk the whole idea was scrapped. They wanted to simplify the guns. The ... original idea was to use the
Number 32 scope and mounting bracket that are the same as what would go
on the Number 4 rifle sniper patterns. The idea being you'd have the
same scope and the same mounting, and you just swap them between
sniper rifles and light machine guns as long as you have the little
mounting bracket for each. But the whole idea got scrapped. As far as I know, none of the Bren
mounting systems were actually ever made. And it's only very early guns that have the
second dovetail for that telescopic sight. Now the iron sights here
are based on a rotary wheel. And as you crank this, the rear
aperture sight is going to lift up. You have an aperture sight here, and then
your range markings are on this wheel. (If we can get the light right,
you can see that there.) So it tells you your range setting
as you rotate the wheel up. So fairly complex, there you go, 2, 3, 4, etc. (Sorry, there's some old oil in there as well.) Fairly complicated rear
sight setup, but it works well. Looking at the barrel - I'm going to come
back to the handle in just a moment, we have a gas block out here on the barrel. It is adjustable, you've
got four different settings. And they're indicated by
the different size holes there. To change settings you
simply take the barrel off, and rotate it to whatever
setting you want. There is a little tab here on the front
of the piston that will slide into this, and that ensures that ... the setting there is
properly aligned so that the gun will function. If you want to take the
... gas port system [out], you just rotate this to where it's
kind of halfway in between settings, and then it just drops out of the gun. Oop, and then I drop it on the table. The front sight here is
of course offset to the left, and that's to match the
offset to the left rear sight, which is done because
the magazine is centred in the top of the gun, so you
can't have the sights in the middle. As a practical matter, this doesn't
really cause any significant issues. It's a little awkward for
a left-hander to shoot, but you can actually roll your
head over the top of the stock, and it's not really a big deal. Just a minor note, there's a
lightening cut on the front sight tower of the barrels that were made
by Enfield, but not by Inglis. So that's kind of just a little
identification trick there. And then of course one of the
distinctive features of the Mark I Bren is this stainless steel flash
hider or gas block assembly. And the original idea here
was that where this is currently pinned in position permanently
(or semi-permanently), this was originally going to
be a threaded on component. So the barrel itself actually
comes all the way out to here. You can see the muzzle end of it right there
(with some grease and gunk in there, sorry). And the original point was this slid on, the
stainless steel was more corrosion resistant, so it would help prevent fouling,
as well as rust, in the gas system. And then if you had problems
you could just change this out, instead of having to
change out the entire barrel. This pin would have originally been
basically a removable spring clip that you could like rotate
out, pull the pin out, and then you could unthread
this off of the barrel itself. The other thing that they wanted
to do with that was make a blank firing version of this ... gas
block and [flash] hider assembly that would be correctly
gassed for blank firing. It would have the appropriate
restrictor in the front already, and that would make for a nice
simple elegant blank-firing system. They didn't ever actually do
that, in fact I have a version here that we'll take a
look at in a separate video of the actual blank-firing
system that they used. But that's why this is this distinctive separate
material, separate component out here. There's one other little feature I want
to show you, because it's kind of cool. The barrel carry handle of
course stands vertical like this for pulling the barrel off,
or for carrying the gun. And then it folds down to the side
when you're actually shooting. However, you can also pull the
handle back, and it will unlatch, and you push this all the way down,
and then rotate it forward like so. This one doesn't want to snap back in, but what happens is this little tab locks
into a rail in the front of the receiver here, and holds this solidly
in the downward position. And this was intended for helping to
control the gun with your support hand when you were using it in an
anti-aircraft role lifted up on a tripod. It would also be used by troops for firing
the thing from the hip supported on a sling. And you have your primary
hand back here on the grip, and your support hand
up on the front grip. And it's a neat sort of assault-fire
style of carry handle setting. Alright, I've got a second example here that I'm
going to pull apart to show you the internals, because it's a little happier coming apart. So first pull the mag off. Second is easy, we're going to
pop the handle, pull the barrel off. Next step we can rotate this down
on its side, and the bipod comes off. There is then just one pin holding this
gun together, and it is a captive pin. And if I pull that out, I can then pull the whole
bottom trigger assembly frame off of the gun. So this has that sliding
dust cover in it, right there. This has the trigger mechanism. The recoil spring is captive
inside the buttstock. So it just has this extension rod that
is going to push on the ... bolt carrier. Once I have that bottom assembly off of the
gun, then I can just pull the bolt carrier out. So gas piston, bolt carrier. The bolt lifts right off like that. We
have a spring-loaded firing pin in there. And that's the whole thing field stripped. This is legitimately one of the fastest
and easiest light machine guns to disassemble, reassemble.
There are no small parts to lose. And it is truly a really elegant design. Mechanically this is, of course,
identical to the ZB 26. In a nutshell this is a tilting bolt. So as
the whole assembly is going forward it pushes a cartridge in (these two prongs
pick up a cartridge from the magazine). When the cartridge is fully
chambered, the bolt will stop but the recoil spring continues
to push the operating rod forward. And you can see the little ramp here
which pushes the back of the bolt up. So this is the locked
and in battery position. And what's going on there is
this shiny surface at the top is locking into a recess
in the top of the receiver. Namely, it's locking right in front of this
piece, this is a hardened locking block. You can see it's got a little peened
screw there, this can actually be replaced. So if the headspace grows too excessive you can put a larger locking piece
(locking shoulder would be the term) in there and put the
gun back into service. This tongue right here is the ejector. So when the bolt comes all the way
back carrying an empty cartridge, the ejector will slide in between
those two little rails on the top. It will kick the cartridge out of the
bolt face and push it straight down, where it ejects here out
the bottom of the gun. In fact there is this big ol' hole, so
when the gun is in position to eject this is lined up with the very
bottom of the receiver, right here, and gives you an ejection port. When the bolt is forward
that ejection port doesn't exist, but it doesn't matter because
the bolt's not trying to eject. Now the way this actually fires is you have your loading/chambering sequence. So the bolt's going to
come up, track backwards. And when it gets all the way
into the locked position, like this, this surface on this little tower is going to hit that, right
there, which is the firing pin. That is going to protrude out the bolt face. And yes, it is basically a rectangular
firing pin, not a round one. That's going to protrude
out of the face and fire. So as I mentioned at the beginning
this fires from an open bolt, so it is normally in this position. The whole thing goes forward, chambers, fires. ... (Yeah, there we go, there's the
firing action with the bolt mounted.) And then the gas block taps
gas into the front of this piston, which is going to push the
whole assembly backward. The first thing that's going to
happen, the bolt is locked in place, so the op rod is going to come backward. And then ... the ramp on this hook is going
to act on this surface at the back of the bolt, which pulls it down, just like that. It's then out of battery, and then the
whole thing can reciprocate backward, extract, and then eject
the empty cartridge. By the time Dunkirk happened, the British
had manufactured about 30,000 Bren guns. By the way, they had also fired up
production at the John Inglis Company, they'd contracted with John Inglis
in Canada to manufacture Brens. By ... 1938 it was kind of
evident that war was a-coming, and they wanted to have redundant
manufacture outside of the British Isles. So these would be manufactured
by Enfield and by Inglis initially. So they had about 30,000
when Dunkirk happened. In the process of evacuating
the BEF from mainland Europe they managed to lose about
27,000 of their 30,000 Bren guns. And that put them in a serious small arms
shortage ... in the aftermath of Dunkirk. That, combined with some
issues that came out in the early stages of World
War Two using these in combat, they found some issues, fouling issues with
the gas system, and a number of other things. This would lead to a
desire to modify the design, which would lead to a modified version,
and then a Mark II version of the Bren gun. We will cover those in a future video.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this one. Thanks for watching.
"Several part video"
I, for one, am excited for Forgotten Brens.
Did anyone else also watch the first Bren video on youtube today, from 9 years ago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNbfEXtngXw&ab_channel=ForgottenWeapons
wow so informative i learn so much from reading between the lines
like how it was originally 8mm mauser so if they changed nothing and just converted it to 303 it would pretty much be indestructible i wonder how long it took to perfect their 20 round magazine then have them say oh add 10 rounds more and keep it just as reliable
when looking at the parts i was a bit confused then remembered everything is pretty much upside down it kind of reminds me of a rpd
that rear sight adjustment knob makes me think of the little orphan annie decoder ring from a christmas story
cordite propellant combined with corrosive primer compounds i think they made that front section stainless cause if they didnt it would have corrosion welded itself to the barrel
Saying it's the best light machine gun of ww2 is like saying it's the best submachine gun of the cold war. Yeah it's good, but the general propose machine gun was in use during ww2.