Hitler's Zipper: The MG-42 Universal Machine Gun

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and i'm here today at morphe's taking a look at an mg42 i'm sure most of you guys recognize this as a standard and iconic german machine gun from world war ii this is a very early version in fact we'll touch on this in a moment but this gun was in service before it was formally adopted this particular one so if we were to explore where the mg mg-42 came from the story really starts in 1935. it starts when the mg-34 starts getting into the hands of troops on a regular basis they're in production and they're actually getting issued out the mg34 isn't perfect in service it has some reliability issues and perhaps more importantly it is an expensive and time consuming gun to manufacture and the vermont isn't able to get mg34s as quickly as it would really like to so the decision is made that instead of trying to iterate on the mg34 to fix some of its nagging little issues instead they want to have an entirely new pattern of gun and they specifically are interested in it being made of stamped largely stamped components this is not just because that will make it quicker and cheaper to manufacture it also means they can minimize the number of quasi-exotic alloys that they need germany doesn't have a good domestic source of alloying elements like nickel and manganese and vanadium and a milled machine gun like the mg34 largely milled components requires a lot of fancy alloy steels in order to work effectively with stamp steel you can get the same end result by using pretty much just simple low carbon steels you don't need any fancy alloys and that's what the german military was specifically thinking about when they commissioned the mg34 now they recognized that stamping wasn't something that was in common use with the arms industry at that point we think of germany world war ii as a bunch of stamped guns but this was kind of the first major one that would be produced and so in looking for a company to develop the new gun they actually kind of went outside the box and started talking to companies that were not traditionally arms manufacturers so in particular three companies were asked in 1937 to produce prototypes of a new machine gun under you know using these characteristics they didn't really care how it locked or how it operated as long as it was largely stamped components so the three companies were by the way orin matal uh a company called stubegen i'm probably mispronouncing that and also a company called gross fuse which i'm probably also mispronouncing named after its owner gross fuse specifically was not an arms company they had never manufactured weapons they were primarily a tooling manufacturer they made machines you know manufacturing machines they had an engineer by the name of werner gruner who would take on this project and he ended up getting the winning design grinner head didn't even have army experience himself he was a total novice kind of makes you think of perhaps gaston but he came up with an idea for a roller locked recoil operated machine gun with a largely stamped sheet metal receiver uh the other two uh competitors for what would become the mg42 were both gas operated guns interestingly and in an april 1938 trial between all three the gross fuse design won out so it would take about three more years really four more years almost five years of further development it would go through troop trials as the mg39 a prototype experimental gun um at that point the rate of fire was only about a little over a thousand rounds per minute and one of the primary characteristics of the mg-42 of course is that it has a very high rate of fire 1500 to 1600 rounds per minute was standard in german service and that was something that was specifically being sought by the german military so one of the changes that they made to the mg39 was to tweak some of the bolt design elements and we'll look at those in a minute to up the rate of fire to 15 or 1600 rounds a minute it would continue to go through development and refinement in 1941 there would be a further set of field trials on what was at this point known as the mg 39-41 uh it was formally presented to hitler in december of 1941 and another 1500 were ordered for troop trials and what's interesting though is the gun was not actually formally adopted by the vermont until october of 1943 and that is where my early comment about this one being in service before it was adopted comes from because by the time the mg-42 was actually formally adopted there were many thousands of them already in service production began in 1942 there are 1942 and 1943 dated guns before they go to a series of date codes but i'm getting ahead of myself in fact why don't we go ahead and take a close look at the gun now i'll show you those markings and also how it actually works all right let's start with the markings here on the back left of the receiver these guns were actually dated in 1942 and early 1943 after that all the factories would transition over to a two-letter date code system so that captured guns couldn't be used to figure out how much production was actually going on so this is a very early pattern here they are actually labeled mg42 there's your serial number after these guns after you hit 9999 a suffix would be added so this is in fact only the 2404th mg-42 manufactured by the gustloff company and that is their three-letter production code mg42s would be made well they are marked from five different factories those would be gustloff steyer mauser borsigvald and a company called uh magay which is a subsidiary of rheinmetall so consider it rhinematol grosvoose the company that actually developed the gun would manufacture a lot of parts and they did manufacture receivers and so you will find receivers that have gross fuse code markings but they didn't appear to actually assemble any of the guns they just supplied parts to the other companies which maybe make sense the other companies were actually gun companies and perhaps had a better handle on the final assembly testing and proofing and all that sort of stuff now there are a number of features on here that are indicative of this being a very early gun and the most distinctive one is the charging handle here the early pattern guns basically up until october of 43 when they were formally adopted the early pattern guns will have this horizontal charging handle the problem is this is for one thing sticking way out from the gun and it's prone to get caught on things and break and it also doesn't give you any real leverage it's just a you know this is a roller locked gun if you think about um the stiffness of the charging handle on a typical hk that's similar to this and and unlocking the 42 with this horizontal handle requires a really stiff yank on the handle so very early on they would replace this with a cam style of charging handle that was a lot easier to use in practice we also have a number of distinctive features of the receiver things like these plates uh which would become more crudely welded on later this uh machining on the very end of the receiver is distinctively very early as is the front sight that front sight with the screw here is both windage and elevation adjustable and that would be replaced by a much simpler front sight before very long the very first mg-42s including this one were issued with bakelite buttstocks those proved to be a little too fragile in practice in the field so they were replaced by wooden buttstocks this is an early replacement wooden buttstock these were also too fragile in fact you can even see that this one is cracking right there and so these were replaced by a reinforced pattern that has wire wrapping back here this may not be this isn't the stock that was originally issued on this gun but it is a very early german replacement stock and then we also have aluminum grip panels on here which is unusual and early those would be replaced by bakelite the feed system on the mg34 is a rather clever one push this up we can lift the top cover what we have is a feed system here that actually divides the work into two parts so the belt has to be pulled into the gun by these pawls of course that's typical of a machine gun you have a stud here on the bolt that will run in this track in the top cover and that translates forward and backward movement of the bolt into side to side movement of the feed system which pulls the belt into the gun what's cool about the mg-42 and this would be copied on a lot of subsequent machine guns is that it pulls the belt part way in as the bolt is going backwards and the rest of the way as the bolt is going forwards and this gives it a much smoother operating uh rhythm than a gun like a browning uh that pulls that that does that all in on the rearward movement of the bolt also by the way the bits up here on the top cover are not spring loaded nor is the roller on the bolt uh so if you are going to close the top cover with the bolt forward you have to make sure manually that the feet tray is in this position if the bolt back then you move it to the other side put that there the bipod is reasonably well thought out here and this is this is actually a post-war bipod the original early mg42s had this stud on the bottom of the the receiver that would lock into a pair of little holes in the bottom of the bipod the problem is that's really a finicky and overly complex way to go about locking the bipod so before too long they replaced that with these simple sheet metal tabs which just lock into the vent holes or that particular vent hole on the bottom of the receiver like that now as a universal machine gun intended to be capable of sustained fire and one having a deliberately very high rate of fire it's very important that the mg-42 be able to have an easy system for changing barrels and in fact has a fantastic system for changing barrels so i just have to lock the bolt back then we take this latch push it forward and what we have here is a sheet metal latch that comes down and is riveted onto the receiver there and when i pull this out it pops my barrel out and then we can just pull it out like that you can use any number of things to hook into this hole in the barrel to pull it out if it's too hot all right with the bolt forward and the spring uncompressed i can then push this little spring-loaded latch on the bottom of the receiver that allows me to rotate the stock and it unlatches from the back of the receiver so there's our stock i can also take this out that's actually the buffer assembly to reduce felt recoil a bit that's the butt stock itself we have the recoil spring note that this is a three wire braided spring that does a number of things that are nice it means if one wire breaks the spring still works this reduces oscillation in the spring gives it an extended life really the the braided wire springs are a very important development and you'll see them used on other guns in the future most notably ak fire control groups now i can use the charging handle here to pull the bolt back there we go there is our bolt assembly and then i can pull the charging handle off bring it back to here and then lower it down and take it out the fire control group on the mg42 is much simpler than the mg34 we have a cross bolt safety here but then the gun itself is full auto only so you can see the sear down in there that's all you got full auto the 34 attempted to have well did have a semi auto setting that made the fire control group far more complex now when i say that the mg-42 had a stamped sheet metal receiver this is true but it is i think substantially more complicated than the stampings people think of typically today we think of like the u-shaped receiver of an ak with you know two little rails welded in well this has a lot of extra bits um welded on the outside and the inside there are guide rails in the receiver there's a lot to it but it was still far cheaper and easier to manufacture than an mg34 milled receiver mechanically the way this works is actually a roller locking system this was not patented by gruner but as far as anyone can tell he actually didn't know about the patents it was only patented in 1934. and gruner came up with it independently which is pretty cool you know sometimes when you get someone thinking outside the box who hasn't worked in the industry before they come up with a clever solution so the idea is when the this is recoil operated so when it fires the whole thing is going to move back i should say the bolt locks into the barrel extension here so uh kind of like the ar-15 which does the same thing um the force of firing is not really exerted on the receiver and that's part of the reason they can get away with a sheet metal receiver when this is locked in battery these two rollers on either side push out and are locked into this barrel extension right here and here the barrel extensions by the way are extremely hard uh when the gun cycles backwards these rollers are able to reciprocate into the center of the bolt there we go and then the bolt can travel backwards independently of the barrel so that's basic recoil operation right there when the rollers are fully in their inward position here the firing pin can't protrude forward when they go out the firing pin does this fires from an open bolt i can actually take this apart a bit more rotate that around we can pull that out pull that out there's your firing pin it's the little small thing that sits in this locking wedge and there is the bolt head extractor on the top ejector on the bottom this plunger uh actually is the ejector so that goes forward what this means is when the bolt goes back this will hit a stop in the receiver which punches the ejector forward kicks the cartridge out the bottom of the receiver these are your sear engagement surfaces so that's what the trigger group is actually holding on the stud back here is what operates the top cover and then these are your de facto guide rails this looks very crude because this is a forged part and there is simply no need to do any finishing to the center section here so they left it in a raw forged state now the mg42 system isn't perfect and one of the issues that it had the most substantial issue that it had in service was what was called bolt bounce the idea being when this goes into battery it's going to hit and then it's actually going to bounce open and closed very slightly and very quickly and these rollers will come in and back out a couple of times and if you get the right combination of the bolt bouncing far enough the rollers coming far enough in and the firing of the cartridge being delayed enough and we're talking like four to eight milliseconds this can result in the gun firing while the rollers are not actually engaged in the barrel extension and that causes the gun to basically explode now in german service this was a recognized issue but doesn't appear to have been a particularly huge issue they spent time all the way through basically the end of the war trying to fix it best indications i've seen uh primarily from an author by the name of folky mervang who wrote the definitive book on the mg 42 and 34 is that german use of steel cased ammunition during world war ii kind of mitigated these issues because the steel cases had a stronger or stronger than brass and they could survive being slightly out of battery without rupturing upon firing in the recreational historical collector shooting circuit um every it is not recommended that you fire an mg-42 in original german world war ii configuration after the war uh countries who used these guns would develop a bolt bounce stop basically a spring that was added to the bolt that would prevent these issues and it's very easy to retrofit that into the gun and very highly recommended if you have a world war ii mg-42 that you want to shoot you've got a spare bolt in post-war configuration drop it in there's no permanent change to the gun and it just makes the gun a lot safer i want to cover just briefly the rate of fire these had a very high rate of fire 1500 to 1600 rounds per minute this was considered a good thing by the german military who specifically requested it and they saw a couple benefits to this i think primarily was you are less likely to get returned fire if you are attempting to suppress an enemy position with what is 25 rounds per second uh they in the training manuals they compare this out the mg08s fired seven rounds per second the mg-34s fired 15 rounds per second and the mg-42 fired a whopping 25 rounds per second and the idea was if the enemy position is receiving that volume of fire they're going to be a lot less able to put their head up and return fire and that makes the gun more effective in addition there were a couple ancillary benefits it was deemed easier to see where you were hitting based on you know dust and dirt kicked up by bullet impacts because of course at 1500 rounds a minute there's a lot more of that happening for you to see and a very dense cone of fire like that makes the gun more effective when you're attempting to spread fire across a wider area you swing the gun across say a bunch of brush or a hedgerow or you know a large enemy formation you're going to get a much higher density of bullets on your target than if it was firing at a slower rate of course we also have our rear sight here you can flip down the site and there's also an anti-aircraft site there is a little socket out here for the spider front part of the anti-aircraft site they'd stop putting these on at the end of the war or at least guns at the end of the war stopped having them if they were you're not put on or removed by soldiers but that's what that is anyway the downside of course to this high rate of fire is that you have to carry a tremendous amount of ammunition uh in order to keep the gun running so that was the downside the mg-42 would prove to be a pretty darn popular gun in german service it was well liked by the troops uh it was the same weight as the mg-34 virtually the same but it had more open clearances it required less maintenance and it was just more less finicky and more likely to run without any problems now the mg34 would remain in production throughout the war largely for use in armored vehicles all of the mounting points for machine guns in tanks and armored cars and bunker fortifications those had all been designed around the barrel change mechanism of the mg-34 and redesigning all of that stuff to fit a different machine gun didn't make sense so the 34 stayed in limited production for those applications the 42 became the primary infantry machine gun and in this way it filled the same universal machine gun role as the 34 but in a slightly narrower scope so if you haven't seen my video on the 34 i suggest you take a look at it we go into the universal machine gun concept there in effect you kind of lose out on the vehicular mounted aspect there would be some anti-aircraft use of these but not quite as much as had been originally intended with the 34 this was primarily going to be an infantry light machine gun and an infantry heavy machine gun in the light roll it was configured much like you see it here on a bipod and then there was a version of the left very intricate and very complex and very effective quadropod mount or tripod mount that allowed it to be used in a sustained fire roll indirect fire if you liked but very stable accurate at long range in total about 400 000 of these were manufactured during the war remarkably more than half of them were made in 1944 production of small arms in germany in general tended to go up right through to about the beginning of 1945 before strategic bombing and all the other problems that germany was having started to really have a discernible impact on actual production totals so as i said at the beginning this is a very early example most likely captured in north africa rommel found out about these guns relatively early was a big fan and made sure that the africa corps got a bunch of mg42s so that's probably where this one comes from obviously i said this was a popular gun but obviously it was popular because it is still in use effectively today uh the mg-42 only had to undergo minor modifications to be re-chambered for the 762 nato cartridge and it would be used by the bundeswehr the german army in the 1950s for a very long time and it was adopted by a wide variety of other countries as well because it is fundamentally just a really good machine gun so hopefully you guys enjoyed the video hopefully you learned something about the mg42 and its implementation today thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 279,715

Rating: 4.9798527 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, mg42, gustloff, grossfuss, ww2, world war, machine gun, universal machine gun, gpmg, 8mm, 8x57, germany, afrika corps, early, interchangeable, mg34, mg3, general purpose, WWII

Id: OVPxZdBxUJU

Length: 23min 13sec (1393 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DamnedDutch]

No criticism intended but wasn’t it called Hitlers Buzzsaw? Or did it go by multiple names? I live in Europe so i have seen multiple of the bastards but I am now unsure.

[u/AriOccasionalContext]

Pretty sure zero people have forgotten about the MG42.

[u/CaptainJam2004]

One of the scariest things ever made from stamped sheet metal

[u/Stalins_Mustache420]

MG42 go brrrrr

[u/Ro0dy]

When you hear it zip you know you're about to get fucked

[u/Goldreddit1356]

Is it just me or does the FG42 Sound like an even more terrifying mg42 like it sounds like it fires 50 bug faster then a vz.41

[u/Radioactiveglowup]

I think this is literally the only firearm I could identify by sound across a field.