Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming May of 2019 Premier Auction. Today we have basically the best product-improved version of the Browning Model of 1919 air-cooled machine gun. This is an M37 and, ... well it's a post-World War Two development. In 1950, in November of 1950, the US military requested basically an improved 1919 specifically for use as a tank mounted machine gun. So they were developing some new tanks after World War
Two, and ... well the regular 1919 had a couple issues. There were a few bits on it that had turned out to
be not as durable as maybe everyone would like, and, more importantly, it only fed from one side. And that's fine
for an infantry gun where it doesn't really make any difference, but when you go to mount a machine gun like this
in a tank or, as they would later do, in a helicopter, it becomes much more important which side the gun feeds
from. So the Army wanted a version that could be switched to feed from either the left or the right, so that they could
mount it into a cramped space in a tank or other vehicle. Now initially there were some modifications made to the standard
1919A4, and that was temporarily adopted as the 1919A4E1. And they converted something like
18,000 guns to that new pattern. But at the same time they had folks working on
developing a from-scratch new model that would be better. And the guy who ended up with the job of designing this was a guy
named Bob Hillberg who worked for the High Standard company. Now Bob Hillberg had his hands in
a bunch of other firearms designs, he'd been working as a firearms
designer through World War Two. Clever guy, ... not a well recognised name, but had a lot
of other guns to his name, especially at High Standard. And at this time he was the chief engineer at High
Standard and this project kind of just fell into his lap. High Standard was doing a bunch of other work,
the R&D department was busy with civilian arms, and so he ended up pretty much doing this by himself. And what they ended up with... The first design actually before it got to
Hillberg was the T151, that wasn't so successful. They gave it to Hillberg, he redesigned it as
the T152, which was quite a bit more successful. They did some trials on that, decided
they really liked it, made a few tweaks, became the T153, which was formally
adopted by the US military as the M37. It wasn't actually produced by High Standard, it
was actually produced by the Rock Island Arsenal and the ... Saco-Lowell company
in between 1955 and 1957. And, unfortunately, I was not able to find any
good data on exactly how many they made, but many thousands of these things. They
would be used in the M48 and the M60 tanks, as well as a couple of different
... early helicopters in the US inventory. And this really is the perfected version of the Browning 1919. So let me go ahead and show you what all they changed to it. Alright, there's a whole bunch of stuff
going on back here that you can see. So we have a link ejection chute, and
this is just pinned in place with this pin. The same way that some of the feed
pawls on the other side are pinned in place. We'll get up close to that in a moment.
We have this replacement charging handle. So the original 1919 had a charging handle sticking out
right here, side of the bolt where you would expect it. But if you're gonna go mount this in a vehicle,
you don't necessarily have easy access up here. So what they did was put a charging handle on
that puts a handle right behind the pistol grip, so that it can be easily operated from either side
and without having to get up to the front of the gun. The top cover latch has been simplified,
and they gave it these two easy-open knobs. That's a definite improvement over the
original 1919, although remember that these are modifications that wouldn't really
have made sense necessarily on an infantry gun, because, well, this is a lot of stuff to
get in the way and to snag on things. That's not an issue inside a tank, it would be
an issue if you're out carrying the gun around. The back of the top cover plate here has been redesigned.
So we still have an iron sight mounted on top of it. However, the casting is a bit different to accommodate this.
We have an improved latch system to remove the backplate. Removing the pistol grip has been much simplified,
this is a nice improvement over the original gun. So on here if you push this over, that's like the
safety latch, and then you can push this tab down, and then the backplate of the gun just slides off very nicely. We still have the hydraulic buffer in there. The ... tabs on either side of the receiver here
have been strengthened, made a little bit bigger. We have a safety here on the bottom
of the gun now. That's fire, that is safe. And all that does is simply drop in place a little
block that prevents the trigger from going up. The original 1919s really
didn't have a convenient safety. One of the other really nice improvements, perhaps
... the most significant improvement of the gun overall, is the use of a captive recoil spring. So on the original 1919 you had to
actually use a very long screwdriver through the back plate of the gun to basically
catch the recoil spring, rotate it 90 degrees, and lock it in place before you could take the gun apart. And goodness help you if that thing came
unlatched and went flying across the room, it was a real mess to try
and get back into the bolt. On the M37 Hillberg gave it a much simpler captive
recoil spring. So a very nice improvement there. The rest of the disassembly is pretty much the same, you're
gonna pull the bolt back to here and pull out this plug. This is what would have
originally been the charging handle, it now really acts as the same thing, but this handle hooks
onto it. That also prevents the bolt from coming out. With that pin removed I can take the bolt out.
This is basically mechanically the same. However, instead of one track for the feed system to
run on, it has two. You can see these two holes here. Where some of the aircraft conversions of the 1919 during
World War Two had these complex feed plates on top, Hillberg simply gave this a pair of
wedges right here that are reversible. So you can pull them out and there are
two matching holes like this in each track. So you pull them out of there, push them
over to these two holes, drop them in, and that allows you to reverse the feed direction. Looking up here at the front end
of the gun, everything is reversible. So we have a mounting point on the left side of the receiver
here with this cross pin that holds in place your feed pawl. On the other side we have the exact
same mounting points, and over here they're holding in your cartridge
guide and your [link ejector chute]. The [link ejector chute] here is another important
addition for a tank gun. This ensures that the links... chute ejector, link ejector, this ensures that the links
will be dropped nicely into most likely a carry bag, so that they don't end up flying
all over the inside of the vehicle. When it comes to operation, this charging
handle actually also kind of does double duty. You can see there's a stud here that prevents it from
going too far forward, and there's a notch right there. When I lock this back, there's a spring detent right here that pushes this handle downward and
causes this notch to lock into the frame right here. What that does is effectively give you a
manual hold open, so this will keep the bolt open. Now the Browning is a closed bolt gun, so
in order to close the bolt, all I have to do is grab the handle, lift it upward,
and disengage it from that lock. Then the bolt goes forward. One last thing I want to point out here
are the markings on the side of the gun. This simply has a serial number and then it's marked: Gun, Machine,
Calibre .30, M37, Pearl Manufacturing, Grants, New Mexico. This was actually a private company that was
building transferable machine guns before 1986. So they created the side plate for this gun
and then built it using a military parts kit. Those are not the original markings that you
would see on an original military side plate. Those would be marked either
Rock Island Arsenal or Saco-Lowell. So there you have the M37. The final, ultimate, product
improved version of the Browning air-cooled machine gun. These would serve in the US military
until the late 1960s, even after various other guns had been adopted
that were supposed to take their place. Notably the M73 and the M85, both
of which were pretty much failures. These would be used in both the M48 and the
M60 tanks as well as a couple of early helicopters. There is one cool anecdote that... There's one funny anecdote that I want to share with you about this. When Hillberg was designing the gun Springfield Armory was eager to get his
first guns in for testing as quickly as possible. ... In fact they'd contracted not just
for 1, but for I think 25 prototypes. And as soon as he had the first half of
those guns done, Springfield wanted them. So Hillberg, you know High
Standard was not that far away, so Hillberg threw a dozen of these guns in the back of his car,
which was a cute little convertible, and threw a blanket over them. And this was the summer, so he just left the top
of the car down and went cruising up the highway to Springfield. And when he went
through one particular toll booth it turns out without him realising it, the
blanket had blown off of the guns in the back, and this toll booth attendant ... sees
this guy come through in a little cute convertible with a dozen belt-fed
machine guns lying on the back seat, and doesn't say anything, but calls the police.
And Hillberg doesn't find out about it until a few minutes later when he's driving down the highway and is
pulled over by a gaggle of Massachusetts Highway Patrolmen. Apparently he hadn't bothered to bring any papers
with him or anything, and had a hard time proving his association with Springfield
or with the High Standard company. And I guess it sounds like he
spent something like an hour on the side of the road trying to
explain what was going on before successfully making his case and then receiving a
nice police escort the rest of the way to Springfield. It is interesting that these guns were
actually originally developed in .30-06, even though by the time they were put into
production 7.62 NATO was clearly the coming thing. They would in fact do some additional
alterations and they would come out with the M37E1 version of this, which was in 7.62 NATO and
incorporated a couple other changes as well. Most notably fixed headspace instead
of adjustable headspace for the gun, but that's not what we're looking at today.
What we have here is the original .30-06 version. So this is a fully transferable,
NFA registered machine gun. So if it's something that you are interested in
getting, take a look at Rock Island's catalogue. You'll be able to check out all
of their pictures and information, details on this guy as well as
everything else they have coming up for sale. Thanks for watching.
