Ma Deuce: The Venerable Browning M2 .50 Caliber HMG

strap in guys it's going to be a long video hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and i am here today at bear arms up in scottsdale arizona taking a look at one of the bigger guns in their reference collection this is a browning m2hb or mod deuce as it's sometimes colloquially known the hb stands for heavy barrel because it has a heavy barrel but this is only one of a number of original of early configurations of the browning m2 machine gun that were originally built and it's first off it's it's really significant to point out that this has been in ongoing standard us military service longer than perhaps any other firearm still in service longer than anyone that comes to mind these were originally developed in 1918 now they didn't they were technically first adopted by the us military in 1922. we'll get to that in a moment but these guns are still in ubiquitous widespread service today uh there is a move today to upgrade them to the m2a1 configuration which we'll talk about at the end of this video but just the fact that a gun developed literally over a hundred years ago first adopted as of this filming 98 years ago is still good enough to be in wide scale service that is amazing and it really is testament to john browning's genius in firearms design the story of this gun goes back to 1918 and in the spring in april of 1918 the american expeditionary force under general john pershing formally requested a heavy caliber machine gun from the u.s ordinance department they wanted something to be both an anti-aircraft gun because aircraft bombers in particular were getting pretty big bigger than you might think of for a world war one aircraft you know which we kind of think of as being made out of twigs and cloth the germans were developing some pretty darn impressive heavy bomber aircraft and the us military looking at the effectiveness of the 11 millimeter vickers guns for balloon balloon busting among other things looked at that and thought well we would we like the 11 millimeter caliber which is close to half inch but what if we had a high velocity cartridge that was that big now the germans were developing exactly this sort of thing in their 13.2 millimeter uh tuf tank flieger uh machine gun the germans would never quite get the machine gun ready before the end of the war but they did sir they did issue the ammunition with the single shot mauser tank develop rifles to be used as anti-tank weapons and they were reasonably effective in that role not perfect but during world war one tanks tank technology tank armor was such that a gun like this would have been absolutely deadly against enemy tank attacks it would have been a fantastic defensive weapon against tanks of course germany also never did get tanks into world war one in any substantive numbers the the french and the british and by extension the americans did uh and so really pershing was looking for an aircraft gun and he was also being a bit proactive figuring well if the germans copy us on these tanks we're gonna want a gun like this uh to defend against them anyway john browning gets the message he is america's premier machine gun designer small arms designer in general really and what he does is he takes his model of 1917 30 caliber machine gun and scales it up to 50 caliber and internally and we'll take this apart in a minute internally this is almost a copy of the browning 30 caliber now the original guns that browning built as 50 caliber guns were water cooled just like the original 30 caliber guns were water cooled that was especially for an anti-aircraft gun that was a derriguer you know of course you're going to make it water cooled all the basically all the machine guns in world war one are water-cooled that will go away over time and leave us with the heavy barrel configuration that we have here anyway um the gun is the the request is first made in april of 1918. the gun the first real test firing is done in november of 1918 so barely a one-year development time to get what would become the m2 from concept to actual firing prototype and that again is a sign really of the genius of john browning as well as the work of both the colt and the winchester companies who are instrumental in doing the cartridge development and also the gun prototyping to get this thing off the ground in a hurry in fact at one point a newspaper reporter asked john browning about what went into the design of this gun and he credited it to one drop of genius in a gallon of sweat which i think makes a lot of sense that's this was a design that was largely in hand and it just needed to be scaled up so browning was able to pull that off just in time for the war to end now at the very end of the war when they see the results this first test firing the ordinance department is really enthusiastic and they place an order for 5 000 in anti-aircraft configuration and 5000 in tank configuration however those orders would never end up being fulfilled they would be cancelled because the war ended and the urgency of needing a whole pile of heavy machine guns disappeared moving forward into the inter-war years we will see only one element of the u.s military adopt this now it was the water cooled version of this at the time and it was designated the m1921 50 caliber machine gun and that one agency or service branch was the us coastal artillery which we don't really think of anymore because we don't really expect anyone's going to be coming trying to shell the u.s from off our coastline or invade us but at the time hey that's a major part of military planning and the coastal artillery wanted a good emplaced heavy machine gun for anti-aircraft use and the m1921 browning fit all of those characteristics the water cooled nature made it capable of sustained fire the 50 caliber cartridge was one heck of a powerful cartridge that was very well suited to taking down aircraft the rate of fire was high enough to to work in this regard and they mounted them on big old tripods kind of like this one's on but you know held them several feet up off the ground so they could be swung around 360 degrees fired it at high elevation to attack aircraft they liked these guns the problem was most of the other service branches didn't pretty much everyone wanted a different sort of tweaked version of the gun and they all had real problems with them that led to nobody deciding to adopt it so for the infantry this thing was way too heavy especially the water cooled version even heavier than this thing it just wasn't mobile they also found that it was troublesome to hold on target there's a lot of recoil generated by this thing as you might imagine and if you don't have a really good tripod design the gun kind of bounces off target and becomes ineffective so infantry had issues with that the cavalry had problems with its weight as well how do you move this thing around on horseback they came up with ways but it was kind of too heavy of a gun to engage infantry perhaps the us air service initially was interested in this for mounting on aircraft but early aircraft were frankly a bit too fragile to deal with the recoil and the muzzle blast from this thing so that was a problem uh in order to mount them in vehicles for the the armored you know the new armored service of the cavalry well the problem there is some of the guns you want to be able to feed from the left and some from the right because you're mounting these in tank turrets and if you're mounting them in pairs you don't want to have both of them feeding from the same side because the parts will interfere with each other if you're mounting just one well depending on the configuration of the turret it may be more convenient to feed from the left or the right nobody really liked a single standard pattern of the gun so colt retained ownership of the design and they had you know they were selling these guns commercially during the 1920s and 1930s but not in large numbers in total between 1922 when they really standardized the m1921 design in 1939 when world war ii starts to begin they sold just barely over 11 000 of these guns totaled to everybody and that includes overseas contracts which they made sales to the us uh the us air corps the us other elements the u.s military 11 000 guns which is a total drop in the bucket compared to the total eventual world war ii production which would be about 2 million of them so this time spent during the interwar period wasn't wasted though because a lot of development continued to be done on the gun now initially springfield armory which was an official arm of the us military or us government aided inc aided colt in the development of the guns they had engineers assigned at colt to you know to be working on these guns and how do we make them better how do we manufacture them more efficiently that sort of thing and in particular one dr samuel greene who was a springfield engineer assigned to colt made a couple of really important changes or developments to the gun one of them is the charging handle which is very iconic here in that the charging handle is actually cam and it gives you mechanical advantage to charge the gun the original m1921 just had a charging handle sticking straight out the side like a 30 caliber browning and that took a lot of strength to actually [ __ ] the the action so they give it the cam charging handle that is a significant improvement and green comes up with a design for the internal components that allows it to be easily changed between left hand and right hand feed without needing replacement parts or without needing much in the way of replacement parts the bolt can be swapped from left to right just by changing a configuration on one of its parts which i'll show you when we take this apart that was a major improvement in colt being able to produce guns efficiently enough to sell them to a wide variety of services that wanted them in different configurations not directly green's responsibility but the other huge improvement uh fundamental improvement to the gun that took place during this time period was the development of a universal receiver so if you think about a browning 1917 water cooled gun or a vickers or maxim the front trunnion has the base for the water jacket and it is riveted into the two side plates so the receiver of this gun is not a single unit it is two steel plates and then a top plate and a bottom plate and they're all riveted together into a box that hold all the internal parts well in all of the earlier guns you would need a different front trunnion for an air cooled gun like this as compared to a water cooled gun which meant that the receivers had to be designed once they put the receiver together at the factory that gun's configuration was fixed the improvement that they made to this and it was the first browning to be done this way was to make a universal receiver and front trunnion that could be changed between air-cooled and water-cooled configurations when you combine that with the interchangeable feed it meant all of a sudden colt could basically make most of the parts could be interchanged between any of the different configurations of gun by 1933 and by the way that is when the designation was formally changed to m2 combining a couple of early m1921 variations they redesignated the whole thing the browning m2 and you had three major variations and then each one of them could be had either as a fixed mount gun or a flexible mount gun so for example the aircraft version which was a light barrel air-cooled because of course it's flying around on an aircraft and the slipstream will give it all the cooling that it needs you could have a fixed barrel a fixed mount aircraft gun mounted say in the cowl of an aircraft or you could have a flexible mount one mounted in a turret similarly you had water cooled guns that could be either fixed or flexible mount and you also had this version which would ultimately become the most popular which is the heavy barrel version this was intended to allow uh basically the air-cooled ground utilized version of the gun because you don't have a slipstream like an aircraft to cool the gun so you need a heavier barrel so that the barrel can absorb more heat and have more sustained fire before it gets so hot that you have to change the barrel so we have all these different versions being manufactured everyone kind of wants a different different type you want heavy barrel for the cavalry for a tank gun uh you want the the light barrel lightweight air-cooled version for the aircraft guns ultimately ultimately it was really the navy that kept the m2 alive the other service branches were not hugely interested in it they were willing to keep testing it but they never did adopt it the navy saw the possibilities and ultimately by the time world war ii started you might think of this as the 50 caliber as being kind of obsolete especially as an anti-tank weapon 19 the late 1930s are when we start seeing 20 millimeter anti-tank rifles and even those are obsolete very shortly into world war ii well what kept this alive was the idea that it was a good balance because it is relatively small caliber for an anti-tank weapon it maintains a high velocity if you look at the 20 or 30 millimeter cannons that were in use during world war ii as aircraft guns they have quite low velocities and that means their range isn't all that great especially in air combat the 50 offered a good compromise of muzzle velocity weight of the gun recoil energy of the gun aircraft are now able to stand much more recoil than their world war one uh counterparts but still you get you know a high velocity 30 millimeter cannon mounted in the wing of an aircraft and you have real structural issues that you have to address in order to handle the recoil and the 50 was much more forgiving that way it also had smaller lighter ammunition you were able to carry a lot more ammunition for a 50 then you could for something like a 20 millimeter or a 30 millimeter cannon so all these things put together mean that the navy and the naval air service were still interested in these things and that's what allowed it to be there and be available when world war ii began now the reason that the m2 is such a long-lived gun is that it's actually gone through a couple of basically mission changes so when this was first developed for world war one it was intended to be an anti-tank gun and also an anti-aircraft gun well of course by world war ii it's not really an effective anti-tank gun anymore however by world war ii it becomes an ideal aircraft armament not anti-aircraft but in the aircraft and you'll see a lot of allied aircraft mounting piles of these things you know the u.s had fighters with six or eight 50 caliber m2s mounted in their wings as primary armament and that allows what was by that point an obsolete anti-tank weapon to stay in service and in fact as an aircraft as an aircraft weapon would be the primary role of the browning m2 in world war ii this particular example was manufactured by high standard we'll take a look at the markings in a moment high standard made 306 000 of these guns during world war ii specifically for use in aircraft now by the time we get to the 1950s the 50 caliber is really obsolete as an aircraft weapon it's not powerful enough it's short-ranged missiles are becoming a thing 20 millimeter vulcan cannons are becoming a thing and again you have the opportunity for the m2 to become obsolete and drop out of service but instead it becomes a common vehicle-mounted gun now originally these were and during world war ii these were also mounted on ground vehicles primarily as anti-aircraft defensive weapons that's why you see them mounted on tanks mounted on half tracks it wasn't so much to be shooting at access ground vehicles it was for air defense and it will maintain that role a bit longer than it does the aircraft role and then it kind of transitions into being a general purpose vehicular mounted gun and that's where we still see it in service today so that has been a very long-winded i think introduction to the origins of the m2 let's go ahead and pull this apart right now and i'll show you what the internals look like all right the first step in disassembly is taking off the barrel and the first step in taking off the barrel is to pull the charging handle back just a little bit so what i want to do is see that little square feature through that witness hole in the receiver so i pull the charging handle back until that's there and then i can unscrew the barrel now if the barrel's really hot because i've been shooting it a bunch this handle acts as a crank that i can use to unscrew it if the barrel is cool however i can just crank it by hand there we go and then the barrel comes out [Music] next up i need to take the spade grip assembly off the back uh there is one extra thing i want to show you here normally this on a world war ii gun this is the trigger uh and you just hold it down to fire this gun has had one of the few uh service life upgrades to the m2 this is actually a semi-auto hold open so what we do is if we release this there's a little collar right there that will hold this down like so if i release that lever this is now in semi-auto mode and what will happen is when i charge the gun or when the gun cycles the charging handle will stay locked back to the rear until i depress this button and it goes forward then i can fire a single round click which will cause the gun to cycle and stay locked open again so this is it's not really a semi-auto trigger it is simply in an automatic hold open that locks the bolt open after each shot so that you're then limited to single shots at a time when that's desired for the gun for example if you're trying to find range perhaps without letting the enemy know that there is a 50 caliber machine gun in the area anyway in order to disassemble the gun i need to have this unlocked in the semi-auto position now the next step of disassembly is to remove the spade grips there are two latches back here i need to pull this one out and i need to pull this one up and if i hold these two in that position i can then lift the spade grips off the back of the gun now if you've disassembled a browning 30 caliber you may have been wondering about the recoil spring on the 30 caliber guns you have to basically lock the recoil spring in place before you can take the back plate off on the 50 the recoil spring is already self-contained so i'm going to push it in pull this push it slightly in that way and then pull it out and that is our full recoil spring there's a lot less to it than you might expect we're getting close here the next bit is i need to take this little pin out that is what connects the charging handle assembly here to the actual bolt the internal components so there's a little cutout that you can see right there and i want to bring the bolt and that pin back to that position then i can take this locking pin out and then pretty much all the internals the rest of the internals can come out now there's a little detent that we have to bypass in here right inside of that hole is a little detent that locks this in place and we can actually use our recoil spring as a tool to take that out so this pin right there i can push in here there we go it's going to allow me to get this started out back and then i can pull out all of these bits well all right we'll pull them out as two pieces if you're a totally slick pro these all come out as one assembly so as they're laid out inside the gun here are the three main components we have the buffer body the barrel extension and the bolt and like i said this is basically exactly the same as the 1919 or 1917 guns just scaled up a lot so and pull our bolt off there one of the distinctive features of the m2 is that it has two of these crossing tracks these are the tracks that the top cover has a feed pawl that runs in and this converts forward and backward motion of the bolt into side to side motion for the feed mechanism now i can push this in and rotate this internal plate to change from one of these to the other which is one of the key elements in switching the gun from left hand to right hand feed one of the very distinctive features of the browning machine guns is the accelerator lever here and what this does is it slows down the opening of the gun so when the gun is fully in battery like this i've got the extractor here just out of the way you can see this accelerator lever is vertical like that well when you fire the bolt is going to try to move backward and as it does you can see that it's going to pull the accelerator lever with it which is going to pull the barrel extension and the barrel is threaded into the front here so the barrel and barrel extension are a significant added mass that are going to have to move rearward before the cartridge case can be pulled out of the chamber that's going to delay the gun's opening and reduce chamber pressure when it does open this is fundamentally a short recoil operated gun and this accelerator lever gives it a little more delay on top of that so once the whole thing has retracted about that far then these two components are going to stop and that is largely done through this buffer spring pull these two apart this is a very clever design here and we have our buffer spring in the back of the buffer body there so that obviously is a big assist to the relatively small mainspring in there with all of those elements removed we are left with the receiver and body of the gun which is a much more manageable weight and size by itself so there are a couple other elements to look at in here we have a top cover operated by this butterfly latch so rotate that up and the top cover opens if you want to change this from left to right hand feed of course you have to rotate this plate you actually have to replace the top cover with a left-hand top cover or right-hand top cover whichever you're looking to use and then the mounting brackets for these feed poles are identical on both sides of the gun so you do need to reverse these and some of these parts are interchangeable some of them like the cartridge stops are not so changing sides you need the appropriate new cartridge stops but that's pretty much it a new top cover new cartridge stops reverse the bolt and you're good to feed from the opposite side this of course isn't done anymore today because we don't use water cooled 50s anymore but this front barrel support can be removed and replaced with the well with a complete water jacket if you wanted the water cooled iteration of the gun our receiver markings are here on the right side under uh the feed way on the receiver this is still marked a browning machine gun because that was required with colt's original contract with john browning his original agreement with browning but what we have here you'll see this is manufactured by the high standard manufacturing company of new haven during world war ii there would be eight different companies manufacturing uh browning m2 machine guns for the us military those would be colt uh who was the original high standard uh savage the kelsey hayes wheel company buffalo arms company a company called brown lip chapin which is a division of gm the frigidaire division of gm and the ac spark plug division of gm and they would make between them aircraft versions water cooled fixed versions water cooled flexible versions heavy barreled fixed versions heavy barreled flexible versions and heavy barreled turret versions for aircraft with a grand total of about 2 million made one interesting thing about high standard in particular in 1940 the british government wanted uh tried wanted to purchase a bunch of 50 caliber machine guns from colt colt was busy with other work and so they actually licensed production to the kelsey hayes wheel company and high standards so high standard is one of the first companies to get into the 50 cal manufacturing business for world war ii they manufactured i think it was something like 11 000 for the british government and ultimately high standard would end up being the most efficient manufacturer of these guns in the united states by 1944 their total price for the gun had been able to be they've been able to drop it to 245 dollars per gun which still included something like 30 i think 39 of profit margin so they were both the lowest overall cost for browning m2s and also the highest uh profit margin per gun of all the u.s manufacturers to the point that they would actually twice refund the u.s government uh money on the basis of it being deemed excess profit and in total more high standard alone would refund the u.s government more than 2 million during world war ii based on their ability to reduce cost of their browning m2 production this particular gun was almost certainly originally an aircraft gun it's been rebuilt in the m2 hb ground you know current service configuration in total uh high standard built about 9 300 water cooled brownings m2s during the war they built 18 700 and change of the the ground configuration what this gun looks like today and then they built 306 000 of these in the aircraft mounted configuration well there you have the whole thing disassembled there's your browning m2hb really actually a very simple gun to take apart which is both surprising given that it is nearly a century old and also perhaps not surprising in that if it were a lot more complicated it probably wouldn't have survived in service to this day the browning m2 of course remains in service today from its early origins as a water-cooled gun to its mid mid-life use as a fixed mount aircraft gun to its current use in the m2hb or heavy barrel configuration like this it is a tremendously long-serving venerable and incredibly effective firearm now there are improvements that can be made to it uh in fact even as we speak today a lot of the us military inventories are being upgraded to the m2a1 which is basically uh just gives it a fixed headspace so it gives it a quick change barrel that doesn't require the adjustments to headspace and timing that the original gun does frankly when these were first being designed when the design was being perfected factory tolerancing getting getting interchangeable parts that were tight enough in tolerance to have interchangeable head spacing without any modification being able to do that through across eight different manufacturers uh you know for two million guns during the war that was a little more of a challenge than than the factories were able to meet and that's why the browning guns maintain their adjustable head spaces it's not because the adjustable headspace was really a good thing although there are benefits to it it was because that was kind of necessary to meet the production requirements today it's a different matter today we can manufacture barrels um that have the tolerance to be quick change and totally interchangeable so that's being done today um in theory there are you know this isn't the most efficient way to design a 50 caliber machine gun but this is good enough that it just doesn't make economic sense to to throw these away the ones that are already in service because they don't really tend to wear out to the point that they can't be just you know a few parts repaired and put back in service because of that it's not cost effective to replace them with anything brand new kind of the same sort of thing we see with the m16 family until there's a really a fundamental improvement in the gun these wills stay in service i have no doubt so there have been some experiments with other 50 calibers most notably the m85 actually like 50 years ago now the m85 existed because they wanted a more compact gun to fit in us armored vehicles and the m85 was a an attempt at a 50 caliber machine gun that used a receiver that was about two-thirds as long so it saved a non-insignificant amount of space inside a tank turret the problem was it was not an effective design it had a lot of reliability problems it was susceptible to dirt and malfunctioning and it was pretty quickly uh scrapped and the m2 came back and took its place happily as always so hopefully you guys have enjoyed this look at the ubiquitous mod deuce we are going to take this gun out to the range tomorrow we will go ahead and do a headspace and timing check and i'll walk you through how to do that and then we're going to do some shooting which should be a tremendous amount of fun so once again a big thanks to bear arms for giving me access to some of the guns in their reference collection uh like this one to take a look at they're a fantastic group of folks definitely check them out if you're ever in their area up in scottsdale and stick around tomorrow for the video out of the range thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,885,714

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, browning, John browning, jmb, 50, 50 big, machine gun, hmg, heavy machine gun, antiaircraft, tank, turret, flexible, fixed mount, 12.7x99, ww2, ww1, modern, world war, tankgewehr, colt, winchester, high standard, ma deuce, short recoil, closed bolt, collector

Id: cmLnwiJRr78

Length: 30min 45sec (1845 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020