Small Arms of WWI Primer 073: US Browning Automatic Rifle 1918

the French show shot had enabled the untaught to pioneer a concept known as walking fire but what would you get if you worked up a design from scratch specifically for this tactic [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this is absolutely bupkis because we are working on another machine-gun episode and that means we borrowed the gun in the field and then did all nice work up here in the studio so you can get all the history so I have no gun to actually show you today so I'm going to hide my mug as much as possible as we go through covering the US browning automatic rifle model 1918 with an overall length of 47 inches this isn't the largest rifle in length but look at that wait folks it's at fifteen point nine eight pounds I rounded the 16 it has a 20 round magazine although a 40 round was optional and yes I'm taking just a little extra time so you can get a good look since we don't have it in studio alright folks I owe you two apologies at this point one the gun is not here that cannot be helped and two we're actually working a little bit out of order because I would much rather talk about a different gun first but the way this show is structured in order to sort of stack special animations special loans all of the little features and research we need to do the ammo getting it out there that's sort of a it's not always possible to do things in the order that we want to do them the ideal order you can help with that obviously if you're one of our patrons and that makes us a little bit more flexible but anyway what came before our Browning automatic rifle it's so important well that of course was already mentioned in the intro the French show shot this French light automatic rifle was absolutely revolutionary and one of the more significant arms inventions in history I will absolutely get around to a whole episode here on scene Arsenal for this particular gun I just want to make sure I give it the fanfare it deserves for now just know that this one man machine rifle straddled two future classes of weapon the light machine gun category and the sort of automatic shoulder arm automatic rifle category it didn't quite do either perfectly but it sure did a lot of damage in World War one if you've been a follower of the show so far you're going to know that we've covered a lot of pistols and a lot of bolt-action rifles and not much else I mean yes we're the lowest cutting things like that but most the war was fought with very old-style weapons I don't let the video games fool you this is not a running gun sort of war it's much more measured repeating rifle you know fairly in the smokeless air a kind of thing a lot of countries really got into smokeless cartridges and development stopped short of maybe a spitzer cartridge well before the war show shot had a great idea it was really really underappreciated and that's a shame because we know with better hindsight that we see light machine guns as an infantry tactic all the way through World War two and beyond easily and it's still got its role today and that by the way I'm not getting into modern tactics arguments but light machine gun we know that we can think of a dozen of them if you're any sort of fan of military history all right and then when we think about automatic rifles it gets a little bit weirder because the automatic rifle in terms of sort of walking fire we'll get to that in a moment well that sort of fell away into just sort of I guess you could think of like the u.s. m14 like you know and rifle it's a service rifle capable of automatic fire that concept stuck around just fine and then it got merged in with you know intermediate cartridges and that's a whole history that I am greatly just washing right over I mean I am I'm really not covering the details there but a lot of you guys are very familiar with a fully automatic shoulder rifle and very familiar with a light machine gun so that should tell you something about the revolutionary aspect of the show shot we will get into more detail about another day but I need you to understand that the show shot in this sort of in-between phase creates a category of weapon that really doesn't stay around much after World War one and so it's interesting to note that the show shot might never even been a big thing to inspire the next thing to inspire these other classes if it weren't for the fact that war were declared all right so I admit I'm wandering a bit left and right we don't want to talk about like machine guns we don't want to talk about fully automatic service rifles we want to talk about walking fire a very narrow band that we've actually brought up once before and that was during our Pettersen episode now this was a very interesting device that was supposed to enable our standard riflemen to sort of up his firepower and put off some suppressive shots as he walked across the battlefield but let's go a little bit more nuts and bolts on walking fire at this time you see in the Great War trench tactics were fairly new an attacking army struggled to deal with entrenched enemies walking fire or marching fire is a form of suppressive fire used during an assault basically you can bombard a position with artillery ahead of time but as your troops advance you have to stop so that they can enter the line in this window what remained of the enemy which oftentimes was almost all of them well they could pop up and mow down your assaulters as they're on open terrain in no-man's land traditional response to this would be a system of fire and movement where some of the guys would advance while others laid down and provided cover alternating across the open ground but this creates two problems the suppressive effect is very limited it's only half of your force in any given time and just sort of moving and stomping like that well it doubles your time that it takes to cross the ground leaving you even more vulnerable to an organized defense so brief summary on that we hit them with artillery there has to be some small pause for our infantry to run up and then in that moment we need to make sure that we keep the enemy's heads down and especially that we can focus on machine-gun nests and things like that so we want to get our firepower up now it always has to be just relative to the other guy you don't have to have a certain round per minute you just have to have certain round per minute overtop of what they're able to do pop it up over the trench line now in that regard I want to say that walking fire isn't really a new concept in world war one because something vaguely similar would appear as far back as the Battle of königgrätz here in 1866 the Prussians were using their rapid fire that eyes and needle rifles in the woods firing on the move against slower muzzle loading Lorenz rifles fielded by the Austrians now the dress that doesn't seem like the kind of rifle that you could mow people down with very easily being a single-shot bolt-action but compare it to a muzzleloading Lorenz rifle where the shooter usually had to stand just to get the thing reloaded now when you have a clearly superior rifle like the Dreiser at that time you can do something like that you can shoot and move so much faster than the other guy that it's devastating however by the time I get to World War one as you guys have seen almost everybody's fielding a bolt-action rifle I mean that is the 99.9% majority of weapons in the field and so you're not getting any real advantage between attack and defense except well actually I live because there's one other thing that really people sort of finally perked their ears up to even though it existed for a couple decades the machine gun but the machine gun is definitely more in favor of the defender it helps to break up assaults but it's very hard to use in an assault you see the problem is they are damned heavy and usually you have to carry along water to keep the suckers cool so they were best used in defense in somewhat stationary positions if you wanted to fight fire with fire or machine gun with machine gun in this case well you'd need one light enough to be carried by a single man and to make it worse you would have to configure it in a way that the same man can actually work the controls of the thing yeah so at this point that show shot isn't looking too bad now right the show shot means the French get to pioneer what we consider true or walking fire with each advance they can include a number of light automatics and pepper the next trench with enough firepower to make up for the number of men who aren't using them and that keeps the enemy's heads forced down so that our boys can get in and do their business the show shot was also used in a very effective machine gun killer you would take these small squads of men very mobile a little detached from the assault and they would work their way up and where they heard or saw machine gunfire they would fall in with grenades and light machine guns in order to very specifically disrupt that particular threat it made it much easier to advance the line now the show shot made this idea possible but it wasn't designed from the ground up specifically for this so there's a few problems it's it's a little high for light machine gun work and it's a bit heavy and awkward and laid out kind of odd for hip firing and the long recoil mechanism makes it a bit lumpy plus there's a lot of little fixtures on here that are prone to snagging and getting in the way if you want the gun that was designed for sort of walking and firing from the hip you'd want smooth even lines and nothing to really snag on and by the way I know a lot of you probably screaming the screen by now due to some misconceptions but let me clear one thing up right now yes a number of US troops did not prefer the show shot there's two probable reasons for that one a lot of them receive the 8 millimeter French show shot which is a perfectly good light machine gun slash automatic rifle and yet they had already been trained on the gun we're talking about today had it yanked out of their hands that were handed this other thing that wasn't specific to the role that could be upsetting and then to there is actually a u.s. specific version of conversion to 30.6 and that gun had mechanical problems all right so the US needs a light man portable automatic and the French option won't do so where should we turn how about the French this is Andre Virgie no Paul Murray bertier's light machine gun successfully tested by the US Marine Corps in the summer of 1917 and shortly after by the army both found it acceptable in a contract was signed in October of 1917 production of some 5,000 for the army and 2000 for the Marines would be undertaken by Hopkins and Allen but financial complications arose at the same time that our gun today hit its peak and so this design would remain a trials weapon only the Bertini story is a bit intertwine with ours today but I thought you guys might want a peek at it before we get into the real stuff of course if the US needs a new automatic firearm in the middle of World War one there's only one man for the job John machine gun Moses Browning for the sake of you newer viewers let's walk a very brief bio born in January of 1855 John Moses Browning was son to a Mormon gunsmith and at that time they were polygamists so he would be the first of three children born to his father's second wife the thirteenth of his father's children overall there's a lot of Browning's still more siblings would follow but the most notable would be Matthew Sandefur Browning and Jonathan Edmund browning in starting their own gunsmithing business the brothers browning would split their talents amicably John Moses was the ideas man literally he rarely wrote anything down but preferred to make quick models out of paper and sheet steel Jonathan Edmund entered a bit later but became an excellent model maker helping to work out practical problems with his brothers vision as he did most of the solid physical prototyping of the machines and Matthew Sandefur handled the business operations finances etc for a number of years at least at some point he seems to have fallen out with the other two brothers now in our previous lever gun episodes we actually covered a little bit more history on how browning got involved with Winchester Repeating Arms no he sold him a single-shot rifle and then while that transaction was going on he's told that they were working on their lever guns and that he had an almost finished idea that ended up being the famous Winchester 1886 and then the whole family of Winchester firearms would follow based on John Browning's design as a matter of fact you could say that they had about 20 years of just browning designs he really made a name for that company now that is not our story today though because we are not really getting into any lever guns or anything like that directly but this is gonna get curious for just a moment because John Browning while at a local gun club shooting with a friend notice that as the man down on the ground shooting his rifle fired for quite a while in front of the muzzle the sort of sweet clover that was in the field were just depressed just wave and he realized that that was untapped energy now in fairness I remark some had patented a gas piston system in 1884 and browning his idea came to him supposedly in 1889 but according to Browning he was unaware of that patent when he began his own experiments and it kind of shows browning took an old Winchester he had handy and got to work first using a wood block and then later a sort of self-made gas trap bowl over the muzzle this flapper could operate the action of the rifle and it resulted in this patent a gas operated lever action arm while somewhat crude this was the first recognized u.s. use of gas operation also as much as we now know that gas traps aren't really reliable that idea stuck around for quite awhile all the way up into World War two now you are about to see one of the most singularly difficult things about documenting firearms evolution from John Moses Browning because everything's done in his head and he doesn't write much of it down and it happened so incredibly fast the man has just come up with using escaping gases and a flap lock system to operate a lever-action gun you saw the patent it looks like a hankie mousetrap right right away almost at the same time he already applies that concept to a rapid automatic machine gun system and so we have in patent form what is known as the apparatus this patent was filed for in 1891 and granted in 1892 and it is a gas-operated belt-fed machine gun good the Lord man by the way will get more into the apparatus is history when we managed to find a good running potato digger most of brownies gas operation experiments would culminate in this gun in 1895 without giving too much away its most distinguishing feature is the gas operated lever arm set under the barrel now a lesser man having designed a gas apparatus and fitted it to a rifle just to figure it out and then gone wait a second I'm gonna make a mother-effing machine gun modern almost machine gun like that okay you would think that that part would be very distracting would then be focused on machine gun development but even right around the same time he's dropping patents for the apparatus he's already gone back and looked at another way to possibly configure this as a repeating rifle shoulder-fired here again we see a lever operation and not a piston now this could at this point be because of Hiram Maxim is outstanding patent or it could be that browning actually thinks levers are cool and with this patent things go a bit dry I've not found adequate explanation of when browning finally made the jump away from the lever to the piston there doesn't seem to be any paper evidence that I can turn up instead he just became focused on recoil operation designs that would ultimately result in the Browning 1917 machine gun which is another gun we're happy to say we have filmed and are just waiting to get clear of some historical backlog to process into an episode for you all of this is to say that there is a huge gulf between that last patent and our gun today and there's not a lot to explain in-between except some excuses one Bradley got a lot more careful about his patents it would file them only when things were ready to rock and roll that way he got maximum protection this happened a little more later in his career and it's a smart move also like I said Bradley never wrote anything down anyway so why would he be sharing it with anybody until it was absolutely ready to patent and so that means maybe his brother Jaden and had some drawings some prototypes that have since been lost or put aside or knowing browning genius and the way he just sort of has whole system to come out of nowhere there may have never been a developmental model in-between that last patent and boom the early prototypes of our gun today it's impossible to say the documentation is just not there but we can work backwards and from some notes figure out what browning was trying to encapsulate when he came up with his design what he wanted was a man-portable semi and fully automatic rifle in 30 aught 6 it was to be fired semi automatically during in advance and switched to full auto overwhelming fire in the final phase of the assault that means that his rifle had to be a lot of things at once it need to be reliable robust nearly indestructible it needed to be moderately heavy to control that hipfire recoil but still light enough to run with an aim from the shoulder it needed higher capacity magazines than that standard five round service rifle it must be very resistant to mud and dirt because this is World War one and while semi-automatic would be standard the automatic burst fire should be up to 200 rounds of sustained lead poisoning okay so these are the ideas and again man doesn't like to write anything down holes on the patents to the last second and now we're at war and the government's really not in kind of being kind to people are trying to patent super weapons they're saying then we're not don't final that now get out of here so there's like nothing on paper going into this gun except by April of 1917 John Moses and J Edmund browning have worked up a working firing prototype so we go from zero to hey check this out yep from 1895 flap locking patent to 1917 this whole working gun now you may note this is not the final pattern for this rifle but let's run down the details it uses a gas piston system to work a locking bolt it fires from a closed bolt and in sports a detachable box magazine although the size has not settled on at this point it was at that time fitted with that buffington style Springfield 1903 sight I think that's just what was handy and the fire selector is on the left side and is sort of a slide action most importantly the lock works against the receiver at the rear of the ejection port kind of like on a Webley 455 auto loader now many of you have been with the show for a while so you're not gonna be surprised by this next little blip but if you are do tune in door Louis gun episode but I need to remind everybody about this time in American history there was a lone inventor and a kind of irritating chief of ordnance going head to head for those of you too lazy to look they were fighting over the u.s. non-adoption of the Lewis gun basically there was a snag on the 30.6 ammo and it all came down to a simple gas bleeder that the British shop forgot to update in their drawings when they sent them back to the US at some point however the matter became just too personal in to the US Secretary of War Newton Baker would appoint a machine-gun board in order to defuse the matter in 1916 this board would convene for a series of machine gun trials in May of 1917 both browning machine guns would be present the belt-fed model 1917 which we'll cover later and the open top version of our gun today two versions of the rifle were fielded one mostly plain which fired 480 rounds without difficulty from various position there was also a heavier barreled version these had like thick barrels with radiator fins and it was all set up so that these guys could do longer blowout demonstrations of the action sort of like saying yeah we know that we're not going to fire more than two and round bursts with this barrel configuration but we won't you sure that action can withstand a lot of damage so we're gonna put a special Barrel on it just to show off the action did that make sense so they fired the guns I mean 20,000 rounds expended in four hours they managed to have a couple little breakdowns but the combined maintenance effort was something like 14 minutes the only outstanding issue really was when they went to swap a barrel over in action because obviously at that point we do need to swap barrels the gas tube gonna get aligned just right and that was something that they sort of noted okay we'll make it easier to do this but realistically again this is not supposed to be a field swap barrel situation this isn't that kind of light machine gun so otherwise these little cakes teeny tiny kinks ones that you would find and currently produced show shots they're fine so overall ordnance board is blown away and they choose to adopt both the automatic rifle and the machine gun right now immediately let's go they design a contract that follows later but they said we need these guns to prevent confusions the belt-fed was adopted as the Browning model 1917 and that rifle became the Browning automatic rifle that would be the model 1918 despite a recommendation for adoption the contract to Colt who had worked up these prototypes for the B AR would not come until July of 1917 this would be a request by the way for 12,000 rifles now right around this same time some 20,000 Lewis guns we're also finally being cooled up when these were offered to the commander-in-chief of the America Expeditionary Force however he opted to wait six to nine months longer waiting on a gun that was still in trials and getting by with the Hotchkiss and show shots that he had on hand in anticipation of the Browning rifle a gun again still in development follow that logic 20,000 Lewis Coates Lewis guns we love these things available in like three months time and he say you know we'll stick with this French stuff until you bring you the Browning gun from colt and that raises two big concerns oh by the way the Lewis guns like I said they'd end up on aircraft that raises two big concerns one it's kind of cool that John Browning is so respected that you would just go Browning made it yeah that we want that but number two there's sort of a secondary US Army slash ordnance issue of colt again where you have probably one of the slower manufacturers of the war who just always gets the contract even at the cost of material at the front and that it is very worrisome and it didn't go entirely unnoticed Roosevelt himself denounced the Browning as a paper gun and to be fair to him it was crazy to expect the design to evolve as fast as it ultimately did especially when is being pushed out by Colt who as we'll see we're having some problems plus this gun was kept fairly hush-hush so you can forgive Roosevelt for not having all the details it wasn't currently pushing the presidency it must be absolutely frustrating to be dead-on right like Roosevelt was it was a paper cut yes the models worked but ain't done right and it's in the hands of someone who is not gonna tool it up in time and it must be very hard to swallow when the magic of John Browning combined with as well see in a moment Winchester actually makes the thing work I'm so sorry Roosevelt but anyway winding back just a bit to where we really are in July of 1917 brownie would finally feel comfortable filing his patent thanks to the war this would not be granted until February of 1919 and in many ways it was disputed as prior art especially pointing to the McLean gun it would take some appeal to sort out but in the meantime good old chief of ordnance Crozier started objecting to paying royalties for the new rifle since none of it was patentable well we can just take it right always a delight Crozier I'm so glad you lost on this point this is actually even more reprehensible because for both the Browning 1917 and the BA our John Moses Browning waived his royalty payments for a lump sum payment instead that would be roughly one-quarter of what his royalties would have been over the course of this war in this production he let the government name the price and his quote when he heard it was if that suits Uncle Sam it's alright with me now carry the one and hold that thought in your head for a little bit later in the episode because you're gonna see royalty payments actually meant quite a bit to Browning but it's a little bit down the road in the show instead let's go ahead and break down the fact that this gun would move through just several sort of continuous prototype phases it's hard to put a specific number on this one that one this one that one not everything's documented perfectly or at least I don't have access to it so I'm going to broadly divide this thing stage up into four categories now special thanks goes to William and Douglas who had actually provided these same photos to Dolph Goldsmith's book and then gave us permission to use them here on the show so everyone think William and then everyone go buy Goldsmith's book if you'd like to get more detail than this it's down below now of course this is phase one and that would be the trials model this was an open-top closed bolt firing gun with a Buffington sight and a slight adjuster for controlling the firing mode phase two would be the first set of real Colt prototypes these were open top opened bolt guns with a laterally sliding selector behind the trigger kind of like where some push button safeties are on sporting rifles and shotguns these were manufactured at Colt under Edmonds supervision the move to open bolt was just to help cool the gun and whenever that bolt defaults the open state that means it's just that much more air moving through the action around June of 1917 the third phase would kick in this was an open top open bolt with a rotating fire selector known patent drawings and examples don't appear to have a set rear sight this is likely when they were finally considering moving away from the buffington phase four is basically the final it has all the previous improvements and most obviously the receiver top is now solid it's closed up it has an ejection port on the right side this solid top receiver was much stronger less likely to foul with dirt and in case of a cartridge failure less likely to expel god-knows-what at the shooter eventually a modified form of the u.s. 1917 rear aperture sight would be fitted to this rifle comes in about this phase the safety also saw one last change overall it's a three position switch with semi-automatic full and safe and the last thing that they added here would be the inclusion of an interrupter pin with the selector making setting the gun to safe sort of a two-handed or fiddly thumb and forefinger operation you would never want to accidentally be safe with this gun also by this time we now have a 20 round and 40 round option that second one though is considered a little too awkward for soldiers especially if they want to use the gun prone so it's left as an aircraft roll 20 run is basically all getting it on the ground and there wasn't a huge aircraft roll for the VAR there's some and that's a whole other history we do not have an aircraft or an aircraft configured var anyway at this point we're pretty much caught up to the gun as manufactured which means what we should be doing is pulling the thing out and going over it and fine detail but I had to go to the gun and that means that we are going to have to use the wayback machine and go back to old footage of me from months ago and see how well I did it describing this thing before we sent down into all the scripting work as you can tell here in the past I am trying desperately to disguise the fact that I'm in a hotel room there may be some odd noises they're not as usual coming from me but we do have the gun here now and that is the time in which we can look at it so let's take a closer look at this Browning automatic that is a big gun so the first thing I'm going to show you guys that I don't keep whacking this table is the mag release let me set that down gently and push here right in the trigger guard and again not a lot of room until I get this guy all the way and there ladies and gentlemen is a big Maggie so we'll get that off to the side and turn this gun up all right now I'm not gonna do a disassembly just yet but I do need to get where you can see this so here's our bolt we are actually forward this is a open bolt system so let's give that to the rear I did that this rod right here now you notice it is not carrying itself forward you have to shove that back into place yourself no extra automatic Springs or anything people just weren't as lazy back then no [Music] sorry so much weight here our rear sight is actually based right off of the P 14 1917 rifles we've covered those guys before I mean this is a near identical setup they just gave it a little modification so that we have a good fit honestly brilliant sighting system as we'll see this inspires the us to search stay with the rear aperture going on down the road now Oh flipping around just to give you some more the profile sling at the rear moving forward into our four stock when I say this texturing is aggressive this is like modern FN pistol aggressive texturing beautiful and then down our gas system up here let me get where you guys can see that ever so slightly and I'll get a photo in a moment but we have three positions on our gas system so that we can adjust for our ammo that's done by pressing up on a split pin here pop a little piece rotate and lock it down into one of these other notches I am not about to flex on all that right at this moment keep going in we have our adjustable front sight not on the fly mind you staked in there and then we have a little bit of extra muzzle protection that guy is obviously not rifled for any craziness no oh bring our back and I'm not kidding this is not a light gun these are not my usual comical grunts bring it back they'll see that she's been marked over the top again I'll get you a closer photo in just a moment no I know that might seem kind of brief but take it for what it is this is a very simple gun simple operation the only lasting only thing that really memorize on it is what you're doing with your select so let's zoom in on that as I get this flipped around not recall this little button right here is a later edition so we are forward for our semi-automatic position back for our auto and the idea again here is that if we were forward in semi-auto and we needed to hurriedly go to automatic because we had a big battlefield problem the idea is that you'd go to automatic with an emergency before this pin which is here now but not on earlier ones you would flip this back miss the pin because there was none and go straight back to safe and then Oh SpaghettiOs you're not shooting at the moment you really want to be shooting so this was a expedient solution which meant that you could not accidentally go back it's very awkward to press and push this you need at least two fingers if you're clever with it and honestly at first it's almost two-handed because it's so it's a really awkward motion to sort of memorize and learn you can see I'm struggling with it right now even though I know what I'm doing two-handed yeah okay but trying to bear up the way this rifle while doing it you're not gonna do that by accident which is perfect alright so spun back around again oh because since we already have the gun in our hands it's probably time to actually take it apart so let's do a little strip now I recorded this part silently back in the day that way I could voice over it now like I'm doing first click the chamber and drop the bolt then we'll flip this takedown lever you can do that with the rim of a case but I happen to have a screwdriver handy they get free and now technically you get the trigger group out but I'm gonna let it rest for just a moment see this hole well if we work the slide back it will align with a pin punch that out from the left side using our previous takedown pin and voila okay now I'll pull that trigger guard free and now it's time for another takedown pin again cartridge rim is preferred but I'm just being very careful with a screwdriver nope apparently I was gonna scratch it time to go for brass even so this is a bit stiff so I'll use the case as leverage now we can pull that for stock away but not all the way off to get the rest we need to push and turn on the back of the spring plunger now we can move the piston rearward and release the foreign from here we can pull the piston forward and lift out that hammer take a look and lower this joint now we can pull the piston out this is the fiddly bit there's a cross key holding the bolt I need to arrange everything inside the receiver and pry the cross key out and not scratch up this gun again you could do this with a cartridge rim with the cross key up I can fish out the bolt but honestly I needed gravity so I took into my lap to get it started let's flash forward okay there we go also now firing pin and the bolt and lock all right bit of a mess a bit hurried but I think you guys can tell it comes apart the major components are pretty obvious pretty big still a fair few parts and definitely a bit of a jigsaw puzzle there's a lot of sort of fiddling I will say that as I'm working on this a lot of can be done with the back of a casing or the point of a bullet it's sort of hammer pieces here and there it's filled usable don't get me wrong my one concern in this case though you can see from this gun having been worked on over the years these are number of scratch marks and things like that on it there's a sort of semi destructive process as you're doing it it's not good for the finish there may have been some smarter ways to get this to sort of come apart easier but again you then would have protruding objects or screws to turn and therefore have to have a screwdriver in the auto it's serviceable with just a cartridge and a little pain that part's good still just a little bit finicky and a lot to kind of lose once you get it apart but that's neither here they're there I think by this point having seen all this stuff I doubt it's really coming together how it goes into motion so for that let's kick over to an animation just a reminder Bruno has only two weeks to get regular animations done there's no way he can do these machine guns so we get help from the YouTube channel v BB SM YT thank you so much for your work there's a link down the description if you'd like to see more of his amazing animations now well first take note of the gas piston you guys should be familiar with these the excess gas gets driven into a tube rocks the piston back and that's what operates the gun that Pistons rearward travel drives the hammer and link to the rear of the action dropping the bolt out of lock in the process notice that the bolt locks open after each shot with the mechanism snagged by the sear when we pull the trigger it releases everything forward and the lock is lifted by cross pins pressing it up into the top of the receiver just before the moment of fire [Music] now the hammer isn't a shape we're used to but it does carry its momentum into the firing pin discharging the round the lock presses down on a tab on the firing pin resetting it rearward [Music] the fire selector actually has three positions here we're going to show safe first see a simple trigger block an automatic fire the transfer bar stays firm to the sear keeping it open and semi-automatic fire the deeper pull allows the transfer bar to tip after each shot disconnecting and releasing the seer from here you can also see the buffer spring and disks at work easing the recoil force on this rifle the rest of this gun is pretty straightforward so I'll just leave you to watch for a bit and we'll get over to May for some demonstration [Music] [Music] [Music] now don't get too disappointed there's gonna be some more shooting of that gun a little bit later in the episode I just needed to sort of break things up this is a long one guys anyway so where we left off Cole had a contract in July of 1917 but at this time and I've sort of been hinting at this colt was a little unreliable and that was making people kind of nervous basically they had an outstanding contract for 4100 Vickers machine guns for the past two years and had produced exactly zero and in addition they had production of the 1911 1917 revolver and the 95 14 machine guns and you can see that cool is getting overloaded so I was suggested that Remington could step in as a subsidiary to Cole in order to press more material out but wisely one Lieutenant Colonel John Hodgdon writes of the Ordnance Department stepped up he made the case that Remington should not be forced to work under Colt in this matter colt was radically less productive than remington or really anybody else and so any other producers that came in well their personal production and profit should be preserved it's a lot of peas thankfully the department listened and so they basically told Colt look if you want these contracts if you want to keep producing for us you're gonna need to limit that or release that exclusive license to the production of this gun for the duration of the war and that included not only the B AR but the Browning 1917 s we'll talk about later and so Colt had to finally backed into a corner finally without some collusive friend or poor excuse or whatever finally had to let go they had to agree to not chase anybody for royalties on that particular gun for the duration of the production for the war now don't feel too bad for Colt on this one they were still awarded a 1 million dollar gift as thanks for doing this favor they apparently still had some friends and so we'll see some more manufacturers coming to the fray but not Remington curiously even though that was sort of the point that was being debated instead it would be Colt Winchester and Marlin Rockwell and this is where it gets interesting you see by now it's September of 1917 and Winchester finally has their orders and they are everything that Colt wasn't they were fast prototypers and fast producers they had already gained a lot of experience and planning thanks to the British pattern 14 rifle in later u.s. 1917 in our previous episode we saw millions of these things being assembled in very short order so Winchester wasn't going to just sit around and wait on colt however they still needed the prototypes that colt was sitting on top of now Colt said they needed that gun too or guns or harmony were left at that point but it came down to Colt can we get one of the you know sample production guns and Colt said and we kind of needed and then they said dude there's a war going on a Colt said yeah but we're cold and so the wind of opportunity to use that gun was whittled down to you guys can have it on noon on Saturday but we want it back by 8:00 a.m. on Monday you can do that as many times as you need to and then you just figure it out but we're cold and whatever and Winchester took up the challenge they just got all their engineers together all of them and ran them in shift work so that they were covering the gun 24 well not seven because it's basically one but just from the moment they had it to the moment they had to get it back somebody was working on that gun pulled apart put together in and out and in that furious mess one man actually roast the top Edwin Pugsley was born out of California but graduated Yale in 1908 in 1911 he received a second degree now from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that same year he was recruited by Winchester and began learning the business inside out in the long run Pugsley might be one of the most unsung American arms engineers he was a committed and capable Winchester man with many trials guns to his name along with plenty of sensible engineering fixes but for today he's still pretty early in his career and still an innovator you see Pugsley really understood how to compress a schedule he planned the project in reversed seeing exactly when each component would be needed to be finished for the next stage of tulip this allowed Winchester to compact the schedule to an absolute minimum this rapid tulip wouldn't be easy though because they had to clone parts streamline manufacture determine the materials needed and lay out a plan for the production floor tooling every step of the process so with Pugsley at the helm how did they do in three Sunday borrows just three weeks they had all the data they needed and with his planning sole production was possible not max capacity but the ability to roll them off the assembly line that was ready in three months that is fantastic and to put this into perspective Pugsley plan was so detailed that they were already manufacturing parts for certain guns ahead of manufacturing the tools to make other parts because they knew the time lineup was such that we need to go ahead and start this part and then we can start the tool to make the other part and that's how amazingly perfected and sensible this planning was and at a time of war in a war of attrition that man is a hero on December 15th 1917 at 10:30 a.m. Winchester fired the first production browning automatic rifle minor modifications would follow notably the addition of a flash hider and changing the sling points once the first few of these guns were ready it was time for another demonstration this time at Congress Heights in February of 1918 15 were fired up to 2,000 rounds of pop and everyone was very impressed well almost everyone you see John Browning had a fallout with Winchester years back somewhere around the time his auto five shotgun Winchester had been paying him lump sums for his designs for decades trouble is they were making way way more on these guns than he was I mean many of them are still in production today so you have the best arms designer in history the man who is responsible for almost your entire product line definitely responsible for your astronomical success in the past couple decades and he wants nickel on a gun dollar on a gun who cares right you just need to go find out what that's gonna cost you what your real margins are maybe pass on some of the cost who knows you gotta find a way to work this out unless you're complete idiot now we're gonna tell a totally different story about Winchester and browning another day but they were total idiots and so browning really didn't want to see them ever again he walked out never to return and instead he would take his designs well he'd already had a few in the works with Colt because they were the machine gun guys but he took them especially over to his new friends at FN and back over to Remington well now we are years down the road and yes he brought his gun to cult but Colt can't keep up the production and utterly failed to prototype this gun out properly they couldn't do it instead Winchester did it and they did it really really well I mean whoo now at first browning would just send his brother Edmund to take care of these things right but that means he ultimately like he skipped the Congress Heights demonstration that is the time for him to really soak it up and the man loved showing off his guns he works hard on them so at some point somebody's got to go hopefully get him right like I mean if you're willing to skip out on the Congress Heights demonstration this big you know political army what I mean these are big deals and you're going yeah Winchester's their own Michael that's some hatred all right that's that's some deep burn so if somebody from Winchester would have to go apologize in lure John Browning back because honestly they're still working out some kinks it's his gun he should be there it doesn't feel right and so once again we're going to need another liner hero in this story oh man it was Pugsley again I love this guy also I should point out that this is a photo from further on his life he was a younger man at this time he was the one to brave meeting John Browning for the first time for him and asking him to please come see their work he took along a wood for stock as bait browning turned it over and muttered that he knew nobody who could handle wood as well as Winchester and so he consented to visit fondly greeting old friends and making new ones you see guys I have warmed all of your hearts so by May of 1918 Chester has managed about 1,300 rifles so we're getting there and Colt has zero they have zero rifles good job Colt and Marlins well we got a little history there Marlin Rockwell by World War one was sort of the same company that we talked about in our Winchester lever gun episodes you see at the start of World War one that President Malin H Marlin rejected several British contracts due to the limits of their then current commercial production he didn't really want to expand his company to fit the war rightly realizing that afterwards they would just be over leveraged well the British wanted guns and so they swung JP Morgan at the problem buying out Marlin in December of 1915 with this they started cranking out coal 1895 fourteen machine guns Albert F Rockwell was brought in to head the new corporation a consummate industrialist Rockwell was a self-educated mechanical genius and already a wealthy and well-known figure so in 1916 the company was rebranded Marlon Rockwell to benefit from his fame now just like the previous president didn't want the company had to expand in order to accept the BA our contract this rolled in in June of 1918 and it was going to be a hundred and thirty thousand ish guns we're gonna see that number fall way short but that's not necessarily Marlins fault now in order to do this that expansion meant they had to get a new plant that happened to come from the trouble Hopkins an Allen company who freed up their Norwich Connecticut plant to be purchased about the same time returning to Colt they had only produced a few hundred of the automatic rifles although by the end of July this would rise to 1650 total showing that they really got rolling about the same time then Marlon got into the game alright let's skip some of the nitty-gritty and just get to the end of the war and see what actually got delivered here because we're nickel and dime in this Winchester would produce twenty eight thousand of these rifles Marlin sixteen thousand and Colt oh boy nine thousand no over two hundred eighty-eight thousand were ordered of course most of these had delivery terms in 1919 post-war this was reduced to one hundred eighty six thousand total so there would be some post-war production for inventory and it kept the companies from under from again having too much overhead in the system 48,000 or so would be shipped overseas before the war ended and the average cost per gun to the government was about a hundred and twenty-three dollars 20 cents and when the war was over well Colt got their rights back and went on to commercial production it's a story for another day alright so we've sort of surmised production this is very compressed is a big story guys again look down in the description if you really want the nitty gritty it's actually quite interesting no know what you want you want to see some hip fire action so let's get back over to May and see this gun one more time [Music] [Music] [Music] I hope you guys noticed Mae's fancy belt because that's original equipment that helps with the operation of this gun and I'm gonna tell you as someone who used that for the first time there just to try it out it's a very awkward sensation it's not pressing on your shoulder it's pressing on your hip when does that really ever happen just a reminder this was a setup to ease walking fire semi-automatic shots fired on the leading step while advancing over no-man's land we actually just went a bit trigger-happy and went full auto also we didn't really have the space now by February of 1918 a small number of these guns are starting to trickle into Springfield for inspect final inspection and inventory but realistically we don't see them arrive in France until the summer and by the end of July there's at least 17,000 B ARS available in the country that's enough to field 220 divisions interestingly John Browning's own son Val Allen browning would enlist under a special commission as a second lieutenant in the Ordnance Department whereas put to work in France instructing soldiers in the use of his father's new gun they were generally issued to a two-man team while operating the weapon and the other acting as a loader and also preparing magazines and keeping the gun fed and carrying additional ammunition now there should be the point where the VAR starts hitting the field but nobody really wants to retrain the troops because we're doing all right at the moment like things are looking pretty good for they on Tod that means that show shots and the occasional Lewis gun are still in the frontline for now as ba arse pile up in reserve and honestly it's sort of sensible you see Germany's just not holding up their defenses all that great it doesn't look like it's going to be a complete breakthrough it's not gonna be the end of the war but we're gonna roll them up pretty good walk the line for winter it'll be a little smattering of stuff but every winter things kind of calm down and then the spring well Germany's gonna be so pushed up at this point that we know that they're going to have to go for a major counter-attack and so we need to be prepared to deal with that counterattack in spring of 1919 and also we need to be able to attack in spring of 1919 we talked about this with the pettersen device it was gonna be a secret weapon that was rolled out over the winter - boom surprise the Germans and again the Browning automatic rifle is the same idea yeah we've got it we've got them all the way to the field but let's not go showing them off too much let's not give the Germans too much warning we want to be able to go aha look at this crazy stuff we cooked up while you guys were trying to root for turnips that means that despite all US divisions shipping out with BA ours after July of 1918 Pershing's orders stripped most of them in favor of the French show shot and while it is actually a fine enough weapon for the time I can't think losing your B AR for one would go over well still our rifle today did make it to the fight I'll be it in a limited role the first shots in aggression happened September 22nd 1918 thanks to the 313th infantry company these guys were under the 79th Division and the action was immediately preceding the meuse-argonne offensive only three other AEF divisions would carry the b AR into combat in World War one by the way and Val browning was also part of the 79th and he would mostly serve in the training and support role for the guns themselves but that doesn't mean that he didn't get a little dirty it said that he actually wielded his personal browning automatic rifle in anger during the conflict so now we have actual use of the gun and that means we have some combat reports right well limited use means limited understanding the gun in combat both the 79th and 80th reported exceptional performance when actually firing easier to handle and more effective than the previous show shot now overall most comments on the BA are from the time note its use was very limited and engagements infrequent so mostly this became a test of endurance in mud and marching the 80th in particular had run both the BA are in the show shot in offensive action in these pushes light machine guns that broke down they were left behind maybe fetch to a repair depots but mostly they're just replaced with whatever was handy usually more regular bolt-action rifles under light resistance 400 show shots had been abandoned now with heavier resistance only 72 browning automatics were ditched in the advance not bad for a new gun still there were some problems most centered on the complete lack of time available to clean the guns advance fight advanced fight there's not a lot of energy left for cleaning and you saw the takedown procedure plus Mudd constant and unending it's in everything and eventually we'll pack in tight enough to come down any firearm for the most part the BA are actually did keep running it took a lot of mud to shut one down and I really had one particular vulnerability in that was the aforementioned rust if you could get your gun clean it would start working again so the minute stopped functioning if you can just get to the chamber and the gas tube and just clean that out boom you're back in business now that's easier said than done but that's sort of when you're gonna have to ask of any of these guns in that period so amongst its contemporaries an extremely good weapon and it did exactly the role it was designed for very well it could be fired from the hip it could be walked with semi-automatic fire handy magazines quick detach it's way easier than a show shot it blows everything in its category away because it's one of only two guns that really fits in its category at that time and it's the only one of those two that was designed to really do it the biggest problem with the VAR that we have nowadays is that there were so many attempts to fit it to a roll it was never really designed for I know many of you are upset we aren't covering the later modifications of this gun but believe me there's plenty of attempts and it's gonna take a lot to get this gun into a different role that it never quite fits into well honestly at this moment I'm glad World War one show because this is the heyday of the browning automatic rifle this is when it does its job to perfection it is a walking fire rifle it's not terribly good at being a shoulder fire semi-automatic it's not terribly good at being a light machine gun and as you saw those attempts to do both and it's a nightmare that's it's a whole lot of US history that's a lot of fun to cover and if we get around to world war two I will be delighted to pull out a 1918 82 and go to work but that is another story for another day instead let's all just stop here and fondly remember the little rifle that shoulda coulda woulda except the Germans pulled out of the war unexpectedly with the Armistice and the gun really or it never got fielded the way it should have been and so it's a big what-if it probably would have been heralded as amazing we can't ever for sure know that as a fact though instead we got to see it live so long in the US service life because boy did that thing stick around as you guys know to the point that it sort of lost its appeal alright well let's stay in World War one and go get mais opinion on handling this big bad boy all right once more we've made room for me but not for unfortunately the BA our what with yes I'm sorry but we couldn't bring it home although we did bring some other things home from that same trip that's how we did the Patterson device here in studio so some things are easier to get back across state lines than others all right so we don't have the gun but we can still talk about your experience with it and I'll try my best to pop up some visuals to help is that fair yeah works for me okay so I want to get a little special on this one in addition to what we're doing now because the Browning automatic rifle we're not going to cover its World War two history but a lot of people are used to thinking of it as a light machine gun because of the roll is forced to play later on and that's a whole episode in a very long discussion in World War one though it had two essential roles one of which it really wasn't emphasized on but it sort of played and the other it definitely was emphasized on so role one the less recognizable role is that it was basically a battle rifle is a shoulder-fired full size cartridge autoloading rifle all right we need to judge it as such and then we also need to judge it as a hip fire walking fire you know semi-automatic and fully automatic fired from the hip I don't know what to call it like it's funny but I can't think of a tech I mean the automatic rifle is what it is that's what they call them they call them automatic rifles but that's a category that we really don't talk about anymore we don't tend to think of having a hip slung walking shoot gun in World War two tactics changed and they build up more of a the true light machine gun so and then also true battle rifles so we're gonna talk about these two roles and we're going to break it up so when we first talk about this gun let's treat it like a battle rifle let's talk about it as if we were discussing a Gary during svt-40 from world war ii who does that make sense to you works for Magus alright so let's start there let's get your impressions of a shoulder-fired browning automatic rifle 1918 so guys what I really needed a picture is really just a general idea of a rifle but slightly bigger and that's I know what the B AR is it just looks like a rifle except it is heavy I mean it is about like what 15 pounds I think is what it was that earth I guess gave us her information beginning you haven't seen beginning an episode you skipped ahead stop that anyway yes seriously it is a heavy rifle luckily most of it is somewhat in the center so it is actually pretty well balanced I didn't really feel like I was having to hold up the muzzle so much as just mostly hold it there for steadying so that was really kind of nice like I said it is slightly larger than your average sized rifle I would say and it is fat that I did notice like the for stock and the wrists like and even to the buttstock it's all just really fat like you can look at it in the videos and the pictures like my hand is just basically having to cup the whole thing I've never I've never actually felt like I couldn't fully grip a rifle entirely like my hands around the four stock before until that that was really interesting experience for me speaking of the four stock if you notice it's actually got some really severe checkering on it I'm guessing this because they really don't want you to lose your grip on it and no surprise you don't want to lose your grip on this thing especially with shoulder firing but I did notice that there was no way that thing was going to slip in my hands no matter how sweaty I got that day so kudos I didn't have to worry nice and then the rear with the wrist the wrist itself was insanely thick like if you notice on my shoulder and normally I don't wrap my thumb around because it just really isn't necessary but for this one I had to just because it was there was just nowhere else to really place my thumb it just made sense to wrap it around that time in order to actually get a solid grip and while I was doing that I also noticed that I was having to grip the rifle at a very strange angle in the back like I actually had to tip my hand forward slightly in order to grip it was like it's just a shallower angle that I had to grip it at in order to reach the trigger which was very unusual and not incredibly comfortable in my opinion if you haven't seen this screening section go back and watch that it just it looks a little bit weird trust me the charging handle when operating it wasn't difficult to operate but it was a bit strange because you're pulling back against the way the spring and then sub just letting go you have to push it back forward so a little bit strange but not difficult to operate and the last thing one of the last few things we'll talk about operating switching between semi-auto and auto fire you know I feel like maybe I could have squashed my thumb down around and switched it there but then I would have lost my grip a little bit on the wrist or maybe I could have scooched my my front hand for back a little bit and switched it there but again that's changing my grip up and not something I would be comfortable doing you know one on film or two you know in an actual battle so just I feel it's more comfortable it makes more sense to bring it down to operate it in my opinion and the last thing but not getting not difficult to operate just that's what I think you should do the last thing is just popping the magazine in and out super easy I didn't never find it snagging or difficult to know when it was in or not just give it extra tap on the bottom like with any with any mag like that but overall Organon it's wise it's kind of big and heavy and I don't see myself shooting that all day especially 20 rounds of of 30.6 that's a that'd be a bit much for me but I mean it was a neat shooter yeah I feel like the P AR is a bit like trying to wear your dad's shoes just oh my god yeah yeah you you you've worn shoes well assuming you're smaller than your dad I mean we're like assuming your teenager who's just shy of his dad right and you've you've worn shoes and then you go to put on these shoes and you know how shoes should feel and they just don't they're slightly too big and they just the foot shapes a little off from your foot shape that's been more is it something like the worst sensation everyone else wears your shoes okay but that's not it anyway so the VAR to me just feels like it's scaled up just a bit too much when you treat it like a rightfull so I'm not saying this is how it feels is a light machinegun slash walking fire whatever but as a rightful if you just pick it up and you go I'm gonna shoot this is it's so close to being a normal gun and for somebody my size it's actually quite manageable in a lot of ways but even though I'm my size I normally hander handle thinner wrists normal rifles designed for people smaller than me so when I got to pick it up I'm like well this is pleasant in a way but it's also not right like this is not how it normally feels it's everything's just girthier all the way around and it's a little interesting but you get used to it fairly quickly and then much like driving a pickup truck and then going to a compact you get really weirded out when you go back to a normal size rifle so from the shoulder definitely an interesting feel and not nearly as unbalanced or muzzle heavy or hard to work with as you would think if you take a good stance you can carry this thing fairly well now what about pulling the trigger because there's some interesting things that go into this gun being an open bolt and then select fire thing why don't you walk us through your impressions of actually shooting it from the shoulder the shooting section my favorite section that's what I do bringing up the sights and they're just like standard 1917 sights so they're really good I was able to view the sight picture on it was perfect so kudos for that one nice job pulling the trigger the trigger on that was smooth no complaints there but the loft time on it it was insane I actually ended up flinching a number of times she's because there was such a delay on that I mean here let me just show you so watch this is completely unloaded guys again we've checked this before we brought it on and I'm again checking it now all good you see that there's just so much of delay in there you want what's this do it one more time it's just I don't know when you're when you're not expecting it to immediately go bang raise you pull the trigger it's kind of weird it puts you off and as a result like you know maybe a nine-millimeter it's not gonna be so bad but in 30.6 you know there's a good bit of refill coming back at you so for me on range my first time shoulder firing something of large of a caliber it was not something I was expecting when it went bang so if you notice they weren't actually a few times where I flinched like my second or my first shot like just because I wouldn't be expecting it it was it was a bit unusual I feel I would need a good amount of practice with that in order to actually get good at shoulder firing something in full auto and that large of a cartridge I really didn't have the time that we had that day unfortunately get good at it so sorry about that but definitely a different and new experience for me the recoil it well it wasn't too bad it wasn't the the weight of the rifle did help with that but it was still significant enough that you can see it did it did pop me back and forth a little bit there and then firing it in full auto it was it was practically uncontrollable you saw there was a little bit there at the end where I you could see I couldn't control the barrel going up and I actually had two Flyers on that one that was a bit a bit unfortunate but they still stayed on the berm they just went a little high of the target so yeah shooting this guy don't get me wrong it was a heck of a fun thing but from the shoulder it just makes no sense you could only be doing this in a semi full auto that's just not it's just not controllable it's not doable I will say in defense of some people out there I'm quite certain that you could get good at shouldering the B AR but it would take time it's not an automatic thing or I mean if you just have any bear that one guy that can be through this gun but amazed defence lock time is a huge concern because we fired the Lewis gun and actually we've handled a number of submachine guns at this point and two things happen there well it's one thing overall you don't really take all the recoil of us so on the Lewis gun we're on the ground its bipod it out it's a smooth linear gun you don't anticipate like you you just wait for the gun to go bang because there's a noise and maybe some gas you close your eyes a bit that's not flinching by the way I get comments all the time about you know May flinching if you can see your eyes closed before the bang that's a flinch after not really the kind of thing that effects your aim the bullets already gone alright so we had some pre flinching this time we had the eyes closed then bang and I'm gonna say I'm probably guilty of it too on the particular gun because it is a very long long time from the shoulder and you're anticipating not just 30.6 but by the time you've selected full auto you're expecting a burst of 30.6 oh yeah there's something about that just I don't know it activates the defense mechanism for sure in a way that a submachine guns shooting pistol cartridges who cares but-but-but-but and you know lying down with light machine gun who cares but but but but but but you get over that very fast with the VAR yeah I'm gonna say people probably put some practice into not necessarily being caught off guard by that long a lot time I mean that thing was almost comparable to shooting like you know you know black powder muzzle loader in a lot of ways because it just click and then shoot and you can hear it in the audio you hear that that metal thunk sound that is that bolt going forward that's the forward stroke you're hearing before every shot that metallic noise that we picked up with our microphones beautiful yeah is quite interesting but it's also I mean it's apparent that there's some dwell there so with all that covered I don't want an opinion yet because we gotta go all the way back around and talk about the ergonomics of hip firing this thing and just to remind everybody may had a cup mounted on a belt a steel cup to fit the butt into and then she had to bear into that at the hip and we gave her some bursts of automatic now we experimented a bit here and there because we had some problems I'll let her cover that but overall we're thinking like a full burst because that gives us the best picture we do know that developmentally we should have done some left foot single shot stuff like semi-automatic just left foot bang left foot bang we'd not have the room we were set in with some trees for down a hill it just didn't feel right to try to walk that up because we're a berm was you saw how high we could have some rise we didn't want to back off that burn more than 50 feet and accidentally send a singer of 30.6 who knows where that's just not responsive there were cows there yeah anyway so Cal's aside let's get your opinion on actually hip firing working this gun as a walking fire done so guys I thought I'd fired some full auto guns in my lifetime before I fired Lewis gun from my hip fire to MgO a 15 maybe not an mp40 turns out no apparently I have not done that because it was all in the shoulders I was firing it not from my hip it's like it was like I was rocking a loaded baby use your shoulders and away from the face guys but yeah seriously I was using my shoulder to kind of bear some of that impact whenever I was firing down near my hip line I wasn't using my hip city so when I'm putting the var into this cup that is attached to my hips suddenly instead of the weight being you know brought back with his shoulder and like into my elbow carrying it no it was like someone had grabbed my pants and yanked them back and also started twisting them so I hate to say it I believe we have some footage of it and I'm a little ashamed of it but I got I lost my footing on this one you know what I let that clip play long enough to hear me howling like a woman in the background because that was one of the funniest things I've ever seen she walked right out of frame for every camera except for the front-facing one and that was their first burn we had not done a practice burn and I'm so glad for once we did not do a practice burn because I'm so glad we got that on film we never get those moments on film I was disappointed for two reasons one I lost my footing and two I stepped out of frame it was like the two things my two jobs not supposed to do step out of frame lose your footing I failed at two jobs that day you can watch her attention focus down on the range to make sure all the rounds went down range and then it immediately shifts to like the number two camera on the right and she's like the first thing she's worried about is like did I come out of frame oh my god so funny I knew he didn't give me enough room because why would you I've never jumped that far out of frame before I stepped a whole step back alright so the reason for that by the way and I tried this too although I has forewarning is that seriously I've shot some stuff from the hip just like me from the hip position you're still carrying it in your upper body you still lean into it like you would normally do still sort of stiffen up and carry that weight back in here if you do that if you got kind of your butt back and your shoulders forward and the BA are lights up and it's attached to your hip your butt's that subtly back gets pulled back yeah somebody's grabbed your belt line and just yanked you back when you weren't expecting I mean it's it's fantastic now you saw her adapt on the fly in that shot she actually got control of it very quickly it wasn't overwhelming so we can laugh I mean some people with a little less experience might have just gone buns over teakettle but may is very safe and actually we swapped that target I forgot to take a photo of it but she had I'd say at least 15 rounds still on paper even with that weird display also it wasn't my fault the belt is made for this you you not [ __ ] to the smallest size on there apparently I'm smaller than small for a military man during that time so not my fault yeah that's the one thing that she didn't have she doesn't have a 1918 waist slash hip lock I need to eat more meat I'm not sure that's what we need to do what we ended up doing is we ended up tightening the belt all the way down and then stuffing like a roll of duct tape behind her small of her back she's apparently just enough to make it tight so thank you duct tape and I kept the belt from rotating and then we got the actual footage that you saw us for that properly so properly using the B air from the hip and expecting to actually have to carry the weight in your hip which again is a very odd sensation very odd sensation how does this work I mean how do you feel being able to control that gun at a low angle semi close-range semi-automatic or fully automatic not that we got to walk with it but how confident are you about that whole thing so let's let's refresh our memories and go back to the shoulder fire section where I was talking about the weight and the balance on that guy it's got a lot of heft to it but the weight is on the center so when I suddenly bring that down to my hip well shoot that weight really kind of doesn't make a difference one I've got it into the cup for the back section so that's steadying and got a nice little solid spate place for me to put it like there's no question - where exactly down the midsection I'm going to hold it it fits right in that cup it's right in a perfect spot on my hip and then - with the balance in the center well my hands are around the center sec got my my left hand on the for stock my right hand on the rear its it's perfect it feels more natural it feels like oh my god maybe it was designed for hipfiring who knows crazy ideas here on this channel anyway so yeah I've also I've got the checkering on that for stock that we talked about before man does that still come in handy I mean you guys need to go back and watch that slow-motion shot as I'm saying this now go ahead and skip back please because seriously like I am able to keep that gun steady it is amazing but yeah nothing really different in terms of ergonomics other than those two things like it just it feels like it was meant to be hip fired I mean luckily when we got the belt settled for the for the cinching section as soon as that was ready it really felt like it was this place you just got to make sure your widen your stance a little bit that that is something you kind of have to actively remember to do because that is a little bit different when it comes to shooting so you feel like you could walk and fire this pretty much all day yeah I mean to be honest when it feels like you're walking with it you just got to make sure that you kind of do it's it's not like you're doing a casual walk like you're your face you're not faced forward with it you're face to the side so you just got to make sure it's kind of like an Aikido stance that you take with it and you do you are just able to like saunter forward essentially I mean I believe with eyes did a great job of that with the O 815 a while back showing a good walk fire with it essentially I feel like this won't do much better than that even just because you're able to keep it so steady as you're with it as you're just standing out with it I can't imagine walking with it would be any more difficult yeah I would say with the O 815 I could not cross my ankles I could not take a standard full step full stride walk I would have to like catch one leg up here put the other one out and so more of a scissoring walk in order to make sure that stayed stable I didn't want to over cross my legs that kept the balance I would say with the VAR of the cup actually it's almost so natural that I don't know that I would have to pay that much attention in my life because you might not have to because of also wherever you switch the cup around you can put it more just towards the side so that you could actually have more of a frontal stance that's true you just have to reach more around and sort of twist your upper body to get into business if you're comfortable with that and then on the cup by the way while we're talking about it I'm gonna steal something back here you know what I'm just gonna borrow this little guy and before everybody gets excited no this was actually not really used in World War one but something very similar was if you own one of them you already know what it is let us know if we can borrow it so if we have a gun and we want to not hold it to our shoulder we want only our two points not three one hand to hand no shoulder no third point then in order to control the axis of this weapon we have to be aware of where our muzzles pointing and we have to be aware of where our butts pointing so we're sort of controlling two circles of possible aberration right with the cup it's a artificial shoulder we now have three points and we only have to control the walk at that front we know where the rear is going to be better than that because the cup actually cups around it so there's really nowhere for it to go except for that one space just back into you it's true no up no down no left or right it's a very good shoulder so now if you're hip firing it you basically only have to watch your muzzle and then by the way man I have an opinion on this we think this is where the flash hider comes in pretty strongly because if you're trying to fire any sort of low angle shorter distance 30.6 cartridge you you're gonna need to see where it hits you're not gonna be able to accurately aim with the front of that gun so you need to be able to see your piff your path your dirt dust grass whatever it is that you're hitting turn up and so if you're getting thirty out six muzzle flash right in front of you especially in low-light you're not gonna see where the heck you're hitting so I imagine a blinded I imagine that's where the flash hider came in it has to be it makes the most sense and what would do is give you the best chance let me put that back down of directing your shots on the fly because remember it's not meant to be blunt and rapid adjustment we fired it that way because that's what we had and you guys kind of like it when we do that but realistically that was supposed to be like the last thing you would do when you crested the trench like you would if you ran across a machine gun if you ran across sort of stiff resistance like a dozen guys you'd be like oh crap it wasn't the norm the norm was left step right step left step bang right step left step bang is this nice even pace hmm so I think it works really well I actually think that you it's hard to argue a better device than this for this specific role the problem is the role eventually vanishes so all of that said in the Great War in the trenches in and out of trenches how would you feel about having been assigned a browning automatic rifle is this a yes or a No in your book so here's the thing if I'm thinking about firing from the shoulder only its act it would get an O in my opinion because one I've got my wrist at this awkward angle the top that makes no sense for gripping the trigger where it's at it's heavy I mean ya got 20 rounds of 30.6 which is great but it makes no sense from the shoulder if I'm hit firing this thing walking firing with it suddenly that angle from my hand down here is at a much better spot I'm able to reach the trigger easily and just hold the rifle just watch the video like again it makes sense where the trigger is now and that thick wrist there it's perfect for that and then I've got I guess at 30 at 6 now I've got 20 rounds of it and I can walk with this thing and the maneuverability on this is cane and the mag is easy to switch out yeah I would take this in the battle I feel I could defend myself attack with it goodness me I would have a day with it so actually yeah I would definitely take this in a battle yeah for me the only real negatives are the fact that it's very difficult to switch from semi-automatic to fully automatic not very difficult but a little poorer than I would like and then I wish they had more rounds I mean granted if they have more rounds we won't be able to go pro with it but that is true there is an emphasis on the ability to go prone with this rifle which we did not test and fortunately we really never do I'm sorry to say we we should rebuild the whole show and start from square one again right third one guys let's do it again alright so but prone would be very hard with that forty round mag that we saw our glimpsed earlier in the episode so here's the breakdown the selector is a little slow so if you were in semi-automatic and you suddenly want to go full auto it's not as sudden as you'd like you kind of have to be a little thoughtful about that switch over to the magazines are a little shallow that's your comment but not really mine because at the time twenty rounds was still very very good that period that was a very I mean that's four times the service rifle that's so that's okay by me especially if you think of it as a semi-automatic rifle and not everyone wants to think of is the fully automatic light machine gun see I'm just thinking of it like compared to the Lewis gun where the difference in I'm not around yes you're you're comparing it to a light machine gun I am compare it to a shoulder fire service rifle we have semi automatic five shots in this so four times Oh four times yeah thing I mean or like a Bertie a carbine good lord we're doing way better than that so I'm losing my trail and the third point is that lock time just that that open bolt which is necessary in order to keep the system capable of up to a two hundred round burst because it keeps it cool but it's like the one trade-off it's a semi uh it's almost entirely designed around being semi-automatic with a burst fire option but the bolt which browning originally designed to be a closed bolt so therefore designing the gun around semi automatic function it was opened up in order to make more sustained automatic fire so the the open bolt is a concession to that sort of light machine gun role whereas if they just left it closed it would have been a little bit better maybe much better semi-automatic rifle so you know we're not gonna have an overheating problem if we're firing every other step on a semi-automatic rifle not really not the way that they had to open up the bolt like your mantra yes thank you so with all that said I'm gonna have to agree with me I would give this a very high marks rifle unfortunately it came very late in the war so it didn't make a very big decisive difference and it's so odd because it's such an icon in American history because it stayed on for so long afterwards and it's even arguably odd that it's an icon because it stayed past its usefulness in a lot of ways and that again is a whole other episode that we hope to actually get into and have the ability to do much further down the road so with all that said we're gonna wrap up the show I know on something like this with this big American name behind it a lot of you are going to be new viewers if you've liked this format please go check out some of the previous videos because we do this kind of depth for everything we take whatever information we can and we coalesce it for you and there's something interesting about every unique piece in this war not just the big names now also if you're new make sure you stay after the credits because that's where we drop in our dates and right about now I think we have a little disabled with what social media thinks about shows like ours so that tends to come and go but hopefully these things will last a lot longer than any particular opinion all right man how you doing pretty good now how about you so with that we'll say goodbye later this is you next time [Music] hey guys here for the update and it's both of us this time I know we're throwing you for a loop but yeah we just want to give some special thanks Thank You Marty Morgan for inviting us Louisiana shoot that was an amazing opportunity made a lot of friends it was a heck of a lot of fun and thank you Bruce Canfield for the loan of equipment and for letting us play with all your toys yeah and then I need to throw out some extra thanks number one our own crew don't let me forget this like J and Bruno and then also let's talk all of our extended friends like Marc and Michael and our executive producer Michael because I have another Michael to thank Michael Smith who was an excellent host and gave me plenty of tips on how to handle his gaggle of friends and their unique idiosyncrasies it made filming a lot easier I assure you and then I have to thank good ol Bob Carr and there's a few other characters that I want to get into from that but I feel like I'm just gonna overwhelm the whole thing so I'll save them for when we start talking about some of these other machine guns that came from that same day so don't feel left out just yet now all of this is to say that scene Arsenal is a very big group effort I am in constant conversations with people like our good friend Andrew who has archival research group he actually did a lot of work in prep for this episode with me trying to find some lost footage of John Moses Browning himself handling a Browning automatic rifle that's cool yeah we have not found the film that though we tried it's not where it's supposed to be and if we're being honest it was last seen in 1935 and a lot of these things were recycled during World War two so it may or may not exist but we were gonna try our best to find it this is a man to definitely look up and possibly support because these are the things that you can turn up when you support the people who do direct research we're just repeaters all right now we also have a lot of curators and other friends that come in and really help me with individual projects inventories out of their home countries or museum pieces that we have no access to without getting on a plane these guys are heroes and I try to mention them per episode but I want to make sure while we have a big one to say this is not a lone project I burn a lot of hours I'm a bit overworked and I'm definitely underpaid don't get me wrong but I put a lot on volunteer help from other people who believe in firearms history and so I say this because right now if you're watching this as a time capsule sometime the future right now there's some debate about how safe we are undercurrent especially YouTube's policies but we're gonna host ourselves as many places as we can we've made a joke out of uploading to pornhub our friend Karl has taken that much further and I salute him for it I don't know how much investment I will put into that but we'll find out we're gonna do it takes to share this message because the message itself is what's important it's a love and appreciation for firearms history the development the use and then the lasting legacy of what's here on the wall now that aside I am NOT going to take the show in a political direction although I myself have political opinions and I will express my own on my own time with my own accounts not with the channel so if you're afraid that this is going to start getting a little preachy I assure you it will not we will just update you if things affect the ability to produce the show we won't tell you how you should feel or how you should think I'm pretty sure you can all make up your minds on your own all right with all of that covered if you want to be a supporter of ours on patreon that makes us the most independently operable that allows us to not pick sides with the show itself that allows us to not have to weigh in on every little detail in order to get bonus points it lets you tell us that the core message has its own value and that you want it to go on alright thank you thank you everybody I'm both eyes

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 946,528

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, bf1, battlefield1, worldwar1

Id: OkMc8IurfAY

Length: 91min 33sec (5493 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018