Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today
at the Rock Island Auction Company where they have started doing some kind of bigger guns. This is a Swedish made Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft
gun, and this thing was developed in the 1930s. And it was adopted by the US Navy
in 1938, and by the US Army in 1941, and by almost everyone else in the world
too at some point. This thing saw service in all fronts and on both sides of World War Two. This thing is actually a machine gun
as well as being a cannon. So it's 40mm, but to put things in perspective
what we're talking about is a roughly... It's a 4 pound shell, each actual cartridge,
and the projectile part is about 2 pounds. So just under 1 full kilo of projectile being
fired between 2,700 and 2,800 feet per second. So that's the same muzzle velocity
as an M1 Garand, a .30-06 rifle, and you're getting that out of a 2 pound
high explosive projectile and you're getting 2 of them every second. This thing fires at 120
rounds per minute, because it is also a machine gun. So for the US, and really for everyone else who used these things, this was a piece of intermediate level anti-aircraft artillery. This filled the gap between a large anti-aircraft
gun (something like a 90mm or a 3 inch anti-aircraft gun, which could fire
at, say, bombers at high altitude), and on the small end something like a .50
calibre machine gun set up for anti-aircraft use. This fits right in the middle. (And it's really cool.) Now when the US adopted this thing it was
being manufactured by Bofors in Sweden, and it wasn't exactly a high-volume sort of production. In fact I think kind of from the US perspective they
looked at this, and they're like Bofors must be this, like, sod roofed, old-style, you know, ye olde
factory with like workers with leather caps, and little teeny bifocal glasses, and anvils, and
hammers, and files and stuff making these guns. In reality, they were magnificently made guns.
They were handcrafted, they were excellent. And this is in fact an original
early Swedish production one. But the US needed more than Bofors could
be producing, especially in time of war. We didn't want to have to be buying
these things from the Swedes at, you know, expensive manufacturing costs, and then
trying to ship them across the Atlantic Ocean, or even just transporting them from Sweden
somehow into Europe, like this is gonna be difficult. There are submarines and Germans around. So instead, the US bought ... licensing rights
to manufacture these in the United States. And in fact, the Firestone company, now known for tyres,
manufactured the carriages - these wheeled assemblies. And Chrysler manufactured the guns. During World War
Two Chrysler built 60,000 of these things. That's just... that's a hard number for me to even wrap
my head around (and by the way, 120,000 barrels, because every gun they made,
they made a spare barrel for it as well). As I said, these would see service in all theatres, but it
was in the Pacific that they were particularly effective and necessary. By the time these were actually
in the field for the US it was basically 1943, and the height of German airpower had
really come and gone. And the US, you know, this wasn't so critical in Europe, still useful, but
it was in the Pacific where it was really essential, where these were used by US Navy vessels
as defence against Japanese air attack. All right, let's talk about how this thing actually
works, because it's not quite what you might expect. This requires a crew of three men,
you'll notice there are two seats. That's not because you have a redundant
operator, you need both of these guys. So what's going on here is crewman number one ... is sitting over here and he controls the
gun's traverse, pivoting it around side to side. You'll notice he has a spider sight to target
whatever aircraft they're trying to shoot at. Operator number two sits over here and his
hand wheels control the gun's elevation. He also has a sight, he also has a foot
trigger and he's the one who fires the gun. So guy number one over here is constantly just keeping
the ... traverse on the airplane, that's his only job. Guy number two only has to deal with the elevation
of the gun and firing it, but firing with your foot. That's not a particularly complex matter,
when the sight's on the target, push the trigger. Guy number three would be back here and
he's responsible for actually loading the gun. This thing was fed with 4 round stripper clips, and
it would actually fire faster than you could load it. This was the sort of thing where you'd
load in four rounds, and then when you had the gun on target, the ... primary gunner
would fire a burst, probably all four rounds, and then while they're reacquiring the target,
the loader shoves another clip of ammunition into it. This thing has a pretty fast rate of traverse ... on
the M2A1 carriage, which is what we have here, (and this was updated as aircraft got faster and faster),
this thing - every full rotation of these handles gives me 17 and 1/7 degrees of rotation of the whole gun. The previous ... M2, the basic version of
the carriage, it did 6 degrees per revolution. So they about doubled, almost tripled, the rate
of rotation. Now, this thing can do a full 360, there's nothing to stop it (except the
wall behind me), and it can go from pointing straight up 90 degrees to negative
6 degrees downward angle. You could use this in a direct fire role, and it was. This carriage,
of course, is set up for anti-aircraft use. But they did make both high-explosive, which
was I think the primary ammunition used, and they did also make an armour-piercing
... projectile for these things. And you know, a light-skinned vehicle? This could do
some serious damage to a light-skinned vehicle. Alright, so feeding this thing is done
up here. This is actually just a cover over the clip loading machine. This has a mechanical
setup here to pull cartridges down off the stripper clip. You don't exactly just thumb them into
this thing. So you put a clip on here in place and let the gun do the rest. Now it's kind of hard to see because we've got this
ejection chute, stuff on the back of the gun in the way, but this isn't an anti-aircraft gun, like say a 20mm
Oerlikon, which is basically simple blowback. This is much more like a standard artillery piece
set up for rapid fire with a loading operation. This has a vertically traveling breech
block which is right up inside here. So that breech block is going to slide up and down
to lock the cartridge in place, and then it slides open, kicks out the empty cartridge, which is
going to come out through this ejection... Well, it's going to come straight back here, it's gonna
get hit by this chute, and funnelled down to here, whereupon it skips down into this chute, and goes zwheee right out the front of the gun under the barrel. You can see a cooling cut-out here for this big ol' recoil
spring. So the whole barrel reciprocates backward when the gun fires, and that's the energy
that is used to ... open the breech block, feed a cartridge, and then close.
This is like a giant semi-auto falling-block gun. Alright, something else that I want to point out.
This gun has a lot of recoil when it fires. Enough that they put outriggers onto it.
There's one over there (stop that), there's one over here, and then there are outrigger
feet on the front and the back of the carriage. So, in order to safely fire this, you have to set this whole
thing up and we didn't quite do it for one good reason. I'm reading through the manual, and you are explicitly
warned not to mess with the suspension setup unless you have two guys adjusting it and
two more dudes holding the thing in place. Well, I don't have a whole gun crew at my disposal
to set this up. So the way this actually works is these axles actually pivot. The front axle pivots
forward and the rear axle pivots backward, which lowers this whole carriage down
towards the ground to lower its centre of gravity. You can see the outrigger here, that's at its lowest
depth of travel and it's almost a foot off the ground. So, in order for this to actually be
set up you have to hold the gun in place, pivot these wheels up and out of the way,
so the guns actually resting on these pads. Now the reason that they did that is
because the point of the pads is stability. And the best way to get stability is to lower
this whole thing down towards the ground. Not to put it on nice tall feet, that's going
to make it just wobble around a lot more. ... You have to make sure it doesn't tip
over, yes, but you also want to make sure that it doesn't rock when it's
firing, because it's a machine gun. You want it to be stable and put the
shots exactly on the same place every time so you can try to actually hit
a fast-moving aerial target. (This thing's just really cool.) So a few other bits of history to touch on. First off, like I said, this was used by more than just the
United States, the British actually also used these. And in fact these Bofors guns are credited with
a couple of V1 rocket bomb shoot downs, or kills, potentially making them one of the very first
anti-missile weapon systems, which is kind of cool. In addition, let's see, the the Bofors system would
be enormously successful worldwide, of course, and would go on to be successful after the war. So in 1947
they actually made a serious update to this whole contraption. They realised jet powered aircraft were starting to make
this sort of gun a bit obsolete, and in an effort to to kind of delay that obsolescence the new version had a
longer barrel, it used a more powerful cartridge, they upped the rate of fire from 120 rounds a
minute to 240 rounds a minute, so doubled it. And perhaps most significantly they added
... a gas engine and electric motors to this so that you could have one gunner with a
couple of control wheels doing everything, instead of trying to coordinate two
separate guys to do the aiming, so. That gun, I mean, I think those guns are
still in service today in various militaries. These are actually still in service even
with the US, in the AC-130 gunships. We have Bofors 40mm guns up in those guys,
and people, they're still very effective. There's nothing wrong with these things to this day. I also want to touch on the aiming. ... You can see the two spider sights set up here,
and in World War Two that's what you had. However, even in World War Two they had a very
early system of networked, and computerised, and motorised systems for these
guns that you could actually get one computerised, what they called a director,
a fire director, a central aiming device, then you'd have a guy actually aiming at a target, and
you could actually wire it up to four separate Bofors guns and slave them all to this single
director and use them in that way. And that's just super cool, that that sort of technology
was available and actually in use in World War Two. Well, thanks for watching guys,
I hope you enjoyed the video. You know, a gun and carriage system like this
is just so complicated that we could spend hours talking about every little nuance of the system.
Everything from how the outriggers actually fold up during travel, so that there's no possibility of
them coming loose and, you know, causing you to careen off the side of the road. To how
the sights are zeroed, how the feeder works, everything about this gun is - I mean, there's
just so many mechanical systems on it. But hopefully you enjoyed getting just a brief overview
and a little bit of a historical taste for the 40mm Bofors. This thing is actually for sale at Rock Island. It
is a two stamp gun, as such things are called, because it is both a destructive device and a machine
gun. So it is registered per the National Firearms Act. But anyone who's willing and able
to undergo a background check, if you want this thing in your
garage, well, welcome to America. So you can see more information about it, you
can see Rock Island's pictures, their description, their value estimate, all that sort of stuff through
their on-line catalogue. If you take a look at the description text below you'll find a link
that takes you to ForgottenWeapons.com, and from there you can link over
to Rock Island's catalogue page. Thanks for watching.
https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/74/1422/impressive-and-desirable-world-war-ii-us-bofors-40-mm
"Add To Wish List"
Gun Jesus låter som en prästassistent som jobbar i en Filadelfiakyrka utanför Jönköping
Det här var den enda moderna videon jag kunde hitta som visar den här designen när den faktiskt skjuter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSp7CipN1pw
Jag gjorde lumpen med den här besten! Fruktansvärt mäktigt under eldgivning. Han nämner 4 skott per minut men jag vill minnas 6. Våra pjäser hade pansarplåtar runt om, stort magasin uppe på och ett nyutvecklat lasersikte med måldator ombord på pjäsen. En person satt framtill och styrde och avfyrade, medan två stod baktill och matade i ammunition löpande om magasinet tömdes. För att inte hela pjäsen skulle röra sig under eldgivning var man tvungen att slå ner en meter långa pålar i marken för att förankra aset.
Sexig!
Bofors 40mm AA var så eftersökt under andra världskriget att alla stridande makter ville ha den AA kanonen
När ska vi börja bygga liknande sexiga bestar som denna? Jag tycker att Sverige bör bli Europas största producent av vapen.
Två punkter jag tycker Ian borde nämnt:
USA tillverkade ungefär 100 000 pjäser utan att betala några licenspengar alls. Efter kriget kunde Bofors inte sälja några kanoner, då USA dumpade tusentals överskottskanoner på andrahandsmarknaden till löjligt låga priser. Det var en av anledningarna till att man utvecklade den förbättrade versionen från 1947.
En av kanonens stora fördelar var det öppna uppifrån-matade magasinet, som tillät besättningen att fortsätta mata ammunition även när kanonen sköt, vilket innebar att man slapp eldavbrott för omladdning - en stor fördel under ofta korta flygräder. Amerikansk träningsvideo där de gör detta. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCJ8WVk5IhA&feature=youtu.be&t=1m8s