Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today courtesy
of the Canadian Historical Arms Museum we are taking a look at a Stinger light
machine gun. Medium machine gun perhaps. This is a fantastically cool firearm that
was never an official US military weapon. This was actually manufactured partly on base in Hawaii and partly on a troopship en route
to Iwo Jima by a group of US Marines. ... The project was led by a guy named Sergeant Grevich who came up with this concept originally
on Bougainville fairly early in the war. The idea was you take an aircraft
Browning machine gun, an ANM2, which has a ridiculously high rate of fire for Browning. This is about double the rate of fire of a standard 1919
ground gun, this fires at about 1,400 rounds a minute. Well, you take that gun, you add a bipod off
a BAR, you add a buttstock off an M1 Garand and you have yourself what they described
at the time as the American version of an MG42. A very high rate of fire, a very portable, light
support sort of machine gun. And what particularly distinguishes it from the other machine guns that were in
American inventory at the time is that it didn't require setup. So ... what we don't have on here right now is one of the belt
boxes, they had a 100 round belt box attached to the gun. It has a bipod if you want to go prone, but this can be fired
with the trigger from the hip, theoretically from the shoulder. With a 1919 you kind of had to lay down a
tripod to mount the gun on, there was no stock. So it could be sort of fired from the hip,
but not nearly as well as something like this. So initially on Bougainville the idea was for
this to be sort of a jungle patrol weapon, where you might be on patrol and be ambushed by a Japanese
squad with something like a Type 99 light machine gun ... at a range of something like 10
yards and not be able to exactly see them. And you needed some sort of weapon that you could
just dump a lot of fire in a general area very quickly. That's what Grevich came up with. Now when he proposed
this to his CO in Bougainville he was shot down, so to speak. But the idea kind of stuck in his head. And later in the war,
in 1944, he gets reassigned to the 5th Marine Division, they're in Hawaii preparing ... training to invade
Iwo Jima and this idea comes back to him. He's out training with his men with Browning 1919s and
just isn't satisfied with the performance that they're getting, what they're able to accomplish with them. And he thinks back to Bougainville, he's like, "You know what,
we had this idea back there that, um, let's try this again." And so he runs this idea past
his company commander in '44, and his company commander thinks, "Now that's an
interesting idea, and that's a Marine Corps sort of thing to do." So they go ahead and build 6 of these guns, actually
do a demonstration for the battalion commander. The battalion commander also thinks this is a
pretty darn cool concept and approves its use. And so these actually saw use
on Iwo Jima in February of 1945. So before I tell you about exactly what happened
with them, let's go ahead and take a closer look at exactly what this thing is, because unfortunately none of these original guns actually survived
World War Two - to the best of my knowledge. So originally the concept for the Stinger used
guns that were taken off of shot-up American torpedo bombers and dive bombers because these aircraft
had rear gunner turrets with pairs of ANM2 Brownings. They ... are belt fed of course and ANM2s are set up so that
they're convertible, they can feed either from the left or the right. So you can get a pair of them, one from the left, one from
the right, sets up nicely in a little compact aircraft turret. It also meant that they had spade grips on
them with mechanical trigger mechanisms, instead of the sort of the solenoid fired guns
that you would expect if they were wing mounted. This also meant that the guns were set up
with traditional typical charging handles. Which are, on this gun, set on this side. So this is, while being an aircraft gun, it's not like a wing mount gun,
it's instead a design that can be easily set up to be used by hand. So the most substantial modification
was to the back end of the gun. The spade grips needed to come off because
there needed to be an actual shoulder stock. And then they manufactured a trigger bar that would work in
conjunction with the shoulder stock, as opposed to the spade grips. So the documentation at the time talks about
both M1 Garand and M1 carbine stocks being used. The reality of the matter, as was discovered rebuilding
this reproduction, is that it has to be an M1 Garand stock. And the pictures of ... the final
versions of these guns really show that, in that you'll never see a slot for an oiler in the
stock, which you would in an M1 carbine stock. The issue here is that there's a ... buffer at the back of the
ANM2 rear cover plate (on the Browning 1919s as well). That buffer tube is too big to fit inside an M1
carbine stock, so it has to be an M1 Garand stock. In fact, you can see that buffer tube right here,
you can see how much of the stock is hollowed out. So they did also have to reinforce the stock,
you can't see that here without it removed. ... Grevich and his guys originally used aluminium for the
trigger guard here, as well as for the top plate above the stock. This one has been recreated in a fairly crude
manner which matches the character of the originals. The top plate here is fairly crudely
cut and they used brass screws on it, again because the the surviving accounts and documentation
describe that they actually used brass screws to attach this. So this is up here so that you have a good
attachment to the back plate of the gun. Now the one element on here that isn't quite historically
appropriate is the use of this bracket for mounting the rear sight. On the original guns they used BAR rear sights, and they either
screwed or welded them to the top plate of the receiver here. Now when rebuilding this gun the Canadian
Historical Arms Museum decided that they didn't want to permanently modify the
original ANM2 by screwing or welding this sight on. So instead they added this bracket that connects to the rear
stock mounting bracket and the ... rear sight is mounted to that. The original gun's very, very similar. You just wouldn't have
the extra bracket. This would be welded directly to this top plate. The one element that we don't have on
this particular gun is one of the belt boxes. ... In the aircraft use these had 200 round belt boxes,
which could hang off either the left or right side of the gun. Obviously your left hand feed would have a
left hand belt box, and right, right and so on. The Marines cut those boxes down to 100 rounds,
200 was a little bit unwieldy both for the weight and for hanging off one side of the gun. And they went into combat with them with 100 round belt
boxes on the side, and you can see that in the original pictures. Next up we have this front assembly,
and this is a couple of different things. This is just a tube that is sleeved over
the barrel and the front end of the receiver. It is actually easily removable,
it's just a tight fit on there. And what the Marines did was two things. They
added a bipod, this is a BAR bipod welded on. They cut it in half because the BAR barrel
was obviously way smaller than this shroud, welded the bipod legs on. These can still fold up,
forward or back, for stowage which is handy. And this is a bipod that was pretty
awful for the BAR, like heavy and clunky. It actually is a pretty darn good fit
for a gun like this, which is pretty cool. They then also added a carry handle. And there were a
couple different versions of the carry handle that they used. So this is pretty much the best one, this is using
either a BAR or a Browning 1919A6 carry handle. Also modified slightly to fit this shroud. The other option that they used initially that seems to have been
rejected and replaced because it was maybe not quite durable enough, was to actually take the original spade grip and weld
on one of the spade grip handles up here on this tube. Now this handle is deliberately offset to the left to make
this thing a little bit easier to fire from the hip right handed. And trying that out they got that right.
It is handier to have that thing slightly offset. Lastly on here you see the front sight which is just a threaded
rod with a big round red obvious front sight post on it. In aircraft configuration these would have had big spider
sights built into the turret rather than on the individual guns. But, of course, you need some sort of sight on
this gun. Even if it was often fired from the hip in sort of an assault position at close range, they were also
used for things like attacking pillboxes where you needed sights, you needed to be able to fire accurately. And that's
something that would be done prone from the bipod. So add a nice big front sight post right there. Not something that you're going to use to be,
you know, precision shooting at 500 or 500 yards. But that wasn't the point, this
was a relatively close range gun. Alright, so firing from the hip. Having the carry
handle offset a little bit actually works pretty darn well. One of the interesting eccentricities of a 1919
trigger like this is that the trigger actually pushes more vertically up than it does back. And from
a hip position this actually works pretty well. So, that's how you carry the thing. Important to note you don't want to hold it like this, even
though you can sort of hold this thing from the shoulder. (This weighs, by the way, 23 pounds approximately.) The problem is this ejects out the bottom. So you
... can't really carry it that way or fire it that way. However, we need to try this prone. Yeah, that's pretty darn cool. That front sight pretty much takes up the entirety of the rear
aperture, because it is both closer and larger than the originals. So you just use that with the open sight.
One of the problems with the BAR was the little front sight kind of disappears in this rear notch.
Well, that nice bright red front ball is pretty darn visible. So on their way to Iwo Jima on the ships they're
still putting the finishing final touches on these guns, and there are 6 of them in total by the time they arrive. So, 5 of these guns are distributed out to G Company,
which is Grevich's company, and they do it in a way that's a little different than the normal distribution
of machine guns in a Marine Corps company. What they do is ... instead of having all the guns in a machine
gun platoon, they distribute one gun to each of the rifle platoons. So Grevich himself has one, four of the
other platoons each get one of the Stingers. And then the sixth gun, the last one,
goes to a guy named Corporal Tony Stein. Which is a little bit unusual, Tony Stein was in Company
A, like, why does one guy outside of the unit get one? Well, we're pretty sure it's because Stein actually
helped fabricate the guns on board the ship. He was a machinist by trade and
I can totally see the deal being like, "I can help you guys make those things run
great because those look like a great idea. The deal is though if I help
you, I get to use one of them." Speculation here, but that seems
like the most likely situation. At any rate, Stein carries one of these on to the invasion
of Iwo Jima, and proceeds on February 19th of 1945 to conduct himself in such a manner as to be
awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, one of actually a substantial number
that were awarded on Iwo to Marines. ... Basically he uses this in a pillbox destroying role. The idea was (and this was kind of the plan that Grevich
had put together as a standard tactic to use the Stingers), the guy with the Stinger would put covering fire onto
a pillbox to cover a guy with a demolition charge getting up close enough to throw
a demolition charge into the pillbox. However, there's some anecdotal at
least evidence that [with] the rate of fire, if you could fire one of these things
through the entrance slit into a pillbox, the ricocheting bullets actually did a
substantial amount of damage inside. More so than you would have gotten
with a typical 1919 ground Browning. At any rate, Stein is doing this sort
of thing with tremendous bravery, standing up in the middle of fire and
directing ... fire from 75mm half-tracks. And no fewer than eight times he runs out of
ammunition (because the thing fires insanely fast), procedes to leave the gun, pick up a wounded man,
carry him back out to the beach, get more ammo, return to his gun and and carry on
where he had left off. Eight times. And survives that day, and is awarded the
Congressional Medal of Honor for the work. Unfortunately, about two weeks later he is KIA, as unfortunately
tends to happen to people who do things that result in the Medal of Honor. So, what's historically very interesting from a
firearms perspective is that in Stein's citation it actually very specifically calls out the fact that he did
this with an improvised and unofficial firearm, which is this. The whole story was documented
by the Marine Corps Gazette in 1946. There are surviving pictures of these guns and it's
one of the very, very few examples of an actual sort of homebrew, Frankenstein, put-together
gun that not just worked well, but was also approved by unit
commanders at the time and place. And even more unusually was actually
used in combat to extremely good effect. There are some questions as to like, "Why didn't
the US military adopt something like this?" Well, they actually did some testing. There was a
test firearm designated the T33 that was tested by Springfield and Aberdeen in late
1944, right about this same time. They rejected it for a number of reasons, and it's ... With an understanding of military
procurement you can kind of understand how the exigencies of a particular problem for
a particular group of Marines on Iwo Jima would lead them to put together
exactly the gun they needed, but would leave the military thinking this isn't something
that we really want for the whole ... overall organisation. There're also certainly questions of how well would this work in the
long term, aircraft Brownings have these big old holes in them. It is in fact a bit remarkable that they didn't have serious
reliability problems with Iwo Jima's notorious fine sand. On the other hand they were only used for a couple of days.
So none of these guns, none of the originals, survive today. They were probably all left on Iwo Jima. Especially not being formal, official military firearms, you know,
they didn't get kept. Once they'd served their role they were just left. So I would like to give a big thanks to
the Canadian Historical Arms Museum, they are the ones who put this gun together with the
assistance of O'Dell Engineering up here in Canada. A very cool opportunity to take
a look at a gun that, you know, I'd love to show you an original, but there are no
originals and this is absolutely the next best thing. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks very much for watching.
Everyone. Everyone says we’re stupid.
“Who says Marines are stupid?”
Marines do
Big props to the COs that gave these things a chance to shine, if only ever so briefly.
I wonder who signed off on these aircraft MG's being transferred to the infantry. Maybe they were reported as damaged by enemy fire and designated as scrapped?
EDIT: Maybe that is why they were not preserved after Iwo Jima? Because they were already accounted for as destroyed?
Thanks,OP. I spent 23 yrs in the Corps, considered myself a history buff, and this is the first time I've ever heard of the Stinger.
And you do that today, even in combat, I bet you'd get a court martial for your troubles.
Lmao forgotten weapons is the shit
Visited Cpl.Steins grave back in ohio before I left for Paris island. His medal of honor citation was a big motivator for me.
Marines aren't dumb. Marines are incredibly smart. They know their jobs better than anyone else. They just love to do stupid shit.