After World War One, there was a lot of tinkering with the BAR by the US military. It was recognized as being a very good platform, but the original M1918 configuration left a lot to be desired. It was deemed to heavy to use effectively form the shoulder, but also not really well suited to sustained fire. In an effort to optimize it for use as a dynamic support weapon by a small squad, the Infantry & Cavalry Board requested a model with a heavier barrel and lightweight bipod in 1920. Six experimental examples were made form existing BARs, and the design was formalized two years later as the Model 1922.
This pattern of BAR has a heavy finned barrel to give it more sustained fire capacity and a folding bipod and rear monopod for more accurate use prone. The Board also experimented with larger magazines, and ended up recommending a 30-round size – although this was never put into production. In total, 500 of the Model 1922 guns were made, all converted from existing BARs. Experimentation continued slowly, and eventually in 1937 a lighter pattern was adopted as the M1918A1. The Model 1922 was formally declared obsolete in April 1941, and virtually all of them were rebuilt to the new M1918A2 pattern for use in World War Two. Surviving examples like this one are extremely rare – this is the only known example in private hands.
In 1995 there was a Battle of Okinawa commemorative postage stamp, showing a marine with a BAR working a hill. His name was Edwin “Mike” Narcovage. He was in my dad’s squad, and I met him in the 1960’s. They were on patrol, and took fire from a hut. Mike hosed it with the BAR, pulled out the empty magazine, and held his hand out for his assistant to give him another. The kid gave him a dumb look. He had decided that those “boxes of bullets” were too heavy, and had dumped them quite a ways back. He was sent back to get them.
That scene would make an interesting postage stamp illustration, how would you illustrate it “Wee stamp sized picture” even if you could (You know like the Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima) would it would win a U.S postal service commission… A noble looking Marine with a BAR mag on the floor, looking in vain at someone shrugging their shoulders. Anyway, interesting story; clearly they still won on that occasion, given you met him in the 60’s. Infantry weight carrying can border on ridiculous, but if you was in a war you’d like to think your fellow soldier might… Of all the things to ditch even for a short time, because he was doubtless tired; not ditch the ammo. Given it could well be of use given you are in an attack, and the Japanese are shooting at you. Oh well, the U.S won the War overall. These things happen – Suppose it illustrates the benefits of lighter guns/ammo; in that .556mm is better than… Nothing, because it was too heavy to carry. Suppose we can’t really illustrate such events on something as small as stamp, even if we wanted to.
According to Mike, he was an 18 year old, and totally clueless. Mike said, “Give me a magazine!”. The kid said, “What?”. Mike said, “Those boxy things full of bullets!”. I always wondered where he stuck the BAR. The stamp was from a photograph. Mike heard a “CLICK”, and spun around an almost shot the combat photographer. He said they were crazy- just wandering around taking pictures.
Hey, salute… You guys won anyway. Forgotten boxy things with bullets in aside…
Your comment reminds me of the “Willie and Joe” cartoons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_and_Joe Hadn’t heard of them William, thank you for sharing knowledge, of.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Pyle Never heard of him either, well worth knowing about; thank you.
“(…)that .556mm(…)”
No ammunition with caliber below 1 mm is in issue so far I know.
“(…)we can’t really illustrate such events on something as small as stamp(…)”
I am not sure about U.S. limits w.r.t. post stamp sizes, but for example Kyrgyzstan issued 184 mm wide stamp https://canadianstampnews.com/kyrgyzstan-issues-worlds-longest-stamp/
A good example of the need to explain the smallest detail , or never underestimate thw power of human stupidity [ clueless]
I suppose the Pentagon could do a study: what is the maximum weight of ammo a coffin-dodging oxygen thief is likely to carry without jettisoning?
if they thought were stealing the metal, there’s probably no limit to the weight they’d move
Thank you for sharing this story. It really made my day.
My grandfather did marksmanship training for the navy from 42-45. I hope the guys he sent through were better educated.
You can tell this gun is an early attempt, given looking at it now… You’d lose the monopod to save weight straight away. They had clocked “Walking” fire was problematic… They ditched the monopod later also, oh well, steam train era; this was new fangled tech, I suppose you know like an Iphone… Which to older folk can present issues, who simply want to use it’s “telegraph” function in order to call someome down the road, and they answer… Amazingly.
Monopod not needed, ammo leaving soldier led behind gun on floor… “What we don’t walk, firing it?” Revolutionary.
Anyway, I like 5.56mm again… Light.
Interesting topic in of itself walking fire really; I mean what did they expect to be able to do, wander round zapping ze Germans who explode or turn into gold coins (Like in a video game, which had not been invented.) after saying “Nein your superior weaponary is to much mit us ve surrender” zap, zap… Speak to the hand Gerry.
5.56mm is not very good at shooting through log bunkers. Or masonry. A friend was in Iraq, and said the 7.62mm was barely adequate. The .50 was great.
Fair point William, mind you; at least he had it on him.
Bit like that carry gun argument in states (I am British) but they say, hey well at least he had a .32Acp on him. Unlike a .45Acp, because it was hot, or whatever.
My friend was a transportation captain on convoy duty. He got to see all 3 calibers in use. Interesting comments.
In the BAR, you see the price paid for “getting it wrong”. The US was saddled with that weapon for decades simply because of the effect that the “installed base” had on things, and because they got off on entirely the wrong heading for an effective LMG… Well, there you go.
There’s nothing wrong with the BAR mechanisms; the root of the problem lies in the doctrinal concepts behind the specs they used developing it. A one-man MG is of questionable value, and the idea of firing “on the move” in a full-house caliber is flatly insane. No matter how good you might be, the majority of your shots are likely to be going anywhere but into the target. The human frame is simply a piss-poor support for anything machine-gunnish that you want to be effective beyond about arms reach, although there are freakishly good shooters that can get decent results out to range firing offhand. Do not make the mistake of extrapolating that freakishly rare ability out to the general population, or you’re doomed to disappointment.
Had they flipped the BAR on its head, provided for a decent tripod mount, and then used that as a basis for an actual LMG-class weapon? The US would have been miles ahead, but they’d made the mistake of listening to the French, went down the road of telling John Browning they needed an “automatic rifle”, and that’s just what he gave them. To the detriment of US machinegunnery and tactics for the next century… We’re still trying to overcome the effects that the BAR concept had on our tactics, with spotty results. I can’t wait to see how the M27 actually performs for the Marine Corps in peer-level combat; I think there are going to be some ugly “lessons learned” about the need for the belt-fed MG down at the squad level. Hell, fire team level… If it were me, I’d build every one of my fire teams around something in the 7.62 belt-fed class, and quit worrying about “agility”. If you’re moving too fast for your guns to keep up, you’re probably moving too damn fast in the first place, and the very first time your little fly-weight units run up against someone who is heavily armed and who knows how to use that fact…? Y’all are gonna die in job lots, waiting for the MG teams to come up from the rear.
Or, so I suspect. The current revolution in military affairs known as “the drone” may have changed that basic calculus, but we’re only going to find out by finding out.
Given the US military track record on uptake and figuring out how to use the machinegun, I’m not optimistic about the whole drone issue. They’re prone to f*cking things up, at the institutional level, whenever “new things” show up. Case in point: I can show you that there was an “IED/Mine issue” going back to WWII, threaded all through Korea and Vietnam. When did the US Army/Marine Corps figure out that something like the MRAP was possible and necessary? Oh, about 2005 and relatively deep into Iraq/Afghanistan before anyone was willing to admit it.
What you have here in the M1922 BAR is artifactual evidence that the US Army had no idea what it was doing, when it came to machineguns. That the M1918A2 was the basic squad fire support weapon going into f*cking Korea? Purely criminal and proof of utter incompetence.
“(…)one-man MG is of questionable value, and the idea of firing “on the move” in a full-house caliber is flatly insane(…)”
And 7,62×63 was probably worst among military cartridge of that era for this purpose due to being close to high end of power level.
I have heard that early on they had Al Topper on hand demonstrating to the brass how easy it to use the BAR to hit silver dollars thrown in the air firing semi-auto. The likely skills gap between Mr. Topper the average conscript was not apparently much considered.
Did that rear sight have “Meters” stamped on the top of the sight leaf? And if so did they have one marked “Yards”?
It surely does… Which is really a bit bizarre, in that the Army was still using Imperial measurements right up until WWII in most applications.
Hell, the stupid bastards still have the odometers on all the vehicles calibrated in miles, which is stupid as hell because you wind up having to have a freakin’ conversion chart taped up somewhere, if you’re trying to use the odometer in conjunction with navigation. The conversions are nuts when you’re trying to do that at night, while moving. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more challenging navigational exercise than vehicle-borne night orienteering with night vision devices.
The whole thing is schizo as hell, but I find the use of meters on that sight leaf to be highly anachronistic. No idea where they’d have gotten that, in the 1920s. Unless, maybe… Off of one of the Colt Monitor projects? Something they built for the international market?
Americans doubtless do not like to hear it, but the US Expedition Force (A.E.F.) in France was mostly dependent on French, not US machine guns.
To quote Major Glenn P Wilheln in Army Ordnance journal: “The A.E.F. did most of their indiect firing with French guns, French ammunition and French [metric] tables.” I recommend strongly his long series of articles on “Long Range Small Arms Firing” about the US Army Ballistic Experimental station in the journal Army Ordnance from 1920 onwards.
At National Archives, College Park, the WW1 files on small arms ballistics are dominated by the metric system. From about 1922 onwards, this changes back to imperial measures.
Nevertheless, the drag table in that standard work McSHANE/KELLEY/RENO from 1953 is based on velocities in meters per second.
I mention this NOT to promote any preference metric versus imperial, but simply to point out that there was a period when US Army ballistics was dominated by French ideas and consequently the metric system.
This could be the origin of the graduation of the sight in meters.
Correction: Glenn P. Wilhelm not Wilheln.
The original concept for an automatic rifle (Chauchat or BAR) was a three man team, gunner, loader and “scout” who carried extra mags and provided flank and rear security. The WW1 infantry platoon had 3 auto rifle teams. In combat the platoon was divided into 2 half-platoons (sections, one commanded by the platoon leader and the other by the platoon sergeant. The platoon leader divided his AR teams as he saw fit, usually one in one section and two in the other. Commonly one was at the center of the first section and two in the rear section. The first section often used an arrow formation with the AR team at the apex. They ditched all this in the mid 20’s and went to permanent squads each with its own BAR as the squad base of fire. I’ve been told by a number of old vets that the bipod on the M1918A2 frequently got “lost in combat” in WW@ to lighten the gun. The primary purpose of the AR in WW1 was suppressive fire on enemy machine guns to allow the rifle bombers to drop drop rifle grenades on the MG long enough for the hand bombers to get close enough to finish the job. By the time the US got into the Great War, the Germans would come out of their shelters when the shelling stopped and displace into shell craters. Because the Western front ran from the channel to Switzerland, there was little scope for vast flanking maneuvers. Square divisions were ideal for this kind of combat, not so much for wars of maneuver. Instead of 3 threes, they using twos, so the second wave can move up to reinforce the first wave or pass through to continue the attack when the first wave bogs down. The Pedersen device was an attempt to increase the suppressive fire available to the platoon. If they had actually put it into use. Most of the riflemen would probably used just that. The rifle bombers would probably kept their bolts and every body else would have ditched them. When complaining about the power of the 30-06 power, when it was designed they had to consider the ability to kill horses as well as the use of indirect volley fire by riflemen at long range. 5.56 is not exactly a powerful horse killed. Nobody foresaw indirect fire by trench mortars’ or indirect fire by MG’s. Hindsight is 20/20. WW1 saw a true revolution in the way armies fight. An infantry man of 1914 would be lost in 1918 or later combat, a 1918 infantryman would be right at home in todays combat once you show him how to strip current weapons.
The basic problem with the BAR-as-LMG is a somewhat shorter range issue than the one created by the current failure to procure and train on a truly adaptable tripod: You cannot get the results of a true MMG-on-tripod (which you absolutely need in order to just answer enemy fires, let alone dominate the range space…) from anything that relies on significant support and control by mere man. The human shoulder is an amazing thing, but it’s absolute shiite at providing a base for consistent, repeatable fires that you can reasonably control. If PFC Shuffleupagus was mil-dot accurate, and you could tell him something like “ten mils left, five up, fire for effect…” that’d be a different thing. But, because he’s a human being without any real calibration, you’re left going “Yeah, they’re up there a little left, and a little less further up…”
You can’t do with a frikkin’ bipod or shoulder what you can do with a true tripod/T&E. Period. That was true then, it was true in WWII, and it’s true today so far as I can tell. It may change once the primary MMG platform is something like the Boston Dynamics “Big Dog”, but that’s a ways off.
I suspect that you’re a bit off with the “infantryman of 1918” thing, though. If you were talking about one of the German Army’s Stosstruppen? Maybe. The real problem in WWI was that few had really wrapped their heads around the sheer volume of change that had taken place, and many armies simply looked at how they’d fought, said something like “Well, we won’t be doing that again, and went right back to sleep until the lessons really got rammed home during the opening campaigns of WWII. You can see it in the manuals; you’ll look long and hard for any real “lessons learned” about small unit tactics in most Western armies. They were all about the battalion and higher level of things, and basically ignored the implications of what the last German offensive had on everything. It was much, much later when they actually had their noses rubbed in it all that they realized how effective infiltration and dislocation actually were, down at the platoon and below.
The Germans “got” all that, though. Which showed.
Ironies abound throughout the whole thing. The US and Great Britain were the first off the mark with things like the general-purpose short rifle in the SMLE and M-1903, but the further implications eluded them. If only they’d applied the same sort of reasoning that led to the short rifles to their MG efforts… The same clarity of thought, vision, and purpose might have led to someone flipping the BAR on its head, and turning it into an actual decent LMG with either a top-mounted magazine, an effective tripod like the BREN or Lafette, and maybe, hope against hope, the belt feed they eventually slapped on top of the MAG-58.
There was nothing mechanically wrong with the BAR; it was all down to bad doctrine and human interfacing, along with purely delusional visions of how combat actually worked down at that level. The idea of “Yeah, we’ll advance under a hail of fire from Automatic Rifles, against entrenched or just well-positioned medium machineguns…”
Jesus quite literally wept. When you contemplate the sheer “wastage” of human potential and manpower, you want to rage at the heavens, invent a time machine, and go back to slap the ever-loving snot out of a bunch of people. I mean, OK… WWI, I can buy and make peace with the idea that nobody knew how modern war worked. By WWII, however? There was no ‘effing excuse for not having done the damn homework and figured out that things like the .30-06 and emphasizing the individual rifleman were decades out of date, and that we badly needed something akin to the MG34 instead of the failed French concept of an Automatic Rifle suited to the insanity of “Walking Fire”.
The BAR could have been a truly great gun, if they’d had the wit and wisdom to just pay attention to what was going on down at the squad level, then designed for that. They did not, and we suffered the losses that led to.
Check out the AEF 1918 manual “Instructions for the Offensive Combat of small units”. The BAR was not intended to full fill the machine gun role. It was an automatic rifle not a light or medium MG. The Chauchat and the 1918 BAR were primarily intended to be fired in the semi-auto mode, not full auto, Granted in contemporary manuals the term Automatic rifle and light machine gun were used interchangeably. The Lewis gun was sometimes called an AR and other times an MG. Generally the British used it in a section all by itself with around 12 or 14 men in it. Most of whom just carried loaded drums of ammo in their 4 pocket vests. It was used tactically as an MG. See “Machine Guns, Their history and tactical employment, Being also a History of the British machine gun corps 1916-1922” Hutchison 1938. See “The new Platoon Instructor” Gillman 1918. See “Musketry and Rifle Platoon Training” Infantry School 1922.
one thing to remember, in WW2, most US Infantry and Engineer Combat units usually had a lot more weaponry than the TO&E said they were supposed to have. Squads with 2 or more BAR’s and their own M1919 mg’s. Plus the on call availability of US Army artillery truly frightened the Germans.
“(…)Nobody foresaw indirect fire by trench mortars(…)”
If it was so, then why did Deutsches Kaiserreich developed leichte Minenwerfer 7,58 cm around 1909?
If I remember correctly those were developed for Pioneer (Sappers) as siege weapons, not integral infantry weapons. Same for German hand grenades. Though trench warfare was more like siege warfare than maneuver warfare. A lot of sapper techniques ended up being incorporated in general infantry tactics.
You also have to remember that the German Army used its version of combat engineers in very much the same way that the US military (and others…) used theirs: As test dummies for all the new, complicated weapons. Many of which were developed/designed by the engineer branches themselves… The US Army Chemical branch actually came directly out of the Army Corps of Engineers, similar to how the aviation bubbas came out of the Signal Corps.
It was the same in the German army; the initial Stosstruppen were actually “assault engineers”, and their officers were initially from the German Army engineer branch. After some teething problems, they brought in a commander from the Guards Rifle regiment, a light infantry outfit that was steeped in the same Jager traditions as the Germans transmitted to the Finns.
There’s a definite need out there for someone to trace out all the histories of the various European light infantry forces, whether Jager, Bersaglierie, or whatever else they named them. The roots of modern tactics and doctrine are buried there, going back to the days when light infantry simply screened and scouted the “Big Army” units making up the line of battle.
see “Stormtroop Tactics” Bruce Gudmundson Prager 1995.
I wonder if the 26th Cavalry (PS) had them in the Philippine campaign?
I don’t believe any of these were on issue to any actual units; they were fielded for testing, and that was about it.
I notice an awful lot of pontificating by people using first names on how such and such was so stupid, how combat engineers were used as test dummies, etc. Please post your SOURCES for all these opinions. This site had become a rant location for armchair historians bent on insulting almost everyone to feel potent. The Marines in the Pacific eventually found an efficient way of Manuever and Fire using the BAR. One gun for each four-man fire team. Remember, the AXIS lost with their concept of everything based on the MG as the base of fire. Post your full name, people, and who you really are before insulting people and organizations. Now I expect a diatribe of insults as I post my name. Time to grow up and realize your opinions mean little in the greater scheme of things. 30 years as a LEO here and a Vet. P.S. 6.8 MM is the new caliber selected. Sometimes bigger is better.
Mark, your conclusion, if I understand it correctly, “Axis lost WW2 and consequently its infantry on infantry fighting concept must have been wrong”, has also been brought up by others, but still is not convincing to me, admittedly from my German point of view.
Simplified, the typical “infantry on infantry” encoounter ended up in the US doing the obvious thing, and call in the artillery and/or air support. Anyone being in the same position would have done it.
When these non-infantry assets could not be brought to bear, as in Huertgen Forest, infantry encounters “on equal terms” did not suggest inferiority for tactics as employed by Germany. (Huertgen Forest is one of the battle names engraved in stone at the WW2 Monument on Washimgton Mall.) U.S. Army actually thought it necessary to make a movie (FB 181) to play down German Machine effectiveness.
Quoting sources is the base of serious research, of course. But there is the language problem. For example, German Bundesarchiv has made online the entire surviving files (from January 1942 onwards) of German assault rifle history: RH 11-1/52a, RH 11-I/52b, RH 11/I-53 and RH 11-I/54 (combined about 2.6 Gigabytes of scanned files). But they are in German language and many would already have problems to convert tabulated data from metric to imperial.
Last not least: my full name is Jochem Peelen, but for years I have been JPeelen on this forum and do not intend to change it.
“German Machine effectiveness” should of course read “German Machine Gun effectiveness”.
I mentioned Huertgen Forest because one U.S. author, when I brought the name up, flatly denied he had ever heard of it and could not find anything about it.
Available in English is “The German Squad in Combat” War Dept. Military Intelligence Service Special Series #9 25 Jan 1943. This is mostly a translation of a German Manual. It covers how the LMG was used as the squad base o fire, among other topics. The Heer used a 10 man squad in WW2 and the US Army used a 12 man squad.