#m1918a2

How The BAR Works

The vbbsmyt channel returns with an excellent video illustrating how the Browning Automatic Rifle’s action works. The video not only shows how the operation of the original M1918 but also the M1918A2. 

The video shows how the rising bolt locks the action and how the fire selector interacts with the rifle’s sears. The video then shows the M1918A2′s rate reducer slowed the weapons rate of fire between fast and slow settings. Definitely worth watching if you wondered how the BAR worked.

For more on the history of the BAR and its various evolutions click here

Tripod Mounted BAR

While exploring the Springfield Armory Museum’s online archive I stumbled across an interesting modification made to an M1918A2 BAR. The photographs above show an experimental kit which was developed to enable the BAR to be mounted on a tripod.

The photographs feature a BAR mounted on an M2 tripod, originally designed for the M1919 machine gun. The tripod mounting kit includes a combined mounting point and carrying handle which appears to fit over the BAR’s foregrip. At the rear there is an elevating screw assembly which is attached to the trigger guard and can be folded back to fit into a cup which is attached to the butt stock by a belt. The photograph captions mention old and new elevating screw assemblies suggesting the design may have evolved during development. 

Another, more complex, attempt at a tripod mounted BAR, with a non-standard tripod and a new trigger system, the weapon again appears unmodified but a new pistol grip and butt pad has been added. The entry describes it as a ‘Kosar’ tripod, presumably after the tripod system’s designer (source)

Other alterations to the BAR appear to be minimal and the weapon still feeds from s 20-round box magazine. The Ordnance Department photographs are all dated 21 July 1944, indicating the experimental tripod mounting kit was developed during World War Two. Why the kit was developed is unclear as it aims to allow the BAR to be used in the sustained fire role. The BAR, however, was inherently unsuited to this role as its rate of fire was limited by its 20-round box magazine and lack of a quick change barrel. The kit would also have added to the BAR’s already substantial 8.8 kg (19 lb) weight. It does not appear that the BAR tripod mounting kit was ever fielded. 

Source:

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Browning Automatic Rifle m1918a2 full auto test standing. I did get a fair amount of muzzle climb, with practice that could be reduced. It’s amazing how much .30-06 at 500-650 rounds per mi ute pushes you back. Original issue had a sling that would allow this to be fired from the hip.

I had an amazing time shooting a 1940’s era Browning Automatic Rifle m1918a2 light machine gun today. I didn’t realize the selector has 3 modes, safe and 2 speeds of automatic. Unlike the earlier models this one does not have a semi-auto setting but with the slower auto it’s possible to shoot a single round with a quick pull and release of the trigger. Shooting it supported was easy and because of the weight there was very little felt recoil. Unsupported and on the fast setting I did get a fair amount of muzzle climb but considering it shoots .30-06 at 500-650 rounds per minute I expected it to. It’s easy to see why this rifle had such a long service life 1918-1970s (U.S.) because of it’s ease of use and amount of power.

Alright, this is gonna be the first of a couple little writeups on guns and possibly boats and planes and stuff depending on what the other mod gets up to. 

Today’s writeup is gonna be on our good buddy, the BAR. Short for Browning Automatic Rifle, usually designated either the M1918 or the M1918A2 depending on what stuff is put on it. It was designed at the tail end of World War One, where it was fantastically effective, and served all the way through World War Two, Korea and even the early days of Vietnam. It’s got a reputation to go with its longevity, too - video games, movies and TV often represent it as this big, hulking BFG that was the assault rifle before assault rifles, and could function as a rifle, a machine gun, whatever you wanted it to. 

In some sense, it was everything it was cracked up to be, especially in the last days of WWI when it was first used - see, the M1918 BAR was actually adopted in 1917 as the Browning Machine Rifle (BMR - don’t ask why they changed the name). Its purpose was walking fire. This is a gloriously suicidal tactic where, basically, you have one man in a squad with an automatic rifle (think proto-LMG), and a whole bunch more with standard bolt-action rifles. When they all go over the top of the trench, the guy with the automatic rifle lays down suppressing fire for his squadmates, firing from the hip. Early BAR mag belts actually had a metal cup on the hip you were supposed to stick the gun’s stock into to help with this. Now on paper, walking fire seems like a great idea. After all, it’s the beginnings of fire and movement! Of course, what no one took into account is that on the other end of that infantry charge was a bunch of Germans sitting behind their Maxim Guns. So in practical usage, they tended to be used more as a squad support weapon, almost like an early assault rifle. And in this usage it was, frankly, fantastically effective, as there was no other weapon like it at the time - the French had designed the Chauchat for walking fire, and although it wasn’t quite as bad as people are led to believe it was, its open-sided magazines led to a lot of stoppages. The British, meanwhile, had the Lewis Gun, which was only a light machine gun on paper. That big cooling shroud that makes it so iconic also led to it having a total weight of somewhere around 27 pounds. The BAR, at a “light” 16 pounds, was truly far ahead of its time. 

Let’s cut to after the war. Countries around the world were adopting new, proper light machine guns - the MG34, the Zb.26 and its cousin the Bren Gun, the Type 11 machine gun, and several more. Their uniting features were that they had magazines with capacity that was huge for the time - 20 for the Zb.26, 30 for the Bren and Type 11, and for the MG34 belts could range anywhere from 50 to 250 rounds in length. They also all had bipods, which made them easier to shoot from the prone position (which, considering they weighed on average anywhere from 22 to 30 pounds, was really the only practical way to shoot them.) Finally, all of the above weapons, with the exception of the Type 11, have quick-change barrels; even the Type 11 has enormous cooling fins around the barrel to allow it to better resist heating up. 

The BAR, being designed as an automatic rifle, had none of these. Its 20-round magazine, located on the bottom, was awkward to change out in the prone position, and in fully automatic fire it would empty itself far too soon. There were experiments with 30 and 40-round magazines, but they were dropped partly because they interfered with shooting from the prone position, but I suspect partly because on the eve of World War II a literal warehouse full of WWI-era BAR mags was discovered. 

In addition, its barrel was fixed, and although it was fairly heavy, sustained fire would overheat the weapon fairly easily (something like 150-200 rounds if I’m not mistaken), and due to it being a fixed barrel GIs in both WWII and Korea are documented as having been forced to fire their weapon until the barrel was ruined. All these problems with the rifle led the government to seek to update the rifle, really, just after the end of World War One. The first, and arguably one of the most famous, of these revisions, was known as the Colt Monitor. 

Picture related, it’s an FBI agent practicing with his Colt Monitor. The three differences that might jump out at you are that it has an enormous Cutts compensator on the muzzle, that it has a pistol grip (albeit a small one), and, more subtly, the handguard has been modified so that it doesn’t cover the barrel. This was really meant to to be a lighter, more portable version of the BAR, and that it was - with 6 inches cut off the barrel, which itself was extremely light, the whole gun weighed just over 16 pounds, making it arguably the most portable version of the BAR. 

Another version of the BAR (pictured above) that deserves some mention is the first official, government-endorsed revision of the weapon - the M1918A1. Frankly, this wasn’t really all that different from the original gun. The main differences were a bipod, which attached to the gas tube just in front of the cut-down handguard, and a hinged buttplate designed to increase the ease of firing the weapon from said bipod. 

Now, the weapon we all know and love, the one we see in WWII and Korea, the one grandad used, was the M1918A2, or the second significant revision of the BAR; also the one that saw the most service. This was, effectively, a different gun than its predecessors. It had a bipod mounted far towards the muzzle, a handguard that deliberately covered as little of the barrel as possible, and a complicated hydraulic buffer to regulate the rate of fire between 350 and 550 rounds per minute, for sustained suppressing fire and “direct” fire respectively. In addition, its sights were replaced: The World War One model had a very nice aperture rear sight, whereas the ‘A2 used a set of sights taken almost directly from the M1903 Springfield rifle, and if you’ve ever handled a Springfield then you know exactly how much those sights, frankly, suck for shooting under any kind of stress. Finally, there was a set of “wings” added to the trigger guard to aid in inserting the magazine, as well as a simple cylindrical flash hider screwed onto the muzzle.

On paper, this all sounded great, but the only issue is it made an already-heavy weapon (16 pounds) into a 22-pound beast of a gun, and it still only had a 20-round capacity and lacked a quick-change barrel. In addition, the bipod took far too long to deploy and adjust, and was actually known to break if treated roughly. As a result of all this, GIs were known to discard as much weight as they could from their guns. 

This photograph from Okinawa serves as a good example of this - it’s actually incredibly hard to find a photo of BAR gunners, in WWII especially, actually with all the accessories and stuff on their rifles. Generally they’d get rid of the bipod and flash hider as soon as they could, often discarding the hinged metal buttplate as well. In other words, they would get rid of as much weight as they could, leading to the BAR being used more or less in its WWI configuration. Interestingly, some BARs were used in said configuration anyway, as the M1918A2 was really equal parts new guns and conversion kits for old guns. This led to things like WWI-era BARs with cut-down handguards and bipods added, or even totally unmodified M1918 models. Although I don’t know for sure, it seems like the original models saw more use in the Pacific Theater than in Europe, mostly because of the Marine Corps’ longstanding “tradition” of playing second fiddle to the Army in terms of equipment.

Pictured is a BAR gunner on Guam, using an unmodified M1918 BAR; recognizable due to its hanguard and “peaked” rear sight, in addition to the lack of wings in front of the trigger guard. 

The BAR would wind up serving all the way through Korea, where it was actually extremely effective - due to the only other machine guns US forces had at the time, M1919 Browning designs, requiring emplacement on a tripod before use, the BAR proved an incredibly effective source of highly mobile covering fire; gunners would often literally sneak up on enemy machine gun teams, alone, before opening fire on them. Interestingly, troops issued BARs in Korea often kept not only the flash hider, due to the massive increase in night engagements, but also the weapon’s bipod. 

The last use of the BAR by US forces was in Vietnam, mostly by South Vietnamese troops issued the then-obsolete weapon as a second-line arm, but also by several U.S. special forces groups, who would use the aging, but powerful and reliable automatic rifle instead of currently-available weapons such as the M16. I’d provide a photo here, but it’s incredibly hard to find any pictures of BARs in use in Vietnam, in American hands.