The MG42: The Machine Gun So Good It Inspired an Entire Weapon Class

fire wiped them out the Russians ran to their places the string of cartridges slid through our hands with brutal rapidity while the noise of the gun burst against our eard drums the mg-42 was shuddering and jumping on its legs and shaking the veteran who kept trying to steady himself its percussive bark put a final touch on the vast din which broken out through the vibrations and smoke we were able to observe the horrible impact of our projectiles on the Lost mass of red solders in the trench in front of us the mg42 took a horrible toll that quote penned by Guy Moro veteran of the gr tchin division in his Memoir the Forgotten Soldier perfectly encapsulates the abject horror that the subject of today's video the mg42 wrot introduced in 1942 and the name it was a German machine gun that put more than double the amount of lead downrange as its Allied counterparts so fast did it fire in fact that the Americans took to calling it buzs saw simply due to the fact that when the trigger was depressed its brutal rapidity sounded more akin to a power tool than any kind of machine gun that they'd ever heard don't believe us we'll have a listen to this hear what we mean it fires so fast that you can't even distinguish between the individual rounds in your ear and if that just happens to have peaked your interest then boy do we have a treat for you because in the next 20 or so minutes we're going to fully dissect the mg4 42 in all of its terrifying Splendor so let's begin shall We The mg42 Story begins with the mg8 Germany's go-to machine gun during World War I which was introduced all the way back in 1908 compared to the later mg42 however it was a very different Beast with it being all about laying down slow and steady barges of fire which had achieved by having a nice and middling rate of fire of 500ish round per minutes which made sure its Barrel didn't get too hot as well as through the incorporation of a water cooling system literally a big shroud filled with water around a barrel which could be emptied and refilled during firing which have done fast enough ensured that the barrel would never over heat this was all well and good make no mistake the mg8 which continued to see service right the way through to 1945 as both a fortress gun and among second line units was certainly a mean bit of kit but it wasn't perfect chiefly its downsides came from one thing and one thing alone its weight as with all of its supplementary gobbins its tripod a full water Jack into an optic of some kind it could happily be pushing 40 kilos which when World War I had shown that Modern Warfare was all about Mobility was certainly not ideal as even the most absolute of units would struggle to quickly Chu one over their shoulder and Scar a double quick like when the Tactical situation called for it postwar addressing these shortcomings led to the development of the mg13 in 1930 a far lighter machine gun that weighed in at a mere 13 kg easily light enough for a single soldier to operate and maneuver as for how they achieved such radical weight savings water cooling was dropped in favor of just an air cooled barrel and make up for that in quite a clever move it has to be said it was also fitted with a mechanism that allowed for quick Barrel changes during combat to facilitate sustained firing further to that the heavy tripod was also dropped in favor of a simple little bipod that clipped onto the end of the barrel and for a stock it was fitted with a light little padded tube that could be folded away just to make it that little bit handier on the Move particularly if one wished to Rambo it as a final touch it also dropped belt feeding which had been used on the mg8 in favor of magazine feeding which both allowed for quicker reloads and kept the rounds nice and compact so that the machine gun was easier to maneuver on the battlefield there can be no doubt about it the mg13 had ticked every single box that it had been asked to and it was indeed a nice light super portable machine gun it had its issues however because it had gone too far the other way and it was in fact so focused on portability and maneuverability that it was a tad useless in the sustained fire roll the lack of tripod for instance meant that it couldn't really be firmly anchored down to keep it steady when giving it the beans from a defensive position and it being magazine fed meant that despite the clever trick with the Quick Change Barrel it simply couldn't lay down a heavy barrage of fire effectively as them having a m 25 round capacity coupled with the 600ish rounds per minute fire rate of the gun and meant that you had 2. 5 seconds of fire till it was empty and you had to stop what you were doing and stick another one in as compared to a belt-fed machine gun where if you knew you were going to be laying down heavy lead you could simply join belts together and squeeze the trigger to your heart's content what they really needed was a Do-it all machine gun one that could operate in both the light and heavy rolls effectively and that's exactly what they got for 4 years after the mg13 with the introduction of the mg34 it was belt fed and had a quick change Barrel so could happily keep up sustained rate of fire it had a supplementary lefet tripod which could be carried separately to spread its weight arounds and give it a nice stable platform for firing from a defensive position it also had a high rate of fire 900 is rounds per minute which certainly gave it an edge when laying down suppressive fire and the cherry on top it did all of this while actually being lighter than the mg13 weighing 12 kg instead of 13 in fact it struck the middle ground between light and heavy machine gun so well that its basic design of belt fed and air cooled with a quick change Barrel spawned a whole new classification of machine gun in Modern military lingo general purpose machine gun or gpmg with everything from the FN mag M60 PK and type 67 all essentially being The mg34 Descendants it entered service in 1936 having been produced since 1934 and there's no two ways about it it was an absolute rollsroyce of a machine gun being reliable although it could struggle a touch in really sandy or dirty environments and also having no expense spared in its production with nearly the whole thing being made from machine parts I Parts made from cutting them out of billets of Steel this however made it really expensive both in terms of material because of all the metal that was paid for and then not used as it was cut away from the B and in terms of the wages of the work putting it together because it took 150 man hours to complete an mg34 with these lingering issues in mind the PA that be set out to procure another new machine gun in the early years of World War II and guess what the result of that process would be yes the mg42 so now let's bring this chapter to a close move on and take a look at what exactly it was the first thing to note about the design of the mg42 was that rather than being made from machined Parts as the mg34 before it had it was instead made from largely stamped components which is to say parts that are manufactured by forcing sheet metal against a punch to give them shape rather than painstakingly cutting them out of AIT of Steel this naturally is a lot quicker than lengthly and arduous Machining and so the production time for an mg42 was a mere 75 man hours that's half that of the mg34 this expedited production along with the the fact that stamping is inherently less wasteful than Machining also made it cheaper to boot with the cost of an mg42 coming in at a mere 250 Reich marks as opposed to 327 for an mg34 do note however that while it heavily used stamp metal in its construction not all of it was built that way as some components I. E the bolt and the barrel had to be made the old way for strength and durability Beyond just the fact it was made of largely stamped metal however the mg42 also made use of a roller locked operating mechanism the mechanism uses a bolt head with a locking roller that engages with recesses in the receiver creating a nice and secure seal when the bolt goes into the battery before firing it also operated as an open bolt weapon which is to say a weapon in which the bolt is held at the rear of the receiver before firing rather than a Clos bolt system in which the bolt returns forward before the trigger is pulled this was intended to enhance cooling by creating an occasionally open Airway and also make it more reliable under rapid firing as closed bolt systems of the time was simply found not to be able to with heavy rates of fire inevitably locking up and seizing under intense movements and speaking of rates of fire we've teased you a lot thus far that the mg42 was rather fast firing but now let's hold you in suspense no longer and just come out and say it the mg42 fired at 1200 rounds per minute a third as fast again as the already very fast firing mg34 and at least double as fast as most Allied Machine Guns most of which hovered around the 5 to 600 rounds per minute Mark beyond that it fired the same round as every German machine gun has since the mg8 7.

92 by 57 mm rounds and more similarly still had also had a handy dandy bolt Quick Change system which from the personal experience of one of the team can usually be changed in around 5 seconds if you have the muscle memory for it and a new Barrel laid out ready to go it was also a touch lighter than the mg34 that came before it another bonus of stamped manufacturing weighing in at 11. 6 kilos naturally all of this came together to make quite the solid little machine gun one that was rightly feared by anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves on the business end of it but despite this like any machine it was far from perfect and did of its drawbacks with the big one being that it was rather prone to bolt bounce I. E firing without the bolt being fully locked which typically led to catastrophic failure as its feed tray and ammo belt became a tangled and mutilated mass of metal inside the receiver or just flatly blew itself apart German production of the mg42 would run from 1942 to 1945 at which point 4 123,00 of them in total have been made do note however that while this was meant to replace the mg34 it ever actually did and both of them were produced in tandem until the Reich fell just with priority being given to the mg42 As and when factory conditions allowed it so now that we know about its design let's move on and have a look at how it was used German infantry Doctrine during World War II was built around small units of 10 men called groupers that were roughly analist with a largish squad in modern NATO Doctrine notably however whereas you might imagine a machine gun as being a support weapon of sorts what intended to lay down suppressive far that made the enemy Keep Their Heads down and score a few lucky kills while The Rifleman did the bulk of the killing with precisely aimed shots in German Doctrine the opposite was actually the case say the machine gun was the weapon of choice for the squad and in fact the rifleman's main job was to support the machine gun by keeping its operators alive while they mowed down the enemy with a merciless barrage of fire this idea is exactly why the mg-42 had such a high rate of fire since they were to be doing the Lion's Share of the killing the more lead they were putting down range the better and to put the mg42's 12200 rounds per minute cyclic rate of fire into context because we've only compared it to Allied stuff in general terms thus far consider that the British Vic's gun and the Bren gun both had a rough rate of fire of 500 rounds per minute and the American m1917 m1918 Bar and m1919 all put out around 600 rounds per minute and what you get the idea as for how it switched between being both a light and heavy machine gun this didn't involve just bunging it on its tripod and calling it a day but also involved a complete change in the type of unit that these were handed to although do note thanks to war being quite chaotic there are of course exceptions to this rule in the light R it would be used by a normal 10-man grouper which would consist of a squad leader a deputy squad leader to stand in for him if he caught a bullet a three-man machine gun team made up of a trigger man a loader and an ammunition carrier and a further five normal Riflemen the trigger man would be armed with an mg42 obviously in addition to a pistol in case he was caught short while the squad leader was armed with a submachine gun everyone else just carried a rifle except for the loader who since he would have his hands full feeding the brass hungry mg42 was just issued a pistol further spread among them would be a plethora of other kits including plenty of hand grenades and just in case it was needed the mg42's tripod which could be worn as a backpack thanks to the inclusion of Handy Dandy straps spread across the whole cper would be about 1,800 rounds of belted 7.

92 by 57 mm rounds to feed the mg42 able to be easily chucked over the loader when called for all of this kept the grouper Nimble they weren't carrying anything too heavy but still able to lay down some serious Firepower thanks to the mg4 2 that formed their core and the ample ammunition and miscellaneous gobbins They Carried for it as for its use in the medium and heavy roles we won't stress too much about the exact numerical makeup of a German heavy weapon Splatoon primarily because the sources we consulted really varied in exactly what it was and hell if we know which is correct seriously German Universal machine guns written by folk myy claimed it was made up of two squads each with a single mg-42 while mg34 and mg42 machine guns by Chris McNab claims that it was made up of four squads each with a single mg42 so with that in mind and out of fear of accidentally giving you all incorrect information or we should not comment on the numbers at all what we do know for certain however that really demonstrates how doctrinally different these two formations were is that the heavy machine gun platoon included three ammunition carriers per mg42 and a dedicated transporter for them usually in the form of a horse and wagon if a standard gripper was all about being quick and Nimble the heavy machine gun platoon really was all about digging in and laying down the lead big time we also know that the heavy machine gun platoon use some pretty smart tactics to help with such lead laying down for example they could make use of advanced Optics that allowed them to fire the mg-42 indirectly essentially as a very light artillery piece this tactic actually goes back to the mg42's great great Grandad the mg8 which was similarly used in World War I and further to that with their whole stick being laying down an ungodly amount of Fire they also made very extensive use of a very handy feature of the tripod the so-called tan for automas or Deep Fire function this was an automatically adjusting component of the tripods that as the m42 fired mov the tripod from left to right and up and down in a WAV likee predetermined pattern this naturally was just a bit good if a was taking on a large group of enemy combatants rather than worrying about aiming specifically you just pointed at their Center and plant your finger down until they will stop moving having heard all of that then you probably won't be surprised to hear that the mg42 as incredible as it was went on to have quite the large impact on post-war arms design so good was it in fact that as much as the mg34 was the first true gpmg the mg42 was the only one that anyone was thinking about come the war's end its impact goes Way Beyond just helping to popularize the gpmg concept however because on the technical level many of its more Innovative features either inspired later developments in their image or were just straight up copied by later guns a great example of this can be found in the American M60 introduced in 1957 it is to simplify quite a bit a hybrid of the mg42 and another German World War I weapon the fg42 with some homegrown American Innovations also thrown in to plug the gaps between the two as for the bits that came with it its Belford system is an exact copy of the mg42's and its stamped receiver while not an exact copy of the mg-42 was very much inspired by it as American designers saw just how much the use of such a manufacturing method to expedited production of the m42 as compared to the mg34 then there is the Belgian FN mag first introduced in 1958 and used by an insane number of countries since then its trigger mechanism is basically an exact copy of the mg42 and its belted system is also very similar as well albe it not an exact copy also of note is the Spanish amalay first introduced in 1982 it is to simplify a bit basically just a shrunk down mg42 chambered in 5. 56x 45mm NATO kind of anyway because while many would have you believe it is exactly that it does have a few differing design cues that prevent it from being a pure copy Chief among which is its operating mechanism as it uses a roller delayed blowback system more reminiscent of the HK91 rifle than the roller locked mechanism of the mg42 barring that however the analy is otherwise basically just a chambered mg42 wearing a slightly different frock when it comes to mg42 clones however the Amal with its mg42 is internals and kind of looking the same if you squinted it a little bit barely even registers as a blip on the radar because a lot of countries just straight up at the mg-42 into production themselves with either really minimal to the point of being moot changes or basically no changes at all beside a different language on the stampings take this for example the German mg3 it's entered service in 1959 and it is basically just an mg 42 rechambered for 7. 62x 51 mm Nato rounds mechanically it is exactly the same was the only difference as being really really minor supplementary stuff such as the addition of a latch for attaching a plastic assault drum a spring-loaded feed cover that can be closed regardless of the position of the bolt unlike on the mg42 where it had to be opened by hand and could only be closed when the bolt was in a particular position and sites that have graduated out to only 12200 M rather than 2,000 m really minor stuff here then there's the mg 51 a Swiss variant from 1951 that differed only in being chambered in 7.