1/35 BAR (Browning) Resin or Metal?

Italeri offers an Allied infantry weapons set with BAR's included. Tamiya also offers one. "Powerful" is a pretty vague word. It fired the same round as the M1 Garand and the Browning .30" machine gun. It was basically a squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun comparable to the British Bren gun. It was much heavier than an M1, and fussy to keep clean and working smoothly. And the BAR man was always picked off first by enemy riflemen, so it was not popular. It disappeared from service once the M14 became available in the 1950's, as it did the same thing and was lighter.

My father served with the 41st ID in the Philippines and whether it was more powerful than the M1 is moot, as the troops all considered it to be. They liked the fact that it could shoot clean through up to 24" palm logs or standing trees, making clearing out Japanese snipers relatively easy once they were detected.

It was also the choice of many gangsters such as Bonnine and Clyde, and in point of fact was the weapon of choice used to kil them as it would penetrate the steel car bodies of the 1930s which the .45 ACP Thompson submachine gun would not always do.

Cookie Sewell

Would the BREN count? You could shoulder fire that.

Pat

Depends what they (and you) mean by "powerful". From the point of view of "not a machine gun, but can put down a high volume of fire for suppression purposes" then yes, it probably was. The BAR was always a neither-fish-nor-fowl weapon -- not as good as a regular rifle for normal infantry use, not as good as a machine gun for suppression fire, not as good as a submachine gun for assault fire -- and yet still effective, especially when several were used together (as was typical of US Marine squads in the Pacific).

Generally, however, US squads would probably have been better off with a true light machine gun.

Bruce

But did anyone ever shoulder fire one of those while standing, or fire it from the hip? You could fire the BREN that way. I still like the guy who got the VC for firing the PIAT from the hip and taking out the three Tiger tanks with it. Most of the people familiar with it thought he deserved it just for shooting the damn thing from the hip, even if he had never hit anything with it. :-D

Pat

A friend of mine had one. Boy, you aren't kidding about that weight factor...that thing is mighty heavy. I once handled some sort of a HK German rifle that also seemed way too heavy for a soldier to carry around.

Pat

I would think it would be physically impossible for any normal human being to fire any model of ATR from the shoulder (they were typically about 1.5m in length), and firing one from the hip would be risking severe injuries. This was particularly true of the Boys ATR, which combined several features: excessive weapon weight, severe recoil, deficient ammunition and poor accuracy. The father of a friend of mine described it as suitable for removing the paint from a stationary AFV at 10 metres, if you could successfully score a hit, which was unlikely.

Bruce

Does a light machine gun normally fire from an open bolt or a closed bolt?

(kim)

that wouldn't be the 50cal sniper rifle, would it? great for those 2 mile cleanings....

No, it was some German or Austrian standard issue heavy military rifle; it was all made from stampings and it weighed nearly as much as a BAR.

Pat

The BAR didn't weight 27 pounds, not even when loaded.

It just felt like it did after the first mile.

Cheers,

"16-19 pounds empty" is the value given in that article, and an empty BAR is remarkably useless. The magazine only held 20 rounds, so for any sort of effective use you (and your buddies) had to carry a lot of extra ammunition. The *practical* weight of the BAR with sufficient ammunition to make using it worthwhile was considerable (although probably less than that required for most machine guns).

Bruce

Well, if you're adding in the ammo to the weights you listed, then yes, the total load for a BAR man was probably close to 30 pounds when you count the gun, bi pod, and 10 magazines of ammo. But if you're going to count the ammo, then that 11 pounds you listed for the M-1, is going to need to go up by 8 or so pounds also.

Michael

that bullet head ex-marine historian on that gun show sez it's 23 lbs with one full magazine in. now he couldn't be wrong, could he?

I didn't list them.

And ...? The original point was that the BAR is one heavy mother, one of the factors that made it extremely impractical *as a rifle*.

The lone BAR-man in a US Army squad was in a tough position: he had to lug all that weight around, was not much use to his buddies in a "minor" skirmish, but when it came to anything more, the small clips made it difficult (if not impossible) for him to lay down the sustained firepower that his squad was likely to need. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, the Marines mitigated this problem somewhat by including an extra BAR in the squad (and later, a third one) -- although of course that also meant even more ammo to lug around!

Bruce

Bruce Probst wrote in news:1183936620.088521.46740 @q75g2000hsh.googlegroups.com:

I have a book called I think, the 49th Parallel. It's about a Marine in Korea. First person, nonfiction. He loved his BAR, just thought it should have had a bigger magazine, 30 or 40 rounds.

Frank