What type of gun did Holman use at the end? To me it looked a lot like assault Rifle (specificly it looked a lot like AK 47), but assault rifles weren't invented until 1944. So what type of gun was it, or was it just historical inaccuracy?
shareIt's a box magazine automatic rifle designed by the famous John Moses Browning (he also designed the 1911 pistol and the big .50 cal machine gun still used today) during World War I and fires the same big rifle caliber 30.06 round used by the 1903 bolt action Springfields also shown in the film. The BAR was also used by the infamous gangsters of the depression era like "Baby Face" Nelson and Clyde Barrow. It was a devastating weapon.
Follow this to see the other firearms used in the film:
http://www.imfdb.org/index.php/Sand_Pebbles%2C_The
Actually I accidentally found out about that gun soon after posting.
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shareThe BAR was memorable in the film ""Saving Private Ryan".
The Tom Hanks' character asks the Ed Burns' character where his BAR was?
Ed Burns' response is so funny about it being at the bottom of the English Channel. Tom's character tells him to find another one.
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Sig Line:
Many cynics and skeptics mistake their hubris negativity for actual intelligence.
The BAR was a great gun to have if you needed to shoot THROUGH something to get somebody.
shareI'm not sure how accurate this is but I read that the U.S. ARMY could have deployed the Browning BAR with the doughboy G.I.s in World War I, but the highest American authorities were so apprehensive of the BAR falling into the hands of the Germans that they refused to allow this innovative, state-of-the-art machine gun to leave the United States. Instead the doughboys got stuck with that gad-awful French Chauchet machine gun that even the French troops hated using and didn't want to use. It was pronounced, "Sho-Sho", but should have been more aptly pronounced, "jam-jam".
What do you think about this debate? There was debate that the U.S. ARMY would have been better off keeping the BAR through Vietnam instead of using the M60 squad machinegun, affectionately nicknamed, the 'pig'. The U.S. Army ripped off the internal design from the defeated krauts in WWII, but instead of simply replicating the excellent German M40 squad machinegun, American pride dictated our own indigenous design, even if it was derivative of the German M40. To this day all the gun experts keep wondering why the Army didn't just save time and money by copying the German M40. It proved far more reliable than the M60 and was slightly lighter also. In summary, if the Army didn't want to copy the German M40 then instead of constructing the M60 the Americans should have continued using the BAR. (According to International patenting and licensing agreements, the U.S. government would have eventually been required to pay royalties to the post-war, German company that invented the M40 had the M40 been copied by the Americans, assuming that German company still existed AND officially demanded royalty payments and licensing fees. It made no difference that the M40 came from a defeated Nazi government no longer in existence.)
There's no such thing as an M40. There's an MG34 and an MG42, both of which were excellent general purpose machineguns, and there's an MP40, one of the first submachineguns made almost entirely from stamped and welded parts. I think you're talking about the MG42. It's a good weapon, but accuracy is rather poor and it eats spare barrels and ammunition like nothing you've ever seen.
shareYou're right, but I'm sure the guy meant MG-42, confusing the name with the MP-40.
Copying the Sturmgewehr-44 would have been a good idea, too - the Russians did it, refined and simplified it, and came out with the AK-47.
--If they move, kill 'em!
The germans also had that paratropper rifle, FG42(?). It could have filled a role like the BAR. They had wild recoil problems I guess, kinda like a auto M-14 given to green recuites.
I think of the BAR in the 1st world war as a super weapon in a sense, I mean what other weapon gives one man the fire power & mobilty of a at least a squad armed with bolt actions? Its shown as the force muitiplier it is in the Sand Pebbles.
A lot of the feed mechanism and hinged top-cover features on the M60 were taken from the MG42 and FG-42. Many NATO countries used a 7.62 version of the MG-42 called the MG-3.
The MG-42 was a recoil-operated design (the recoil of the fired round causes the barrel to move backwards a fraction of an inch, unlocking the weapon) while the M-60 was gas-operated (propellant gases from the burning gunpowder are tapped thru a port in the barrel into a piston assembley , and the piston moves rearward, unlocking the bolt).
The M-60 had several flaws, among them, heavy weight, a less-easily-changed barrel(the bipod and front sight were attached to the barrel. which made it quite heavy, and the barrel had to jacket or guard or handle, which made it awkward to change especially when it was red-hot), and a gas system that vibrated loose whilst firing.
The BAR's greatest flaw was that it only held twenty rounds and it didn't have a quick-change barrel. When you fire a lot of rounds quickly, the barrel can get burnt out in fairly short order. There was a European version of the BAR, the BAR-D, that had a quick-change barrel, but it was still hampered by the twenty-round magazine capacity.
The current M240 light machinegun is a modified MAG-58, which is basically designed around the original BAR's tilting-bolt design, highly modified with a belt feed mechanism. It is superior to the BAR in every way.
But in 1918, no question, the BAR was hands-down the best weapon available.
"...Of all the Thompson Gunners, Roland was the best..."
The WWII and Korea veterans I have known who handled the BAR as their weapon and were willing to talk about it told me they spent more time with the select fire set to single shot (semi-automatic) than Full Auto for all the reasons you mentioned.
shareThe final version of the BAR had modifications that made it weigh 20lbs!
I read that the VC loved it (used captured BARs when they fought the French), in the right hands it can deliver a lot of fire power & be mobile too.
No, there was an M40 bolt action rifle. It was an American sniper rifle introduced during the late 1960s.
So, the M40 wasn't an automatic rifle but it was an actual weapon.
The BAR was a real monster at 15 lb weight. The WW2 Garand rifle, for comparison, was 10 lb and feels like a mile-long of bricks compared to today's M-4 carbine. The BAR really was an "automatic rifle", not an assault gun, which is lighter and shorter, still less a submachine gun, which is even lighter and shorter still. It sacrificed none of the attributes of a true rifle (enormous range, accuracy, and power in single-shot mode), while adding full-auto capability (although the magazine would be emptied after only a two-second spray on full-auto).
What it lacked was a 3-round burst selector position like more modern weapons. You had to have a disciplined and precise trigger finger to simulate that.
Horsing around a BAR while lugging a bunch of spare magazines was a physically demanding job, and firing it effectively handheld in full-auto required real training and Schwarzenegger level muscles. Using the bipod while prone on the ground was more manageable.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet that BAR stands for Browning Automatic Rifle.
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