The HELL of American BAR

In the Second World War, the German infantry squad was built around a machine gun. Everything else, the riflemen, the ammunition carriers, the squad leader, existed to support that one weapon. It was a doctrine built on firepower. And for the first years of the war, it worked with brutal efficiency. German squads pinned their enemies, suppressed them, [music] and held ground with a belt-fed machine gun that never seemed to run dry. But American infantry had something Germany never planned for. Not a crew served

weapon, not a tripod-mounted gun requiring a team to operate. One man, one weapon slung over one shoulder, loaded with 20 rounds of full power 3006, capable of automatic fire at up to 650 rounds per minute. A weapon that one soldier could carry at a dead sprint across an open field, hit the dirt, and immediately put down the kind [music] of fire that made German machine gunners forget about their own guns and start worrying about staying alive. The Army’s own records put it plainly. BAR men were

priority targets for enemy fire. The casualty rate for BAR gunners was high. And the reason was tactical logic. They went after the man with the automatic weapon first because they understood exactly what that weapon meant in a firefight. This is the story of the Browning automatic rifle. The weapon Persing considered so dangerous he hid it from the Germans. The gun that anchored every American infantry squad for nearly 40 years. And the reason the biggest, toughest man in the squad always got handed the heaviest weapon on

the battlefield and never argued about it. By 1917, the Western Front had settled into something that neither side could break. Thousands of German Maxim machine guns, water cooled, beltfed, capable of sustained fire measured in thousands of rounds before needing attention, sat in fortified positions with interlocking fields of fire across no man’s land. When American forces began arriving in France, their commanders looked at what they had and recognized the problem immediately. The United States entered

the war with an inadequate collection of machine gun designs, hamstrung by years of bureaucratic indecision and the absence of any coherent doctrine for their use. What they did have was bolt-action rifles. What they needed was something a soldier could carry forward across open ground under fire while putting enough rounds down range to keep German heads below the parapet long enough for the rest of the squad to close the distance. The French had tried to solve this with the Shosa, a light automatic rifle that American soldiers

called the damned and jammed for its spectacular tendency to fail at the worst possible moment. It was better than nothing, not by much. John Moses Browning had a different answer. In February 1917, before the United States had even formally declared war, he brought a prototype automatic rifle to a demonstration at Congress Heights in Washington DC in front of 300 people, military officials, congressmen, senators, and foreign dignitaries. Browning fired the weapon. The crowd was so impressed he was handed

a contract on the spot. The Army conducted formal trials at Springfield Armory that May, and the evaluation board’s recommendation was unanimous. Get this weapon into production immediately. It was faster than the Show, lighter than the Lewis gun, fed from a 20 round detachable box magazine that could be changed in seconds, and fired the standard 3006 cartridge that American Rifle and Machine Gun ammunition Supply was already built around. The BAR, formerly designated the M1918, was in American hands by the time the

first major US offensives of the war began that autumn. Here is where the story gets interesting. General John Blackjack Persing, commanding the American Expeditionary Forces in France, looked at the BAR and immediately understood something that some of his own officers hadn’t fully absorbed. This weapon was too good to risk losing. Persing ordered that most American divisions arriving in France turn in their bars and take shows instead. The logic was straightforward. He was afraid that inexperienced

American troops would lose bars to German capture early in the fighting, giving German engineers enough time to reverse engineer the design and field their own version before America had enough of them to make the firepower advantage decisive. The war in 1918 was still expected to last into 1919. Persing intended to hold the BAR back until he had enough in theater to deploy them in overwhelming numbers at a critical moment. For the soldiers who had already trained on the BAR and were now being handed a Shosha, the reaction

was not subtle. The word used most often in contemporary accounts was unprintable. Four divisions were allowed to keep their BARS. When those units went into combat at San Miel and the Muse Argon offensive in the autumn of 1918, the reports from the front were exactly what Browning’s demonstration had promised. The BAR gave assault troops the kind of portable automatic fire that no infantry weapon had been able to provide before. Suppression you could carry forward with you, not just set up behind you. The war

ended before Persing’s full deployment plan could be executed. But the weapon’s combat debut was enough to cement its reputation for whatever came next. The M1918 A2 that American soldiers carried into the Second World War had been refined from the original. Gone was a semi-automatic setting replaced by a two-speed automatic selector. Slow at 300 to 450 rounds per minute or fast at 500 to 650. A bipod went on at the muzzle, a shoulder rest folded over the butt to help manage recoil. And with a 20 round

magazine seated, it weighed right around 20 lb, which is a lot for a rifle and not much for a machine gun. And that gap was the entire point. The German MG42 was a magnificent weapon. beltfed, quick change barrel, capable of 1,200 rounds per minute, requiring a crew to operate effectively. It was a crewerved weapon that anchored a position. You set it up, you fed it ammunition, and it held ground. What it could not do was get up and move with the speed of a single infantry soldier in the middle of an

assault. The bar could. One man carried it. One man fired it. One man could move with it at full sprint, hit the prone position, and immediately open fire. In the hedgeross of Normandy, where American units spent weeks fighting hedge to hedge through terrain that stripped away almost every firepower advantage they had on paper, the BAR was what kept squads moving. A platoon leader from the 79th Infantry Division put it in writing. He recommended two bar teams per squad for hedro fighting because nothing else could flush a

dug-in German position the way automatic fire from a weapon that moved with the men could. A company commander from the 12th infantry regiment was equally direct. Heavy automatic fire from BARS was the best way to clear hedros. Not artillery, not the M1 Garand, the BR. The Germans figured out the BAR quickly across multiple theaters. The pattern was consistent. Enemy units gave priority fire to the BAR gunner. The man with the automatic weapon that was keeping their own heads down. This was not careless aggression. It was sound

tactical thinking. The BAR was the center of gravity of the American rifle squad. take it out. And 12 men with M1 Garands were still dangerous, but they were no longer an automatic fire threat. They lost the one weapon that could pin a German machine gun crew long enough for the rest of the squad to maneuver. Remove the BAR and you stripped the squad of its suppressive firepower. And against German squads built around the MG34 or MG42, that gap mattered. So they shot the bar man first, which meant the BAR man knew

walking into any engagement exactly where he stood on the German target list. One veteran drafted 8 days after high school graduation recalled being told during indoctrination that the biggest, meanest man in the squad carried the BAR. At 6’1 and 127 lbs, he qualified and carried it for 14 months across Europe. That framing, the biggest and toughest man got the bar, was not just about weight. It was about what the weapon represented. You were the priority target. You knew it. You carried it anyway. What the

Germans never quite solved was that the BAR’s mobility made it nearly impossible to neutralize, even when they were actively hunting it. Combat reports noted that by the time German units brought fire to bear on a bar position, the gunner had moved and was already firing from somewhere else. The weapon’s portability, the thing that had always made it look inferior to a beltfed machine gun on paper, was exactly what made it so hard to kill. In the Pacific, Marines put the BAR to a different kind of use entirely. Fighting

through dense jungle terrain, they stripped the weapon down. Bipod off, flashhider off, and used it the way Browning had originally imagined it in 1917. A portable automatic rifle one man could carry and fire from the shoulder. They positioned the bar gunner at the front or rear of a patrol where he could break contact immediately if an ambush hit. Marines reported back on exactly the qualities that mattered in that environment. reliability, penetrating power through jungle vegetation, and the kind of sustained fire that could

suppress a dug-in Japanese position long enough for the rest of the patrol to either close or withdraw. At Pearl Harbor, BAR gunners pointed their weapons skyward and used them as impromptu anti-aircraft guns against incoming Japanese dive bombers. It was not the weapon’s intended role, but it was a measure of how much individual soldiers trusted it. When everything else was chaos, they grabbed what they had and made it work. Korea gave the bar its most decisive test. Chinese forces attacking UN positions used mass night

assaults and concentrated infantry attacks that relied on momentum and numbers to overwhelm defensive positions before defenders could organize a response. The BAR gunner was the answer to that. With 12 loaded magazines on his belt [music] and more in his pockets, a BAR gunner in a prepared defensive position could sustain fire long enough to break the momentum of an assault that a rifle squad alone could not have stopped. Combat accounts from Korea document the BAR being credited specifically with

disrupting and halting Chinese attacks that would otherwise have overrun American positions. The weapon remained the backbone of the American infantry squad through the entire Korean War. It was still in limited use when Vietnam began. It was finally phased out in the late 1950s, replaced first by a variant of the M14 and later by the M60 machine gun. And even then, the army found itself temporarily without an adequate squad automatic weapon during the transition. The search for a replacement that could

do what the BAR had done eventually led decades later to the M249 squad automatic weapon. The problem Browning had solved in 1917 had to be solved again from scratch because nothing that came along for 30 years did it better. The BAR was not a perfect weapon. Nobody who carried one claimed otherwise. 20 rounds was a small magazine for an automatic weapon, and changing it from the prone position with the magazine mounted underneath the receiver was an awkward operation under any conditions and a genuinely difficult one under

fire. The barrel could not be quickly swapped when it overheated, which cap sustained fire at practical burst lengths before the gun needed a moment to cool. It was heavy. The bipod and shoulder rest added weight that most soldiers in the field quietly removed and left behind. And yet, the men who carried it kept finding ways to make it work. In every theater, in every campaign, across two world wars, and into a third. They stripped it down when weight mattered, loaded extra magazines when firepower mattered, positioned it

where the squad needed it most. The BAR was acknowledged in combat reports from junior officers and NCOs as the backbone of the infantry squad. Germany tried to eliminate the gunner. The Japanese tried the same. Korea’s Chinese forces learned the same lesson. All of them were acknowledging in the only language that matters on a battlefield what John Browning had built in 1917 and what American industry had put into the hands of nearly every rifle squad for the next four decades. The biggest toughest man in the squad

carried the bar. That was the rule. And if you ask why, why the burden fell to the strongest soldier, why enemy snipers made him their first target, why commanders kept demanding more of them per squad than doctrine called for? The answer comes back the same way from every theater, every war, every man who ever fought beside one. It was the weapon that moved when the machine gun couldn’t. It went where the crew served gun couldn’t follow. And when the shooting started and the squad needed

automatic fire right now, it was already there in the hands of the biggest, toughest man in the unit, who knew exactly what carrying it meant and carried it anyway. If you want more stories about the weapons that defined American military power, the ones that changed how wars were fought, [music] and why the men who carried them are still talked about today. Subscribe to Warfare Unlassified. New videos every week. And there’s a lot more where this came from.