Bren Light Machine Guns: A British import/export
One of the iconic light machine gun designs of the past century has to be the British Bren gun with their distinctive top-mounted magazine and WWII starring role. Yet ironically, if you look into the history of these guns, they may owe more to a town in central Europe named Brno and Toronto Canada than they do to England.
In 1921, the Czech firm of Zbrojovka Brno, (ZB) began experimenting with a compact light machine gun that fired a full sized round from a 20-round top-mounted box magazine. Gas operated, air cooled, selectively fired, this gun became fully fleshed out by 1926 and was adopted by the Czech army as the ZB v26. By 1938 when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, over 120,000 of these handy guns were sold to two dozen countries around the world.
Then production really took off…
