So you want your very own BAR you say?
One of the most iconic US military firearms of the 20th Century was the Browning Automatic Rifle, better known by GIs in both World Wars as the BAR. Sadly, most of these guns were torched up and trashed in the 1960s, but if you look hard enough, you can find out for your very own. Officially designated “Rifle, Caliber .30, Automatic, Browning, M1918,” this 16-pound light machine gun was revolutionary when it was introduced in the tail end of the First World War. At the time, the US Army grew from 200,000 to over 4-million in the span of about 18-months. Far outstripping all of the arsenals of weapons, the new Doughboys needed a machinegun capable of being mass-produced, then carried into the field in huge numbers. It was to be used along with such wonder weapons as the Thompson submachine gun, Pedersen-device equipped Springfield rifles, armed airplanes and modern field artillery to scour No Man’s Land of the Kaiser’s storm troopers…
Well, today its been a little revamped.
Read the rest in my column at Firearms Talk