Men of the 3rd Ranger Company, 3rd Infantry Division, adjust their gear before undertaking a dawn combat patrol across the Imjin River, Korea. 17 April 1951. Korea.
Signal Corps Photo # 8A/FEC-51-12902 (Welter). From U.S. Army Archives.
Note the BAR M1918 on the left, the “broken TV” patch of the 3ID, fixed bayonets on the Garands, and the M2 select-fire Carbine with its distinctive cone flash-hider to the right.
The footage above is from a US Army training film for officers and NCOs covering various stages of marksmanship training. The film discusses the make up of rifle squads and section and the deployment of their rifles and automatic rifles. It’s kind of dry (its an Army training film from 1935) but it’s good stuff if you are a fan of BARs (assault firing!) and M1903s (remember, the Garand was not adopted until 1936).
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