Loading was accomplished by inserting the pull tab on the ammunition belt from the left side of the gun - either metal links or metal tab on cloth belts - until the belt-holding pawl at the entrance of the feed way grabbed the belt and held it in place. Official name: Machine Gun, Cal..30, M1919A4/M1919A6. A recoil buffer tube extended from the back of the receiver to make the cycle of the bolt smoother than previous designs, to absorb some of the recoil of the bolt, and formed a place for the pistol grip to be installed. 1919A4 SEMI AUTO RIFLE. .50, M2, Aircraft, List of U.S. Army weapons by supply catalog designation, http://blindkat.hegewisch.net/lrdg/mgs.html, "Browning 0.303in Mark II Machine Gun (R.A.F. The inflation of prices that followed, and the availability of parts from surplussed and scrapped machine guns, led to the development of semi-automatic versions of the Browning M1919. Mg M/52-1 and Mg M/52-11 were Danish designations for the M1919A4 and M1919A5 respectively. As a company support weapon, the M1919 required a five-man crew: the squad leader; the gunner (who fired the gun and when advancing carried the tripod and box of ammunition); the assistant gunner (who helped feed the gun and carried it, and a box of spare parts and tools); two ammunition carriers. [3] The A6 version saw increasing service in the latter days of World War II and was used extensively in Korea. The Fixed model had a backplate. The Browning .303 was used on the RAF's 'eight-gun fighters' the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire, and as a turret gun in the Boulton Paul Defiant, and in the Handley Page Halifax, Short Stirling, Avro Manchester and Avro Lancaster bombers, and the Short Sunderland flying boat installed in various Boulton Paul or Nash & Thomson turrets. The M1919 Browning is a.30 caliber medium machine gun that was widely used during the 20th century. When it was decided to try to lighten the gun and make it air-cooled, its design as a gun that fires from the closed bolt created a potentially dangerous situation. Browning machine gun was adopted for use in tanks. The original M1919 was designed to use in tanks. Please improve this article by adding a reference. The tips of the accelerator's two curving fingers engaged the bottom of the bolt and caused it to move rapidly to the rear. Once the bolt closed, the firing pin dropped and the round was fired, and the sequence was repeated (at a rate of roughly ten cycles per second) until the trigger was released or the ammunition belt was exhausted. In 1900, John Moses Browning filed a patent for a recoil powered automatic gun. Although the gun worked well, Browning improved the design slightly. The experimental T151 had a flat backplate (? Learn how and when to remove this template message, recoiled to the rear of the gun upon firing, Browning Machine Gun, Cal. It was belt-fed, with a normal belt containing 75 rounds; it also used a pistol-esque grip and odd, yet functional iron sights. Many M1919s were rechambered for the new 7.62×51mm NATO round and served into the 1990s, as well as up to the present day in some countries. The US Navy, because of their narrower inventory of 7.62mm NATO ammunition, used linked belts of either 7.62mm M80 Ball or a 4:1 ratio mix of 7.62mm M80 Ball and 7.62mm M62 Tracer. The presence of M1919A4 weapons in the weapons platoon gave company commanders additional automatic fire support at the company level, whether in the assault or on defense. The Browning i… |date= The Model 1919 Browning, an air-cooled, upgraded version of the water-cooled Model 1917, was the prime machine gun in use by all U.S. Military forces during World War II. The Browning Mk 1 and Mk 2 were older-style Commonwealth designations for the .303 caliber Browning machine guns used on the vast majority of British aircraft of World War II. If the gun was very hot from prolonged firing, the cartridge ready to be fired could be resting in a red hot barrel, causing the propellant in the cartridge to heat up to the point that it would ignite on its own without warning. As the bolt went into battery, the extractor engaged the next round on the advanced belt resting in the feedway, preparing to draw it from the belt in the next firing cycle. [33] The synchronized variant of the Fixed model had a trigger motor for through-propeller, gun synchronizing needs.[33]. The A6 variant had a folding bipod mounted on the front of the gun, a sheet-metal buttstock, carrying handle, and a tapered barrel. The M1919A4 played a key role in the firepower of the World War II U.S. Army. Colt produced a derivative of the M2 aircraft machine gun, the Colt MG40. It saw wide use in World War II mounted on jeeps, armored personnel carriers, tanks, and amphibious vehicles. When folded down, the aperture formed a notch that could be used to fire the gun immediately without flipping up the leaf. [2] The original idea of the M1919 was to allow it to be more easily packed for transport, and featured a light barrel and bipod when first introduced as the M1919A1. ), the T152 had spade grips and a "butterfly" trigger like the M2HB, and the T153 had a pistol grip and back-up trigger like the M1919A4 and an extended charging handle similar to those on the M1919A5. A camming track in the left side of the receiver caused this to move down as the bolt moved back, lowering the next round down on top of the fired case, pushing it straight down out of the extraction grooves of the bolt face through the ejection port. [7] In Ordnance circles, the .30 M2/AN Browning had the reputation of being the most difficult-to-repair weapon in the entire US small arms inventory. M1919 Browning machine gun specification Creator/User : United States of America It was used on US aircraft early in World War II but the lighter .30-caliber weapon was increasingly relegated to training duties as the war progressed. [14], Mk 21 in Vietnam being fed by an upside-down M-13 link belt (the links are not visible), The increasing American involvement in Vietnam created a demand for small arms, especially the new M60 machinegun. The M1919A4 weighed about 31 pounds (14 kg), and was ordinarily mounted on a "lightweight" (14lb), low-slung tripod for infantry use (light and low compared to the previous M1917 tripod). It had a thinner barrel and receiver walls to keep down weight. of mount with adapter, links, mini link loader and manual. As a partner for the infantry version, a special version was produced as M1919A5 for installation in tanks. Soviet airmen compared them to Soviet ShKAS in terms of reliability: "But they often failed due to dust," recalled pilot Nikolai G. Golodnikov. The Poles developed a copy of the Browning M1919 chambered for 7.92×57mm Mauser, designated, This page was last edited on 6 February 2021, at 05:22. The .30 in M2/AN Browning was widely adopted as both a fixed (offensive) and flexible (defensive) weapon on aircraft. The M1919A6 was an attempt to combine the portability and low profile of the M1918 BAR with the sustained firing capability of the M1919A4. The rearward movement of the bolt caused the rear end of the feed lever to pull to the right, causing the feeding pawl at the other end to move left over the belt. When the gun was ready to fire, a round would be in the chamber and the bolt and barrel group would be locked together, with the locking block at the rear of the bolt. During the Second World War, two additional variants of the M1919 were adopted by the US military. It used the standard 7.62mm NATO M13 link "strip-out" disintegrating link,[16] in which the bolt pushes the round out of the bottom of the two-part link and then forwards into the breech. The M37E1 was a M37 machine gun converted by Rock Island Arsenal and Springfield Armory to chamber the 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge and feed the M13 disintegrating belt. Like most of Browning’s designs, the 1919 was very reliable for the day and age in which it was produced (insert Glock joke … The rearward movement of the bolt caused the rear end of the feed lever to pull to the right, causing the feeding pawl at the other end to move left over the belt. It was deemed still too heavy for field use and was not adopted. The cocking handle was pulled and released a second time. [7], The M2 also appeared in a twin-mount version which paired two M2 guns with opposing feed chutes in one unit for operation by a single gunner, with a combined rate of fire of 2,400 rpm. 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