You’ve probably heard of the American BAR. It’s one of the most powerful automatic rifles of the Second World War. But despite it being so great, America ignored the BAR completely and based their next machine gun, the M60, on the German FG 42. So, you’d probably assume that the FG 42 was better. Yet, during actual combat, the story wasn’t so simple.
When John Moses Browning walked into a live-fire demonstration at Congress Heights in Washington, D.C. in February 1917, over 300 people showed up, including members of Congress. Browning showed off two weapons that day. One was a water-cooled machine gun that would later become the M1917 Browning. The other was a shoulder-fired automatic rifle he had been designing since 1910, and it left every single person in that crowd stunned.
See, America was about to enter the First World War. Their soldiers in France were stuck using the French Chauchat, which was one of the worst light machine guns ever built. The BAR, on the other hand, fired the .30-06 Springfield cartridge, the same round used in the M1903 Springfield bolt-action rifle. It was gas-operated and air-cooled, measured 47 in long, and weighed about 16 lb in its original M1918 form, and it could fire at roughly 550 rounds per minute from a 20-round detachable box magazine.
For 1918, that kind of portable automatic firepower was completely unheard of. This is where America almost wasted its own secret weapon. Production started at Winchester in early 1918, but it took months to ramp up. The first BARs did not reach France until July, and they were not used in actual combat until September the 12th, 1918, when the 79th Infantry Division carried them into the Saint-Mihiel Offensive.
Even though the BAR only fought for about 2 months before the armistice in November, it left an enormous impression on both sides. One official report compared it directly to the Chauchat and said the Browning was practically as mobile as an ordinary rifle with the same accuracy, but with firepower that could suppress entire defensive positions.
The Assistant Secretary of War later wrote that the BARs were highly praised by officers and men alike, and that even after days of hard usage in the rain, they always functioned well. But then the BAR story took an odd turn. After World War I, militaries everywhere started building dedicated light machine guns.
Instead of of something new, the U.S. military decided to force the BAR into that role despite it never being intended to fill it. You see, Browning had designed the weapon as an automatic rifle, something a single soldier could fire from the shoulder or even the hip during an infantry advance. The whole idea was what they called walking fire, laying down suppressive bursts while moving forward across no man’s land.
So, it was a rifle first and a support weapon second. During the 1920s and 30s, the army bolted on a bipod, added a heavier handguard, and installed a flash hider. They also attached a small hinge shoulder rest to the back of the stock. All of these modifications served the purpose of turning the BAR into a squad automatic weapon for covering fire from a fixed position.
But, this caused a weight problem that quickly spiraled out of control. By World War II, the M1918A2 variant weighed over 20 lbs with a loaded magazine, and this version removed the ability to fire in semi-automatic mode entirely. So, soldiers could only choose between a slow rate of roughly 300 to 450 rounds per minute or a fast rate of around 500 to 650.
A lot of troops hated this, and it was common to see experienced soldiers completely stripping off the bipod and flash hider just to shed a few pounds. But, some units held onto the older M1918 models because they still had semi-auto and weighed noticeably less. On top of all that, the BAR had a fixed barrel that could not be swapped out in the field.
Most proper light machine guns like the British Bren or the German MG 34 let the gunner quickly replace an overheating barrel during sustained fire. The BAR, however, could not do that at all. If you held the trigger down too long, the barrel got dangerously hot, and there was nothing you could do about it except stop and wait.
So, combined with a 20-round magazine that emptied in a few seconds on full auto, the BAR sat in an awkward middle ground, too heavy to be a rifle and too limited to be a true machine gun. But, the FG 42’s origin story, on the other hand, was far different. In May 1941, German Fallschirmjäger launched the airborne invasion of the island of Crete called Operation Mercury.
At the time, German parachute troops were part of the Luftwaffe rather than the regular army. These were considered the elite of the German military. Their shock tactics in the Benelux during 1940 had turned them into celebrities back home. But, the German RZ parachute straps had a serious design flaw. Parachutes used a single riser with two straps that forced the paratrooper to land face down in a forward roll.
This meant they could only carry holstered pistols and hand grenades during a jump. Their Kar98k rifles and MP 40 submachine guns all had to be dropped separately in metal containers beneath the transport aircraft. So, every paratrooper hit the ground with nothing but a pistol and a handful of grenades, and the weapons containers could land hundreds of meters away, stuck in trees or scattered across open terrain with no opportunity of retrieving them.
The whole time British and Commonwealth defenders were dug in with bolt-action Lee-Enfield rifles and belt-fed Vickers machine guns pouring accurate long-range fire from positions that a handgun simply could not reach. But, this quickly turned into a bloodbath. German paratroopers took massive casualties sprinting across open ground trying to locate their containers while Commonwealth soldiers and snipers simply picked them off at range.
Germany technically won Crete, but the losses among the paratroopers were so severe Hitler personally canceled all future large-scale airborne operations. But, Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, secretly kept a weapons development program alive behind Hitler’s back. In December 1941, the Luftwaffe issued what they called the LC-6 specification to the German arms industry.
They wanted a single weapon that could replace the bolt-action rifle, the submachine gun, and the light machine gun all in one compact package. It could not exceed 39.4 inches in length, or weigh significantly more than the standard Kar98k, and it had to fire single shots from a closed bolt for accuracy, switch to fully automatic fire from an open bolt for cooling, and feed from detachable 10- or 20-round magazines.
On top of that, it also had to accept a bayonet and launch rifle grenades. So, then the paratroopers made a decision that would haunt the entire project. The weapon had to fire the full-power 7.92 by 57 mm Mauser cartridge, the same round used in every standard German rifle and machine gun. Now, the Luftwaffe had actually been offered the intermediate 7.
92 by 33 mm Kurz cartridge from the MP 43 program, which was shorter and lighter and would have made recoil far more manageable. The paratroopers flatly rejected it because of what happened on Crete. They had been outranged by British soldiers with full-power .303 caliber rifles and they refused to accept anything with less range or stopping power.
This single decision would define everything about the FG 42. Six manufacturers submitted prototype designs and it was the proposal from Rheinmettal designed by chief engineer named Louis Stange that won the competition. But before we get to the combat, let’s talk about engineering because this is where the differences between the American and German designs really matter.
The BAR operates on a fairly straightforward gas system. Gas is tapped from the barrel and drives a piston that unlocks and cycles and it feeds from a 20-round magazine on the bottom. In its World War II or two configuration, it fires from an open bolt in both automatic modes. The bolt sits all the way to the rear when the gun is cocked.
You pull the trigger and the bolt flies forward, strips a round and chambers it. It is simple and effective, but open bolt firing introduces bolt slam, which means the whole mass of the bolt is crashing forward at the moment you’re trying to aim and that ruined accuracy on individual shots. But the FG 42 had one thing no other weapon in the war could do.
On semi-automatic, it fired from a closed bolt so the bolt was locked forward and the chamber was loaded before you pulled the trigger. This gave you proper rifle accuracy on aimed shots. Flip the selector to automatic and the gun switched to open bolt firing, which let air circulate through the barrel between bursts and helped prevent overheating.
This dual system was ahead of its time and you would not see it become common until decades later. Stange borrowed the rotating bolt concept from the World War I era Lewis light machine gun and built the action around a long stroke gas piston. The stock sat in a perfect straight line with the bore rather than dropping below it like a traditional rifle, which pushed recoil straight back into the shoulder instead of flipping the muzzle upward.
You would not see this layout become standard until the M-16 showed up in the 1960s. But here is what really set the FG 42 apart from the BAR on paper. The magazine fed from the left side rather than the bottom, which kept the profile extremely low when firing prone. It had a folding bipod and a built-in spike bayonet that tucked into a bracket underneath the barrel so nothing snagged during a jump and the whole thing weighed just 9.
3 lb empty in its first model, the type E. That was around the same weight of the M1 Garand. So compare that to the BAR at over 20 lb loaded and you can start to see the trade-off. The BAR had the mass to absorb .30-06 recoil reasonably well, but the FG 42 did not have the mass to handle the full power 7.92 * 57 mm Mauser, which is a very similar cartridge to the .
30-06 in terms of energy. And that mattered enormously in combat, but it also caused a ton of production problems that would quickly start to show. By late 1942, Rheinmetall had produced about 50 working prototypes, but they could not handle mass production. So, the contract went to Heinrich Krieghoff, and because Germany was running short on strategic materials, the original steel in many components had to be swapped for manganese steel.
So, only about 2,000 of the Type E were ever produced. After field reports came back that the lightweight rifle was not sturdy enough for sustained automatic fire, Krieghoff redesigned it into what collectors call the Type G. This revised model was heavier with a wooden buttstock replacing the stamped metal one, and the bipod moved from mid-barrel to the muzzle.
About 5,000 more were built before production costs pushed the program aside in favor of cheaper weapons like the STG 44. Total production across all variants was roughly 7,000 for the entire war. But numbers only tell half the story because both guns had to prove themselves in actual combat. The BAR’s combat reputation was built across every theater of the war over six years of continuous fighting.
In the jungles of Guadalcanal, Marines carried BARs through suffocating tropical heat and seasonal rains. One official report from the Pacific described the BAR as functioning under all conditions with few exceptions, and specifically praised the penetrating power of the .30 caliber round in the jungle. The .30-06 could punch clean through dense tropical vegetation stop a .
45 caliber submachine gun round cold. In the hedgerows of Normandy and the frozen forests of the Ardennes, the story was the same. Lieutenant Colonel John George wrote in his book Shots Fired in Anger that two weeks into Guadalcanal, his unit had thrown away all the accessories and were using the guns completely stripped down because the extra weight was not worth hauling through the jungle.
But this is where the BAR’s greatest strength became its greatest curse. Enemy forces on every front quickly figured out that knocking out the BAR gunner was the fastest way to [ __ ] an American squad. So, BAR gunners became priority targets in every engagement and there was no hiding with that weapon. The average life expectancy of a BAR gunner during sustained combat was reportedly around 30 minutes.
That made it one of the most dangerous assignments in the entire infantry. The BAR man carried the weapon and six pouches on his belt holding two magazines each totaling 240 rounds. His assistant gunner carried additional ammunition and was trained to grab the BAR and keep firing if the primary gunner went down. And every other soldier in the squad was expected to know how to operate the weapon because the odds of the BAR man being killed or wounded were painfully high.
But, soldiers kept volunteering for the job anyway. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, Sergeant Clarence Colson of the 1st Infantry Division crossed Omaha Beach firing his BAR from the hip. His landing craft had grounded 400 yd offshore and the soldiers had to swim in under constant German machine gun fire. Colson reached the shore with one of his gunners, Private Richard Sims, set up behind a stone wall and used the BAR to suppress a German pillbox until the defenders raised a white flag.
He earned the Distinguished Service Cross that day. The most remarkable BAR story of the entire war belongs to Private Wilson Watson. He was a young farmer from Arkansas who enlisted in the Marines in August 1942. And when the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines, 3rd Marine Division landed on Iwo Jima in February 1945, he was assigned as a BAR gunner.
On February 26th, his squad was pinned down by fire from a fortified Japanese pillbox in the rocky ridges. Watson charged it alone firing his BAR into the opening until he was close enough to throw a grenade inside, then ran around to the rear and killed the defenders as they tried to escape.
very next day his platoon got pinned down again at the base of a jagged hill. So, Watson scrambled up the hill under mortar and machine gun fire, reached the crest, and held that exposed position firing from the hip for 15 straight minutes. In those 15 minutes, he killed over 60 Japanese soldiers by himself before his platoon caught up with him.
They called him the one-man regiment of Iwo Jima and he earned the Medal of Honor from President Truman in October 1945. Believe it or not, actor John Wayne later credited Watson’s hip firing style as the direct inspiration for his signature shooting pose in war films. But, the FG 42 had a very different kind of combat debut. Its first deployment was during Operation Oak in September 1943, the famous glider raid to rescue Benito Mussolini.
After Italy signed an armistice with the allies, the Italian government imprisoned Mussolini in a mountain top hotel at Gran Sasso. Here about 200 Carabinieri guarded the place. A force of German paratroopers along with SS commandos under Otto Skorzeny landed by glider on the rocky plateau right next to the hotel.
Photographs from the operation show several paratroopers carrying the brand new FG 42. But the Italian guards surrendered without resistance and not a single shot was fired during the entire raid, so not quite the flashy combat debut. Mussolini was later flown out on a small Fieseler Storch aircraft, but then came the Battle of Monte Cassino and here the gun would finally show how good it could be.
From January to May 1944, the German 1st Parachute Division defended the ground near the ancient monastery against wave after wave of Allied assaults. After Allied bombers destroyed the monastery on February 15th, 1944, the rubble actually gave the German defenders even better cover than the intact building had.
Paratroopers armed with FG 42s fired from the shattered windows and collapsed stone corridors. The compact size of the weapon was perfectly suited for fighting inside those ruins and the full power 7.92 by 57 mm Mauser round could punch through brick and timber that would stop smaller calibers. The allies called these paratroopers the green devils because of their distinctive camouflage jackets and their absolute refusal to give up ground.
They held Monte Cassino for months and only retreated to avoid being outflanked. After Italy, the FG 42 also showed up in Normandy where Allied troops captured enough of them that it created the false impression the gun was being produced in massive numbers. In reality, those 7,000 rifles were spread thin across multiple fronts.
So, there was one thing most people overlook when it comes to the FG 42’s combat performance. That full power cartridge the paratroopers had insisted on was almost impossible to control on automatic fire. At roughly 9 lb, the gun was simply too light for the immense kickback. The 20-round magazine emptied in about 2 seconds at the cyclic rate of around 750 rounds per minute and the barrel was extremely thin to keep the weight down.
So, after about three magazines fired in quick succession, the handguard became dangerously hot. Field reports consistently noted that paratroopers used the FG 42 almost exclusively in semi-automatic mode because sustained bursts were impractical without the bipod on a stable surface. One post-war test by the US Navy in the 1980s confirmed that with the bipod deployed, the FG 42 was no worse than an M16A1 on full auto, but without it, the weapon was extremely difficult to keep on target.
So, the FG 42 turned out to be a phenomenal semi-automatic rifle that could deliver short, controlled bursts when the situation demanded it. But, it was never the light machine gun replacement that the original specification had called for. But, the story of the FG 42 did not end with the war itself. After the German surrendered, American weapons engineers got their hands on captured FG 42s, and they were fascinated.
In 1946, a company called Bridge Tool and Die took a captured Type 2 FG 42 and literally cut it apart. They reinforced the receiver and bolted an MG 42 feed tray onto the left side to create a belt-fed hybrid they called the T44. It was crude and ugly, basically a chopped-up German rifle with another German gun’s feed system attached to it, but it worked well enough to prove the concept was sound.
You see, the BAR had a 20-round magazine and a fixed barrel, and the Browning M1919 was reliable but heavy and awkward in its light machine gun configuration. The US military knew that German machine guns were superior to anything the Americans had used during the war. So, they wanted a new weapon that combined the best features of what they had captured, and this is where the FG 42’s real legacy began.
After testing, the army identified what they wanted, including disintegrating link belts along with a quick-change barrel and the reliable gas system from the FG 42. So, they built a new weapon from the ground up called the T52, which kept the FG 42’s gas-operated rotating bolt and the MG 42’s feed mechanism.
It was now chambered in the experimental T65 cartridge. That cartridge eventually became the 7.62 by 51-mm NATO round, and in January 1957, the T161E3 was officially adopted as the M60 general-purpose machine gun. It weighed 23 pounds, roughly 10 pounds lighter than the old Browning M1919A6 it was replacing.
And if you look at the M60’s layout, you can still see the FG 42 everywhere, from the inline stock to the pistol grip shape to the gas system. It is not the topic of this video, but still interesting to mention that a lot of people who actually use the M60 were not kind about it. The M60 inherited some of the FG 42’s complexity, along with its innovations, and the weapon had a long list of maintenance problems that frustrated American machine gunners for decades.
Some critics argued the US would have been better off licensing the MG 42 design and converting it to NATO caliber, which is essentially what the Germans did with the MG3. But regardless of its flaws, the M60 served from Vietnam through the Gulf War, and some variants even remain in limited use today. Okay, so let’s break down which gun was better, cuz the answer depends entirely on a few things.
If we’re talking which weapon had more impact on the outcome of the war, the BAR wins, and it is not remotely close. Hundreds of thousands were produced, and they served on every front from North Africa to the Pacific to Western Europe. Soldiers trusted the BAR with their lives because in every jungle and harsh setting, the thing just kept working.
The FG 42, by comparison, was issued to maybe a few thousand paratroopers across a handful of engagements, and most German infantry never even saw one in person. But if you are asking which was the better design, the FG 42 wins on almost every count. Its straight-line stock became standard on modern rifles, while its side-feeding magazine kept the shooter’s profile low in a way the bottom-feeding BAR could not match.
The BAR was a 1918 design that the army kept bolting accessories onto for 25 years without fixing its core limitations. But the FG 42 was a much newer design built from scratch around a concept most countries would not fully embrace until another two decades. Now, you could argue the FG 42’s biggest weakness was a problem the designers could not have solved without changing the specification itself.
If they had accepted the intermediate Kurz cartridge, the FG 42 might have been the first truly controllable select-fire weapon of the war, but they wanted range over controllability, and they got exactly what they asked for. The BAR had a similar issue from the opposite direction. It was heavy enough to absorb the .
30-06 recoil reasonably well, but too heavy to be the agile rifle Browning had originally intended. And its fixed barrel and 20-round magazine meant it could never sustain fire where a proper belt-fed machine gun could. So, both guns ended up stuck between two roles, too heavy for one and too limited for the other.
So, you could say that the BAR won the war and the FG 42 won the future. The reliable workhorse that served millions of soldiers on every front got slowly retired and forgotten by the military that depended on it. And the rare experimental rifle that barely saw combat had its guts ripped out and welded to another German gun and turned into the M60 that replaced everything the BAR had been.
And if you want to know just how rare the FG 42 really is, there are fewer than 50 registered examples in the entire United States, and they sell for close to half a million dollars each. The BAR, by comparison, can still be found in surplus stocks around the world. If you enjoyed the video, please consider liking and subscribing.
