Meet the Browning M2: The Mother of All Machine Guns

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The weapon’s effective range is 6,000 feet, but its maximum range is four miles.

When Lauren Bacall Wellington served during the Iraq War, the former Army sergeant and combat medic did more than treat the wounded.

Wellington spent her 13-month deployment from 2007 to 2008 with the 1st Cavalry Division at Forward Operating Bases Falcon—just south of Baghdad—and Prosperity, in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

She often pulled guard duty at the main gate with a Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun, looking out for suicide car bombs.

Does the classic weapon look intimidating? “It does when I am behind it,” Wellington said. “It’s a huge machine gun with a lot of power. If I had a choice between running toward a 50-cal or toward the zombies, I would run toward the zombies.”

The Browning M2 heavy machine gun—“Ma Deuce” or “50-cal” to the troops—casts a long shadow over U.S. military history.

A wounded Audie Murphy, one of America’s most decorated soldiers, fired one from atop a burning tank destroyer and held off six tanks and 250 German soldiers for more than hour during a battle in eastern France, an act of bravery that won him the Medal of Honor.

In 2003, Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith repeated Murphy’s feat by climbing on top of an armored vehicle and firing a 50-cal at more than 100 enemy soldiers that had pinned down his platoon.

Smith died in the firefight, so his Medal of Honor was posthumous.

The M2 has been in production since 1933—the longest service record of any weapon in the U.S. inventory, according to Gordon Rottman, author of Browning .50-Caliber Machine Guns. Its sheer firepower and reliability ensure that the Ma Deuce will be around for years to come.

“Witnessing the down-range effects of the .50-caliber bullet is an eye-opening experience,” writes Rottman in the definitive guide to the gun. “There are few who can say they were wounded by a .50-cal. Those hit seldom say much more.”

In World War I, both the French and British possessed large-caliber machine guns like the Hotchkiss, but American machine guns only fired rifle-size calibers. American Expeditionary Force commander Gen. John Pershing believed that the Army needed a heavy machine gun to maintain parity with rival forces.