Meet the Browning Automatic Rifle: The Best Machine Gun of All Time?

Paul Richard Huard

Security,

Hard-hitting and reliable, the BAR put portable firepower in the hands of ordinary G.I.s

World War I is often called “the machine gun war” because of the devastating use of automatic weapons such as the Maxim gun. It’s also when some of the drastic developments in machine gun technology occurred.

Artillery fire actually killed more men than machine guns, but statistics simply don’t convey the horror of European armies on the Western Front facing automatic fire. For example, during just one day in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme the British lost 21,000 men – many of them killed by Spandau machine guns, the German version of the Maxim. 

But the Maxim was heavy. It weighed 60 pounds before it was loaded with an ammunition belt and water in its cooling jacket, and it took four to six men to move and operate it.

It didn’t take long for both military men and weapons designers to consider what it would be like to deliver “walking fire” with a lightweight, man-portable automatic weapon.

The French attempt in 1918 was called the Chauchat, named after chief designer Col. Louis Chauchat. The 8 x 51-millimeter Chauchat was portable — it weighed about 20 pounds — and had a detachable box magazine. It could fire in both semi-automatic and full-auto … and it was piece of crap.

Its flimsy metal parts and a magazine that was open on one side were cost-cutting decisions made by individuals clueless about how filth from the mud-clogged trenches caused the Chauchat to malfunction frequently.  Soldiers issued the Chauchat referred to it as “damned and jammed.”

But by then, the United States had entered the Great War. That not only meant the influx of American manpower but also the nation’s industrial might and ingenuity — including the formidable abilities of John Moses Browning, the Thomas Edison of weapons design.

The result was the Browning Automatic Rifle, one of the most influential and frequently-used machine guns ever designed.