Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a beast of a .50 calibre Colt machine gun.
This is specifically an MG52-A, and that is
the later pattern of Colt's commercial, international sale,
.50 calibre machine gun up to World War Two.
So, basically development of this gun, and more directly the cartridge that it uses,
began at the very end of World War One.
The US Army in 1918 requested ... a .50 calibre heavy machine gun cartridge
that could be used both for anti-aircraft and anti-tank use.
Development began right away, the development was done by John Browning.
He basically took his 1917 water-cooled machine gun,
and scaled it up to be more huger.
Development kind of slackened off after World War One ended,
of course there wasn't nearly as much urgency to it.
But the Colt Company continued to work on this project.
They were, after World War One, the sole licensee to manufacture Browning machine guns.
So they kept at this, 1921 they had the first functional practical models,
and they were working with the Army.
The Army ordered like 20 of them in a variety
of configurations for testing and experimentation, kind of like,
"What do we think we want to do with this gun? Where is it appropriate? Where is it suitable?"
They had both water-cooled and air-cooled versions available, and the Army was looking at this.
Well, the one application that it actually sort of got some acceptance from early on with
the US military was coastal anti-aircraft artillery.
And that was with anti-aircraft mounts of water-cooled guns
to give it some sustained-fire capability.
And the idea of an anti-aircraft .50 calibre was that
aircraft are getting more heavily armoured and more durable, and
.30 calibre bullets maybe aren't going to cut it quite so well.
Where this thing is a beast that should have no problem
dropping aircraft out of the air in the 1920s.
So, Colt would make these all the way up until World War Two
for international and domestic commercial sale.
They would continue to work [with] the Army developing the gun further,
and that development track would lead to the M2,
the air-cooled, heavy-barrelled, Browning .50 calibre machine gun that most people are familiar with.
I actually have a couple of videos on the M2. If you're interested,
you can check those out and see where the military development track led.
But this stayed in Colt's catalogue, it was ... put into the catalogue first in 1924 as the Model 1924
that you could order either as a water-cooled or air-cooled gun.
In 1932 they decided to change up the model names,
probably just to make it sound a little less old.
If it's 1932, do you really want to buy the Model of 1924 anything? Nyah, probably not.
So, the water-cooled version became the MG52, the Machine Gun 52.
The aircraft version became the MG53.
And all told, Colt would sell about 11,000 .50 calibre machine guns
total of all types between 1922 and 1939.
Which is really not that many when you divide it out over that many years.
They were selling these things in small quantities to a variety of international clients.
Now it's worth pointing out that FN, Fabrique Nationale, in Belgium
had the licence rights to produce Browning patent guns for Europe.
And that included the machine guns like this one.
Now FN tooled up to make air-cooled Browning .50 calibre guns,
and interestingly they also made them in calibres like 13.2mm Hotchkiss.
But ... there wasn't as much demand for the water-cooled guns.
By the 1930s in particular, this was kind of not really maybe
going to be so good for static, emplaced, water-cooled defence.
But it was looking more interesting for aircraft-mounted guns.
And those would of course be air-cooled models.
So FN tooled up for the air-cooled guns and sold those to people.
When people ordered water-cooled guns from FN, they actually just purchased them from Colt.
So Colt would manufacture the guns and send them to FN,
who would mark them as they desired and ship them off to a final customer.
Now sales were, as I said, pretty sporadic and slow, this was a specialty item,
and not ... something that everyone really wanted, and also a very expensive item.
However, once World War Two became ... a thing, a bunch of orders came in
from a lot of western Allied powers who all of a sudden kind of thought,
"Wow, we're going to need some more guns, what can we get off the shelf right now?"
So, we'll talk about where these went,
because I think this is probably a relatively late production one.
Pre-World War Two, but in this rushed batch of orders from a lot of western countries.
So we'll talk about that in a moment.
But first let's take a look at a couple of the features,
and how this differs from the M2 that we're used to seeing today.
Let's start with the markings here, we have Colt Automatic Machine Gun,
Model MG52-A, calibre .50.
The "-A" indicates that this is actually a dual-feed version of the gun.
Which is to say that the bolt and a number of the other components
have been modified so that it can be set up as either a left-hand feed or a right-hand feed.
That's important if you want to mount this in a vehicle where there are some
space considerations that dictate where the ammunition is going to come from.
Or if you want to set this up as part of a dual mount with two guns.
You would want one to feed from the left, and one to feed from the right.
Beyond that we have Browning patent numbers, Colt's address.
The serial number here: "C" indicates that this is a Colt commercial gun,
serial number is 2133, and the "W" there indicates that it is water cooled.
Although the MG52 designation does as well,
but this allows Colt to track which guns were water and air cooled just by serial number.
Now most of the notable features here are elements that were improved on the M2,
and thus here are different from what the M2 shows.
One of them is the simple charging handle.
Now because this is a dual-feed gun, it's actually set up so that it can have
a charging handle on either side. And right now it's been put together with both of them in place.
Which is fine, you can do that, but you don't have to.
However this is just a straight pull-it-back charging handle,
like the Model of 1917 .30 calibre gun.
With the M2 the Army would address the issue of it's really hard to actually charge this thing,
because it takes a lot of straight-line force to unlock the gun and pull the barrel back.
The M2 would have a camming charging handle,
where the top bit gives you a bunch of extra leverage to unlock the gun, and then pull it back.
This ...
(it helps if I'm not dragging the other charging handle),
but this guy takes some real effort, there we go, to unlock.
In that vein we also have a front trunnion here
that is specific to a water-cooled gun.
So the trunnion that's riveted onto the side plates here, includes the back of the water jacket.
One of the key ... elements of the M2 design is that it was a universal receiver.
Meaning that you could swap the guns between water cooled and air cooled
all on the same receiver.
What Colt had done before that for these commercial pattern guns
is they had a setup, a receiver and trunnion block, for water cooled,
and a separate one for air cooled.
And they were different, which means that's logistically less easy for them to manufacture.
It's more overhead, more production equipment.
This is part of why FN didn't set up production of water-cooled guns.
And they couldn't simply adapt the air-cooled ones to water jackets.
So again, the M2 would refine this and make them universal.
Taking a look at the internals here, you can see two tracks on the bolt.
And this is to allow the feed system to be set up for either left or right-hand feed.
You would take this plate and flip it between this path and that path.
That's why you have two charging handles, you can set up whichever one you want.
And then if we look here,
there are a couple of elements on each side of the gun
that are specific to whichever side feed that it's being set up for.
So you have these pawls on this side that hold the belt in place.
If you want to switch the feed, you pull this pin out,
and you can move these pawls over to this side.
On this side we have a cartridge stop, front and back,
that stop the belt when it comes to the proper location.
So you would want to pull those out and replace them with pawls on the other side.
This isn't a gun that can be ... hot swapped with all the parts that are already in it.
You would need some replacement bits,
like you'd need different cartridge stops to fit on the opposite side of the gun.
And you would also need a couple of different parts in the top cover.
But the important element is that parts like the bolt and the receiver are universal.
The rear sight is pretty cool, this is just like the rear sight on an early 1917 Browning.
Which makes sense because this is basically a 1924 Browning.
Very similar to what the US military was using on the Benét-Mercié light machine guns.
You've got all sorts of different options for notch sighting, aperture sighting,
there's a battle-sight aperture there. And it goes out to 2,600 yards.
... Our windage rotates the entire thing on its base. It's a really cool sight.
Totally, really, impractical, and you would see this also massively simplified on the M2.
The front sight is a square post inside a massive protective shield.
It is windage adjustable right there with a screw.
And there's the front sight itself nestled in there.
There is no muzzle device on the gun, it doesn't need a booster,
the .50 is powerful enough to run the gun.
We just have a drain plug on the bottom, and also a water port.
So ...
if I flip this over, what we have here is the steam condenser hose port.
So when you fire the gun a bunch,
and by the way this takes two gallons of water in the water jacket.
And if you just start rapid firing the gun,
that's enough to go for about 500 rounds before you have to top it back up.
If you do that you're going to turn all that water into steam,
which you can then capture through a hose here and run into a condensing tank.
Colt did make a ... manually operated pump system for multi-gun mounts,
where you could ... have a crew member cycling water through the water jackets
if you're going to be doing a lot of sustained fire.
The other thing here is just a drain plug.
So if you're done shooting and you need to get the water out,
that's where it can come out.
Going to the back of the gun, we have a number of cool elements.
Of course you've got your trigger pad right there.
There is actually a manual safety, unlike the M2s.
So that side is safe, and it's just a cross bolt that blocks ... there we go, that side is fire.
And that just blocks the trigger pad from going down.
Below that we have this interesting control.
This is the lever that allows you to pull the spade grips off.
This, ... think of it like a little screwdriver attachment on the inside of the gun
that allows you to open (this direction) or close (this direction)
the buffer inside the barrel extension.
So this allows you to adjust the functionality of the gun a little bit,
and this is something that would go away on the M2 as not necessary.
In fact I can show you that pretty easily.
If I lift this up I can just slide the spade grips up and off the gun.
And this lever right here (which moves nice and freely when the spade grips are off),
controls that blade,
which fits into this and allows you to adjust the buffer there.
As far as the internals go, this is basically identical to the M2.
So we have our recoil spring here, just like the M2 that is self-contained.
And this pin just locks into a hole in the side of the receiver.
So there's that.
We can then pull the bolt back to this position,
and then the two charging handles come right out.
And then I can just pull the bolt out the back of the gun.
Basically just an M2 bolt. There's the extractor.
Just like the M2, these early pattern .50s require manual adjustment of timing and headspace.
But if you're interested in that, you can check out my
shooting video on the M2 where we go through that process.
Alright, so between 1939 and 1941 hundreds of these guns, if not thousands,
definitely hundreds, were ordered by countries including Canada, Norway, Great Britain.
The Netherlands bought a bunch of them for the Dutch East Indies.
These are primarily MG53s, the aircraft guns,
but they do include a bunch of MG52s.
In particular Canada bought 374 of them right on the outbreak of war.
Now this one's in really gorgeous condition,
it almost certainly didn't see heavy active combat service anywhere.
But I think there's probably a pretty good chance that this is one of those guns
that was bought right at the outbreak of World War Two,
just based on the relatively high serial number for the model.
It's very cool to get a chance to look at these.
Of course, they are very scarce in the United States,
being far outnumbered by M2 ... US military pattern guns.
So, a neat look at kind of the origins of the .50 calibre machine gun from Colt.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.