Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to talk briefly about the United States attempt to convert
the MG 42 into .30-06 calibre, as well as kind of what happened to the MG 42 after World War Two.
Why wasn't it more widely used by the Allies? When we look at the MG 42 today,
it typically has this reputation as being one of the best machine guns of World War Two.
It was one of the first guns, well after the MG 34, but in German service it really kind of was the leading edge
of the general-purpose or universal machine gun concept actually put into practical service.
And the both the 34 and the MG 42 served the German military very well during World War Two.
So it's a valid question, like, why didn't the US put any real work into trying to duplicate that gun?
So, first off of course, the US did make an attempt to re-engineer the gun to .30-06. This is the T24.
And ... this didn't happen right at the beginning of the war, it took a little bit of time
before the US had actually captured some examples of the MG 42 to get an idea for what it was,
to have a basis for redesigning or re-engineering it.
In 1943 there was a contract given to the ... Saginaw Steering Gear Division of GM to
re-engineer the MG 42 and produce two examples in .30-06 calibre for testing.
Now it's important I think to put this in a little bit of chronological context,
because at this point converting the MG 42 was not a huge priority for Saginaw.
They had ... been building a lot of Browning machine guns, 1919s in particular.
And when they got this contract to do the R&D work for the 42,
they had also just gotten a big contract to take on production of the M1 carbine.
So they had a lot going on, and they had you know a couple of these big projects that were
well proven, they knew they were going to make money, they could handle them.
And then someone also tosses onto their plate this experimental thing, like, "Yeah, maybe we want to try out this."
So, I think they actually subcontracted a lot of the engineering work, the drafting and designing to some other firms.
Ultimately they did produce the two requested guns and ... it was something like a 24,000 dollar contract,
so these are expensive guns to convert, and convert is what they did.
Both of the Saginaw produced guns had mostly German parts.
They still had German receivers, the barrels of course were new,
some of the feed components had been changed up to accommodate .30-06,
the buttstocks were new, interestingly, and actually a little bit shorter.
They took off the original sights.
They replaced the sights on one of the guns with BAR sights just so they could do some accuracy testing.
But by January of 1944 the two guns were delivered to Springfield for testing,
and in February of '44 they were actually tested. And the testing did not go well.
... Like, the common view of this among people who are familiar with the T24, "If you don't know anything else
you know that, like, they made the ejection port too small because they didn't change it
... from 8mm Mauser length to .30-06 length, and how could they be so stupid?"
It's really not that simple. They did extend the ejection port,
however the ejection port on the MG 42 isn't exactly huge to begin with, and because they did stick with
original German receivers there was only so much larger that they could make it.
So the guns did mostly function.
What Springfield found in testing is that they were actually pretty decent in 2 and 3 round bursts,
but they started having a lot of problems in longer sustained fire. And specifically it was primarily failures to eject.
I've seen some speculation among knowledgeable folks that part of this problem was actually cases coming out of the gun,
hitting the trigger guard and bouncing back in just slightly and getting caught in the ejection port.
That's possible. Obviously I haven't done any actual shooting with a T24, because only two of them exist.
So I can't say for sure, but I do actually have the complete text of the ... trials report
available on ForgottenWeapons.com, so if you want to read through it and see exactly what
every malfunction was, I have a link to that PDF in the description text below.
Ultimately, the final part of the test that the guns got to was an endurance trial. It was supposed to be 10,000 rounds.
I should point out, by the way, only one of the two guns got to that point.
The headspace on the number two gun that they got was wildly excessive. Like someone screwed up something,
and that should've been caught before the gun was delivered to Springfield, but it wasn't.
And they ended up using the number two gun basically as a source of spare parts
to keep the number one gun running through the test.
In the endurance trials the gun got through just over 1,500 rounds fired, which is OK, not bad.
Except that it had 51 malfunctions in the process, which is, OK pretty bad.
So, that puts us into like the spring of 1944. At this point the war is going very well for the United States,
it doesn't look like we're actually going to lose the war with Germany.
There's not necessarily a lot of desire for a new machine gun. In retrospect we look at this and we say,
"Oh, this universal general-purpose machine gun concept was brilliant and clearly the way of the future."
But during World War Two the US wasn't using it, and had set up all of its organisational doctrines
around the semi-automatic rifle that we had and the Browning light and heavy machine guns.
Remember in World War Two and into Korea the US is still using Browning 1917A1 water-cooled
heavy machine guns for the equivalent role that the Germans put the MG 42 or 34 on a Lafette mount for.
So the US has all of the elements that it thinks are necessary,
the US also specifically thinks that the rate of fire on the MG 42 is stupid, that it's way too high.
The Browning rate of fire was about 600 rounds a minute, when these two Saginaw
.30-06 calibre T24s were built, one of the considerations was that they needed to have a lower rate of fire.
So the goal was actually 350 rounds a minute, down from the 1,200 to 1,500 that the MG 42 was getting.
They didn't quite get that.The production guns actually had a rate of fire about 600, which was about the same as the Brownings.
And this also was probably something that contributed to the unreliability of these conversions.
They had a much heavier bolt and there ... hadn't been any iterative testing.
They only built two guns. To get a conversion like this working well generally requires
several iterations and, you know, a bunch of different test examples.
They put together their best effort, best kind of "low effort" effort,
to redesign the gun, new calibre, reduce the rate of fire. It's not surprising that it had problems.
What really was the reason that the 42 wasn't further worked on in US service is there didn't seem to be a whole lot of need for it.
The US Army considered the Brownings to be more reliable guns. They preferred the rate of fire.
They had the gun already in production. And objectively looking at the war they're like,
"Why should we adopt the guns that the losing side is using. Because it doesn't seem to be hurting us at this point."
Alright, now let's talk about what happened after World War Two.
So in the wake of the war, of course, there would be a bunch of small arms development and R&D based on,
"What are the lessons that we learned from this big war? How do we apply them to a new generation of small arms?"
However, this would not happen immediately. Some of the R&D would start happening immediately,
but the incentive to actually start rearming, re-equipping military forces on a large scale didn't exist in the late '40s.
There was a ton of war materiel already out there.
It didn't look like it was going to be, you know, an imminent need.
Just, you know what, we've spent enough money, let's like rebuild all the countries, rebuild people's economies rather than
immediately go out and try and replace all our small arms. So the US would stick with the Browning machine guns and the BAR.
Through the Korean War all of those were in service, and the Brownings in particular were very much liked in service in Korea.
There still didn't seem to be, within US Army doctrine, a real need for a new general-purpose style of machine gun.
Ultimately that would come. 1954 is when the US Army formally started looking for a GPMG,
and what they would adopt would be the M60. Now the M60 of course had been in development for a while,
and it was fundamentally the action of the FG 42 combined with the feed system of the MG 42.
So we do see some use of elements of the MG 42 in post-war American small arms.
Now, if we look at other countries, we're going to see the British went and started investigating the Taden gun (or TADEN gun).
Which was going to be in .280 calibre, and it was going to be the light machine gun ... counterpart to the EM-2 rifle.
And that was effectively a belt-fed Bren gun. That would get scrapped when the EM-2 got scrapped.
They didn't think it would be effective to convert it to 7.62 NATO.
Which brings me to 7.62 NATO, which for a lot of the Western powers was kind of a big hang-up.
Once you see that the NATO organisation is developing and wants to have small arms standardisation,
it doesn't make a lot of sense to go and spend a lot of money adopting something that might
very well get changed within just a couple years if NATO decides to adopt something different.
So I think we see a bit of stagnation, or a bit of hesitation, on small arms development
while waiting for at least NATO calibre decisions. What would ultimately become the 7.62mm NATO.
There are a couple of countries that went ahead and continued...
well ... a lot of course continued to use existing World War Two hardware.
There are a few that took that and converted it to other cartridges, Scandinavia in particular.
Norway converted MG 34s to .30-06, Norway actually looked at converting MG 42s to .30-06.
Shortly after the war they did actually order a couple thousand barrels, but there appears to have been
... a miscommunication within the Norwegian military community.
They actually ended up selling off their stock of MG 42s, and then ordering conversion barrels,
and then ultimately they would convert the MG 42 barrels into .30-06 calibre MG 34 barrels.
Long story, but the Norwegians kind of bypassed converting the 42 for that reason.
The Finns actually looked at converting the MG 42 into 7.62x54 rimmed.
And they did this during World War Two, they were actually testing that conversion in 1943.
And for them it worked really well as one kind of might expect that it could.
The big ... challenge in that was developing a push through belt for the 54 rimmed cartridge,
which Arno Lahti, brother of Aimo Lahti, successfully pulled off, and the Finns were ready to adopt that.
They wanted to buy a couple thousand MG 42 receivers from the Germans to build the guns on.
This was now at this time 1944, and Germany rejected that request. Probably because,
while they were producing a lot of 42s, they wanted to keep them all for themselves.
So that conversion never ended up happening, but it could have. ...
There are a couple of these MG 42 conversions that, not quite the right place at the right time, but otherwise had potential.
A little bit of a funny anecdote. The German Bundeswehr retained the MG 42,
and then went to purchase new ones from Rheinmetall in the '50s, after the war, once they were allowed to start rearming.
Interestingly, ... like Grossfuss, the guy who had originally ... the designer of the MG42,
came to Rheinmetall and basically said, "Hey, you're building guns on my patent. You owe me a royalty."
And Rheinmetall went back to him and went, "What are you talking about? Like this gun was developed by the Wehrmacht,
it's a, you know, they did all the development, ... we don't owe you a royalty, the Wehrmacht took care of all that."
And Grossfuss came back and went,
"Well, so you're basically just saying that the Bundeswehr is the modern incarnation of the Wehrmacht, right?"
And the Bundeswehr went, "Mmm, um, there are your royalties, just - let's not talk about that."
So the Germans would continue to use the MG 42, and then the MG 3 which came
... well after the war, after NATO had adopted the 7.62 NATO cartridge.
If we look at the French, a country that wasn't, as it turned out, going to be all that interested or concerned about NATO standardisation.
They also tested the MG 42. And when the French went to develop a new general-purpose machine gun after the war,
and they had better reason to do so quickly than most of the other countries, because
as of World War Two the French were still using the Hotchkiss 1914 as their heavy gun.
That was well and truly obsolete by that point, it was still using the 8mm Lebel cartridge,
... they really just needed to get rid of that thing after World War Two.
So they examined the MG 42s. Once they started a machine gun trial, one of the guns
that was presented was basically a French version of the MG 42.
Ultimately they didn't take that. They went with a lever delayed, ... delayed blowback gun instead made by Châtellerault.
Which however used the MG 42 feed system and also the MG 42 trigger mechanism.
So we do see the MG 42's influence staying and, you know, continuing to see use in France.
And then of course, probably the elephant in the room, is the FN MAG,
which is the gun that much of NATO did end up adopting. So where did the MAG come from?
Well mechanically speaking, the FN MAG is basically an upside-down BAR that is belt-fed instead of magazine-fed.
There have been a lot of experiments with producing a belt-fed version of the BAR.
The US started experimenting with that as early as 1933,
none of the guns were quite all that reliable, not quite successful. They kept iterating them
and in fact the US was experimenting with that right up to the middle of World War Two before they finally gave up on it and said,
"Look, we've spent a lot of time, we've done a lot of iterations on this design and we just can't quite get it
to the point where it's reliable and actually better than our Browning light and heavy machineguns.
So we'll just, OK, fine, forget about it." 1944 the US stopped working on that project.
After the war it would come back.
The Swedes, who of course had a license to build the BAR, the Swedes started experimenting with a belt-fed version of the BAR,
because they thought that would be a really good weapon for them.
They were unable to get it to work reliably, and they went to FN in the 1950s to say,
"Hey, ... like you're the people who know about the BAR, we bought our licence from you, you make these,
you've been working on them for decades, would you be interested in doing a belt-fed version of the BAR for us?"
And FN looked at that project and said, "Why yes, yes I think we can do that."
And so FN took the project on and ... that gun was designed
by basically Dieudonné Saive's protégé, [Ernest Vervier] the guy who took over from him.
And it was introduced in 1957 and FN managed to make that thing very reliable and very successful.
And we would see that gun finally get adopted by ... a lot of the smaller countries.
So a lot of the big countries, the major military powers, would go other directions.
The US went to the M60, the Germans kept the MG 42, the Austrians would keep the MG 42,
the Italians would keep the MG 42, the French developed the AA-52 on their own.
The British are a little bit of an outlier here, in that the British ... actually were testing ... they wanted to test the MG 42.
They found that British proof loads were a bit stronger than German proof loads, and they had some issues with kabooms
before they even had a chance to test the guns. And then they ... also had their own version of a belt-fed Bren
that was looking decent. But they kind of put that all on hold pending NATO cartridge adoption.
And then when they finally did start testing guns they had access to ... FN MAGs,
and the FN MAG ended up winning their trial. So the British would adopt that.
The Russians of course are on a different cartridge system, so they're not really part of this question.
But they would adopt the PK in 1961 which is the same concept as the MG 42, a universal machine gun.
So, ultimately what I'm kind of rambling around saying is that the universal machine gun concept
would ultimately be seen as the modern next step in small arms development and, you know, small unit organisation.
But there would be a window of 15 years, ... 10 to 15 years, before it would actually happen.
And that comes from the economic cost of World War Two delaying any sort of real adoption of new firearms.
Along with the development of NATO and its standardisation ... incentivising people to wait,
figure out what the standard's going to be, and then ... figure out what gun you're gonna use.
And just the development cycle of firearms.
10 years is kind of a good rule of thumb to actually develop a fully functional new military small arm.
If you look at the development cycle of rifles, machine guns, ... maybe a little less on the submachine guns.
But rifles and machine guns, if it takes a lot less than 10 years, chances are
the gun's gonna have some problems once it actually comes into service.
If we look at the AK, you know, ... the AKM isn't around until the mid '50s,
despite being in development from the late '40s, about ten years there.
... Well the M60 takes about 10 years, the M14 takes about 10 years.
The FN FAL is introduced in the early '50s, but its development begins 1944, 1945
with some of the FN developmental work being done in Britain.
So it's not surprising to me that since it wasn't decided to adopt just a simple conversion of the MG 42,
any new gun is going to take, call it 10 years before it's really effective and in a position to be adopted on a wide scale.
So, that has been a little bit rambley I think, but hopefully there's some interesting information in there for you guys.
Hopefully you enjoyed watching.
Thank you, and we'll be back tomorrow with another Forgotten Weapon.