The Madsen light machine gun is one of the stranger
light machine guns designed out there, and this
is without a doubt the strangest version
of the Madsen light machine gun.
[ Belt-fed Madsen LMG ]
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
where they have all the best cool collectible machine guns,
and we're looking at a German Luftwaffe
contract - not really contract - a German Luftwaffe
belt-fed Madsen aircraft machine gun.
This thing is the culmination of several levels of strange.
So let's start at the beginning, the Madsen light machine gun was one of the very first
practical, effective, reliable and successful light machine guns developed.
It was first patented and first manufactured in 1902, it saw use in World War One.
And it was a machine gun that was purchased in relatively small numbers
by a ton of second and third tier military forces all the way through to the 1950s.
Like the first version of the Madsen was 1902,
the last actual designated model version I believe was the Model 1950.
Like it started before World War One, it was still in production
coming up with new designs to sell to people after World War Two.
from the very outset put Madsen light machine guns on ... the aircraft that it was arming.
At first these were just standard ground guns,
but in the mid-1920s they start looking for something
that's a little more suitable, a little better for aviation use.
And one of the main elements of an aviation machine gun,
whether it's on an aircraft or anti-aircraft, is you want a high rate of fire.
Because in this sort of aerial engagement
you generally have a very short window where you are actually lined up on target
and you're in the right position and you have the opportunity to fire.
And so you want a high rate of fire gun to get as many bullets out there as quickly as possible
to get the best chance of making an actual hit.
You are not doing sustained fire, you are not firing long continuous extended bursts.
It's - got an opportunity now, make a shot,
and then the planes both move and the window is closed.
So in the 1920s the Danes did experiment with the Vickers gun,
but Madsen was able to make some modifications to the Madsen gun.
I should say DISA, d-i-s-a, it's the Danish Industrial Syndicate,
they are the manufacturers of the Madsen gun.
They were able to make some modifications to the design
and get the rate of fire up to about 800 rounds a minute, and that was enough
to be a serious competitor, a contender for an aviation machine gun.
And the Danes would end up using high rate of fire Madsen guns.
... Most people loved the Vickers, the Danes weren't that enthralled
with the Vickers gun for aircraft. So they used Madsens instead.
Now it's kind of interesting, is through the 1920s there was a competition
for air force contracts, but ... as best I can tell it was between
the Danish Army technical services and the DISA factory.
And both of these groups were modifying Madsen light machine guns.
But they were doing various different versions of them,
with different pros and cons and different expenses.
So the first ones that were adopted came from the army actually.
And they had a high rate of fire gun and they developed a drum magazine to use with it.
Typical Madsens have box magazines of 20 to 30 rounds capacity.
Well, the Army came up with a drum and that gave them the capacity to go with the high rate of fire.
And in 1924 or 1927 the Danish government
actually purchased those and equipped a bunch of their aircraft with them.
Now by 1930 they changed their minds and DISA had come up with this.
It is a belt-fed adaptation of the Madsen.
And the Danish Air Force decided that was better, they bought some of them,
and then it appears they actually went back and retrofitted their earlier
drum-fed guns to this belt-fed design.
And by the time World War Two starts, the Danes have a grand total of 139 of these things.
They've got 131 of them in flexible mounts,
and another ... 31 of them in fixed mounts.
So the number in the Danish Air Force was pretty tiny.
However, the Madsen as I said was a very popular gun for export sales.
And in 1940 when the German occupation of Denmark started,
the DISA company was actually in the process of making a
fairly substantial order of these [belt-fed guns] for Hungary. ...
And when the Germans occupied the country they took over DISA,
and they basically said, "Yep, right, keep on making those, but now we're taking them."
And so the Luftwaffe actually acquired several thousand of these guns early in World War Two.
A couple of markings on the side here, so Madsen MG is a pretty obvious one.
This is our serial number, 2742.
I've seen pictures of a couple of other examples of these guns,
the serial number is different on each, this number is the same on each.
Fl 206000, I am pretty sure that that is a Luftwaffe like item/inventory number.
Because I've seen reference to this sort of number on some non-gun items
that the Luftwaffe had, gauges, devices, just various things
that they would have had to design and acquire and account for.
So I'm not an expert on the Luftwaffe's bureaucracy specifically,
but pretty sure that's what we've got here. And then this is a Luftwaffe inspection mark.
So that's it for markings,
other than an additional 2742 serial number
matching on the ... trigger assembly of the gun.
This gun kind of begs the question of where do I even start?
Originally this was intended to be an aircraft gun,
and it was then slightly re-purposed by the Germans to be an anti-aircraft gun.
So the extended charging handle here is very much an aircraft modification.
It's in the same location as a regular Madsen charging handle,
but it is much extended to make it easier to grab.
A shoulder stock is kind of applicable to both roles, same with the pistol grip.
Typical Madsen guns have a straight-wrist stock coming out the back here.
The pistol grip is frankly a lot handier,
and for an aircraft use you don't want a full shoulder stock because it takes up space.
And so instead you've got the thing on a mount with a pistol grip.
Now the Germans had these guns set up with barrel shrouds
that could accommodate MG 34 bipods, and that's what we've got here.
So you've got two little studs to fold the bipod legs up.
You can attach the bipod either to the back or to the front.
These were probably used on anti-aircraft tripods more than they were used on actual bipods.
And of course you can see that this also has anti-aircraft sights set up on it.
However, for the Germans the bipod and the tripod
used the exact same mounting interface, so this works for either one.
That being said, what makes this gun really interesting to me
is the fact that it's a belt-fed Madsen.
So traditionally the Madsen has a top-mounted box magazine right here,
and they had to go through a lot to convert it to use belts.
So let's start by taking this belt box off.
There is a latch holding the belt box in place right over here.
And if I push that forward I can then lift the box out.
And here's your first sign that there's something really weird going on
(well, besides the total bizarre look of the Madsen in general).
There are feed pawls built into the belt box itself.
Half the feed system is on the gun, and the other half is right here on the box.
So this is where the magazine well is typically located on a Madsen gun.
And it's a top-mounted magazine, and it just drops cartridges essentially into a little feed trough,
from whence they get dropped into the gun.
Now mechanically the Madsen is a really unusual design.
... I guess easiest way to think about it
is to consider it a full-auto adaptation of the Martini-Henry.
It's basically a short-recoil falling-block action.
So I have a separate video about the ... mechanical function and disassembly of a regular Madsen.
I strongly recommend checking that out if you haven't seen it.
What they've done here is take off the ... magazine well
and attach a system to feed belts.
So if we look at this, this is the feed pawl that's actually going to pull the belt down.
So when I cycle the action here. ...
Your box would normally hold I believe a 100 round belt of metallic link cartridges.
They look very similar to any other standard .30 calibre machine gun link.
And the feed pawl here is going to drop down over these, grab a cartridge, pull it up.
These are going to prevent the belt from being pulled too far up.
And these here on the gun are going to prevent the belt from being pulled back down.
So the problem is because the magazine well was originally kind of
slapped on the side of the gun,
there isn't a mechanical way to build the whole feed system (really, kind of, sort of) into the gun
without having it take up a lot of extra space.
And then you have to find somewhere else to put the feed box, where do you store the belt?
So this system allows the belt to be stored very conveniently
right up tight on the side of the gun.
The first thing that happens when you gaze upon a belt-fed Madsen
is your eyes glaze over with all of the weird bits and pieces sticking out of it.
And then - slowly - you can start to assess, OK, what do things do?
Like this, this is the catch that holds the box in.
These are the two lugs that attach to the little trunnion pivots on the belt box.
This is the feed pawl that's going to pull the belt up.
These are the holding pawls that prevent the belt from going back down.
This is actually our ... fire selector. The ejection port is down here.
But when you look closely you'll notice that this has a port for the cartridge
that's like sized for maybe .30 carbine, and you think to yourself this is ... an 8x57 Mauser round.
That's what this gun is chambered for, how does it go in that?
And the answer is the belt presents the cartridges like this.
They come up here and they are held in this, the feed position.
And as the bolt comes forward, these little grabby arms
(very much like a PK for example)
those are actually reciprocating as the bolt is cycling.
So when you are feeding a new cartridge in the cartridge gets presented here,
and then (I don't want this to feed in ...)
but then ... the bolt is going to come the rest of the way forward
and these claws snap around the extractor rim of the cartridge.
When it fires the next round, it is going to pull that substantially backward.
In fact it's going to pull this cartridge far enough backward
that the nose tips in, and goes in right there.
The cartridge is then pushed into place by a feed rammer arm.
You can see that rammer right there.
That pushes the cartridge all the way into the chamber.
You can see this is now bringing up the next round into position.
The ... little hands come forward to grab the rim of the next cartridge.
When the bolt cycles back it is pulling the empty case out
and running it down a trough inside here to spit out through the bottom.
You can see that trough in here, right there, as I pull the bolt back.
And the now empty links have nowhere to go.
And they are just pushed further upward by the next cartridges in the belt,
forcing them up and around that ejection chute.
Madsen disassembly begins with this latch here.
I rotate it all the way up and I can lift up the top cover.
So if you need to access the top of the action you can do that, this is for standard Madsens as well.
You can see that the chute there is fixed to the top cover.
Now I can also take this and pull it out, it is captive.
And then ... the whole firing and charging handle assembly of the gun pivots down at that point.
The recoil spring is held in this tube, normally it would go down into the stock.
But there is no stock on the aircraft version, so they relocated the spring to up here.
This is an extension from the spring, and this acts on the bolt carrier.
This is a truly, wonderfully, bizarre gun.
And I apologise to you guys that I'm not going to pull it apart any further,
but I'm really a bit concerned about being able to get everything back together here.
And this gun doesn't belong to me, ... in fact it doesn't belong to Morphy's either,
it has already sold to a buyer at auction.
So a big congratulations to the owner of this gun, they've got something terrifically cool.
But they are such an unknown (you might say a forgotten) weapon today.
Apparently they were primarily used by the Luftwaffe for airfield defence.
And I suspect while they've got the bipod mounting setup,
they were probably used on anti-aircraft mounts more.
Those anti-aircraft mounts use the exact same mounting points as the bipod.
So what you've got here could just drop right onto a German anti-aircraft tripod,
and I suspect that's how they were primarily used.
And most of them probably didn't see much actual use or firing.
So, this is the first one that I've seen in the United States.
There might be a couple more, but they are extremely rare guns here, and just stupidly cool.
So a big thanks to Morphy's for having this gun, for finding it,
and for making it available for us to take a look at.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.