Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
Today we're out at the range doing some shooting with a German World War Two MG34.
This was the standard machine gun of the German army going into World War Two.
It was a high quality gun, it was largely made of milled components, fairly expensive to produce.
Which is why they ended up replacing it with the MG42 later on.
But this saw extensive service all the way through World War Two.
Loading procedure on this: we are going to open up the top cover,
we want the bolt all the way back, we want the charging handle all the way forward,
So if I dry fire this, that's how ... we have it in this position.
Bolt back, handle forward. We're going to go ahead and set
a belt in like this, you want the links up,
and then I want to make sure that the top cover here is all the way over to the right.
Put it down, latch it in place. We're good to go.
Lift up my sight.
Now one interesting thing about the MG34 is it actually has a dual trigger in it.
Pulling just the top portion of the trigger fires a single shot,
and pulling ... the second little trigger down there on the bottom
fires full automatic. So if I just pull the top,
I get single shots. Pull all the way down at the bottom here,
and I get a nice burst.
So the 34 was an extremely high-quality gun, as I said.
They're outstanding to shoot, they have a pretty nice moderate, moderate high rate of fire.
Just fantastic general-purpose machine gun.
Alright, so we're done shooting the 34. Now we're going to take a look at the German MG42.
This is the machine gun that was brought in to service to replace the MG34, and ...
it never did fully replace the 34.
For a long time ... the two guns were built in tandem.
Now the MG42 is made largely of metal stampings for the receiver.
This made it significantly cheaper to manufacture.
The other thing that the 42 did, that the 34 didn't, was have a significantly higher cyclic rate.
The original early-war MG42s had a cyclic rate of about 1,200 rounds a minute.
Which is really pretty phenomenally fast.
The idea was to make it basically impossible for anyone to run through
a field of machine-gun fire. Which is something that could happen
with some of the Allied guns like the Vickers, or the Maxim, or the Brownings, which had slower rates of fire.
Now 1,200 rounds a minute was really too fast.
What tended to occasionally happen was the locking rollers would engage
and actually bounce in slightly and allow the gun to fire out of battery from time to time.
And that's obviously a problem.
This particular gun has a modified bolt, it has a helper spring on the two locking plugs [??],
which ensures that it won't fire out of battery, but it does slow the cyclic rate down to about 950.
Anyway, let's do some shooting.
So to load the MG42 up, we bring the top cover up, we want the bolt all the way back.
We want the bolt handle forward. We need to make sure the feed tray is down, top cover is up.
I'm going to ...
take a belt of ammo, lay it in there
Bring our top cover ... we want to make sure that this is all the way over,
bring our top cover down, latch it in place. It fires from an open bolt, so we're all ready to go.
This thing's really impressive. Goes through ammo fast, it went through spare barrels fast.
In fact, let me empty the belt out here, and I'll show you how we go about changing the barrel.
Alright, to change the barrel out on the MG42 is actually a pretty simple procedure.
And it was designed so that the gunner could do it from behind the gun,
without having to expose himself to enemy fire any more.
So, we need to have the bolt all the way back,
and we have this latch on the side,
pull that open,
the barrel comes out just like that.
Now the barrel is pretty hot.
As is that case.
We can pull the barrel back like so, then I can grab a new barrel, shove it in, all from behind the gun.
(Yeah, trunnion's fine.)
Latch is back in place, I can now
grab another belt.
Again, cartridges down, links up. Sure that's over. In place.
And we're back in action.
These are extremely effective general-purpose machine guns. They were used for infantry,
they were used on vehicles, they were used all across the Wehrmacht.
And the American propaganda films, or American training films,
really had to do a lot to try and get American infantryman to believe
that this gun wasn't quite as effective as everyone really thought it was.
That was kind of a losing battle, this was an excellent gun, so.
I hope you guys have enjoyed watching.
Tune in again to ForgottenWeapons.com for more general-purpose machine guns.
Thanks for watching.