Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be
selling in their upcoming May of 2019 Premier Auction.
Today we have basically the best product-improved version
of the Browning Model of 1919 air-cooled machine gun.
This is an M37 and, ... well it's a post-World War Two development.
In 1950, in November of 1950, the US military
requested basically an improved 1919
specifically for use as a tank mounted machine gun.
So they were developing some new tanks after World War Two, and ... well the regular 1919 had a couple issues.
There were a few bits on it that had turned out to be not as durable as maybe everyone would like,
and, more importantly, it only fed from one side. And that's fine for an infantry gun where it doesn't really make any difference,
but when you go to mount a machine gun like this in a tank or, as they would later do, in a helicopter,
it becomes much more important which side the gun feeds from. So the Army wanted a version that could be switched
to feed from either the left or the right, so that they could mount it into a cramped space in a tank or other vehicle.
Now initially there were some modifications made to the standard 1919A4, and that was temporarily adopted as the 1919A4E1.
And they converted something like 18,000 guns to that new pattern.
But at the same time they had folks working on developing a from-scratch new model that would be better.
And the guy who ended up with the job of designing this was a guy named Bob Hillberg who worked for the High Standard company.
Now Bob Hillberg had his hands in a bunch of other firearms designs,
he'd been working as a firearms designer through World War Two.
Clever guy, ... not a well recognised name, but had a lot of other guns to his name, especially at High Standard.
And at this time he was the chief engineer at High Standard and this project kind of just fell into his lap.
High Standard was doing a bunch of other work, the R&D department was busy with civilian arms,
and so he ended up pretty much doing this by himself.
And what they ended up with...
The first design actually before it got to Hillberg was the T151, that wasn't so successful.
They gave it to Hillberg, he redesigned it as the T152, which was quite a bit more successful.
They did some trials on that, decided they really liked it, made a few tweaks,
became the T153, which was formally adopted by the US military as the M37.
It wasn't actually produced by High Standard, it was actually produced by the Rock Island Arsenal
and the ... Saco-Lowell company in between 1955 and 1957.
And, unfortunately, I was not able to find any good data on exactly how many they made,
but many thousands of these things. They would be used in the M48 and the M60 tanks,
as well as a couple of different ... early helicopters in the US inventory.
And this really is the perfected version of the Browning 1919.
So let me go ahead and show you what all they changed to it.
Alright, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on back here that you can see.
So we have a link ejection chute, and this is just pinned in place with this pin.
The same way that some of the feed pawls on the other side are pinned in place.
We'll get up close to that in a moment. We have this replacement charging handle.
So the original 1919 had a charging handle sticking out right here, side of the bolt where you would expect it.
But if you're gonna go mount this in a vehicle, you don't necessarily have easy access up here.
So what they did was put a charging handle on that puts a handle right behind the pistol grip,
so that it can be easily operated from either side and without having to get up to the front of the gun.
The top cover latch has been simplified, and they gave it these two easy-open knobs.
That's a definite improvement over the original 1919, although remember that
these are modifications that wouldn't really have made sense necessarily on an infantry gun,
because, well, this is a lot of stuff to get in the way and to snag on things.
That's not an issue inside a tank, it would be an issue if you're out carrying the gun around.
The back of the top cover plate here has been redesigned. So we still have an iron sight mounted on top of it.
However, the casting is a bit different to accommodate this. We have an improved latch system to remove the backplate.
Removing the pistol grip has been much simplified, this is a nice improvement over the original gun.
So on here if you push this over, that's like the safety latch, and then you can push this tab down,
and then the backplate of the gun just slides off
very nicely. We still have the hydraulic buffer in there.
The ... tabs on either side of the receiver here have been strengthened, made a little bit bigger.
We have a safety here on the bottom of the gun now. That's fire, that is safe.
And all that does is simply drop in place a little block that prevents the trigger from going up.
The original 1919s really didn't have a convenient safety.
One of the other really nice improvements, perhaps ... the most significant improvement of the gun overall,
is the use of a captive recoil spring.
So on the original 1919 you had to actually use a very long screwdriver
through the back plate of the gun to basically catch the recoil spring, rotate it 90 degrees,
and lock it in place before you could take the gun apart.
And goodness help you if that thing came unlatched and went flying across the room,
it was a real mess to try and get back into the bolt.
On the M37 Hillberg gave it a much simpler captive recoil spring. So a very nice improvement there.
The rest of the disassembly is pretty much the same, you're gonna pull the bolt back to here and pull out this plug.
This is what would have originally been the charging handle,
it now really acts as the same thing, but this handle hooks onto it. That also prevents the bolt from coming out.
With that pin removed I can take the bolt out. This is basically mechanically the same.
However, instead of one track for the feed system to run on, it has two. You can see these two holes here.
Where some of the aircraft conversions of the 1919 during World War Two had these complex feed plates on top,
Hillberg simply gave this a pair of wedges right here that are reversible.
So you can pull them out and there are two matching holes like this in each track.
So you pull them out of there, push them over to these two holes, drop them in,
and that allows you to reverse the feed direction.
Looking up here at the front end of the gun, everything is reversible.
So we have a mounting point on the left side of the receiver here with this cross pin that holds in place your feed pawl.
On the other side we have the exact same mounting points, and over here
they're holding in your cartridge guide and your [link ejector chute].
The [link ejector chute] here is another important addition for a tank gun. This ensures that the links...
chute ejector, link ejector, this ensures that the links will be dropped nicely into most likely a carry bag,
so that they don't end up flying all over the inside of the vehicle.
When it comes to operation, this charging handle actually also kind of does double duty.
You can see there's a stud here that prevents it from going too far forward, and there's a notch right there.
When I lock this back,
there's a spring detent right here
that pushes this handle downward and causes this notch to lock into the frame
right here. What that does is effectively give you a manual hold open, so this will keep the bolt open.
Now the Browning is a closed bolt gun, so in order to close the bolt, all I have to do
is grab the handle, lift it upward, and disengage it from that lock.
Then the bolt goes forward.
One last thing I want to point out here are the markings on the side of the gun.
This simply has a serial number and then it's marked: Gun, Machine, Calibre .30, M37, Pearl Manufacturing, Grants, New Mexico.
This was actually a private company that was building transferable machine guns before 1986.
So they created the side plate for this gun and then built it using a military parts kit.
Those are not the original markings that you would see on an original military side plate.
Those would be marked either Rock Island Arsenal or Saco-Lowell.
So there you have the M37. The final, ultimate, product improved version of the Browning air-cooled machine gun.
These would serve in the US military until the late 1960s, even after
various other guns had been adopted that were supposed to take their place.
Notably the M73 and the M85, both of which were pretty much failures.
These would be used in both the M48 and the M60 tanks as well as a couple of early helicopters.
There is one cool anecdote that...
There's one funny anecdote that I want to share with you about this. When Hillberg was designing the gun
Springfield Armory was eager to get his first guns in for testing as quickly as possible.
... In fact they'd contracted not just for 1, but for I think 25 prototypes.
And as soon as he had the first half of those guns done, Springfield wanted them.
So Hillberg, you know High Standard was not that far away,
so Hillberg threw a dozen of these guns in the back of his car, which was a cute little convertible, and threw a blanket over them.
And this was the summer, so he just left the top of the car down and went cruising up the highway
to Springfield. And when he went through one particular toll booth
it turns out without him realising it, the blanket had blown off of the guns in the back,
and this toll booth attendant ... sees this guy come through in a little
cute convertible with a dozen belt-fed machine guns lying on the back seat,
and doesn't say anything, but calls the police. And Hillberg doesn't find out about it until
a few minutes later when he's driving down the highway and is pulled over by a gaggle of Massachusetts Highway Patrolmen.
Apparently he hadn't bothered to bring any papers with him or anything, and had a hard time proving
his association with Springfield or with the High Standard company.
And I guess it sounds like he spent something like an hour
on the side of the road trying to explain what was going on before
successfully making his case and then receiving a nice police escort the rest of the way to Springfield.
It is interesting that these guns were actually originally developed in .30-06,
even though by the time they were put into production 7.62 NATO was clearly the coming thing.
They would in fact do some additional alterations and they would come out with the M37E1
version of this, which was in 7.62 NATO and incorporated a couple other changes as well.
Most notably fixed headspace instead of adjustable headspace for the gun,
but that's not what we're looking at today. What we have here is the original .30-06 version.
So this is a fully transferable, NFA registered machine gun.
So if it's something that you are interested in getting, take a look at Rock Island's catalogue.
You'll be able to check out all of their pictures and information,
details on this guy as well as everything else they have coming up for sale.
Thanks for watching.