I'm Jonathan Ferguson, I'm curator of firearms here at Royal Armouries and we thought it would
be interesting to do quick video on a few of the firearms that appear in the
movie Dunkirk,but of course also were there for real
the most common, both in the movie and in real life if you're a British soldier at
any rate at that time was this version of the Enfield. The short magazine
lee-enfield. Short because it's short not because the magazine is short the
Magazine is actually quite long, ten rounds twice as many as the German Mauser. Might
be relevant for if you were the soldier at the time certainly. Bolt-action weapon
as a lot of modern rifles still were at that time lift; so lift, retract, the empty case that's
in there comes out, close it up, lock it. The other thing
was the charger guide, there. So you feed in your five rounds and another five rounds
And they were trained to operate this very fast indeed. It has five what we call charges
or Clips, five rounds at a time, two charges to make it ready
the safety here; get it on safe and it can be carried about and then click off the safety and you can start shooting and
operating it. Very simple, robust. Not much to choose between this and any
other bolt-action rifle at the time this has ten rounds not five. So
that's what most people on the British side were carrying around. Right at the end of the
film, spoilers, you will glimpse the enemy rifle: the Mauser kar98k. Carbine, basically which is
a short rifle very similar in length to the short magazine
lee-enfield. The British were one of the first to shorten the infantry rifle to
make it lighter and handier and do away with the idea of short carbines
for everybody else. The Germans followed suit in WW2. So this is, like the Enflied,
was another Victorian / Edwardian vintage weapon tweaked to suit more modern
warfare as it was then. So, the same idea it's bolt action with a couple of subtle
differences you can find out a lot more about elsewhere. Only 5 rounds on the weapon
but of course you've only got 5 rounds on your clips, so once you've fired 10 out of the Lee
Enfield, it pretty much becomes a five round rifle, unless you get a lull in combat
and you can refill it to its capacity of ten. That by the way, the floor plate there
pushes the rounds up for feeding. It's also on this gun, a way to tell if it's empty
so when you're panicking and you're firing at the enemy and suddenly the gun
won''t close, you know you need to put another 5 rounds in which presses that down and
lets you close it up, and again spoilers but in the movie, you don't get to see these
used an awful lot because of the situation. So moving on I think I'm right in saying that
in the film we've got both Lewis and Bren style machine guns and
we have those guns here, but I'm trying to keep things short so I've gone with the Bren gun, partly as an excuse to show you
all this, because this is the first-ever Brent gun. First one ever made, aside from
prototypes of course and it's actually marked on here, it says Bren Gun Mark 1
the markings are quite cool I think because it's Enfield with a crown and Cypher and the date, 1937
which is kind of how all the old flint locks and percussion were marked as well so
a bit of a throwback, because it's the first one. There's a plaque of the side
which we can show you, and it's complete to its original specification for the Mark 1
with the correct barrel and it's folding handle at the back which was for
grasping and also to help use it in the anti-aircraft role which we see in the film.
On this early gun there's a dovetail mount for an optical sight that
wasn't actually issued during the war. You've got the barrel
lever here, barrel nu, pull that up the barrel comes straight off the
front - with a machine gun, it's important to replace the barrel every
couple hundred rounds of fire to let it cool, so you'd swap the barrel over
The two British weapons are in 303, rimmed full-power rifle cartridge again from the Victorian era
partly why these iconic Bren magazines are curved by the way because of the
taper and rim on the back, you have to curve the rounds to make them feed reliably
hence the magazine was curved. The Mauser is in the equivalent German 7.92 x 57
millimeter cartridge, very similar not too much to choose between , but it
doesn't have the rim, so it's less prone to jamming up, and there's an important scene
right at the beginning of the movie where, it's not quite clear why, but the rifle jams up
and perhaps you could say that's down to the rims
these little technical detail can become significant when you're then one being shot at or you're the one shooting
one more point on the bren, it is in the light machine gun, it can be mounted to a vehicle
it can be mounted to a ground mount for different purposes. It can be used off the bipod
as a man portable, true light machine gun. Magazine fed, 30 round magazine
so the rate of fire is not like an MG42 for example
but it is well-respected, well liked, robust accurate low recoil machine. Czech design
tweaked by the british. The legend was that it was too accurate to be a
machine gun but nonetheless it was a good one. We don't have aircraft here at the
Armories sadly, but we do have a number of machine guns, so when you see Tom Hardy
flying around over the beach doing his best with his friends, those
Spitfires were originally armed with 8 303 Browning machine guns
which is an absolute torrent of lead, when you hear that go off in the movie and you see the effects
it's as close to the real thing as you'll ever get
we know some of the guys who worked on that film and they actually set up real
303. machine guns firing real tracer and that is composited in to the
actual plate all on film, and it looks and sounds amazing.
So, belt fed machine gun, no pistol grip no trigger you
don't need any of that, it's in the wings of the aircraft eight
of them all firing at once, converged at a set distance maybe 300 yards so that
the pilot knows where the bullets meet in the sky and then he has put
those in front, usually, of the enemy aircraft so that they fly into his bullets
Around that time we were all discovering the little 303 bullets were
maybe not damaging enough so they're experimenting with I think 1 squadron
with twenty millimeter canon great big, slow firing, heavy, explosive
bullets and they would do much more damage to the aircraft that lots of loss
of little 303 bullets and over time they set them on a mixture
2 20mm canon, and 4 303 machine guns instead of 8 or 12 in some cases
but the hurricane has these 303 browning machine guns. So this has actually been sectioned
not massively relevant, I show this partly because of the date, 1939, the year war broke
out. So there you are, four guns of the era from out excellent collection
that we have here and are very fortunate to have.