[ Mk22 Pedestal Mount ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's with this
behemoth of an awesome piece of equipment.
This is a US Navy Mark 22 double gun mount.
This holds a pair of Browning water-cooled .50 calibre machine guns.
These were manufactured from 1942 until the end of World War Two in 1945,
and they were actually made by a company here in Pennsylvania.
They were made by Heintz Manufacturing of Philadelphia.
Now a few basic specs on this thing, overall it weighs 825 pounds.
This was originally designed as a deck mount for boats, for ships.
So this whole thing would be bolted down solid to the deck of a vessel
where you didn't have to worry about recoil and balance and everything like that.
They were also used for fixed emplacements on land, however.
So the Navy originally adopted this as the Mark 22.
It was an improvement over their Mark 21 mount which only held a single gun.
This of course holds two.
And then in 1943 the Army took a look at this and went,
"Well, that looks pretty sweet, we'd kind of like to have some of those ourselves as well."
And so the Army adopted it as the M46
in exactly, as far as I can tell, the exact same configuration as the Navy mount.
... There would be a second one adopted by the Army in 1944, the M64.
And that was set up to use air-cooled guns instead of water-cooled guns.
The water-cooled .50 calibres were not as prevalent
as the standard M2HB air-cooled guns that people are much more familiar with.
But there were a lot of these in service, there were a lot of them that got made.
And if you have a fixed emplacement where you're not trying to move the guns around,
well, why not water cool it?
You've got a substantial amount of firepower in this thing to deal with,
and that's going to generate a lot of heat.
So, let's look at a few of these specific design elements here.
So first off, the guns. There are a pair of water-cooled Browning .50s back here.
They're both mounted into the [whole] gun on spring-loaded reciprocating mounts.
And the easiest way to see those mounts is actually to look up from the bottom of the gun.
So you can see right there we have ... a forward and a rearward spring,
and there is an oscillating slide right here.
So the gun is mounted to this mechanism in the centre,
so when it fires it'll bounce back and forth
without directly transferring all of its recoil into the mount.
The guns are fitted with the same sort of spade grips you would get on a standard M2HB,
so these each have thumb triggers in them.
The gunner is going to push himself into these padded shoulder rests
and have one hand on each gun to fire them.
So they can be fired singly or simultaneously.
Now the mount is capable of full 360 degree rotation.
It can depress as much as negative 10 degrees,
useful if you're trying to fire down off the deck of a large vessel.
And it can elevate up to 80 degrees. Now especially at 80 degrees
it's going to get a little funky for the gunner to try to stay positioned with the gun.
And so that's why you've got this.
This is actually basically a web belt that hooks the gunner onto the gun.
It's attached via a couple of quick-detach - oops - very quick-detach clips here.
(Hook that back on.)
And the gunner would simply belt himself in, like so.
And then he can lean back and just put his weight into the gun.
It makes it a lot easier to hang with this thing and manoeuvre it around.
There is an elevation lock here.
And if I loosen that up, there we go,
then we can pivot the ... guns up and down as well as rotating them around.
Now the balance at the moment is a little funky.
This wants to pivot backwards, and I suspect it's because
there's no water in the jackets of the guns.
Once you put that water in, I bet this balances really just about perfectly.
Alright, ammo. It's going to be an important element, right?
We've got two machine guns, we're going to want to feed them as much as possible.
The largest capacity drums that were available for the M2
were these 200 round "tombstone" (named obviously for their shape) drums.
Now you can also ... fit these up with just plain ammo cans
that will hold 100 rounds of belted ammo.
These guys we can lift right off.
And the way these work is open these two clips,
pivot the drum open, and we have a winding spool here on the top half.
... You would take your belt of 200 rounds, clip one end of it on here,
wind it up, and you can probably fit about 80 maybe 90 rounds on this spool.
You then take the rest of the belt, drop it into the bottom of the drum,
and just wind it up back and forth.
At the end the belt comes out here where it feeds into the gun.
And note that there is a little spring-loaded clip here
to prevent the belt from going backwards.
Now the reason for this weird combination of just laying the ammo in
and having some on a spool, is that if you had a 200 round-deep belt box,
by the time you got to the bottom of it, the weight of the ammo belt that was going to be pulled up
and over this 90 degree roller would be enough to potentially cause problems.
So what this does is it maximises the amount you can get simply by stacking a belt in the can,
and then you can get more ammo in by having it on this spool.
Which, once this is closed, ...
the bit on the spool is going to feed around here and then straight out.
Now of course the winding ... handle here just slides out.
And you would not have this on while you're firing the thing, or else this is going to
spin around and probably fall out.
The armour plate here is 3/8ths of an inch thick.
And it is hardened armour plate, not just plain mild steel.
And that will easily stop .30 calibre gunfire.
It'll probably do a pretty darn good job stopping .50 calibre,
as well as all manner of shrapnel and other projectiles.
A few features on here. Of course this is the bracket to hang the tombstone drums,
or just a plain tray that will hold a .50 cal ammo can.
You've got these knuckles that are welded in because
this is where the charging handle of the gun is.
So I can reach in there ...
and charge the gun and still have armour protection for my hand.
And of course some armour protection for bits of the gun that stick out to the side.
Got a hole for sights, we'll take a look at the sights in just a moment.
Right here we have the empty brass chute.
So the M2 is going to eject brass vertically down out the bottom of the gun.
It'll come into this chute, brass will come out, it'll then hit this
and drop straight down the front of the mount so that you're not spraying brass around.
Links are going to come out the side of the gun here and here,
and they're just going to fall down the centre and clatter harmlessly off the armour.
I should also point out that these are left and right hand guns.
So ... the one on the left feeds from the left, the one on the right feeds from the right.
That was one of the cool features of the Browning .50 is that it was really easy
on the universal standard receiver to adapt the guns to fire from either side.
Now sights, you'll see there that the front sights remain on these guns.
But the standard infantry rear sights have been removed and just covered over with solid plates.
We have a little covered compartment here where
we can stow our anti-aircraft spider sights.
Once those are mounted on the gun we get a set up like this.
Pretty standard for anti-aircraft sights, and these were
predominantly used for the anti-aircraft role.
So the whole point of a spider sight like this is that
the circles are about aircraft velocity, and then these are of course direction of travel.
Because the key element in anti-aircraft shooting is getting a proper lead.
Bullets take time to travel, and you have to shoot in front of your target,
not where your target is now, so that the bullet intersects with the aircraft.
And so these ... they look just sort of like you just draw some circles.
These are actually pretty carefully calibrated so that
at a specific range and a specific speed these 3 concentric circles will give you proper leads.
And part of the process of becoming a good anti-aircraft gunner is understanding those,
and being able to estimate distance and speed of aircraft.
Alright, you can actually get a really good view of this through the camera.
So the rear sight just has a plain crosshair which you would then line up
with whatever element of the spider front sight you're trying to aim on.
Now you'll notice this view looks awfully dark.
That's because there are actually a pair of tinted lenses here that you can use.
So if you're shooting up into the sun (a classic air-attack tactic is to attack out of the sunlight),
well, the gunner can engage one or both of these lenses
so that they can actually look at an oncoming aircraft.
And there's also some adjustability here with this wheel.
I can move the whole sight forward and backward
so that whatever fits me with these shoulder rests.
I can bring the sight to the appropriate point for my own physiology.
So this may not be the absolute coolest M2 mount ever made.
That honour would probably have to go to the fully powered and articulated
quad gun turret that was used all the way through the Vietnam War.
But this one's pretty darn cool.
And it's even cooler given that it comes with a pair of water-cooled
fully transferable, registered, legal M2 heavy machine guns on it.
So, no batteries required, no power required,
pretty sweet. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.