[ Vickers Gas-Operated MkI No2 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Royal Army Museum in Brussels, part of the
War Heritage Foundation of Belgium.
And I have a chance to take a look at some
really fantastic historical firearms from their reference collection.
In particular today we have a Vickers Gas-Operated Mark I Number 2 gun.
And this is essentially an aircraft Vickers Gas-Operated machine gun
that has been rebuilt for ground infantry use.
Very, very unusual, cool gun.
Now the reason that this exists, if we take a few steps back,
going into World War Two British aircraft
... there were of course some guns that were fixed in wings,
and then there were also observers' and turret mounted guns.
And the Vickers Gas-Operated was the standard armament for British aircraft observer mounts.
Well, as the war progresses observer mounts are fairly quickly replaced
with things like electrically powered multi-gun turrets.
And those turrets use Browning machine guns, not Vickers Gas-Operated guns.
And so there starts to be a bit of a surplus of ... Vickers Gas-Operated in British service.
Now in 1943 the Royal Air Force decided to make use of this.
They needed guns for air base defence.
This ... is sort of the rear-echelon armaments,
and they don't ... want to try to justify
requisitioning things like Bren guns that are needed by front-line infantry.
But they need something, like what if the Germans dropped
paratroopers onto British air bases, you need to be able to defend them somehow.
And so what they decided to do was take the Vickers Gas-Operated guns
that they already had as excess and convert them to ground use.
And that is what we have here.
So essentially they added a shoulder stock, a carry handle, and a bipod, and a pistol grip
and voilà, you have turned an aircraft gun into a ground gun.
So let me show you up close exactly how they did this conversion.
So what's really cool about this is they basically did
almost no permanent modification to the original aircraft guns.
Right here is the outline of the receiver of the original Vickers Gas-Operated.
So this element, this pistol grip frame has been added.
And this buttstock has been added.
Now on the original guns, instead of that buttstock,
they had a sort of a single D handle grip with a firing trigger back here.
Something that could be used in single or double mounts by an aircraft observer.
That obviously isn't going to work from a ground mount.
Oh, and then lastly of course they added this bipod.
So we'll take a look at each of these elements in detail, but worth pointing out
the bipod feet are adapted from the Bren gun, as is the carry handle here.
The pistol grip is clearly shaped like a Lewis gun grip.
And then we have a pair of sights on it.
So let's set this thing up.
Now the drum feed remains identical to the original guns.
And so if you're going to have this drum, you have to have space to put the shooter's ... face behind it.
So there's a nice padded buttplate, a pad here, but there's no cheek rest of any sort.
And the sights have to be high enough to clear this drum,
and so you have an awkward situation as far as I can tell shooting this
where you have to sort of just hover your head here.
You don't want to press it against any of this stuff.
And it has to be high enough to see the sights, as I said.
That rear sight is set up with three different apertures for 400, 600 and 800 yards.
They fold down when not in use.
And you can see that they've actually just made use of the original dovetail bracket here
that held the rear aircraft sight in order to hold this new sight bracket.
The front sight also pivots down out of the way when not in use.
And then lifts up to match the height of the rear sight.
And we have a very basic square front post in there.
Like the standard Vickers Gas-Operated, the magazine release is back here.
Push that forward and it pulls a pair of locking brackets out.
We've got a locking tab in the front.
This is one of the smaller 60 round magazines I believe.
And by the way, the ground forces who used these did actually have
specialised web gear with basically an over the neck
piece of web gear that would hold two of these drums.
And they'd have 4 to 5 ammo bearers per gun.
Given that this still fires at a rate of about 950 rounds a minute,
you're going to go through a lot of ammunition rather quickly.
Disassembly is really pretty easy, this is all just held together with captive pins.
So we've got one up here, pull that out, and one down here ... like that.
That allows us to pivot down the fire control unit, the pistol grip.
And then there is a third one right here. That lets me pull off the buttstock unit.
With that off, the rest of the field stripping is basically just like a regular aircraft version.
Gas piston, it is a Gas-Operated...
And then a tilting bolt.
And we can pull that apart, you can see the firing pan up there.
This surface right here will impinge on the firing pin and fire - oops ...
and fire the gun as soon as it's fully in battery.
So if you're interested in the internals, I suggest
you check out my previous video on the Vickers Gas-Operated.
Now I can't fully remove this assembly because the front pin here
is actually a bolt that's then cotter pinned in place.
And I don't want to destroy that pin to take it off.
But it does fold down all the way,
and so you can see what's going on here, it's really quite simple.
Pulling the trigger just pulls this bar.
Which comes back here to a pair of hooks, one on each side.
Those hooks match into these hooks,
and when you pull the trigger it pulls this bar forward, which drops the sear.
... These guns are open-bolt full-auto only, there was no semi-auto option.
Semi-auto would have been a nice idea on an infantry gun,
but it has no place on an aircraft gun.
And these were being produced as quickly and easily as possible.
They weren't trying to come up with the ideal ... design for an infantry gun.
It was just, "What's the minimum we can do to re-purpose these aircraft guns for an infantry role?"
So this by the way, is a spring plunger.
The sear actually has some forward travel, you can see that
the sear pin there ... has an elongated hole.
This is all identical to the original aircraft guns.
And in fact this block right here was taken from an aircraft gun
and just had this sheet-metal buttstock added over it.
I should point out here there is also a safety built into it.
It's just fire and safe, and in the safe position it simply locks the trigger.
There are some photographs from British documentation that show
a different sort of [carry handle] coming out the front of this. ...
This one and the other of these guns
(the museum here has two of them in their reference collection),
both of them have Bren gun handles that have been welded onto the bottom here.
This is a little bit interesting, it's actually pretty awkward.
It really gets in the way of your hand in a firing grip.
Now it can be rotated down like this,
but then it really kind of is too tall for the bipod.
I'm really not sure exactly what the intention was with these handles.
They are certainly very convenient for carrying the gun by the handle,
but when you're actually shooting it, a little less so.
One other element I can show you here is the barrel removal.
Now this is not the correct original pin, but this is what was in the gun.
If we take this pin out.
Someone fabricated that from ... something.
But with that pin out we can take this big stirrup and lift it ...
(there we go) straight up and off.
And this is what locks the barrel into the receiver.
So with that off ...
there we go, we can pull the barrel completely out.
And with the barrel out, the gas tube just comes out of the front of the receiver.
Gas tube.
And then the bipod block.
Note that they have handily labelled this "front".
The gas tube here is not interchangeable, you can't actually mount this backwards.
But I guess you could take this off and mount it backwards, and that's why they labelled it.
But essentially Bren bipod feet.
There's no fixed latch on these, it's just tension.
So if you push hard enough on it, it will pop into or out of position.
There you go, there's a closer look at the front sight.
It's just a loop around the barrel that's pinned in place.
And then this little spring piece is what holds the sight in position.
This sort of scoop-shaped muzzle device is also from the aircraft guns,
they didn't change that at all for the ground use.
And there you go, there's the whole thing field stripped.
Essentially no permanent modifications to an original
Vickers Gas-Operated aircraft gun to turn it into a bullpup infantry support weapon.
These started off with use by Royal Air Force air base defence units,
but their use actually escalated into front-line infantry service.
And these were used in a number of substantial operations late in World War Two, in 1944 and 1945.
There were some of these in Market Garden, they tended to be used
by reconnaissance and Commando elements.
There was Operation Infatuate late in the war,
it was the invasion of the Dutch Walcheren Islands.
And these were specifically used there, that's a fairly well documented instance.
But never a ton of use.
But they ... showed up in Norway as well in May of 1945.
These guns did actually see ground service. ...
It's an interesting and impressive gun, it would be really interesting
to get this out on the range and see just how shootable or not shootable they really are.
At any rate, when the war was over these were all declared obsolete, and they were scrapped.
They were a non-standard gun, they ... don't fit well into
the general British small arms of the post-war period.
They have plenty of other guns at that point, and so these all went in the bin.
It is very fortunate that there are a few of them still floating around
in some museum collections, like the one here in Brussels.
So I will say the Brussels Army Museum is one of the really cool military museums out there
that still has a tremendous display of actual small arms
out on display in their really extensive galleries.
And if you're in Brussels, definitely take the opportunity to stop by
and check out the museum. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.