Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Cody Firearms Museum,
part of the Buffalo Bill Centre of the West,
and I'm taking a look at some of the guns in their
extensive and impressive gun collection.
Today we have a pair of automatic rifles here
to take a look at. Now if you're familiar with
the Browning Model of 1918, called the "b-a-r", or the "BAR",
well, this is the Winchester Automatic Rifle, the "w-a-r", or the "WAR".
How's that for a cool name for a military rifle?
These are one of the last stages of development of a rifle
that we've been looking at in several of its previous iterations.
It started out as the Colt Model of 1929, it then turned into the Winchester G30,
then the Winchester G30M, then the Winchester G30R,
and finally the Winchester Automatic Rifle.
Now we'll pick up this story at the end of the G30R project.
Winchester had gone ahead, and ...
even after the Army wasn't interested in their self-loading .30-06 rifle,
they thought there might be a foreign market for it. That kind of petered out.
But the Army looked at it and said, "Well, in its current form it's pretty good,
but what we want to replace the M1 Garand is a lighter rifle."
The G30R would have to have lost a pound and a half or two pounds of weight
in order to be competitive as a replacement for the M1, and that wasn't going to happen.
However, the rifle action showed a lot of promise as a replacement for the BAR in this guise.
And that's what the Ordnance Department said to Winchester,
they were encouraging them to develop it into this role.
And ... in some ways it came closer to acceptance in this role than it did in any other.
Now what we've got here is a 16 pound 3 ounce rifle.
So this is just about the weight of the original World War One M1918 BAR,
but it has a bipod, it has a flash hider, it has good sights.
It has a lot of the elements that the original BAR had,
plus a lot of the modernised bits that the Army wanted,
but without the downsides that came with the A2 BAR.
That thing had a weird fire control mechanism that was problematic.
It had a hydraulic buffer in the stock that was not reliable really.
And a very heavy bipod, the gun weighed way more than it should have.
The Winchester Automatic Rifle is substantially simpler to make.
It's based on these two very well-proven elements:
basically an M1 Garand bolt mechanism, a two lug rotating bolt,
with a David Williams gas tappet action, very much like the M1 carbine.
In fact this was derived from the M1 carbine.
David Williams, who is renowned as being the guy who invented the carbine
(he actually didn't do it all himself, but he was a substantial part of it,
he developed the gas system in the M1 carbine),
this is his project as well, he was instrumental in this project.
When they demonstrated these guns to the Army, he was there to help out.
And basically what they did was they took the G30R and they added a select fire lever to it.
So you could have semi-auto or full-auto.
No differential rates of fire like you had in the BAR.
This would fire at about 585 rounds a minute with a bare muzzle,
and at about ... 625 rounds a minute with the flash hider.
Which is a very nice rate of fire for a light automatic rifle like this.
Now they made a couple of other smaller changes.
You'll notice if you look at the shape of the stock, it kind of comes up at the back.
And that was done very deliberately so that the ... bore axis here
comes right into the shooter's shoulder.
That was done to help prevent the gun from climbing [under recoil] when you're firing. ...
By all accounts this was a well-received gun,
the guys who shot it liked it, it had a good reputation.
It may not have been as absolutely bomb proof as the BAR,
but it was lighter, it was a lot cheaper to make,
and it was good enough. It was by no means a bad gun.
The BAR is a massively over-built gun,
so you could cut back a little bit, and still have something totally serviceable.
So the first Winchester Automatic Rifle was announced to the Army in August of 1944.
That would have been almost certainly this one, this is one of the experimental models.
The Army liked the idea. Obviously they'd been kind of pushing Winchester
to design it, and get it ready, and so here it is.
It took a little while before they did some formal testing on it.
But in December of 1944 they run it through a formal test
and it passes, it actually does really well.
The guys who shoot it like it, it appears to be pretty reliable.
It's good enough that they're willing to spend a whole bunch of money
to get Winchester to make a batch of 10 of them, and that's the outcome of the test.
Unfortunately the trial report has been lost, it may show up some day in some archives,
or someone's attic, or it may be gone forever. We don't know.
But the outcome of the test is that the Army orders 10 of these guns.
And they do that in January of 1945, so pretty quickly after the test.
It's late December when they test it,
10th of January 1945 they've got an order in to Winchester.
Winchester gets to work making them. They have to of course set up a bunch of tooling,
this is not a very fast process to go through, so.
And it's not until June of 1945 that Winchester is finally able to deliver the first 10 guns.
Now it appears that they produced something like 20 in total.
Aberdeen got I believe numbers 2 through 12, or 3 through 12, 3 through 13, something like that.
This particular gun is receiver number 18,
so maybe they made as many as 20.
Winchester ... obviously kept some, because this one never went to Aberdeen.
Anyway, in June of 1945 they deliver 10 of the guns.
And like July and then the very first days of August
Winchester is kind of on the phone bugging Aberdeen trying to find out what the results are.
"How'd it do? We want to know. Did it work?
How many hundred thousand can we sign you up for?"
And then of course we know what happens in early August of 1945,
a couple of atom bombs, and the war ends.
And unfortunately for Winchester, that is the end of the line for the Winchester Automatic Rifle.
It was doing really well, but when World War Two ends a lot of,
if not really all of, the funding for weapons R&D dries up with the US military.
Now they will go on to continue working on a new automatic rifle,
but they do that along different lines.
They'd already pretty much rejected the Winchester G30R for that project.
And replacing the BAR, now that there's no war to fight, is not a big priority.
So the BAR would go on to be used in Korea.
When money came back for weapons development,
the Winchester Automatic Rifle project simply wasn't one of the ones that got restarted.
So these are gorgeous guns, like I said, this is one of the experimental models,
you can tell, it's got this kind of weird goofy flash hider on it.
This is one of the production guns, it's mismatched numbers, it's actually parts from 15, 16, and 18.
So we'll go ahead and take a closer look at this, I'll show you how it works.
Unfortunately, and I hate to give away a dirty secret here,
I can't figure out how it's supposed to come apart.
So I will not be disassembling it for you, but we can take a closer look.
So this may look like an M1 carbine action back here, and there's a good reason for that,
it pretty much is an M1 carbine action.
We have a two lug rotating bolt just like that, all the way back and forward.
This right here is the fire control lever, it's on semi-automatic right now.
And when you rotate it forward, that is the fully-automatic position.
No nonsense with slow and fast rates of fire here.
This does take a 20 round detachable box magazine.
The magazine release is this button on the front of the trigger guard, which pops it out.
So a slight curvature to the magazine.
This is a proprietary Winchester design mag,
although it looks like they took a lot of cues from the BAR magazines for these.
One of the continual problems with development of guns like this
was that the BAR magazine just wasn't all that great.
It was designed for a rifle with a fairly low cyclic rate,
and the magazine often had trouble feeding cartridges up
at a rate fast enough for a lot of the higher rate of fire guns.
Anyway, looking back on the action here we have this big lug, this is the safety.
You pull it back, rotate it up, that locks it in the safe position.
And what that does is actually rotate this sleeve into place.
That prevents the bolt from coming far enough back to chamber a cartridge,
and it also disconnects the trigger.
Now if this looks familiar, it may be because you have already watched my video
on the .50 calibre semi-auto anti-tank rifle that was made
using these same basic principles at about the same time.
Although it's also possible that that video hasn't aired when this one goes up,
so either way, keep an eye out for that video
where you'll see a lot of these same elements on an even bigger gun.
Now, you may have noticed that this thing has a remarkably large forend,
I mean, this thing's huge.
There's a reason for that, you'll also notice that there's no handguard on top.
Well, there's this metal, but there's mostly no handguard up there, just a bare barrel.
And that was done deliberately, the idea here was they wanted to leave the barrel unobstructed
to allow it to cool as quickly as possible, to get as much air flow around it as they could.
However, they recognised that you needed to be able to protect the shooters hand,
and that's the reason that they put on such a huge forearm on this thing.
To give you a place to hold onto it safely, while keeping the barrel exposed.
The buttstock back here has this kind of interesting little twist.
Typically guns like the BAR will have a flip-up plate that you can rest on top of your shoulder,
particularly when you're firing prone, to keep the gun in position.
On the Winchester Automatic Rifle they went with one that rotates into position just like that.
It's actually not a bad idea, that's simpler, and lighter weight,
and less obtrusive than some of the other solutions that are out there.
Taking a look at the [flash hider] here, pretty simple, it's just a cone.
I suspect this is aluminium to keep the weight savings in place.
We have a front sight with nice big sight protectors.
It's interesting that, like the BAR, this bipod will rotate a full 360 degrees.
That seems a bit problematic to me, but who knows?
Maybe they would have changed that if the gun had gone into production.
The bipod legs, this is a big improvement over the BAR,
do not have any wing nuts to lock them in place.
They are spring-loaded detent locked like that. So you can pop them out, pop them back.
The bipod legs did, however, have these thumb screws
which are used for lengthening or shortening the bipod.
You can unlock that and extend the leg out to that long.
You'll notice this particular rifle has a couple of detents cut in the forend,
and those are for those bipod legs to sit in when they are extended.
So you could actually carry it with the bipod legs extended out,
if that's how you prefer to use it.
I don't like the thumbscrews, but at least you don't need them to deploy the bipod.
The rear sight is also kind of interesting, it goes all the way up to 2,000 yards.
And it's got this adjustable screw wheel, which if I didn't have rubber gloves on, I could adjust.
That allows you to move this elevation just by small increments.
... (Just lift it up.) You can also push the button and slide this larger amounts.
So we've got a peep sight on the back here, and then another aperture right there.
In fact, you've even got a third aperture,
and honestly I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between these two.
However, ... (let's lift this up so you can see it), windage is this knob,
and kind of reminiscent of some of the early Trapdoor and Krag sights.
It actually rotates the entire sight base, you can see this turning down here.
So the Winchester Automatic Rifle locks via a two-lug rotating bolt
like a slightly oversized M1 Garand bolt.
The gas action, however, is basically the same as that of an M1 carbine.
And that's located in here underneath the handguard, and unfortunately I can't show it to you.
It is a tappet system, meaning that the gas piston itself only moves a couple of millimetres,
a fraction of an inch, about a tenth of an inch really.
And it has one short, swift strike against the operating rod,
which then gives the operating rod all of the inertia and momentum
that it needs to fully cycle back and forward.
It's interesting just how similar the experimental first version
of the Winchester Automatic Rifle was to the actual production guns.
Really the only difference is the bipod is a bit longer by default and not adjustable,
and it's got this somewhat goofy style of muzzle brake.
The M1 Garand was tested with a whole wide variety of unusual looking muzzle brakes,
as were some of the early rifles in ... what would become the M14 project.
So that's really the only difference, that and a couple of markings.
In fact, we should take a look at the markings, let's do that.
So the experimental version here, the very early one, is marked "EXP" and then W69.
Which would have been a Winchester inventory number of some sort.
I don't know the exact reference there, but that's all we've got on this one.
We've got more markings on the production guns.
So what's that rifle? Ah, that's my war rifle, it even says so.
Right there, WAR, the Winchester Automatic Rifle, calibre .30.
As I mentioned, this is serial number 18 on the receiver,
although it has the op rod from number 15,
and it actually has the top cover from number 16.
Now in addition to that marking, you know things are getting real because of what's on the side.
We are definitely out of the realm of toolroom prototypes now,
because they went ahead and put the full,
nice, proper format Winchester roll mark on the side of these guns.
They were serious: this gun, like Rocky said, could have been a contender.
... Well I think we're all better off that the war ended,
but if it hadn't, you may very well have seen Winchester Automatic Rifles
going into service in, oh, something like mid-1946.
Well, thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I certainly had a good time taking a look at these two very interesting
woulda, coulda, shouldas, you know, "I could have been a contender" - but nope.
So these of course came out of the Cody Firearms Museum collection.
If you are ever in the area, or even anywhere in the Mountain West,
I would strongly encourage you to take some time, head up to Cody
and check out the museum, they have a fantastic firearms collection.
If you are travelling with people who aren't so much interested in firearms,
it is part of a five museum ... institution, including natural history and art museums as well.
So there's a little something for everyone.
If you like this sort of content, please consider checking out my Patreon account.
It is funding at a buck a month from folks just like you that makes it possible for me to
travel up to places like Wyoming and bring you cool guns like these.
Thanks for watching.