Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the James D. Julia
auction house up in Maine, taking a look at
some of the guns they are going to be selling in their
upcoming fall of 2017 Firearms Auction.
Today we have a Browning BAR. Not just any BAR,
but this is actually a World War One Model of 1918 BAR.
These are a little bit hard to find these days,
because a large number of them were actually retrofitted into A2 BARs during the lead up to, and during, World War Two.
So finding one that's in this original World War One configuration is unusual,
and a really good chance to take a look at what the US did
for a semi-automatic or fully-automatic select fire rifle in World War One.
By World War Two the US military would be treating the BAR like a light machine gun,
and modifying it a little bit for that use.
But in World War One that's not what it was designed for.
Note that there's no bipod on this rifle, there never was.
This was a rifle that was designed to be fired from the hip and from the shoulder.
The original tactical concept was that you could have a group of men equipped with BARs
advance on an enemy position ... basically firing from the hip, and primarily in semi-automatic mode,
to basically keep the enemy's heads down while they advanced.
Then, when things broke into very close combat in the final assault on a position,
the selector could be flipped to full-auto and you could have high volumes of fire as necessary.
This is actually remarkably similar to the concept of the assault rifle,
the way that the Soviets would use the AK, the way that the Germans would use the StG44,
except done with a rather monstrous .30-06 calibre rifle instead of an intermediate cartridge.
Now, the walking fire didn't last all that long in practical effect,
that part of the idea didn't really mesh well with reality.
However, the idea of being able to make relatively precise shots in semi-automatic
and then having a high volume of firepower available in full-auto,
that is a very relevant and a very realistic concept.
And that would go on to become the concept of the assault weapon during and after World War Two.
Now as to the details of the rifle itself mechanically, well it was developed by John Moses Browning.
This was yet another rifle that he developed himself and then
took to the Ordnance Department to see if they might be interested.
I am sure it was influenced by the Lewis and the Chauchat machine guns,
these were available and they were understood.
And Browning came up really with a much better gun than either of those.
This is better that the Chauchat because it is much more reliable, it's a much better action.
The Chauchat is an emergency production, just get something out of the door, kind of design.
The BAR is a much more refined gun.
This is better than the Lewis largely because of weight. This thing's going to weigh about 16 pounds,
17 or more when it's loaded.
The Lewis was over 20 pounds, the Lewis was a far heavier gun.
The Lewis can't really be fired from the shoulder. You sort of can for exhibition purposes, but not as a practical matter.
The BAR absolutely can be, and was intended to be, fired from the shoulder.
So for a tactical assault light machine gun/automatic rifle sort of concept, the BAR was an excellent fit.
Let's take a look at the mechanics of the rifle, starting at the front.
This is a gas operated firearm, so there's a gas piston right here, taps gas off the barrel.
There is an adjustable gas regulator on it.
While we are up here, we'll also point out this small conical flash hider.
This was the standard World War One muzzle device.
Rather difficult to find intact on guns today, so cool to see that there.
Moving a bit back, we have this nice hefty forend, that's a really good forend for the gun.
It does a great job of protecting the shooter's hand from both the barrel and gas tube.
This would be retrofitted to a different design in World War Two, so again it's cool to see the World War One one,
with this ... nice deep checkering on it there.
Moving on to the main receiver area of the gun.
Obviously we have our bolt here, this is a tilting ... locking piece,
you can see the back end of the bolt there, obviously, lifts up.
And we have our locking shoulder here, the bolt locks into that. And that's what keeps it closed during the firing cycle.
If you look closely you can see the seams here. This is a removable piece, so the locking shoulder
can be changed out if necessary, or because of wear or headspace issues.
The rear sight was very deliberately taken from the Model of 1917 Enfield rifle,
that had an excellent rear sight to it.
It's got this great rear aperture peep sight, a little narrow front post.
This lifts up if you want a longer range sight, but
with the BAR typically you'd be using it with just the standard battle sight there.
This would also be retrofitted and changed in World War Two,
and interestingly this would be changed to a substantially less useful sight in World War Two.
So World War One guys got the good version.
A few more controls here, the magazine release is this button in the front of the trigger guard.
Push that, magazine comes out. 20 round box magazine.
These are not the best magazine ever designed, the walls are a little bit thin,
the feed lips are a little bit sketchy.
You know, for a gun put together in fairly short order during World War One,
it's a good reliable functional magazine, but much better ones would be developed in the 1920s and '30s.
I should say, much better magazines for other guns.
This is the one ... standard BAR magazine, which was used all the way through all US military service of the BAR.
Now the magazine is a straight in, just pushes in and latches, magazine.
It has a guide rib right here to kind of direct it. In World War Two they would add a couple of guide ears,
some kind of protective ears here, but those were not in place on the World War One guns.
The bolt handle here is non-reciprocating, so you use it to charge the bolt
and then it's just free floating, so snap it back forward.
If you don't do that, the first time you fire the bolt will snap the handle forward,
and then it doesn't reciprocate the rest of the time.
We have a three position fire selector group here, F is for fire, A is for automatic, and S is for safe.
Now there's a spring-loaded button here, and in order to put the gun into safe
you actually have to depress that button and then push the lever down behind it.
Now once it's on safe, it doesn't engage that button, so that button is going to come up
only when you flip the selector lever forward, like that.
This was all very deliberately done by John Browning, in fact there's
... a letter that survives in which he explains exactly why he did it.
The reason was, think about the ... anticipated tactical use of the gun was first on fire, on semi-auto,
where you would be advancing, maybe taking a few aimed shots, or firing continuously, steadily from the hip.
When you then closed with the enemy you would want to flip it to automatic, right there.
And Browning realised that it would be really bad if you went to close with the enemy
and accidentally flipped it all the way back to safe and the gun didn't fire.
So that's why he decided to put in this little spring-loaded peg so that once you are shooting,
you're going to stay shooting here ... until you make a deliberate effort to drop the thing back to safe.
However, even when you are on safe,
all you have to do is just push the lever forward and you can have the gun ready to operate.
So here are our markings on the top of the receiver, and there are a couple of things we need to talk about here.
First off, these guns were manufactured by three different companies, Colt, Winchester and Marlin-Rockwell.
This is a Winchester, and in fact Winchester produced the majority of the guns.
The US government ultimately contracted for about 288,000 BARs.
However, when the war ended they cut that back substantially, and they only ended up making 102,000 and change.
But what they had done was split up serial number blocks for these three different companies
and over the course of several different contracts for each company.
So what we end up with are serial numbers that go up to about [260,000], but with big huge gaps in them.
Because when they cancelled contracts at the end of the war,
some of these serial number blocks had been started, and some hadn't.
And so that's why you'll see a serial number here that is more than double the actual total production of the guns.
Up on the barrel here you can see a "W" for Winchester,
and then the barrel has a date on it of 1-19, so that's January of 1919.
As of the Armistice, the US had approximately 53,000 BARs produced,
and so about 50% of the production was actually done after the end of the war.
They wanted to go ahead and finish what was in production and get the Army fully outfitted.
Of those 53,000, it was about 28,000 by Winchester, 16,000 made by Marlin and 9,000 made by Colt.
Colt was busy doing a lot of other guns at the same time, other machine guns,
so their production of BARs was actually relatively small during World War One.
I think it's important to point out that there is some real propaganda surrounding the 1918 BAR in US service.
The common view is that this gun was basically conceived of by John Browning,
and then in the next week 10,000 of them were shipping off to France for US troops.
That's not really the case. This was in fact a remarkably quickly developed gun,
the process for going from an idea to a prototype and then to actual production
usually takes quite a long time. And in this case it took about a year.
Which, like I said, it's still very quick by most normal standards, but not as fast as the propaganda made it seem.
The first actual order for ... the BAR was placed in July of 1917.
In February of 1918, so over 6 months later, there was a public demonstration with the
very first finished guns, and these were all hand-fitted guns.
So that demonstration was February of '18 in Washington DC. And there was some literature,
the NRA reported on it, and the description of the event was that basically the guns
all worked perfectly, and it's this new miracle rifle from John Browning.
In reality, they actually had a substantial number of problems with the guns in that demonstration
that were kind of hidden, or glossed over, in the spirit of better war time propaganda.
So it wouldn't be until July of 1918 that there was a substantial number of guns actually in production and finished.
So, it took about a year to get everything working right.
One of the cool stories that I want to tell you on this.
John Browning had patent rights to this gun of course, and also to the Browning 1917 water-cooled guns.
And he was making a tremendous, just an unfathomable, amount of money
during World War One from the rights to guns that were being sold to the government.
To the tune of over 5 million dollars it would have actually come to.
Well as part of the ... negotiations for the adoption and the production of the BAR,
Browning actually basically ceded most of his royalty payments.
What he proposed was a one-time lump sum payment of royalties.
Now this was a lump sum payment of 1.25 million dollars, which is an incredible amount of money in World War One.
However, that was something like a quarter of what he was actually legitimately going to be legally owed.
So what Browning effectively did during the adoption of the BAR was
just give back 3 or 4 million dollars to the government ... basically out of patriotic obligation.
He legitimately had no actual need to do that. This wasn't a PR stunt, it wasn't publicised.
It really just was Browning looked at it and realised, "You know what? I've made a lot of money,
I don't need a whole lot more money, and I'd like to do something to help the war effort."
Beyond making all the best guns the US is going to use.
Of course if the US is going to issue the BAR, they are obviously going to issue some web gear and equipment to go with it.
And this is a cool example of one of the gunner's belts for the BAR.
You can see this one is a September of 1918 production, so right at the end of the war.
And there were actually three different versions of these gunner's belts. There was one for the actual gunner.
There was one for the first assistant, and there was one for the second assistant.
This is the belt for the second assistant gunner, so it has four pouches. Each of these holds two magazines.
And then the second assistant gunner also had a rifle, so he had four pouches for Springfield or Enfield rifle ammunition.
The first assistant gunner was more directly associated with the gun and working with the primary gunner.
So the first assistant gunner's belt actually had [five] mag pouches ...
and then it had a double mag pouch for 1911 pistol magazines.
Which would have been the assistant gunner's secondary weapon.
And then the actual gunner's belt had, instead of one of these, it actually had a metal cup on the right side.
And that cup would hold the butt of the gun for firing on the move, for walking fire.
So unfortunately I don't have an example of that to show you. ...
This is a fantastic condition second assistant gunner's belt, and it's actually probably the lesser known of the bunch.
So, some cool web gear to go along with the guns.
One of the controversial elements of the US use of the BAR in World War One is
well, really the lack of US use of the BAR in World War One.
As early as the end of July 1918 there were like 17,000 of these rifles available in France
for the American Expeditionary Force.
And yet it wouldn't be until September, late September in fact, of 1918 that the guns actually saw combat use.
And the question is why? ... There was at least one US division that trained with the BAR in the United States,
shipped over to France with them, and upon arrival had their BARs taken away and replaced with 1918 Chauchats.
Much to their disappointment once they started using 1918, .30-06 calibre, Chauchat automatic rifles.
The question is why?
And the answer that's generally understood is that this was a specific ... dictate from General John Pershing.
And he was concerned that if he started using the rifles in small numbers as soon as they were available,
the Germans would capture them. And the Germans, he thought, might actually be able to reverse engineer
and put these guns into production relatively quickly.
Remember that at this point people were expecting that the war would go on into 1919,
and ... the US would have a major offensive in the spring of 1919.
It was anticipated that the Germans might be running a major offensive as well.
And Pershing was looking ahead to try and make the best long range strategic plans
for the use of a new and potentially game-changing sort of weapon.
It's interesting to me, there are people who will argue that this was stupid,
the BAR was there and why would you cost American lives by not letting them use this rifle as soon as it was available?
While at the same time, there are many people who look at the other new weapons that were developed in World War One,
things like the tank, and poison gas, and flamethrowers in strategic sort of use.
And in every one of these instances, if you look at the initial use of the weapon,
the Generals who were in charge ... they didn't really think that maybe this weapon would be all that effective,
and they just wanted to get an idea for how it would work before relying on it as a major part of an offensive.
And so in every case they would do kind of like a little test run. And every time they did a test run
the other side would notice, recognise what the weapon is, and immediately start developing countermeasures.
And everyone always says, "Well, what if they hadn't done this test run with poison gas?
What if they had just ... sprung it on the Allies as this huge scale weapon?
Well, the Germans could have broken through the lines and taken Paris.
Or what about tanks? If they hadn't done early test runs with tanks
the Allies could have broken through the lines and ended the war early."
Well that's exactly what Pershing was actually thinking about when he decided to delay
use of the BAR until he could equip a couple of full divisions with them all simultaneously.
So this is obviously a question where there is maybe no right answer, there are valid points on both sides.
And the BAR came out of one of those, so.
At any rate, as I've mentioned, these are particularly cool rifles to find in their World War One configuration like this.
This particular one is coming up for sale here at the Julia auction house.
If you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to their catalogue page on it.
And so if you are interested in having this yourself, you can take a look at their pictures, and their description,
and provenance. And place a bid here live at the auction if you want to come join us here,
or over the phone, or through the website.
Thanks for watching.
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