Bren

Origins

Britain ended the First World War with the Lewis gun and spent the 1920s looking for something lighter and less temperamental. Trials from 1930 considered the Vickers-Berthier, the Madsen, the Browning Automatic Rifle and, from 1932, the ZB vz.26 of the Czechoslovak state arsenal at Brno, designed by Václav Holek. The Czech gun was decisively the best, but it fired the rimless 7.92mm Mauser cartridge; Brno reworked it for the rimmed British .303 through the ZB vz.30 and ZGB 33 stages, curving the magazine to suit the rim and shortening the barrel and gas system, and the result was adopted in 1935. Production at the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield, began in 1937 and the first guns reached the infantry in 1938. The name joins BRno and ENfield.

Design & Construction

The Bren is gas operated, a long-stroke piston beneath the barrel driving a bolt that tilts up to lock into the receiver, and it fires from an open bolt to keep the chamber cool. The thirty-round magazine sits on top, which offsets the sights to the left and lets gravity help the feed; the barrel changes in seconds by a carrying handle, and the bipod folds under the gas block. At just under 23 pounds it was heavy by later standards but ten pounds lighter than the Lewis. Its most-remarked quality was accuracy — so good that gunners were taught to "walk" bursts across a target because the gun would otherwise put every round through the same hole. Marks II, III and IV simplified manufacture in wartime; guns were also made by Inglis in Canada, at Lithgow in Australia and at Ishapore in India.

Combat Use

Every British and Commonwealth infantry section of the Second World War was built around one Bren and the riflemen who carried its magazines, and the gun fought in every theater from Dunkirk to Burma, in the hands of the Gurkhas, the British SAS's jeep patrols and the airborne divisions at Arnhem alike. It could be fired from the hip on the assault, from the bipod in defense, from a tripod for sustained fire and from vehicle mounts; the "Bren carrier" took its name from it. Inglis built tens of thousands in 7.92mm for Nationalist China. After the war it served in Korean War, Malaya and Kenya, and when the British Army adopted 7.62mm NATO in the late 1950s the Bren was converted rather than retired, becoming the L4 with a chrome-lined barrel and a straight magazine.

Legacy

The L4 was still carried by British units in the Falklands in 1982 and in the Gulf in 1991, a fifty-year service life almost unmatched among automatic weapons, and Brens remained in Indian and other Commonwealth service later still. The design's descendants include the Czech vz.52 and the British L86 Light Support Weapon's role, if not its mechanism. Deactivated and semi-automatic Brens are widely collected, and the gun remains, with the Lee-Enfield Rifle and the Sten Gun, one of the three arms that define the British soldier of 1939-45.