M1918 BAR

Origins

When the United States entered the World War I in April 1917 it had no modern light automatic weapon, and the French were already practicing 'walking fire' — advancing infantry firing automatic rifles from the hip to keep enemy heads down during an assault. John Browning had designed both a heavy machine gun and an automatic rifle on his own initiative; in February 1917 he demonstrated them to officials in Washington, and the rifle was adopted as the M1918. Colt, Winchester, and Marlin-Rockwell tooled up for production, and the first BARs reached France in the summer of 1918, going into action with the 79th Division in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in September. Browning's son Val, a lieutenant, demonstrated it at the front.

Design & Construction

The BAR is gas-operated: gas tapped from the barrel drives a piston that unlocks a bolt which tilts up into a recess in the receiver. It fires from an open bolt to prevent cook-offs and feeds from a 20-round detachable box magazine. The original M1918 weighed about 16 pounds, had selective semi-automatic and fully automatic fire, and no bipod. The M1918A1 of 1937 added a hinged butt plate and a bipod at the gas cylinder; the M1918A2, standardized in 1940, moved the bipod to the muzzle, added a monopod option, and replaced semi-automatic with two automatic rates, about 300-450 and 500-650 rounds per minute. With bipod and accessories the A2 weighed nearly 20 pounds. Its fixed barrel limited sustained fire, and its 20-round magazine was small next to belt-fed guns, but it was reliable, accurate, and could be carried and fired by one man.

Combat Use

The BAR's first war was short, but its second was its greatest. In the World War II each American rifle squad was built around a single BAR, with the M1 Garand riflemen maneuvering under its fire. The US Marine Corps went further in 1944, giving every four-man fire team its own BAR, so a Marine squad had three. The US Army Rangers and airborne carried it, and BAR men were favorite targets of enemy snipers. In the Korean War it was still the squad automatic weapon, fighting alongside the belt-fed M1919 Browning Machine Gun in the defensive battles of 1950-53. Between the wars it gained a different reputation, when Clyde Barrow and other gangsters stole BARs from National Guard armories; the FBI adopted a commercial version, the Colt Monitor R-80.

Legacy

The BAR was replaced in American service from 1957 by the M14 and the M15 and then by the M60 Machine Gun, though it served into the early Vietnam era with American advisers and South Vietnamese forces and much longer with allied armies. It foreshadowed both the squad automatic weapon and the battle rifle. Transferable original BARs are among the most valuable collectible American automatic weapons, and semi-automatic reproductions made from new receivers let civilian collectors own the look and feel. Its silhouette — long, heavy, bipod at the muzzle — remains one of the defining images of the American infantryman of the Second World War.