MG 42
The MG 42 was the German general-purpose machine gun of the Second World War and the most influential machine gun of the twentieth century. Designed by Werner Gruner at Grossfuss from stamped steel to replace the expensive MG 34, it fired 7.92mm Mauser from a recoil-operated, roller-locked action at 1,200 rounds per minute — a rate that produced the ripping sound Allied soldiers called Hitler's buzzsaw — with a barrel that changed in seconds. Some 400,000 were made, and as the 7.62mm NATO MG3 it is still in service and production eighty years later.
Also known as Hitler's Buzzsaw, MG 42, Maschinengewehr 42, Hitlersäge, Bonesaw, MG3, MG 1
Origins
The MG 34 of 1934 was the first true general-purpose machine gun — one weapon on a bipod for the squad and a tripod for sustained fire — but it was a machined masterpiece that took too many hours and too much steel to build. In 1937 the Army asked for a cheaper gun, and the winning design came not from Mauser or Rheinmetall but from Johannes Grossfuss AG of Döbeln, a maker of sheet-metal lanterns and pressings, whose engineer Werner Gruner had never designed a weapon. He studied production methods, applied stamping and spot welding to everything that could be stamped, and adopted a roller-locked breech developed by Mauser's Edward Stecke. The Maschinengewehr 42 was accepted in 1942 and built by Grossfuss, Mauser, Gustloff, Steyr and Maget.
Design & Construction
The MG 42 is recoil operated: barrel and bolt move back together until two rollers on the bolt head, cammed inward by the barrel extension, release the bolt to continue alone. The system is fast, and Gruner deliberately let it run at 1,200 rounds per minute or more, reasoning that a machine gun's chance to hit a fleeting target is measured in fractions of a second. That rate ate barrels, so a hinged flap on the right of the shroud let the gunner swing a hot barrel out and drop a cold one in within six seconds. The feed used a cam in the top cover that moved the belt on both the forward and rearward strokes, a mechanism copied later by the M60 Machine Gun and the FN MAG. It weighed 25.5 pounds on its bipod, fired from 50- and 250-round belts, and on the Lafette 42 tripod with its telescopic sight reached out to 3,000 meters.
Combat Use
The MG 42 was the center of German infantry tactics on every front from 1942: the squad existed to feed and protect its machine gun, and Allied infantry learned the sound of the buzzsaw and the doctrine of waiting for the barrel change to move. It served the Army, the Fallschirmjäger and the Waffen-SS, on bipods in Normandy hedgerows, on tripods in Italian hills and on the Eastern Front, and its psychological effect was such that the US Army made a training film to reassure soldiers that its bark was worse than its bite — a claim the soldiers did not believe. Against its 1,200 rounds a minute the Bren fired 500 and the M1919 Browning Machine Gun 450.
Legacy
No machine gun was more copied. The Bundeswehr rechambered the MG 42 for 7.62mm NATO as the MG 1 in 1958 and refined it into the MG3, which Rheinmetall still produces and which serves Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Pakistan and dozens of others; the Yugoslav M53 kept the original caliber; the Swiss MG 51 and Austrian MG 74 are close relatives. Its roller-locking principle became the roller-delayed blowback of the CETME, G3 Rifle and HK MP5, and its feed system lives on in the M60 and MAG. It is the pattern from which the modern general-purpose machine gun was cut.
Sources
McNab, Chris. MG 34 and MG 42 Machine Guns. Osprey Weapon 21, 2012.
Myrvang, Folke. MG34-MG42: German Universal Machineguns. Collector Grade, 2002.
US War Department. Handbook on German Military Forces, TM-E 30-451, 1945.
Rheinmetall. MG3 technical documentation.
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