What Happened to the BAR?

[Mike Irwin]

HK,

Most of what you'll find on the Chauchat simply screws it to the wall.

Hatcher's Notebook and Small Arms of the World at least treat the design fairly.

Hatcher does note that the design is one based on long recoil, which is very unusual for an automatic weapon, and makes for a harsh firing experience.

I really didn't find that to be the case. No, it wasn't like firing a .22, but it certainly wasn't horrible.

 

[Fred S]

K80Geoff: The "thingy" on the BAR belt was where the soldier could tuck in the butt of the gun and fire it on the advance. These were on WWI era belts only. The WWII belts discarded this notion and had different pouches for the magazines than the earlier belts.

I have an Ohio Ordnance M1918A3 and the gun is just super. It fires very well and is very accurrate. I load up a mg, put down the bipods and rip off the rounds as fast as I can. They all hit the target and many go in the 10 ring. That 20 lbs has an advantage, it keeps the gun on target.

Here's a picture of my Dad with his BAR while on maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941. He loved the BAR, says it is a great gun. he's still alive (79) but is in the hospital. When he recovers, he's going to shoot my BAR!

 

[Art Eatman]

SOF magazine (Brown; Peter Kokalis), maybe eight or ten years back, did a comparison test of the BAR against IIRC an M14, an FAL and a G3. Full auto, against a large boulder at 500 meters.

Only the BAR could be kept on target for a full magazine. Obviously the greater weight was a factor, but the BAR was the most controllable.

Art

 

[K80Geoff]

Fred S ...Thank you! I kinda suspected it had something to do with resting the butt, but did not think it was for firing on the move, interesting!

I saw it on a BAR belt for sale by http://www.ammoman.com/ but it must have sold as the picture is no longer there.

Your dad doesn't seem to have any problem handling the weight of the BAR in that picture.

One of these years I will get to knob creek and fire one

 

[Matt Sutton]

If any of you ever come through Utah, you owe it to yourselves to see the Browning museum in Ogden (just north of Salt Lake City). There are several BAR examples, including at least one prototype. I believe it's the same prototype named in "Rock in a Hard Place", a comprehensive book on the BAR.
Nearly all of the guns are kept in free standing glass cases, so you can get your nose right up to them.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the commercial version, the Colt Monitor.

http://www.bigjimsmgs.com/IMAGES99/COLTBARPIC.GIF

That's one BAD ASS weapon.

 

[Mike Irwin]

Trust me, Geoff.

After you fire a BAR, the grin on your face won't go away for several days.

 

[Southla1]

"After you fire a BAR, the grin on your face won't go away for several days"

That's for sure!

We had a regular military jeep assigned to range section. The windshield would fold flat on top of the hood. Now kids don't try this at home, remember we were professionsals (YEA RIGHT!)

Anyway we took a M-2 Carbine and put it (after doing some inletting) in a M1A1 carbine stock, that's the folding Paratrooper stock. Then we got one of the BAR's out of the arms warehouse aalong with a bunch of 30 Rd carbine mags and some 20 rd BAR Mags and a "few" cases of ammo.

We folded the windshield flat on the jeep and started driving around the ranges on base lowering the jackrabbit polulation with both the carbine and BAR. We alternated so they could cool.

After 30 minutes of this the base commander, Col. Adleman came roaring up in his staff car and stopped us.

When he pulled up and recognized Don and I he seemed a little relieved (course we were scared s******s). He and we dismounted and we gave him a highball, and then he asked what were we doing. We told the truth............shooting jackrabbits. He said "oh OK I did not know it was y'all I could hear the auto fire from my office and it was not coming from the same place, and the Air Police were busy so I came to check it out myself, just make sure you dispose of the carcasses because I don't want coyotes dragging them on the road."

YES SIR! Gave him another highball and then carried on! I don't remember how many we got but it sure was fun!

That was 2 sweet shooting weapons (if you had good mags to keep the carbine from jamming).

 

[Mk VII]

some National Guard units continued to use BARs into the 1970s. In retrospect it was a complicated and expensive mechanism which was good by the standards of 1918 but by the '40s was looking decidedly long in the tooth. The lack of a replacement owed as much to lack of funding and willpower as much as anything. There were better designs to be had even in 1941. Production was revived in the Korean War by which time it looked even more old-fashioned.
My BAR is a grimy old New England Small Arms veteran with a 9-44 barrel that was presumably given to some Third World army that didn't believe in cleaning things.

 

[MrMurphy]

I just found out today, a guy I work with (a sergeant at my security company) is an Okinawa vet, among other places, and saw quite a bit of action in the Pacific (Army, WW2). I'll ask his opinion of the BAR. Being a grunt, he used it firsthand...that's about as straight from the horse's mouth as it gets.


P.S The upside-down BAR action is true, FN already made a version of the BAR with a pistol grip, they took the action, inverted it, used the feed mechanism off the MG42 (very strong and well tried) along with the pistol grip, trigger group, etc. I think the gas and barrel systems were their own ideas. The MAG (M240 for us) was in use after 1958, and the whole dang world adopted it, from the UK to Egypt, and even Israel, but no, the US had to have one of "our" weapons.... which is why we adopted the M14 not the FAL (then all Nato woulda had one rifle) when both were passed as OK for adoption, and why we adopted the pieced-together M60 (poor job of piecing it together too) instead of the MAG, or the re-chambered MG42 in 7.62, the MG3.

 

[BigG]

Thanks, MrMurphy, for confirming my memory about the MAG. I lost my copy of Small Arms of the World to my Evil First Wife.