The HORRORS of the BAR in WW2 

The HORRORS of the BAR in WW2 

At dawn on the 9th of June, 1944, in a roadside ditch outside the village of Cockigny in Normandy, a 22-year-old kid from Grand Island, New York, named Charles DeGlopper, picked up a Browning automatic rifle and stepped out into the road. His platoon from Company C, 1st Battalion, 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, was pinned.

German machine guns and riflemen had them boxed in. The enemy was maneuvering to surround them. Nobody was getting out of that ditch alive unless somebody did something about those guns. DeGlopper stood 6’7″, over 240 lb. He walked into the middle of the road in full view of every German position and opened fire.

They shot him. He kept firing. They shot him again. He dropped to a knee and kept firing. They shot him a third time. He sat down in the road and kept firing. Every German barrel swung toward him, and while they focused on killing one man with a Browning automatic rifle, his entire platoon escaped. Captain Robert Marr of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment later recalled that DeGlopper had gone on a rampage with his BAR, taking out a large number of the defenders and their machine guns before they finally killed

him. When his comrades retook that ground, they found dead Germans scattered across the road and multiple machine gun positions that DeGlopper had knocked out of action. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously, the only soldier of the 82nd Airborne to earn one for the Normandy campaign. That is the horror of the BAR.

 Not a crew-served weapon behind sandbags. Not a belt-fed machine gun on a tripod. One man, walking, firing. To understand how a single infantryman with a 20-round magazine could do that, you have to understand what the BAR actually was and why that .30-06 round changed everything. John Moses Browning designed the weapon in 1917 in Ogden, Utah for a very specific purpose.

The Western Front had become a slaughterhouse. Every attack across no man’s land followed the same pattern. Artillery stopped. Infantry climbed out of the trench. In the gap between the shells lifting and the soldiers arriving at the enemy line, defenders manned their guns and cut the attackers apart. Browning’s answer was walking fire.

 Give a single rifleman a fully automatic weapon light enough to carry on the advance, and he could suppress that trench during the killing window. The BAR debuted in combat on the 13th of September, 1918 near Verdun. The man who carried it was Second Lieutenant Val Allen Browning, the designer’s own son. The gun weighed about 16 lb in its original form. It fired the .

30-06 Springfield cartridge on full automatic from a 20-round box magazine. By the standards of 1918, it was a revolution. By the standards of 1943, it was something else entirely. The M1918A2, the version American soldiers carried through World War II, weighed nearly 20 lb empty. Loaded with a full combat belt of 12 magazines, the BAR man hauled over 30 lb of gun and ammunition.

The bipod attached at the muzzle caused barrel whip, so most soldiers threw it away. The carrying handle went, too. Marines stripped off the flash hider to save weight. What remained was a long, heavy, air-cooled automatic rifle with a fixed barrel that could not be changed when it overheated, and a magazine that ran dry in under 3 seconds of continuous fire.

It sounds like a terrible weapon, and in many ways it was. But the BAR did one thing that nothing else in any infantry squad on Earth could do. It put a full power rifle cartridge on fully automatic fire into the hands of one man who could carry it anywhere the rifleman went. This is the part that matters. The German 10-man group was built around the MG 34 or MG 42.

That machine gun was the squad. The other eight men carried bolt action Kar98k rifles and existed to feed the gun, protect it, and carry its ammunition. Kill the MG gunner and you killed the squad’s firepower. The Japanese squad followed a similar model. The Type 96 or Type 99 light machine gun anchored the position.

 The rifleman carried bolt action Arisaka rifles. Aimed rate of fire for a trained bolt action rifleman, about 15 rounds per minute. The American 12-man rifle squad was philosophically different. It was built around the rifleman and every rifleman carried an M1 Garand. Semi-automatic. Eight rounds as fast as you could pull the trigger.

30 or more aimed rounds per minute from every man in the squad. The BAR existed to multiply what the Garands were already doing. So, when an American squad made contact, the Germans and Japanese were not facing one automatic weapon supported by bolt action rifles. They were facing one automatic weapon supported by eight semi-automatic rifles.

 The sheer volume of aimed fire coming from a single American squad was unlike anything either enemy had designed their tactics to handle. And then there was the bullet itself. The .30-06 M2 ball round fired a 150-grain full metal jacket bullet at roughly 2,800 ft per second. That translated to approximately 2,650 ft lbs of energy at the muzzle.

According to Major General Julian Hatcher’s authoritative ordnance reference, Hatcher’s Notebook, published in 1947, that round penetrated 32 and 1/2 inches of seasoned oak at 200 yards. Nearly 3 feet of solid hardwood. There is a counterintuitive detail buried in that data that makes the round even more frightening.

 At close range, around 50 feet, the bullet had not yet stabilized in flight. When it hit oak at that distance, it yawed and tumbled, penetrating only about 11 inches. At 200 yards, combat range, the bullet was flying perfectly point first, stabilized. It punched almost three times deeper. The farther away you were, the worse it got.

 The United States Army Historical Foundation put it plainly. The BAR’s .30-06 ammunition would kill even after blasting through trees and logs that routinely stopped hand grenade fragments or the lower velocity .45 caliber rounds from submachine guns and pistols. In the Pacific, Japanese snipers tied themselves to coconut palms with rope so they would not fall if wounded.

 They had concealment up in those trees. They thought they had cover. A BAR gunner could pour three or four 20-round magazines into the crown of a palm, and the .30-06 rounds would punch straight through the trunk. The sniper either died from the rounds penetrating the wood or the rope was severed and he fell. Either way, the cover was not cover.

 In Europe, German soldiers sheltering behind brick farmhouse walls discovered the same truth. The .30-06 chewed through brick at the mortar joints. Sand-filled emplacements, which stopped grenade fragments and pistol rounds, gave way at about 7 inches of penetration. The psychological effect was devastating.

 A soldier hears wood splintering inward, sees dust and chips kicked off the inside face of his sandbag wall, and realizes the thing between him and the enemy is not protection. It is an illusion. If the horror of the BAR was its penetration, the proof was a man named Henry Schauer. On the 23rd of May, 1944, at noon, outside Cisterna di Littoria, Italy, Technical Sergeant Henry Schauer of Company A, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, was on patrol during the breakout from Anzio.

Four German snipers pinned his entire patrol in a ditch, firing from behind a house and a chimney. Schauer stood up. He walked 30 yards toward the four snipers who were trying to kill him. He stopped in the open with rifle fire converging on him from four directions, and he fired four bursts from his BAR, each at a different range.

 Four bursts, four dead snipers. Then he dropped a fifth who had opened up from behind the chimney. Two German machine gun positions opened fire. Schauer left cover again, knelt, and killed both gunners of the first machine gun at 60 yards with a single burst. Two more Germans ran up to man the gun. He killed them, too. He shifted fire to the second machine gun crew 500 yards away and emptied a fresh magazine.

All four crewmen dead. The next morning, the 24th of May, a German Mark VI Tiger tank and another machine gun pinned the patrol again. Schauer stood upright 80 yards from that machine gun and killed all four crewmen with one burst from his BAR. Walking fire. Exactly as Browning had designed it in 1917. One man, standing in the open, firing, and the enemy position ceased to exist.

War correspondents gave him a nickname after a 17-hour patrol in which he killed 17 Germans. They called him Kraut an hour shower. He received the Medal of Honor on the 27th of October, 1944. If you’re finding this valuable, hit subscribe. We cover stories like this every week. Now, the BAR was not perfect.

 It was not even close. The United States Army knew it was outclassed as a light machine gun and openly said so. The 20-round magazine was the single biggest problem. The British Bren held 30 rounds with a quick-change barrel. The German MG 42 was belt-fed. 50-round drums or 250-round belts with a cyclic rate of 1,200 rounds per minute and a barrel you could swap in seconds.

The BAR fired at roughly 500 rounds per minute through a barrel that was permanently fixed to the receiver. Sustained fire meant overheating and overheating meant you were done. In 1943, the Army tried to solve the problem by reverse engineering the MG 42 in .30-06. The T24 prototype program failed largely because the engineers did not account for the greater length of the .

30-06 cartridge compared to the German 8 by 57 mm Mauser round. The replacement would not arrive until 1957 when the M60 general-purpose machine gun finally entered service. But the BAR outlasted the war it was supposedly too old for. In Korea, at the Chosin Reservoir in the winter of 1950, temperatures dropped so low that M1 carbines froze solid.

Garands malfunctioned. The BAR kept firing. Private First Class Frank Fulford of the 38th Infantry, Second infantry division, described his first night on the line. “He probably fired about a thousand rounds through his BAR that night.” he recalled. His assistant kept loading magazines for him in the dark while heavy attacks hit their position.

A thousand rounds. 50 magazine changes. Through one BAR in one night. He said later that he felt the weapon had saved his life. 102,000 BARs were manufactured during World War I. Another 188,000 M1918A2s rolled off the lines by July of 1945. 61,000 more were built for Korea. Roughly 350,000 Browning Automatic Rifles served across the weapon’s American military career.

It was heavy. It was clunky. It held 20 rounds and overheated if you pushed it. Every firearms historian who has studied it will tell you it was obsolete before the first GI hit the beach at North Africa in 1942. But ask Charles DeGlopper’s platoon whether it mattered. Ask the German snipers at Cisterna whether 20 rounds was enough.

Ask the Japanese soldier behind a coconut palm who heard the wood crack inward and realized the tree between him and the BAR was not going to save him. The BAR was not the best machine gun of World War II. It was not even a machine gun. It was something worse. It was a machine gun’s firepower in one man’s hands.

Firing a round that did not care what you were hiding behind. And every single American squad had one.