Who invented the mg 42

When faced with such a scenario, many GIs were simply frozen with fear. With staged demonstrations of American and German automatic weapons, the film insists that while the German machine gun has a much higher rate of fire than its American counterpart, the MG does not possess the same degree of accuracy as an American machine gun.

By the autumn of , the Germans were fielding large numbers of MGs, one gun per man squad. And while accuracy was not a shortcoming of the MG, the large quantities of ammunition it used, and its tendency to quickly overheat, certainly were. To address those problems, the German squad of was essentially rebuilt around the needs of the MG; the burden of large quantities of ammunition needed to feed the gun was spread out evenly through the squad. When the weapon overheated and the barrel needed to be changed, the machine-gun crew was vulnerable, even though a barrel change could be conducted in less than 20 seconds.

Depending on the gunner and conditions, a barrel change could be required as often as every to rounds. When the hot barrel was removed, it was set aside until it was cool enough to use again. Machine-gun teams would have as many as six spare barrels on hand. Driving through a recently secured area in Belgium, the sharp-eyed Liniewski spotted the abandoned weapon in a field.

Liniewski then did what any unsupervised GI would have done in that position; he stopped his truck and seized the opportunity to snag a great souvenir for the folks back home. All comment submissions will become the property of WW2DB.

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World War II Database. MG 42 Machine Gun. Bill says: 15 Feb PM the mg42 was a real brass eater. Anonymous says: 30 Sep PM the mg42 must have bin the allis biggest fear it sounds like some one ripping a towel it was a murderous wepon. Anonymous says: 6 May AM i saw two of my best friends get mowed down by this tremeeendous gun. Anonymous says: 4 Jan AM this gun is still used today by iraq soldgers.

Anonymous says: 24 Mar PM Hi there. The gunner of the weapon was preferably a junior non-commissioned officer or Unteroffizier. It was possible for operating crews to lay down a non-stop barrage of fire, ceasing only when the barrel had to be replaced.

This allowed the three-man crew of an MG 42 to tie up significantly larger numbers of enemy troops. Both the Americans and the British trained their troops to take cover from the fire of an MG 42, and assault the position during the small window of barrel replacement.

The high rate of fire of the MG 42 sometimes proved a liability — mainly in that, while the weapon could be used to devastating effect, it could quickly exhaust its ammunition supply. For this reason, it was not uncommon for all soldiers operating near an MG 42 to carry extra ammunition, thus providing the MG 42 with a backup source when its main supply was exhausted.

The MG 42 is air-cooled, open bolt, recoil-operated general-purpose machine gun. It fires in the full automatic mode only. The operation functions as follows:. The sequence continues until the trigger is released. The mainspring is only needed to chamber and fire the first round. Due to the extremely high rate of fire the trigger is designed to eliminate the possibility of slowly releasing the trigger and having the bolt assembly slam into a partially raised sear.

The high energy of the reciprocating mass would severely damage the sear in this case, possibly rendering the sear incapable of stopping the bolt resulting in a run-a-way gun.

When the trigger is pulled back, the rear tab on the trigger pushes up on the front of the sear rotating it so the nose drops, at the same time the front of the trigger draws the lifter down. When the sear nose is sufficiently low to release the bolt the lifter has passed below the front of the sear.

When the trigger is released, the back of the trigger drops but the front, with the lifter, rises and the lifter catches the front of the sear and holds in down.

As the trigger continues being released the lifter is pushed upwards until the top of the lifter is in the bolt path. The bolt then strikes the lifter; it pivots about its pin in the trigger and releases the front of the sear.

The sear under action of its spring snaps up and catches the bolt with the entire engaging surface. The shoulder stock or butt is designed to permit gripping with the left hand to hold it secure against the shoulder. The considerable recoil can cause the stock to creep from its intended position if the weapon is not properly "seated" in the shoulder. In , the acute material shortages of the Third Reich led to a newer version, the MG 45 or MG 42V , which had a different operation mechanism and used retarded blowback as opposed to roller locking, used steel of lesser quality, reduced weight to only 9kg, retaining the horizontal cocking handle.

First tests were undertaken in June , but development dragged on and eventually only ten were ever built.