This is the soldier with a machine gun in 1942.

This is a soldier with a machine gun in 2025.

Notice any difference in what they’re holding in their hands.

Have you ever wondered why the infamous MG42 still continues to haunt us? Appearing on what is supposed to be a modern-day battlefield and why it simply refuses to die? Well, if the answer is yes, you’re about to find out the truth through the real story of the most chewed over machine gun by quote unquote history channels.

Let’s begin.

The MG42’s story can be traced all the way back to the MG08.

So, why don’t we start from there and then move to where it is today.

Now, if you look at the MG8 and MG42, you’d see quite a noticeable difference.

The MG08 was a water cooled version of the Maxim gun from World War I that changed warfare forever by introducing sustained high rates of fire.

But times changed and the Germans knew that the next war they were preparing for would not be fought in trenches like the previous one.

They were working on a new soontobe famous blitz creek tactic and they needed something that could keep up with it and provide heavy automatic fire to the advancing infantry.

So the 80 lb MG08 chugging out some 500 rounds per minute simply wasn’t fitting this picture.

By the way, the MG8 would actually be used throughout the entire war by the Germans, but mostly in secondary lines or defensive positions.

Now during the years before the Second World War, the Germans were working hard and in complete secrecy on a new machine gun.

They were strictly banned from developing new weapons after the chaos of the First World War.

So, they had to stay under the radar.

The first thing they came up with was the MG13, a much lighter aircooled machine gun that a single soldier could carry and with the first quick barrel change system instead of a water- fil jacket.

Instead of a heavy tripod, it had a bipod at the end of the barrel.

Remember, these were all still revolutionary features for the time and would deeply influence the MG42 soon to come.

The biggest change, however, and the biggest reason the MG-13 was discarded, was its magazine.

Instead of belts, it used a 25 round magazine, and firing some 600 rounds per minute meant you’d have about 2 and 1/2 seconds of firing time before needing to reload.

So, sustained suppressive fire was out of the question.

Four years went by until they came up with the first real breakthrough, the legendary and much overlooked MG34.

It was actually the first ever generalpurpose machine gun in the world.

It was beltfed with a quick barrel change system made of highquality mil parts and now firing some 900 rounds per minute, which is about a 50% increase in the rate of fire from all previous machine guns.

We could easily say that when the MG34 appeared, it was the best and most modern machine gun in the world.

No other nation had anything remotely close to its features.

It was mounted on tanks and vehicles.

Came with spiderweb sights for anti-aircraft use.

Was mounted on planes as well for dog fighting and strafing runs.

And of course was used by infantry in offense and defense.

Either firing from a bipod, from the hip, from an assistant gunner’s back or, and this is the most ingenious feature of the MG34 and also the MG42, firing from the Lefett mount.

This mount is ingenious in itself and we’ll explain it more in a bit.

Believe me, it’s worth it.

However, as great as it was, the MG34 came with some problems, although they weren’t so much the machine guns problems as they were the problems of the country producing it.

Yes, it was sensitive to dust, dirt, and cold.

So, the gunners had to clean and oil it religiously if they wanted it to fire when needed.

But that wasn’t why the Germans sought its younger brother to replace it.

You see, the MG34 was a luxury weapon built from highquality parts and through a precise and complicated process requiring professional hands.

About 150 man-h hours were needed to build a single MG34 and it cost some $320 Reich marks, which in today’s money is about $3,000.

The problem with that came when you needed hundreds of thousands of machine guns as the war quickly spread to multiple fronts and continents.

Already before the war, the Germans were experimentally trying to find something cheaper and better, using stamped steel instead that would lower the cost and production time, but not by any chance reduce machine gun performance.

So imagine if you’re an engineer tasked to create something better than the best machine gun in the world currently, but to cut its price and production time in half.

Well, that’s exactly what German engineers did.

The MG42 was born.

made from stamped steel as requested with a 30% higher rate of fire, a faster quick barrel change system, more reliable in dirty battlefield conditions, and on top of all that required half the time to produce a single unit compared to the MG34, while also lowering the price by some 80 rich marks per unit.

Now, I think that’s a fairly impressive achievement.

It quickly went into mass production once the model was finalized, and throughout the war, over 400,000 MG42s would be produced.

However, it would never actually fully replace the MG34 for a couple of reasons.

The first was that repurposing factories that were already producing MG34s would mean pausing the production of urgently needed machine guns.

And the second was that the MG34 was the gun used in tanks as a hull or coaxial machine gun, and the MG42 couldn’t be used this way.

This was because of their different barrel change systems.

If you wanted to change the barrel on the MG34, you had to unlatch the barrel housing, twist it, and take out the hot barrel from behind.

Then insert the fresh one and lock it back to continue firing.

The MG42 had a simpler and faster system where you’d unlatch the barrel from the side, extract it with one move, push in the fresh barrel, and slap it locked.

But you couldn’t do this inside the tight turret of a tank without redesigning it completely.

So when you saw the MG42 on a tank, it was always mounted from the outside, like in front of the commander’s cupiller.

for additional anti-infantry or anti-aircraft protection.

The Germans kept parallel production of both machine guns throughout the war, and they needed spare parts for thousands of already produced MG34s.

Now, they had the machine gun that fired more than double the rounds per minute of any Allied weapon.

So, yes, we could now mention those extremely chewed over facts and myths where it fired so fast that you couldn’t hear in between rounds.

just one continuous sound that so terrified Allied soldiers that it could cut a man in half that it was called Hitler’s buzzaw yada yada yada.

And don’t get me wrong, most of these things are actually true.

It’s just that I’m more impressed by the ingenious and mostly overlooked engineering behind and around this gun that made all those nicknames and myths actually true.

This gun wouldn’t still be in service in just slightly modified versions today if it wasn’t so good.

Now, imagine how good it was in 1942 when there wasn’t any competition for it in the world.

When it appeared on the battlefield for the first time in 1942, it was immediately noticed by Allied troops who quickly learned to fear it, and for good reason.

The MG42 now fired from the open bolt for better cooling and to prevent the gun from locking up or cooking off rounds in the chamber after prolonged firing.

It had short recoil operation with a roller locking bolt.

This basically means the barrel and bolt move back together after firing under recoil.

Two roller bearings stop the barrel after traveling a few millimeters back until the bolt goes all the way back.

Extracts the spent casing and loads the next round from the belt into the chamber and fires it upon locking.

With this process continuing at extremely high speed for as long as the trigger is [music] pressed.

The standard German cartridge that was quite powerful was the 8x 57 mm mouser, the same one that car 98 infantry rifles fired.

Although machine guns would sometimes use a more powerful version of the same ammunition with traces usually being every fifth round in the belt.

This was so the gunner could observe the impact of his rounds and lead them onto the target.

Belts were non-disintegrating made of linked steel strips in 50 round [music] lengths.

Later joined into 250 round strips for the ammo box or longer in tanks or stationary positions.

Germans also had these drums attached to their machine guns that would hold a 50 round belt, keeping it clean and ready as ammo, so they didn’t have to carry it around their necks or trip over it like Allied soldiers did.

Also, take a look at the German ammo cans.

They had neat little folding handles with leather grips for more comfortable carrying, and they were positioned so you could carry two cans in one hand or fold them to stack boxes on top of one another where you needed space, like in tanks or bunkers.

They were also watertight, could be latched onto belts or attached to the Lefett tripod.

And again, the Allies had nothing anywhere near this.

It’s fascinating how far the Germans went in their thinking and in making every little thing work together.

And the pinnacle of that was definitely the Lefett tripod, which we have to tell you about before we continue with what happened to the MG42 after the war.

Because both the machine guns and the mount stories didn’t end with the war they were designed for.

So, this is the Lefett 42, a specialized mount weighing some 45 lb.

Allies had their heavy tripods as well, but this one was much different.

It was ingenious and turned the light machine gun into a heavy machine gun.

The Lefett had tubular steel legs that held the central body with the gun.

Two coiled buffer springs would absorb the recoil of the gun to make it more stable and accurate with a separate trigger, so the gunner didn’t have to wrestle with vibrations when firing.

It had fine precision aiming controls and advanced optics that raised the gun’s range up to 3,000 m, making it effective even in indirect fire, like a sort of light artillery.

But what’s ingenious about it was actually its mechanical computer called the Tifen Foyer Automat.

It worked like a sort of clock mechanism where the gunner would set two range limits and the sweep zone he wanted.

Basically, he selected the field where he wanted the machine gun to lay fire, whether that be a road the enemy was expected to come by or a bridge they wanted to control or deny access to.

Using this mechanism, when the trigger was pulled, the gun [music] would fire and automatically sweep itself across this preset field.

Anytime the trigger was pressed, the gun would fire across this zone, and the gunner didn’t even have to be near the gun.

He could tie a string [music] to the trigger and stay in cover while the gun fired across the designated zone as long as it had ammo.

The Lefett tripod worked the same with MG-34 and MG-42, and it’s one of the most overlooked features of German weaponry, significantly boosting the effectiveness of their machine guns, turning them into full auto snipers.

It was also easier to swap barrels when the gun was in the mount, and a well-trained crew could literally do it in 3 to 4 seconds and continue laying fire.

In defensive positions, MG42s were just a nightmare for advancing Allied troops, and not just because of the rate of fire.

With the Lefett mount, as you saw, they were much lower to the ground and therefore more difficult to spot and destroy.

Germans were also masters of deception to make it look like there were more machine guns than they actually had.

They would prepare multiple firing positions for each team and after firing for some time, move and switch position, then continue firing from a different angle.

This frustrated the allies who received fire from all directions and thought there was a much larger force on the other side.

Plus, they had no idea where to direct artillery or tanks to silence the machine guns.

If Germans had to retreat, they would often do that after inflicting catastrophic losses on Allied soldiers [music] and then withdraw to a new position where they do the same thing again.

This was especially common in the later stages of the war when Germans were constantly retreating toward Berlin and making every advance by the Allies paid horribly in blood.

Germans also had a tactic where they’d [music] use two machine guns.

One firing traces far above allied positions to make the enemy believe the fire was aimed at rear units so the front units would attempt to advance.

The second machine gun waited for this moment and would cut them down as soon as they stood up.

As for the German gunner, firing 20 rounds per second meant you’d have to be very disciplined with your finger on the trigger for multiple reasons.

You could damage the gun if firing for too long, either overheating the barrel or causing catastrophic failure in the feeding system that could blow the gun up in your face, which did happen, by the way, quite a bit.

This extreme rate of fire was a double-edged sword.

Of course, the ammo was spent faster, and someone had to carry enough of it to feed the hungry gun.

So, to max out the potential of machine guns, [music] either MG34 and MG42, as they were both used in parallel, Germans organized their squads around the machine gun itself.

Unlike allies who looked at machine guns more like a support for the infantry and categorized them into light, medium, and heavy, Germans did all of that much better with just one [music] weapon because they organized it much better.

A standard infantry squad would consist of 10 soldiers.

The core itself was the machine gun team with gunner, his assistant, and an ammo bearer.

These three worked together around the gun, carried all the equipment for it, making sure everything was operating smoothly and assisting each other in adjusting fire, reloads, barrel swaps, and repositioning.

When the gunner was hit, the assistant took over without hesitation and continued to lay down the fire.

These three usually carried a 9 mm pistol as a sidearm.

Then there were six soldiers armed with KR 98 bolt-action rifles.

They made sure that the machine gun team was safe, protecting them or advancing under their covering fire to secure the position if they were on the offensive.

The 10th man was the squad leader, usually an NCO.

He was armed with the famous MP40 submachine gun, and he would command and direct the squad and their fire and coordinate with other units.

They usually had a horse or donkey to pull the cart with ammo.

As you could expect, they were quickly burning through thousands of rounds, which are not easy to carry by hand.

One 250 round box weighed some 8 kilos or about 20 lb, [music] and it would be gone in about 10 seconds of firing.

So, you’d have to be really careful in prolonged engagements.

So, you may be wondering if the MG42 was so [music] good.

Why weren’t captured ones from the Germans used by the Allies? And why did no one copy it and make it part of their own army? Well, they did use it, and they did copy it, although unsuccessfully at first.

Allied troops would actually use captured German machine guns whenever they had a chance, [music] especially partisans and resistance movements.

It said that Germans would execute soldiers captured using their machine guns, although this was more likely to be isolated cases.

However, the problem with using your enemy’s weapon is that you weren’t trained for it.

You didn’t know how to maintain it and operate it, nor did you have spare parts or ammunition for it.

If you could capture some, then great, but there wasn’t a steady ammo resupply, and when something broke, it couldn’t be replaced.

As for copying it, America actually did try to reverse engineer captured MG42s in the T-24 project.

They built two prototypes rechambered for the US 3006 cartridge.

However, they couldn’t solve technical problems to make it actually work.

Nor could they reach the rate of fire the original MG42 had.

They eventually abandoned the project as it was draining too much time and energy they could use to produce the guns they already knew how to make.

But this doesn’t mean they didn’t steal some inspiration from it.

Some MG42 elements were combined with ergonomics of the German FG42 paratrooper rifle and later became the M60 machine gun, believe it or not.

Okay, so now we covered the MG42 in World War II.

But what happened when Germany finally surrendered and World War II ended? A lot of weapons careers ended with the end of the war or in the years after it, but not this one.

First thing was that there were enormous stockpiles of MG42s after Germany surrendered their weapons and they were scavenged by many countries across the world and some made their own copies like the Yuguslav M53 for example.

It is a direct copy of the MG42 that stayed in service for decades.

Okay.

Now, what did Germany do when they aligned with NATO in the years after the war and needed a new generalpurpose machine gun to rearm its army? They looked to British and American weapons of the time and said, “Well, that’s crap.

We already had something much better.

” So, they took their good old MG42s and repurposed them in a new standard caliber, 762 x 51 NATO, and named it the MG1.

It was exactly the same gun as the MG42, just with a new barrel and modifications for the different caliber.

And look at this.

It was still better and easier to produce than anything other nations had.

In the following years, the MG1 was a bit modified, introducing a heavier bolt to slow the rate of fire to a more controllable and economic some 900 rounds per minute.

It then evolved into the MG3 with smaller improvements like introducing the disintegrating American belt.

But the core principle of the weapon was exactly the same as in 1942, and it was now used by some of the most modern armies in the world.

They even use the same Lefett style mount just improved with modern optics and fire control, but essentially the same thing that turns the MG3 into an extremely deadly longrange weapon.

It is still mounted on vehicles and tanks now in remote controlled turrets with night vision and whatnot.