“The mere sound of an MG42 firing took a psychological toll on troops. The situation became so bad the U.S. Army produced a training film intended to boost the morale of U.S. soldiers terrified of the machine gun’s reputation.”
“The German gunner pays for his impressive rate of fire,” he intones. “But you get maximum accuracy with a rate of fire that isn’t just noise! The German gun is good—but ours is better. Their bark is worse than their bite.”
I suspect American soldiers who had faced the MG42 in combat would have had some rather, um, *colorful* replies to that training film.
It is still around in the form of the .308 Win version called the MG3. Very, very reliable. You can see it in action in Afghanistan, or my favorite as German troops in an APC light up a couple of Serbs in a KFOR mission.
How many threads are you going to post about that stupid gun? The MG42 was a war loser not a war winner. An excessive rate of fire is a serious flaw in a single-barreled air-cooled weapon, as I said in the last piece of fluff posted for this gun.
The MG 42 was a model for the design of the M-60 machine gun, which was the US Army primary machine gun post-WWII.
BOR makes mention of it in his book Killing Patton.
Germans would fire off burst about knee high..........
It was hard keeping it fed at that rate of fire. Each gun had to have its own ammo truck parked beside the bunker.