Thank you for your comments @schurmann.
Please note that the FG 42 belt fed that I know of is the Light Automatic Machine Gun T44. And that seems to have had a side feeding mechanism similar to the prototype belt fed Kalashnikov. In this case, the Johnson belt fed seems to have a bottom closing mechanism. This would be much like the mechanism used in the HK 21.
It must have been something as the FG42 eventually evolved into the M60 belt-fed LMG.
Additionally, it is my understanding, faulted as it probably is, that the box and feeding mechanisms can be loaded from either the left or the right sides.
Regarding the MP40...
Hollywood movies usually (not always, just usually) liked to portray the users of the MP-40 firing “at the hip”, spraying the room (and evil grinning Nazi warriors) indiscriminately. I would imagine that it would have been a terrible waste of bullets. How could you possibly hit anything without sighting your target first?
As regards to your comments...Outstanding! I have always wanted to fire this weapon, and I have often wondered what it must have been like.
Regarding the MP-44. I have looked up this weapon on the internet. It does seem rather heavy and bulky. Not like the AK-47 that we have become accustomed to.
“...the FG 42 belt fed that I know of is the Light Automatic Machine Gun T44...” [vannrox, posts 39 thru 42]
Excellent job, finding imagery. I’d read a little about the T44 project but never encountered these pics before. The Army Dept is spotty, concerning what they will allow DTIC to release and what they won’t. Doesn’t seem to correspond to any of the classification rules the rest of us lived with. Seen the loopiest OCAs make more rational decisions.
I should have been more clear at the outset. After spending a decade in the field of operational testing, I refer to a system as fielded and rarely give it further thought. So theT44 project may have used FG-42 parts, but was not an FG-42 as the Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe used them.
Haven’t been fortunate enough to examine either Johnson light machine gun up close, so I’ll defer to you on its feed cover orientation.
The M60 was described as incorporating some MG42 concepts. Never verified myself; while in uniform, I used the M60 only a couple times, and wasn’t able to do a side-by-side comparison with the MG42.
Designing and producing a workable light machine gun is a difficult endeavor: so many constraints apply. US Army Ordnance never did a good job of it: rejected the Lewis gun (which Isaac N Lewis had swiped from Samuel MacLean), adopted the Benet-Mercie M1909 (which later succeeded as the Hotchkiss Portative), fastened onto the BAR for a stretch of 40 years, bungled the English/metric conversions during WW2, killing the MG42 copy, adopted the M1919A6 (rather heavy for a light gun), rejected the FAL for the M14 (pretending that either could sub for a light machine gun), adopted the M60 (problem-prone early variants), adopted FN’s Minimi (sometimes cursed by users, or so I hear), avoided FN’s MAG until about 1997 (40 years after its debut). Ditched some promising designs at intervals along the way (including one each from John C Garand, William B Ruger, and David Marshall Williams - if my memory is accurate).
Many praise the MP44 but the best that can be said for it is that it pioneered concepts that became universal: select fire, intermediate cartridge. Darned thing outweighs a loaded M14 and comes close to the weight of a BAR, while handling characteristics cannot be rated as anything better than “clunky & awkward.” The late Jeff Cooper once opined that a Pennsylvania deer hunter armed with a Winchester carbine would likely come out the victor in any house-to-house scuffle against troops armed with MP44s.