German Gunners Tested Captured .50 Cal Browning — Refused To Believe Its 800 RPM Fire Rate.

German Gunners Tested Captured .50 Cal Browning — Refused To Believe Its 800 RPM Fire Rate.

February twenty-third, nineteen forty-three. The Kummersdorf Proving Ground, fifty kilometers south of Berlin. Hauptmann Klaus Dietrich stands before a weapon that should not exist. Not in this form. Not with these specifications. Not from a nation that his technical education taught him understood nothing about precision engineering.
The Browning Machine Gun, Caliber point five zero, M2, Heavy Barrel. Serial number stamped into the receiver reads three four seven two one. Captured three days earlier from a disabled M4A1 Sherman near Sbeitla, Tunisia. Shipped north through enemy air superiority at extraordinary cost because the Heereswaffenamt technical intelligence section demanded immediate analysis.
Dietrich commanded the machine gun testing section at Kummersdorf since nineteen forty-one. His previous twenty months evaluated forty-seven different automatic weapons from eighteen nations. Soviet DP-28s. British Bren guns. French Hotchkiss designs. American M1919s in thirty-caliber. Each weapon told a story about the nation that built it. Engineering priorities made visible in steel and mechanical tolerances.
The M2 tells a story that contradicts everything Dietrich learned in seven years of weapons engineering. At eighty-four pounds without tripod mount, the weapon masses nearly eight times the weight of the ammunition belt it fires. The barrel alone weighs twenty-four pounds. German doctrine emphasized weight reduction. Portability. The MG34 achieved nine hundred rounds per minute at twenty-six pounds total weight. The newer MG42 delivered twelve hundred rounds per minute at twenty-five pounds.
American designers built a machine gun that weighs more than three MG34s combined and fires half as fast.

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