But you know hwat I mean, in WW1 it was seen as a squad weapon.
In WWII it was confused bewtween a personal/squad weapon.
Example:-
D-Day US airbourne forces drop into Normandy without ANY BAR!
British Forces did carry the Bren. And the US paras did carry a squad weapon, just not the BAR.
Why? Because there was no clear doctine for the use of the weapon at this time.
Thats why I made my comment about confusion over the use of the BAR.
Minor tactical doctrine stuff aside, the BAR was still a very effective weapon. It wasn’t as effective as the Bren in a sustained fire role, but it was good enough.
Most US infantry I’ve heard talking about the BAR speak very lovingly of it. And as far as small unit infantry tactics, the US Army virtually rewrote the rules in the field and they varied greatly from their training --which focused on an outdated, precision, “one shot, one kill” style shooting-- to a more realistic area suppressive fire mode in actual combat. That’s across the board. But soldiers I’ve seen interviewed testified that they used to pair up BARs, and fire and reload intermittenly. The BARs use in the Pacific is also hard to marginalize as the Marines used the weapon to great effect and this gave them a huge firepower advantage the Japanese could never match.
The reason the BAR was used in great numbers by the US airborne forces was that they carried a different version of the .30 cal. M1919A6 that was almost a modern general purpose machine-gun. This really should have been issued to US forces across the board. Though certainly not as effective as the MG42, the Browning they carried could be used far more easily than the M1919A4 as it shared the emphasis on mobility and ergonomics with its bipod, buttstock, and flash suppressor…
