The MG 42. An "evil" gun?

 Why do I like the German MG 42?

 Many will say liking any gun in military history is a pretty sick enterprise. It makes me a real bad person right? How many people died as a result of a trigger pull on that particular weapon? Truth is though, humans are going to kill each other no matter what. Go ahead and pick up a rock and, if you follow the same logic, chances are you are admiring a stone item that is culturally insignificant but responsible for more bashed in skulls in human history than anything delivered from the barrel of a gun.

  I've come to accept human nature. Guns are just the latest expression of that 'big rock'.

  But it is also worth mentioning, considering the MG 42's origin, that I am not a Nazi or any kind of follower of that particular ideology. I'm just a student of human history who notices that war is pretty much our favourite activity as a species. I just happen to find it entertaining to notice the ways we devise to kill each other. Now, let's move on to the fun stuff.

  The MG42 is my favourite 'evil' gun.

  First off, it looks like a real bitch, like that ex wife who bailed with Bob from marketing but had a certain femme fatale quality to her nonetheless. Risky, but good looking. A whore (in hindsight), but a good fuck at the time. Standing there laughing at you on her stilted legs, knowing she could blow you away at any time, she's the bitch that could wreck your life when you stare her down. That's an MG 42. That's a serious gun.

  And, for some reason I can't explain, I'm referring to the MG 42 as female.

   She was made of stamped steel, mass produced at the time, when the Germans in '38 were anticipating annexing some pretty serious amounts of real estate and were in need of a replacement for the heavier, more sturdy but less reliable MG34. The Wehrmacht needed something they could mass produce fast while still maintaining high quality and lethality. There's something about the way Germans engineer stuff that I can appreciate, like BMWs and Porsches, high quality stuff that's over engineered, looks great, but is a little too pricey.

   The MG42 was a lot like that.

   The order requirement from the Wehrmacht on a dream gun was a paradoxical checklist. They needed something they could produce cheaply and also something that could spit out terrifying amounts of ammo. The contract, like all seedy government contracts, was hard to fulfill. The Wehrmacht ended up accepting a bid from a guy who had never even built a gun before, Johannes Großfuß, a guy who ran a stamped parts steel factory who had no experience in gun manufacture but saw a niche he could fill when profitable Nazi government contracts started floating around 1930s Germany. One of his engineers came up with the "roller locked mechanism" an innovation in gun manufacture that improved firing rate and heat efficiency and won him the design. The Nazi's liked it so much they had three factories mass producing the design by 1940. Großfuß won the contract not because he owned enough politicians to see it through but because his was the best actual design as voted on by hardcore military people. (This was in a narrow period in military history when the government officials dictating military policy weren't owned by the private corporations producing the guns.)

   The Nazis were working off Guderian's as yet unproven 'Blitzkrieg' doctrine, the idea that some future 'lightening strike' would undo the ass rape of Versailles through speed and firepower and blow into France in a way that nobody had seen before. The German Army was gaming a new West Front offensive but this time without any 'hypothetical' rerun of WWI that involved Verdun, trenches or the Maginot Line.

   That was pretty much the MG 42's future function in a nutshell. To be the support weapon of every infantry platoon. To spit out 1200 rounds per minute. It's an amount of spray that the human ear can't even properly register, the interval between each report being so slight that it ends up sounding like ripping cloth, a continuous roar those GIs who faced it nicknamed "Hitler's Buzzsaw". The Russians on the Eastern Front had a similar nickname.

   The idea, from the German point of view, was that your TOT (time on target) was low when aiming so the interval between bullets mattered. The MG 42 was designed to put ten bullets on a target in a single second. That makes it harder to miss than similar machine guns available at the time like the British Vickers or American Brownings (both 600rpm ish guns). All forces who faced it hated it and agreed on one thing when facing an emplaced German machine gun position...

   It was a shit brix weapon.

   Of course, like every cool thing the Germans produced in WWII, the gun had its drawbacks. The thing was so lethal and spat out so much ammo that you had to be careful how you used it. You could run out of ammo pretty fast if you had a gunner who liked waving his dick around. Wehrmacht regulations warned against holding the trigger down for more than five seconds. 7.92mm ammo is heavy if you've got to carry it around. Belt fed machine gun defensive emplacements proved the gun's home. Also, it could turn red hot in minutes. Barrel changes were critical when laying down suppressive. And after '42, when the best days of Barbarossa were dying at Stalingrad and the whole Lebensraum fantasy started going to shit, defensive MG guns started coming into their own for the Wehrmacht.

   It's a brilliant gun. It looks evil. The design has been so successful that modern versions have transpired like the current MG3 in use in the modern German Army and in other Armys worldwide.

  You should hate it as a civilian. And you do. Because you don't have to face it.

  Still, it's my favourite 'evil' gun!

The Christmas Truce 1914: All quiet on the Western Front?

   One of my favourite Yuletide war stories is the unofficial truce on the Western front in 1914.

   Sure, it's a clichéd story today and everybody uses it as the feel good wartime Christmas story but so what, I'm sipping eggnog by a roaring log fire in a Swiss chateaux overlooking the holiday lights of an alpine ski resort. Actually, I'm telling you outrageous lies. I'm really knocking back cheap CVS pharmacy vodka next to a crusty electric heater in Los Angeles suburbia overlooking my douchebag neighbor's dog shit stained lawn. But that's why I love military history. You get to realize how worse off you could be. You could be in the trenches on the Western Front but for a simple accident of chronology. If you were born male in Britain, Germany, France or Russia in the years 1885-95 it was pretty much guaranteed you'd wind up spending a Christmas knee deep in mud, rats and lice while waiting for your turn to play dodgeball with machine gun bullets.

  That's why there's something really heart warming about a football match in No Man's Land.

   It was Christmas 1914 in a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas 1914. The soldiers on the field had no real beef with each other. This whole war was triggered because some rich guy the average infantry man had never heard of ate a bullet in Sarajevo. And no mustard gas had melted off anyone's skin yet and the meat stacking operations of the Somme or Passchendaele hadn't even happened. There was still room in 1914 for an outbreak of human camaraderie, spontaneously between men who realized, in a shared holiday season, that they were all human, ordinary joes, flung into the wrong place and time as enemies and destined to be mere pawns chewed up in the global games of fat cat financiers, politicians, generals and old aristocracies.

   Some things in history never change right?

   It's hard to imagine Christmas in the trenches in 1914. It's not the type of war that happens anymore.  Siege warfare in open mud. WWI came at an interesting period where, for the first time in military history, there was no battlefield mobility. Cavalry were obsolete and armored maneuver warfare hadn't arrived yet. Modern small arms were pretty much perfected though. The British Lee Enfield and German Mauser rifles were both accurate up to 600 meters in the hands of a good shooter. That the Enfield was in use all the way up to 1957 was testimony to the effectiveness of those simple bolt action rifle designs. Of course, trench warfare was also the stage where the machine gun finally came into its own. The British water cooled Maxim gun could spit out a flesh ripping 600 rounds per minute. Artillery too had developed to the point of precision accuracy, timed fuses, multiple shell trajectories, howitzers, air bursts, rolling barrages, all of that steel rain was pretty much perfected by this time.

   This made for the worst kind of stalemate in military history.

   Hell, you can go all the way back to Themistocles and a general would still have multiple unit types at his disposal; heavy infantry, ranged units and cavalry, giving a commander at least three unique elements to play around with when trying to defeat the enemy. But in 1914, you lost that fast moving cavalry unit (the first tanks would not come until Delville Wood in 1916) so all you had as a commander to play war with on your carnage planning desk was artillery and sad meat sacks called men.

   1914 was still early in the war. The British army was composed, at this stage, of elite non conscripted men. Real soldiers. Volunteers. (They hadn't all been wiped out yet). The German Schlieffen Plan had been attempted through Belgium and had failed spectacularly at the last minute. Yet it was still a 'fair war' at this stage. Even with the trenches being laid all the way to the Channel, the barbed wire, the artillery strikes, it was still a war all soldiers could 'relate to' on some 'working class' level. With 'workers of the world unite' brewing in the East, there was a definite sense amongst the officer corps on both sides that they could lose control of their forces ideologically if fraternization were ever allowed to occur.

   And then Christmas Eve 1914 rolled up.

   And the war was still on like the newspapers had said it wouldn't be. I think this was the point where the average soldier on both sides realized they'd been duped. The situation in the trenches was taking on a permanency in winter that was starting to look like a really shitty long term deal for a soldier who was far from home with no personal grievance against the 'enemy'; except the one manufactured by hysterical propagandist newspaper headlines.

   And then it happened...

   The Germans in the trenches along the Western Front in Flanders received an influx of mini Christmas trees in wartime care packages from home (German supply lines being shorter than British ones). They lit their trees with candles and began singing traditional Christmas hymns (Tannenbaum) from the trenches on the other side of No Man's Land.

   The British were confused.

   Let's not get all fuzzy nostalgic here. The British had lost 94 men that day to German snipers all along the front. The Germans had lost similar numbers. This wasn't some outbreak of peace and love '60s style. This was a spontaneous Christmas celebration by the enemy in a trench across the way.

   But the British got curious. Like any enemy would.

  

   They popped their heads up over trench parapets to watch the lighted spectacle the Germans were putting on. Suddenly, signs began to appear from the opposing trenches in broken English.

   "You no fight, we no fight! Tommy!"

    That must have been a weird moment as the sun came up on the frost hardened mud of Christmas Day Flanders. The first man stood up and offered himself up to the snipers. But nobody fired. He was not shot. More men stood up, testing life itself at the hands of an easy bullet, for Christmas' sake. And then they began to march, from both sides, toward each other.

   I'm getting misty now. Someone has begun chopping onions in my immediate vicinity. It's Christmas right?

   Both sides met in the middle of no man's land

   Smokes were swapped. Hands were shaken. Alcohol was shared. Helmets were sampled. A game of football was played on shell pocked land where, the story goes, the Germans won 3-2. This fabled match is recorded as hearsay in regimental histories, something that was witnessed but never actually recorded by the players. God, I hope it happened. I would like it to have happened in the same way that I would like that some Jewish baby born two thousand years ago can make me survive my own death. Both stories are equally unlikely but it doesn't spoil Christmas by wanting to believe in them.

  The generals on both sides had a shit fit of course. How could it happen? How could ordinary men be friends with each other in the absence of state sponsored propaganda? It was never to happen again. The war got increasingly ugly and left everybody with scars. People wondered where had all the 'good' wars gone?

   To No Man's Land?

   Just the way the politicians, generals and old aristocracies always intended.

    Merry Christmas to you all.