If you watched HBO’s World War Two saga “Band of Brothers,” you may recall the Browning 1919A6 Light Machine Gun making its appearance in the Bastogne episodes. It was a stop-gap gun that looked a bit like what you’d get if you crossed a M1919A4 belt-fed light machine gun with an M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). If the light machine guns of World War Two went to a dance, the M1919A6 would be the badly dressed fat kid with two left feet who struggled just to get onto the floor while the British Bren, German MG34, Japanese Nambu Type 99 and Russian DP-27 were doing the Jitterbug.

History of the M1919A6 Light Machine Gun

Surprisingly, despite its many shortcomings, the “substitute standard” M1919A6 remained America’s “limited standard” light machine gun until the M60 finally replaced it in the early 1960s. I shot a semi-auto clone of the M1919A6 for the first time last summer. Built from original parts, this gun operated identically to the full-auto version with the exception that it fired once per pull of the trigger. Taking it to the range offered a rare opportunity to experience firsthand some of what a machine gunner equipped with this ungainly weapon had to deal with.

In the HBO series, the actor who carried the weapon handled it with deceptive ease. I found there was no comfortable way to hold the darned thing even with the twist-locking barrel handle. It’s 32.5 pounds of sharp edges and hard angles that’s awkward and difficult to carry. With the receiver flat on my shoulder and the buttstock pulled down by my bent forearm, the barrel jutted out high above my head behind me.

Negotiating the uneven woods trail to the firing range, it slid back and forth between the base of my neck and the tip of my shoulder blade, digging deeper into my neck and shoulder with each step. The barrel stuck up like an antenna, seemingly destined to snag every low-hanging branch and make the receiver bite me all the harder. With the gun butt in one hand and a 250-round ammo can in the other, I was counting the steps of the short, 100-yard walk to the fallow field where I planned to shoot. The infantryman assigned this weapon had to be tough just to lug it around.

M1919A6 Features

Once in position, setup was swift. Unlike the Browning M1919A4, there was no tripod to set up, no pintle to secure, and no complex traverse and elevation gizmo to attach and adjust. The 1919A6 is a one-man affair, requiring only the individual adjustment of the bipod legs, two big wing nuts per leg. I set up a target the previous day, a 12-inch Birchwood Casey Shoot-N-See bullseye on a 36-inch square white board 100 yards into a field 300 yards across with a gentle upward slope backed by a thick tree line.

The M1919A6 was functionally identical to the earlier M1917 water-cooled and M1919A4 air-cooled guns. so if a soldier knew how to use one, he could use them all. Though semi-auto-only, the gun comprises the same gas-boosted, recoil-operated, closed bolt, belt-fed with the same controls as the machine gun. Pulling the charging handle, the manual of arms required machine gunners grab it from the bottom with the palm up for safety. The air-cooled Browning machine guns got hot fast because they fired from a closed bolt.

If the barrel was too hot from excessive firing, the chambered round could cook off immediately, driving the charging handle unexpectedly back. Gripping the handle palm up got the gunner’s thumb out of the way. With my limited ammunition supply, and less than half the machine gun’s cyclic rate of fire, a cook off was highly unlikely, but good habits are most helpful when started early.

Ammo Setup

Cloth belts, of 250 rounds with a ratio of four ball rounds to one tracer saw the most action in World War Two. Today, the hand-cranked loading machines for cloth belts are costly and most shooters use the metal, disintegrating link belts originally designed for aircraft use. My research revealed that ground forces used plenty of these linked belts later in the war.

Regardless of belt type, a full belt began with a metal starter tab a few inches long. It allowed loading the weapon without opening the top cover. The soldier pushed the starter tab through the receiver’s feed slot until the end came out the right side. He then pulled the exposed end hard toward the right to lock the first cartridge in the belt against the feed pawl. At that point, if the gunner was planning to fire, he would pull back the charging handle twice. You read that right…TWICE.

Charging the Weapon

The initial pull advanced the first cartridge in the belt into the loading position directly in front of the bolt. The second pull stripped that cartridge from the belt, lowered it to the level of the barrel, chambered it, and positioned the next cartridge in the belt for loading. There’s a lot going on mechanically inside these guns and you can feel it when working the charging handle. You have to put some muscle into it, much more than any sporting firearm you’ll ever use. The 5-pound barrel attached to its extension inside the receiver is the greatest part of the reciprocating mass. The guns had no mechanical safety either. Once a round was in the chamber they were ready to fire. To make the gun safe, you have to open the top cover, remove the belt, and draw back the charging handle to clear the chamber. 

The gun can also be loaded without a starter tab from an open top cover. Just remember that with disintegrating metallic links, you lead with the double loop end of the link. You simply orient the first round in the belt with the center of the bolt, make sure the belt feed lever in the top cover is all the way to the left, close the cover tight with a rap of your fist, and pull the charging handle back once to chamber the round. I had to do this a number of times while I was getting the hang of how the gun handled with ten round belts.

Getting on the Gun

The 1919A6 is clumsy to move around with, but firing from the prone position its merits became apparent. I shimmied underneath the hook of the buttstock, supporting the weight of the receiver on my back, grasped the pistol grip with my right hand, and the wrist of the buttstock with my left. Resting on my elbows like that, I had a very steady hold which helped maintain a good sight picture through the flip-up, windage and elevation adjustable, aperture rear sight.

A soldier firing the 1919A6 prone was less exposed to enemy fire than one firing the 1919A4 from a tripod, and probably more accurate than he’d be if shooting with a free gun. In under ten seconds, which was all the time it took me to get a precise sight picture for each of eight shots in the belt, I grouped them into 4.65 inches at 100 yards. I think that’s pretty good for a 14.5-inch sight radius. 

The really eye-opening experience came at the end of my test in a rapid-fire experiment where I burned through a 25-round belt as fast as I could pull the trigger. My semi-auto cyclic rate turned out to be 176 rounds per minute, a far cry from the 400-450 rounds per minute that a full-auto gun is capable of. Even at my kindergarten cyclic rate, I began to feel what I’d describe as the gun’s rhythm, rocking back and forth as the action went in and out of battery with each shot.

Rounds Downrange

Looking downrange over my sights, I could actually see my shots kicking up the dirt way in front of and far behind the target. Those standing above me on my right and left had a clearer view of what was happening downrange. One said, “You’re all over the place.” The other, who has experience with belt-fed machine guns, said, “No, he’s right where he’s supposed to be.”

What recreational shooters who’ve never fired a light machinegun often don’t realize, is that a machine gun isn’t meant to deliver a precisely aimed single shot into one target. That’s a rifle’s job. A machine gun like this M1919A6 is meant to deliver a lot of shots over a large area to destroy or suppress multiple targets. The rocking rhythm of the gun provides the vibration to create that spread downrange.

That spread is referred to in the military as a “beaten zone,” which is an apt description for the ellipse-shaped area pounded by bullets as they strike in front of and behind the target. I’m fairly sure that changes in the cyclic rate will change the size of the beaten zone, but in this case, with this semi-auto gun, it was estimated about twenty yards long and two yards wide, with eleven shots hitting the 36-inch square target board. If ammo wasn’t nearly a buck a round, I’ve had experimented more with the M1919A6.