If you carried a BAR in the Pacific, you were a marked man. The Japanese knew exactly what that weapon could do to a charging line of infantry, and they learned to shoot the BAR gunner first every single time. But the story of this weapon actually began for a completely different reason in a completely different war.
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| A U.S. Marine BAR Gunner on Guam |
Stuck in the Trenches
When the First World War ground to a halt in the trenches, infantry faced a serious problem. The standard weapon was still the bolt-action rifle. A well-trained soldier could fire maybe fifteen aimed shots per minute, manually cycling the bolt after each one.
That was fine for aimed fire at range, but it created a gap when you needed to cross open ground. If men stopped to shoot, they became stationary targets. If they kept moving without shooting, defenders could set up machine guns and cut them down. Artillery could pound enemy positions for hours, but that fire had to stop before friendly troops went over the top. In that gap between when the guns went quiet and when attackers reached the trench, defenders would crawl out of their shelters, set up their weapons, and slaughter everyone caught in the open.
What infantry needed was automatic fire that could move with the assault. Something that let soldiers keep shooting while they advanced. Heavier machine guns existed, but dragging a water-cooled Maxim across No Man's Land simply wasn't realistic.
The French tried to solve this with the Chauchat automatic rifle. The concept was sound, proving that a single soldier really could carry automatic firepower forward during an attack. But the weapon itself was awkward and unreliable, especially the versions rechambered for the American .30-06 cartridge.
So the task of building something better fell to John Moses Browning.
The Birth of BAR
The Browning Automatic Rifle was chambered in .30-06, weighed around sixteen pounds, and fed from a twenty-round box magazine. But what made it special was the doctrine built around it.
The army developed something called walking fire specifically for the BAR. The idea was that soldiers would advance toward enemy positions while firing from the hip, primarily in semi-automatic mode. You weren't trying to hit specific targets. The goal was to send enough rounds downrange to keep defenders' heads down while the assault line closed the distance.
Browning designed every detail of the weapon around this concept. The fire selector was intentionally stiff, traveling from safe to semi-automatic to full automatic. A spring-loaded stop made switching from semi to full auto easy, but returning to safe required deliberate force so a soldier under stress couldn't accidentally silence his own weapon at the worst possible moment.
The weapon even came with purpose-built web gear. The gunner's belt had a metal cup on the right side designed to support the buttstock while firing from the hip on the move. This wasn't something soldiers improvised. Hip firing while advancing was official doctrine with dedicated equipment to support it. |
| John M. Browning with his BAR |
The BAR first saw combat in September 1918, only weeks before the armistice. But the war ended before the weapon could be tested at scale. The massive spring offensives of 1919, where entire divisions were supposed to advance with BARs, never happened.
Between the Wars
During the interwar years, tens of thousands of BARs sitting in National Guard armories became targets for criminals. Guard facilities often had part-time staff and weaker security, and during the violent years of Prohibition, some of the country's most notorious outlaws took advantage.
Clyde Barrow made the BAR one of his preferred weapons. He favored it over the Thompson submachine gun because the .30-06 cartridge could punch through car body panels in the 1930s, something the Thompson's .45 caliber rounds couldn't reliably do. In 1933, Clyde and his brother broke into an armory in Oklahoma and stole five BARs along with thousands of rounds. When Bonnie and Clyde were finally ambushed in 1934, their car contained three fully automatic BARs and one hundred loaded magazines.
Shootouts where criminals used military automatic weapons against police helped lead directly to the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a $200 tax on automatic weapons, enough at the time to put them out of reach for most civilians.
Redesigned for a New War
By the late 1930s, the army updated the design for the coming conflict. The result was the M1918A2. Semi-automatic fire was removed and replaced with two automatic settings, a slower rate using a hydraulic buffer mechanism and a faster rate without it. A bipod was added, along with a flash suppressor and a hinged buttstock rest. The weight climbed from about sixteen pounds to nearly twenty.
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| A Soldier with the redesigned M1918A2 |
The army was trying to turn the BAR into a light machine gun. But it still lacked one crucial feature that true light machine guns like the Bren or the MG 34 had: a quick-change barrel. Those weapons let crews swap overheated barrels during sustained fire. The BAR required a level of disassembly that was completely impractical in combat. The Belgian manufacturer Fabrique Nationale offered a quick-change barrel design in 1938, but the army rejected it because it wouldn't fit existing receivers.
That decision meant American soldiers would fight the entire Second World War with a weapon that had real limitations when it came to sustained automatic fire.
Into the Pacific
The walking fire doctrine the BAR was designed for turned out to be nearly useless in the Pacific. You couldn't march across open ground firing from the hip when you could barely see ten yards through dense jungle. Japanese positions were often hidden in caves or fortified bunkers that soldiers didn't notice until they were almost on top of them.
So American troops entered the Pacific with a weapon designed for the trenches of France, modified into something that wasn't quite a light machine gun, and used in an environment nobody had planned for.
Once soldiers encountered jungle combat, they often threw away the army's modifications. Bipods and flash suppressors were removed to cut weight, and the weapon was used more like Browning had originally intended.
The BAR became the squad's primary automatic weapon, operated by a three-man team. The gunner carried about 220 rounds in eleven magazines. The assistant gunner carried extra ammunition and was trained to take over immediately if the primary gunner went down. Everyone in the squad learned how to operate the weapon because BAR gunners were expected to take heavier casualties than regular riflemen.
Postwar analysis estimated that the average combat lifespan of a BAR gunner could be as short as thirty minutes once intense fighting started. Eliminating the man with the automatic rifle crippled a squad's ability to lay down suppressive fire, so enemy soldiers targeted the BAR gunner first.
Japanese infantry was organized differently. Their primary automatic weapons, the Type 96 and Type 99 light machine guns, were crew-served weapons with thirty-round magazines and quick-change barrels. Japan never developed anything equivalent to the BAR as a single-soldier squad automatic weapon.
American squads evolved in the opposite direction. By 1944, Marine squads were organized into three four-man fire teams, each with its own BAR. Even if one was lost, the squad still had two more. A Marine division in 1943 had roughly 500 BARs. By 1945, that number had grown to over 860.
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| Marines on Iwo Jima with a BAR and a M1 Garand |
The results showed in combat. During the Battle of the Tenaru, Japanese forces launched a nighttime assault against Marine positions defended by machine guns and BARs. Hundreds of attackers were killed. A similar pattern played out during the massive banzai charge on Saipan in July 1944, where American defenders fired continuously for hours.
Four Decades of Service
The BAR remained in service long after World War II. It saw combat again in Korea and stayed in limited use into the early years of Vietnam. The M60 machine gun finally began replacing it in 1957, nearly four decades after it was first designed.
John Browning built the weapon to solve a specific problem in the trenches of France. He never imagined that the same automatic rifle would eventually appear on Pacific islands, in frozen Korean mountains, and later in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Sixteen pounds, twenty rounds, and a thirty-minute life expectancy. The BAR was never used the way it was designed to be, but it became one of the most important infantry weapons of the twentieth century. And if you were the one carrying it, everybody on the battlefield knew it.
Written by Andreja Rakočević, a military history writer and co-creator of the RogerRoger YouTube channel.