English BREN gun Vs american B.A.R

AdrianM said:
great stuff...what's the guy's name in the video? He was the best part of Full Metal Jacket!
Click to expand...

Your busting my balls man! That is R. Lee Ermey. USMC Vietnam veteran and drill instructor gone actor. I think we can all admit we've found him entertaining over the years, an interesting guy for sure.

-Steve
 
Ok so I'm not an expert here but...I do have experience with the FN C2. I was a scrawny 15 year old in the army cadets and had to pack one of those things on the odd weekend. The combination of packing the weapon and the extra mags (loaded with blanks...) was something to experience. NOW think about what it would be like to pack a weapon that weighs 25 pounds! I think if I had to pack that thing I would have been dragging it in the gravel by the end of a rope. A tougher breed back then I guess.
 
Looks like a hoot to shoot. I dont know about having that big a$$ mag in my field of vision though, probably why the trait was not continued imo..
 
When you are hunkered down as low as you can get, the mag on top makes sense. Also easy to change.

I have an Oz made Bren. Fun to shoot, accurate. My C2 is a useless spray gun. Good for making brass and nosie, only.
 
If I had to stand and shoot it accurately the BAR would be a better bet. Try shouldering a bren and sighting in a target, not possible imo. 15 lbs for a BAR versus 25 lbs for the bren, and having to sight in off the side of the barrel...

I agree, both great machine guns but comparing apples to oranges.
 
I see the Japanese had their opinion on the subject as the type 96 was a copy of the Chek ZB-26. Still the Bren and the BAR are 2 different guns. May as well compare a submachine gun to SAW.
 
Lee Enfield said:
In the real world the BAR doesn't even compare to the Bren as a combat weapon.

How do you change mags while prone or in a defensive position with the BAR?

What kind of sustained fire do you think your loader could help you keep up?

There were good reasons that the British didn't adopt the BAR during the trials which lead to the Bren.

Largely they were the same reasons they converted their Brens to 7.62 rather than adopting the C2/L2 family.

The BAR is an "automatic rifle", the Bren is a "light machinegun".

:50cal:
Click to expand...

They didn't adopt a light automatic rifle variant of the FN FAL as a section weapon because they decided magazine feed wouldn't allow them to produce enough fire and a LAR was too likely to reproduce the Bren's principal deficiency in the LMG role - excessive accuracy (doesn't give a large enough beaten zone.) They wanted a belt-fed machine gun (having been so often on the wrong end of one against the Germans in 1939-'45) so they adopted the FN MAG as the L7 GPMG in the light role (bipod and shoulder stock) and were pleased that it is nicely convertible to a sustained fire role with a tripod kit, making an effective replacement for the water-cooled Vickers that had been used for this by support battalions (infantry specialised with mortars, medium machine guns, and light anti-aircraft weapons and parcelled out by brigades to support their infantry battalions.) It was part of an overall revamp of infantry tactics and establishments in the evolution of an increasing mechanised and armoured army.

The Brens were converted to 7.62mm NATO and retained for use by non-infantry units for whom the belt-fed machine gun was not deemed necessary, e.g. local area defence for artillery units. The infantry did sometimes still use it in some circumstances e.g. we had them in Belize (1986) on a scale of one per platoon, but didn't take them on routine patrols of up to section strength as eight or nine AR-15s with full-auto capacity weren't much helped in close jungle by a longer, heavier magazine fed LMG for which we couldn't carry as much ammo.

The Bren is a very good thing of its kind, and as an LMG certainly better than the BAR which was designed some time before when the role was not as well defined.
 
TheTooner said:
The Bren is a very good thing of its kind, and as an LMG certainly better than the BAR which was designed some time before when the role was not as well defined.
Click to expand...

Good points there from someone who obviously knows from real experience.

As a matter of interest, the REME had them fitted in large numbers to all their vehicles in Gulf War 1 - I remember seeing one FV438 with one on a pintle mount at each corner, and a REME soldier - a SNCO - won a posthumous medal using one in a firefight.

tac
 
This whole business of the Bren being 'too accurate' is a bit bizarre, especially when tied to a claim of the beaten zone being "too small."

The beaten zone of any automatic weapon is very, very long and very, very narrow. For modern GPMGs, while the size will depend on any number of factors, a typical beaten zone (the eliptical shape into which the bullets will fall on the ground) is but metres wide and hundreds of metres long. Essentially, on a 1:50,000 map, it's like a pencil line 1/2" long.

No machine gun is properly used by swinging it back and forth, spraying bullets like a garden hose watering the vegetables.

In the defensive, one sites one's machine guns so as to place the beaten zones across likely enemy axes of advance. So long as the guns keep firing, nobody and nothing can cross that area unless it's armour-plated. That it's even one metre wide is immaterial - the opposition can no more run between bullets without getting hit than they can through raindrops without getting wet.

It's not much different in the offence. Sure, you can wave it back and forth in the hopes of keeping the opposition's heads down, but you could do that with a laser, too. Having a very wide beaten zone would not only broaden the slice of ground the bullets are landing in, but would also result in many more of your bullets coming nowhere near the opposition, going either overhead or burying themselves in the ground in front.

If the cone of fire (that cornucopia-like shape down which the bullets fly in mid-air) gets wide enough to please such commentators, the weapon will be too inaccurate to be able to reliably engage targets at a distance.

Saying a weapon is too accurate is like saying a woman can be too pretty or a beer too tasty.
 
I have reported what I was taught at the School of Infantry by instructors from the Small Arms School Corps of the British Army. If they ever ask me what anyone on CanadianGunnutz.com thinks on the matter, I shall try to faithfully relay your remarks, ATOM, but I don't expect it will change their minds about the tactics in general or the Bren in particular. But I will add, the preference for a belt fed machine gun to replace the Bren as a section weapon was more about the volume of fire than the accuracy.

When they brought in the SA80 system with two LSW (thirty round magazine, longer barrel, and a bipod) per section instead of an LMG, I said that my experience of the C1 and C2 did not recommend the concept to me, but I was just a platoon commander from some infantry battalion so they didn't listen. It turned out that idea was better with the SA80 weapons in 5.56mmNATO than with the FN FAL variants in 7.62mmNATO, but I still thought a belt-fed LMG in each rifle section was more desireable.
 
Last edited:
I also spent an inordinate amount of my time at the SoI, but teaching the use of aerial photography on the All Arms Sniping Course, and I too was told many times about the BREN gun being too accurate for its own good. As I mentioned on another post, shooting it in R mode on falling plates was a no-brainer - no person with an SLR was going to get a look in while there was a BREN on the firing line. In any case, it was not so much an area-swamper, you were taught to fire in three-round aimed bursts, rather than holding the trigger down until the kerrrrrrrrrrrrrlunk happened. In live-firing exercises it was fearsomely easy to pour those three-round mini-bursts through a bunker slot at 600m. I'd go to war with one today if I had to.

tac
 
ATOM said:
This whole business of the Bren being 'too accurate' is a bit bizarre, especially when tied to a claim of the beaten zone being "too small."

The beaten zone of any automatic weapon is very, very long and very, very narrow. For modern GPMGs, while the size will depend on any number of factors, a typical beaten zone (the eliptical shape into which the bullets will fall on the ground) is but metres wide and hundreds of metres long. Essentially, on a 1:50,000 map, it's like a pencil line 1/2" long.

No machine gun is properly used by swinging it back and forth, spraying bullets like a garden hose watering the vegetables.

In the defensive, one sites one's machine guns so as to place the beaten zones across likely enemy axes of advance. So long as the guns keep firing, nobody and nothing can cross that area unless it's armour-plated. That it's even one metre wide is immaterial - the opposition can no more run between bullets without getting hit than they can through raindrops without getting wet.

It's not much different in the offence. Sure, you can wave it back and forth in the hopes of keeping the opposition's heads down, but you could do that with a laser, too. Having a very wide beaten zone would not only broaden the slice of ground the bullets are landing in, but would also result in many more of your bullets coming nowhere near the opposition, going either overhead or burying themselves in the ground in front.

If the cone of fire (that cornucopia-like shape down which the bullets fly in mid-air) gets wide enough to please such commentators, the weapon will be too inaccurate to be able to reliably engage targets at a distance.

Saying a weapon is too accurate is like saying a woman can be too pretty or a beer too tasty.
Click to expand...

Indeed. This whole business of too much accuracy seems wrongheaded to me. I don't think a Bren gun (or anything else) firing bursts is going to be making tiny little groups at any distance.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom