The 'Bulky' British Machine Gun That German Soldiers Tried to Steal From Every Battlefield

Описание: September 1937. A cold morning at the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, England. Workers in heavy wool coats gather around a wooden crate as the lid comes off, and inside sits the weapon that is supposed to save the British Army. It is called the Bren. And the moment soldiers get their hands on it, they start laughing. The thing looks wrong. A fat, curved magazine sticks straight up from the top like a bent tin can. The body is bulky and awkward, with angles that make no sense to men who have spent years training on sleek bolt-action rifles. It weighs twenty-two pounds and stretches forty-five inches long, and when they pull the trigger for the first time, it fires just five hundred rounds per minute. That sounds fast, but across the English Channel, Germany already has the MG 34, a machine gun that screams out nine hundred rounds in the same sixty seconds. British soldiers joke that the Bren is clumsy. Old-fashioned. A weapon built by men who have no idea what modern war looks like. But here is what those laughing soldiers do not know yet. Within just a few years, German troops will be crawling across battlefields under heavy fire, stepping over their own dead, reaching past their own superior weapons, just to rip this ugly British gun from the hands of fallen enemies. The Bren will become the one weapon the Germans try to steal from every single battlefield of the Second World War.

This is the story of the Bren gun — designed by a Czech gunsmith named Václav Holek, built at Enfield and mass-produced in Canada, and carried by British and Commonwealth soldiers from Dunkirk to D-Day to the Falklands. It fired in mud, sand, snow, and jungle heat when nothing else would. And the Germans wanted it more than their own MG 42.

Some of my sources in this video:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bren_li...
https://dn710301.ca.archive.org/0/ite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Václav_...