M1917 Browning machine gun

M1917 Browning machine gun

 M1917 Browning machine gun

  M1917 Browning machine gun

  M1917 Browning machine gun

  M1917 Browning machine gun

  M1917 Browning machine gun

  M1917 Browning machine gun

  M1917 Browning machine gun

  M1917 Browning machine gun

 M1917 Browning machine gun 

  M1917 Browning machine gun

 M1917 Browning machine gun


The M1917 Browning machine gun is a heavy machine gun used by the United States armed forces in World War I, World War II, Korea, and to a limited extent in Vietnam, and by other nations. It was a belt-fed water-cooled machine gun that served alongside the much lighter air-cooled Browning M1919. It was used at the battalion level, and often mounted on vehicles (such as a jeep). There were two main iterations of it: the M1917, which was used in World War I; and the M1917A1; which was used thereafter. The M1917 was used on the ground and on some aircraft, and had a firing rate of 450 round/min; the M1917A1 had a firing rate of 450 to 600 round/min.
Design and development
In 1900, John Moses Browning filed a patent for a recoil powered automatic gun.Browning did not work on the gun again until 1910, when Browning built a water-cooled prototype of the 1901 weapon.Although the gun worked well, Browning improved the design slightly. Browning replaced side ejection with bottom ejection, added a buffer for smoother operation, replaced the hammer with a two piece firing pin, and some other minor improvements.The basic design of the gun was still the 1900 design.
The Browning is a water-cooled heavy machine gun, though some versions that did not use a water jacket were experimented with; the air-cooled M1919 was later developed as a medium machine gun. Unlike many other early machine guns, the M1917 had nothing to do with Maxim's toggle lock design. It was much lighter than contemporary Maxim type guns such as the 137 lb (62 kg) German Maschinengewehr 08 and the British Vickers machine gun, while still being highly reliable. The only similarities with the Maxim or Vickers are the principle of recoil operation, T-slot breechblock, "pull-out" belt feed, water cooling, and forward ejection. Its sliding-block locking mechanism saved weight and complexity, and was used in many previous Browning designs. The belt fed left-to-right, and the cartridges were stacked closer together than Maxim/Vickers (patterns copied by most guns later.)
Service
The M1917 saw limited service in the later days of World War I. Because of production delays, only about 1,200 Model 1917s saw combat in the conflict, and then only in the last 2½ months of the war. Some arrived too late for combat service. For example, the 6th Machine Gun Battalion, fighting as part of the Second Division didn't exchange their Hotchkiss M1914 machine guns for Browning M1917 machine guns until November 14, three days after the armistice.The U.S. equipped about a third of the divisions sent to France; the others were equipped equally with machine guns bought from the French or the British Vickers machine guns built by Colt in the US. Where the Model 1917 did see action, its rate of fire and reliability were highly effective.[citation needed] The M1917 weapon system was inferior to the Vickers and Hotchkiss guns because the British and French cartridges had about 50 percent longer range than the .30-06 service cartridge used in World War 
The Model 1917A1 was again used in the Second World War, and was primarily used with the M2 ball, tracer, and armor-piercing ammunition introduced just prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Some were supplied to the UK for use by the Home Guard since all production of the .303 Vickers were needed to resupply the equipment abandoned during the Fall of France. The M1917's weight and bulk meant it was generally employed as a fixed defense or battalion or regimental support weapon. At the fierce battle of Momote Airstrip in the Admiralties, the US Army's 5th Cavalry machinegunners killed several hundred Japanese in one night using their M1917 Brownings; one gun was left in position after the battle as a memorial to the desperate struggle.
US military variants
M1917
The original gun suffered from a weakness related to the design of the receiver - under field conditions, the bottom plates, which were dovetailed into the gun's two side plates, tore out. An early fix was to attach a roughly horseshoe-shaped steel bracket around the rearmost part of the receiver. A later fix was to rivet "stirrups" (right-angled steel pieces) to the bottom and side plates. The stirrup fix became the standard reinforcement until a more permanent fix for the problem was developed. [Another reported problem was bulging in the sideplates, which was probably caused by stresses put into the sideplates when hammering the dovetails closed.]