The Dark Reason Germans Hated American M2 .50 Cal

While the Allies hated German machine guns in World War II for their incredibly high rate of fire, the Germans, on the other hand, hated the incredible power of the M2 Browning and its 50BMG cartridge. After all, it didn’t get nicknames like meat chopper and crout for nothing. But the real story is actually much darker and well, as you could imagine, after being hit by such a round, more gruesome.
Okay, so let’s go back now and explain why and how what would turn out to be the M2 was created. In World War I, it was realized how important effective machine guns were. But during that time, machine guns were firing the same ammunition as infantry rifles. And as new wonders of the battlefield emerged, like the first armored planes and tanks, they showed the need for something with a heavier punch.
So, General John Persing specifically demanded a new machine gun that could destroy these things much more effectively than the 30 caliber machine guns they had. That request was given to John Browning, America’s most famous gun designer. He got the requirements to create a new machine gun that would fire a half-inch round at a velocity over 2700 feet per second, which was a significant jump from anything he had designed before.
He then took his already reliable M191730 caliber water cooled machine gun and basically scaled it up to fire a new much larger cartridge. That new cartridge was also a scaled up version of the 3006 with a specific request to be rimless for smoother feeding and with some inspiration from the captured German 13.
2 2 mm anti-tank rifle cartridge. It became the 50BMG or 12.7 by 99 mm. They didn’t know it at the time, but they had created one of the most effective cartridges that was soon about to have plenty of use on the battlefield. After some back and forth, the first prototype was ready for testing and soon entered production as the M1921, a water cooled, heavy machine gun intended mostly for anti-aircraft use.
It was then tested to see where else it could be used. And at first, it wasn’t looking very promising. Infantrymen couldn’t handle it as it was too heavy to carry. Weighing about 120 lbs in the water cooled version or £84 for the lighter air cooled model with the tripod adding another £44. So a complete ground setup ranging between 130 and 170 lb plus all the ammo for it which also wasn’t light was not giving a promising future.
Not to mention it had substantial recoil making it difficult to fire accurately. Smaller aircraft of the time also couldn’t make much use of it. And for vehicle use mounted in early small turrets, it was also problematic as it could be fed only from the left side. So at first the only real use was as an anti-aircraft coastal gun, but no one could imagine just how everything would soon change.
John Browning passed away in 1926, but development continued and his design was refined. Internal parts were changed so the feeding could be quickly switched between left or right side feed by changing the top cover. and a universal receiver was developed on which could be mounted either a water cooled barrel with its jacket, a heavy air cooled barrel or a light air cooled barrel for aircraft use.
This concept now began looking promising and with other smaller improvements, the gun got the designation M2 Browning machine gun. During this time, other nations had turned to heavier weapons like 20 or 30 mm cannons. But the Americans believed the 50 caliber’s high velocity and adaptability would still make it effective. So, it stayed in production.
and just how effective it would be was now going to be found out as the new global conflict began. And the M2 turned into the legendary Marduce. 50 caliber or just 50 as soldiers would soon be calling it. Muse, if you didn’t know, was coined from the words mother and deuce, meaning two. Something like mother of machine guns.
And it turned out to be quite close to that. Now, as World War II broke out, the United States already had M2s serving in multiple roles. Fixed aircraft guns, anti-aircraft guns mounted on ships, bombers, or vehicles. and of course on tripod mounts for infantry use. Effective against almost anything they might encounter on the battlefield.
At first, the biggest use was on aircraft with lighter barrels and a tuned up rate of fire from around 500 to about 1,200 rounds per minute. Remember, this is almost the same rate of fire as the German MG42, although it was meant only for short bursts and was tuned up so much because on aircraft or anti-aircraft use, you’d have only a shorttime window before your targets got out of sight.
And in some configurations, the M2 really reached absurd levels. Like for example, you’ve all heard of the B17 Flying Fortress Bomber, which used M2s for protection against enemy fighter interceptors. In the G model, it carried up to 13 of them mounted in twin configurations in various turrets. The fighter bomber P47 Thunderbolt had eight of them, four in each wing.
While the Douglas A26 Invader took this to another level with, listen to this, up to 18 M2s, mounting eight in the nose, four in each wing, and two in the turret. The M2 immediately proved to be a significant improvement over lighter around 30 caliber machine guns early in the war, and had that neat balance between rate of fire and single round power.
More than enough to down an enemy fighter or bomber aircraft. It could easily go through engine blocks, especially with armor-piercing rounds. And when you have several of them firing at the same time, it’s dangerous for anything on the battlefield. American fighter planes would strafe locomotives, armored vehicles, and even tanks with great effectiveness since the roof armor was always thinner.
Very soon into the war, the heavy barrel variant became a must-have on almost all tanks and vehicles and wherever else they could mount it. Already by 1945, millions of M2s had been produced, making it the most produced machine gun ever. And the Germans were frustrated that American heavy machine guns were simply everywhere on the battlefield.
This also made every attack from low-flying fighter aircraft or dive bombers like the Stooka much riskier because almost every jeep halftrack and tank had a 50. This is why on tanks the M2 was mounted on the back of the turret and operated by a soldier standing on the engine deck. This way it could fire upward in case of an air attack, although the gunner was outside the relative safety of his tank.
Before we get into battle, here is an explanation in case you ever wondered why Browning’s barrel goes back after firing. The M2 operates on the short recoil principle where the barrel and bolts start locked together and move rearward as one unit after firing. That keeps the cartridge case supported while chamber pressure is still high so it would not rupture when extraction begins.
After traveling backwards some 10 mm, the barrel stops and the bolt continues rearward on its own, extracting and ejecting the spent case. As it moves, it compresses the recoil spring which pushes the bolt forward again, extracting a new round from the disintegrating belt, chambers it and fires again, repeating the process for as long as the trigger is pressed.
Now, let us talk about how the Germans looked upon them and why they hated the 50s for several reasons. The first and most obvious one is that Americans began relying more and more on overwhelming firepower as their main tactic. And the Germans, of course, were terrified by it.
The Americans never suffered from a lack of ammo like the Germans did. And it seemed that anything with wheels or wings on the battlefield had at least one heavy machine gun. Getting shot at by 50 cals is nowhere near the same as smaller caliber rounds. And they significantly outrange lighter machine guns. Just look at the difference between the 8 mm mouser round the MG42 fired and the 50 caliber beside it.
The 50 delivers between 5 and 10 times more energy than all other weapons used by the infantry. So, if you were fighting from a house, for example, concrete or brick walls would not protect you anymore as the rounds would either go through the wall and kill you, or if not with the first round, a longer burst concentrated on one spot would collapse the whole wall section or shred your sandbag bunker.
Even better armored tanks like the Panza 4 when hit by heavy 50 caliber fire could let some rounds slip through, especially from the side or rear or have their optics and tracks damaged or turret jammed. lightly armored Japanese tanks in the Pacific, for example, were knocked out by the 50s easily, especially when they came in banzai charges, which happened on multiple occasions.
Surprising American tankers who opened up on them with everything they had. There is also one controversial thing about the 50 in World War II, and that is the myth that it was said to have been banned by the Geneva Conventions because of its devastating effect on the human body. This was a myth, but the effect on the body was not exaggerated.
Basically, if you are hit by a 50 in any part of the body, you are either going to lose that part if surviving without it is possible or you’re going to die. And many German soldiers were unfortunate enough to witness that. When the 50 BMG’s energy transferred to a human body, it created an effect so gruesome that we can’t even describe it here because of YouTube, but I’m sure you get the idea.
If it can do that to a wall or a watermelon, imagine what it does to a human body. So, now you understand the German soldiers concern about it. They adapted their tactics to counter American heavy machine gun positions, shifting from direct assaults to taking them out with snipers, tanks, or indirect fire with mortars and artillery.
And to add on top of that, the Germans never had anything like it. Their heavy machine gun of the war was the MG42 or the MG34 when mounted on the Lefett tripod, which was considered the heavy machine gun configuration. And while the Lefet tripod was really ingenious and gave German machine guns extreme accuracy and greater range, the 8 mm Mouser round they were firing had nowhere near the punch the 50BMG had.
The closest thing to the M2 the Germans had was their 13 mm heavy machine gun, but it was used only on fighter aircraft. The Germans did plan to use captured M2s mounted on hubot as anti-aircraft weapons when they had to surface to charge batteries. And they even produced copies of 50 BMG rounds for this purpose, which shows they respected it, although actual use occurred only in rare cases.
Now, before we get into some terrifying modifications of the M2 machine gun, let’s take a look at the different round types they are shooting. The standard one was ball full metal jacket with some serious destructive force, of course, but there are also specialized exotic variants making it even more effective. Firstly, we have several versions of armor-piercing rounds that could penetrate around an inch of hardened steel.
Then we have incendury rounds designed to ignite flammable material which is quite effective when you shoot at enemy aircraft for example. So on top of its fuel leaking upon hit, it could also be easily ignited. There are armor-piercing incenduries combining both functions of the two rounds previously mentioned. Armor-piercing incendury tracer, as the name suggests, adds a tracer element for spotting hits, which again is useful for anti-aircraft fire or for adjusting your fire at longer range, as you’d see where the rounds are landing because the 50 BMG
rounds are effective even at longer ranges of over 2 km. Belts for M2 are usually loaded with a combination of rounds with a tracer every fifth round for standard ground use, while aircraft would load a combination of armor piercing, incenduries, and tracers for dog fights or ground attacks, depending on for what job they needed it.
After World War II, some fancy interesting rounds were developed, like the Ralphos multi-purpose round. This one combined everything in one cartridge with an armor-piercing tungsten core, plus a small explosive and incendury charge that also creates fragmentation. It behaves like a 20 mm cannon shell but in a 50BMG package.
Then there’s the SLAP, short for saboted light armor penetrator, which works similarly to much larger armor-piercing discarding Sabbath rounds that tanks are firing. It has a small subcaliber penetrator made from very dense material, usually tungsten, and has much better armor penetration while being quite effective against light armored vehicles or helicopters.
However, these are usually used in sniper rifles as it is not a cheap round to fire in full auto. Oh, and yeah, while we mentioned sniper rifles, the 50BMG cartridge impressed the American military so much that they built a sniper rifle around it. The most famous example is Carlos Hathcock, the legendary sniper from the Vietnam War, who experimented with an M2 machine gun by mounting a telescopic sight on it for engaging targets with single shots at long range where standard smaller caliber sniper rifles weren’t so effective. He even scored confirmed
kills this way with a scoped M2. This inspired and later led to creation of the M82 Barrett, the so-called anti-materials sniper rifle chambered in 50 BMG that became famous in the American army. This video about the 50 wouldn’t be complete without something called the Quad 50. When one heavy machine gun is not enough, well, you just take four of them and mount them on a single platform and point it at anything you’d wish to cease to exist.
This is the M45 Max and quad mount. Originally created for mobile defense against low-flying aircraft, 50 BMG was good for shooting the aircraft down, but the problem was its low rate of fire and the short time window the gunner had to hit a fastmoving target. So it was multiplied by four and now every second about 40 rounds were fired.
Germans had similar but even more powerful concept with their quad 20 mm anti-aircraft cannons, but it was a much heavier system specifically for anti-aircraft roll while quad 50 was much simpler and versatile. electrically operated turret could quickly traverse it all around and up to 90° upward to quickly get a target in sight.
It could be positioned on the ground on its own or mounted on vehicles. And it wasn’t long before someone turned the Quad 50 on ground targets, especially later in the war when the Allies gained the upper hand in air control, so they didn’t have to worry much about the Luftvafer. They were used for infantry support as well, and the effect of 450s firing at a single spot is just devastating.
This Quad50 lived even after the war and saw combat in the Korean and Vietnam wars as well. It was even creatively mounted on trucks to protect convoys from ambushes. As for the 50 caliber gunners from the Second World War to this day, they have serious firepower in their hands. But that came with the cost that the enemy would do anything to get rid of them as soon as possible.
So, they’d pretty quickly attract the attention of their opponents with their distinctive firing sound, smoke, and muzzle flashes. I don’t know why, but for too long, earlier 50 caliber gunners on vehicles and tanks didn’t have shields to protect them from enemy small arms fire. They were standardized far later in the Vietnam War, and even Humvees in more modern wars didn’t have shields until horrible losses from snipers or urban combat happened.
when they began making turrets and later introduced remote weapon stations like CRWS that solved this problem. Now, instead of sticking your head and upper body out to fire the machine gun, the gunner fires with joystick and camera from the safety of his vehicle and uses advanced tech like a laser rangefinder, night vision, thermal views, and so on.
They are even made to work not just with 50s, but also other machine guns or automatic grenade launchers. As for the M2 Browning, it’s fascinating how far it got from a weapon that wasn’t looking so promising at first. So far, in fact, that it is still very much used to this day with only minor changes and improvements to it and the same core design from over a century ago.
The most visible recent change was the M2A1 configuration with improved barrel change system, flash suppressor, and a manual safety, but other than that, it’s more or less the same weapon. I said this about the MG42, how fascinating it is that such an old design is still used today in a modernized version. But when I did research for Mardus, I realized that it’s even older, literally coming from the First World War, and it still remains a very useful platform and caliber with no retirement on the horizon for both.