Bar m1918

[Douglas Jr.]

Hi everybody,

I recently posted this on Jan Still's Forum, but I just realize that I never had shown this beast in this forum either, up to now.

Let me present you my Browning Automatic Rifle Model 1918.

It was born as a Browning Automatic Rifle M1918 (with provision to full auto fire and semiauto), made by Winchester. However, as happened with thousands of BARs, it was upgraded to a M1918A2 version (only full auto fire) during WWII. Its barrel was also changed in August, 1944; the stock was also replaced, by a hard plastic-like model.

My bet is this gun was supplied to Brazilian troops upon their arrival in Italy during the last half of 1944, to fight attached to the US 5th Army, under Gen. Mark Clark. Brazilian troops left Brazil unarmed (with only few exceptions like high officers and MP personnel) and were fully equipped after arrived in Italian soil.

Anyway, the gun is a firing specimen and it is in good and working condition. I must to confess that I bought this one for impulse, only motivated by my reminiscences of a kid watching reruns of “Combat!” TV show, where the PFC Kirby was always firing one of those with its characteristic slow burst sound.

It has been in my vault since then (2004), and I never managed to get some decent pictures of it. Photographing long guns is a completely different proceeding, and all my techniques that I developed to use with pistols, doesn’t seem to work. In order to mitigate the fuzzy effects, I adopted a white background and made some changes, but I didn’t get the right hand with that. Well, here are the results. I promise to upgrade to pictures when I get better shots.

Hope you enjoy it.

Greetings

Douglas