The film’s narrator further assures his naïve audience that the MG-42 isn’t as scary as it sounds, and closes with, “Its bark is worse than its bite.” The War Department would have had a pretty tough time selling that line to veterans of the landing at Omaha Beach.īy the autumn of 1944, the Germans were fielding large numbers of MG-42s, one gun per 10-man squad.
With staged demonstrations of American and German automatic weapons, the film insists that while the German machine gun has a much higher rate of fire than its American counterpart, the MG-42 does not possess the same degree of accuracy as an American machine gun. The film, which downplayed the German machine gun’s lethality, was shown to infantry replacements that had not seen combat. In fact, the MG-42 was so intimidating that the War Department created a training film to combat the weapon’s psychological effect on soldiers. When faced with such a scenario, many GIs were simply frozen with fear. You are also aware that once you leave the comparative safety of cover and expose yourself, the German gunner has the capability to literally cut you in half if he draws a bead on you you’ve seen it happen before. You’ve been in combat long enough to know that the German gun spits out 1,550 rounds of high-velocity, 7.92 millimeter ammunition per minute, a rate of fire that roughly works out to 25 rounds per second. It sounds like cloth being ripped or the belch of a bullfrog. Directly ahead of you is the unmistakable roar of the MG-42 machine gun, a weapon that fires so quickly it has a cadence unlike any other weapon on the battlefield. You’re a battle-hardened veteran because you’ve survived the rigors of combat for about a month, which coincidentally is the last time you had a bath. Now, put yourself in the boots of a US soldier in 1944 and imagine yourself as a rifleman in a squad that has just been given the order to silence a German machine-gun position. GIs altered the translation and began calling it “Buzz Saw” or “Hitler’s Buzz Saw.” German troops called it the “ Knochensäge”-“bone saw” in English. For example, incoming rockets were “Screaming Mimis,” “Potato Mashers” were a type of German grenade, and the antipersonnel mines that leapt up from under the earth and then exploded at crotch level were “Bouncing Betties.” Not so for the MG-42 machine gun, which received a more ominous nickname that left little doubt about the capabilities of the weapon. GIs christened some of the most terrifying weapons in the German arsenal with some pretty harmless-sounding names. American soldiers had a nickname for everything, even the enemy weapons on the battlefield that killed them.