The
Bren is One Awesome Machine Gun
Cpl. Thomas Peck Hunter, a
21-year-old member of 43 Royal Marine Commando, was Bren gunner in charge of
his section during Operation Roast. Deployed for combat on April 2 near Lake
Comacchio, Hunter and his fellow Royal Marines faced German soldiers behind
three fearsome MG-42 machine guns lodged in nearby houses.
The Germans were well-protected and
had a clear field of fire for hundreds of yards. Hunter realized that the
German machine gun fire would mow down the British troops, who had no cover.
Hunter grabbed his Bren gun and ran
200 yards, dodging both machine-gun fire and mortar rounds. He fired from the
hip and reloaded on the run, purposely drawing fire toward him and away from
his fellow Royal Marines.
Hunter was shot and killed. But his
actions — and his Bren gun — likely saved the lives of his fellow Commandos.
“There can be no doubt that Corporal
Hunter offered himself as a target in order to save his Troop, and only the
speed of his movement prevented him being hit earlier,” stated his citation for
the Victoria Cross, the highest award for valor awarded to members of British
and Commonwealth armed forces.
“The skill and accuracy with which
he used his Bren gun is proved by the way he demoralized the enemy … so
much so that under his covering fire elements of the Troop made their final
objective before he was killed.”
Hunter is the youngest winner of the
Victoria Cross, and to date he is the last Royal Marine to receive the award.
But the weapon he used saw action not only during World War II but in wars
fought by British and Commonwealth troops ranging from Korea to the Falkland
Islands, the Malaysian emergency and the Mau Mau uprising.
Troops who used the Bren often
expressed remarkable loyalty toward the gun, according to Neil Grant, author of
The Bren Gun.
“Almost all regarded it as a
reliable and effective weapon, and it was striking that when discussing the
Bren with veterans who had used it, their first response was almost always the
same — a nostalgic smile, and the words ‘It was a great gun, the old
Bren …’ or something similar,” Grant wrote.
Based on a Czech design with British
improvements, the Royal Small Arms Factory built the first Bren gun in 1937.
The name comes from the two factories responsible for the weapon’s
design — Brno in Czechoslovakia, Enfield in England.
The inspiration for the weapon was
the ZB vz/26, a reliable and hard-hitting light machine gun. British designers
chambered the weapon to accept the then-standard British .303-caliber
rifle round, and they created a curved 30-round magazine to hold the ammo.
The result was an air-cooled,
gas-operated light machine gun that fired 500 rounds per minute — not the
fastest rate of fire, but one that promoted accuracy out to nearly 2,000 yards.
In addition, the weapon only weighed 22 pounds and was a little more than 45
inches long, making it easy to carry.
Gunners grew fond of the Bren. Not
only was it reliable, it was easy to field strip and clean. Its long
service-record attests to how well the weapon worked even under atrocious
battlefield conditions.
In the heat of battle, an
experienced gunner could change a hot barrel in seconds. Reloading the Bren
with a fresh magazine was also easy — although the top-loading design of the
weapon required the use of offset sights to aim it accurately.
After World War II, armories
re-chambered the Bren for the 7.62-millimeter NATO round. Because of the
change, the Bren remained in use with British and Commonwealth forces who also
carried the L1A1 battle rifle — the British incarnation of the famed FN FAL.
This meant that any squad with the
Bren and the L1A1 could use the same ammunition interchangeably, a boon during
a firefight.
The Bren was even part of a Canadian
morale-boosting campaign that featured a young woman posing with a weapon fresh
off the assembly line.
In 1941, Veronica Foster worked at
the John Inglis Co. Ltd. in Toronto, one of Canada’s leading arms
manufacturers. While at the plant, government photographers noticed Foster.
She agreed to pose for a number of
photos of her and a Bren — including one picture where she is stroking the
barrel of the machine gun provocatively while exhaling a plume of cigarette
smoke.
Years before the fictional “Rosie
the Riveter” made a splash in American wartime propaganda art, Foster — an
actual worker in a defense plant — went on to portray herself in other photos
with Bren guns. The National Film Board of Canada used images of Ronnie to
recruit women into the wartime workforce.
Eventually, the Canadians dubbed her
“Ronnie the Bren Girl” — and she became an iconic figure who represented more
than a million Canadian women who worked in the war industry.
For soldiers in the field, she
became something of a machine gun sex symbol. Foster received hundreds of
marriage proposals from Allied soldiers who saw her photograph in newspapers
around the world.
It also was the start of Foster’s
entertainment career. Following the war, she worked in modeling and singing.
Which takes style and a bit of a panache — which fit the British weapon
perfectly.
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