Oct 24, 2022 · A German Waffen SS soldier involved in heavy fighting in and around the French town of Caen in mid-1944. He is carrying an MG42 configured as a light support weapon with a folding bipod and detachable 50-round Gurttrommel belt drum container.

Oct 29, 2018 · A German Waffen-SS soldier carries an MG 42 configured as a light support weapon during heavy fighting in and around the French town of Caen in mid-1944. Credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1983-109-14A / Woscidlo, Wilfried / CC-BY-SA 3.0

The MG 42 (shortened from German: Maschinengewehr 42, or "machine gun 42") is a German recoil-operated air-cooled general-purpose machine gun used extensively by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS during the second half of World War II.

Jan 7, 2018 · The German Maschinengewehr 42, or MG42, was one of the best machine-guns of the war, both in combat and in ease of production. It set the standard for machine-guns in the years that followed, and as such was the most important machine-gun of the war.

—The M.G. 42 is a combination short-recoil blowback weapon. Instead of the rotating bolt action of the M.G. 34, 12 the bolt is locked to the barrel by means of two movable locking studs, located in the bolt head, and operating on two locking cams on the barrel extension.

Feb 6, 2025 · For American combat troops, the MG42 was a deadly problem, from their first encounters with the gun in Tunisia to the last day of the war in Europe. While its predecessor, the MG34, cycled fast at...

Sep 10, 2015 · The MG-42 (a) was the replacement for the earlier MG34 machine gun of the German army. The MG-34 is described in detail in Warrior 59: The German Infantryman (1) 1933-1940. The weapon was in design before the start of the war, but experiences in Poland and France made it quite clear that the MG-34 was far too well made.

Mar 21, 2016 · Two soldiers from the 12. SS-Panzer-Division "Hitlerjugend" with a MG 42 machine gun position in the garden of a château in the Caen sector, Normandy, summer of 1944.

MG-42 gunners were armed with a 08 Luger or Walther P-38 pistol in 9mm. Troops were also armed w/pistols and revolvers from the occupied countries. The Waffen-SS issued the "44 Dot" camouflaged uniform, known as the Erbsenmuster Peas Pattern w/helmet cover. The peas dot uniform, was similar in pattern to the field gray M43 uniform troops.

The Maschine Gewehr 42 (German for Machine Gun 42), also simply known as the MG 42, was a machine gun that was used by Germany during World War II. The MG 42 had an extremely high rate of fire compared to other weapons at the time. It could fire 1,200 to 1,500 rounds per minute.