You’d think that German soldiers with their infamous machine guns wouldn’t bother with captured enemy weapons. But when they got their hands on the British Bren, they loved it so much that they printed manuals in German and wildly issued it to their own troops throughout the war.

 And you’re now going to see exactly why. Okay, so let’s first take a look at what led to the creation of the legendary Bren. In the years before the Second World War, as tensions around the globe escalated, the British Army realized that their best machine guns were still the very same ones from the First World War.

 The Lewis gun, with that circular magazine slapped on top of what looks like a cannon barrel, weighed almost 30 lb empty. It was far too complex for mass production on the scale a major war would need. On top of that, the Pan magazine was much slower to reload and not so reliable, especially in battlefield conditions.

 And with no quick barrel change system, sustained fire was basically out of the question. The Vicers solved the overheating problem with its water cooling system. But that was an old First World War design, useful mostly for static defensive positions. It wasn’t built for the mobile warfare everyone expected in the coming conflict, especially not when the whole world was now focusing on air cooled machine guns.

 So seeing the situation, the small arms committee began looking for a new solution that would hopefully replace both of these weapons. And competitive trials of many different designs began. The Danish Madson competed against the American Browning automatic rifle, French H Hotchkiss, and British-designed Beardmore Farqua.

 The Browning automatic rifle, better known as the BAR, performed better than competitors in those early trials. But the problem was its price and Britain’s tight postwar budget. They experimented further with different designs until something caught their attention. It was the Czechoslovak ZB26 from the Zebraovka Berno factory. The Brits began testing them and refining a new model by sending feedback to the Czech factory until the model ZB30 appeared, which was the first attempt to make this weapon in a British caliber chambered in the famous 303.

Because of the rimmed ammunition, the 30 round magazine got that distinctive curve since rounds stacked on top of each other created that shape. This was quite a problem at first as the original version was chambered in German 792 caliber that was rimless. So the cartridges were sitting neatly on top of one another in a box magazine.

 But that was eventually solved through some engineering headaches. More experienced soldiers learned to load 27 or 28 rounds instead of 30. So the spring in the magazine wasn’t under full tension, which reduced the risk of feeding issues. You see, because the 303 was a rimmed cartridge, loading the magazine needed precise attention.

 Each round had to be loaded so its rim sat in front of the previous cartridges rim. Otherwise, you’d get what was called rim lock, and the magazine wouldn’t feed properly. There was some further refinement through the testing phase, and soon prototypes were torture tested, firing over 140,000 rounds. The recoil springs broke multiple times during those tests, but nobody even noticed until they stopped for routine cleaning.

 The gun just kept running with broken springs. The lower receiver actually cracked and even that didn’t stop the gun. The design won decisively over the Vicar’s Bertier competitor and went into licensed production in Britain. They had to pay £3 to the Berno factory for every gun produced. And if you wonder how the Bren got its name, it is BR for Berno and EN for the Enfield factory that was producing it in England.

 And you get the Bren, the more you know. first units rolled off the assembly line in late 1937. Before we go into combat, let’s quickly describe the Bren itself so you understand what we’re dealing with. So, the Bren Mark1 weighed 22 lb with a cyclic rate of fire ranging from 480 to 540 rounds per minute. For sustained fire, when you take into account magazine reloading and barrel swaps, that came down to approximately 120 rounds per minute.

 It was mostly envisioned to fire from a bipod while a tripod which extended the effective range significantly was issued at a rate of one per three guns. The gun operated on a gas piston system which could easily be adjusted for anything from desert conditions to arctic cold. So whether you were fighting in minus50 or plus50° C, the gun would work just the same.

 The quick change barrel system was simple with a release catch in front of the magazine which you’d rotate to unlock the barrel. Then you’d grab it by the carrying handle, so you wouldn’t need gloves or asbestous cloth to touch the scorching metal, and then just slide it forward out of the receiver. A trained crew could swap the barrel in as little as two or 3 seconds.

 Soldiers were trained to change it after firing 10 magazines. Sights were offset to the left of the receiver because of that top mounted magazine. Okay, so now it’s September 1st, 1939, and Germany has just invaded Poland. At this point, the British had some 30,000 Brens issued to their soldiers, thinking they had an impressive number of light machine guns for the time, but they were now about to be proven completely wrong in one of the biggest disasters in military operations.

 The British Expeditionary Force was deployed in France, and the Bren of course went with them to see its first big combat. But instead of going on the offensive, Bren gunners found themselves covering one retreat after another as the Germans with their Blitzkrieg tactic just crushed everything in their path. British forces were frantically retreating to England, trying to save themselves from an enemy who’d been preparing for years.

 At 30 m from Dunkirk, the Royal Scots were ordered to face and slow down the German SS Totenov Division to buy time for evacuation of the main force. They were sacrificed and ordered to fight to the last man, which is pretty much what they did. The fighting became so bad that battalion commanders picked up Brens from fallen soldiers and held the line until they themselves were killed.

 The Bren was inflicting heavy losses on the Germans who were trying to obliterate British forces. But nothing could really stop them. They were just buying time. The fall of France was a catastrophe for British military ego. But more importantly, a catastrophe for equipment. Out of those 30,000 Brens manufactured, only a little over 2,000 returned to Britain after that infamous Dunkirk evacuation where British forces barely escaped complete annihilation.

But to do so, they had to leave most of their equipment behind. And now, as the enemy was literally at the gates and everything looked like an impending invasion of the British mainland, they were scrambling to arm themselves for the upcoming fight. This led to the creation of what they called the Garage hands gun, a series of improvised or simplified versions of the Bren and other guns that could be produced in an emergency in significant numbers to armed troops who had nothing to fight with. This is how the Sten gun was born,

by the way. One of, if not the cheapest submachine gun of the war. But as the Battle of Britain was slowly won and the threat of invasion was reduced, normal Bren production picked back up rapidly. Tens of thousands of the Bren Mark I rolled off the lines, a simplified version that cut the cost by 25%.

 They would soon be heading to North Africa. But in the meantime, the Germans had been putting captured Brens to use. After Dunkirk, they’d captured nearly the entire British army’s infantry. Listen to this. About 27,000 machine guns. And here’s the interesting part. They actually loved it. They designated it as light machine gun MG138E standing for English origin.

 They printed manuals for their soldiers and Brens were widely issued mostly to occupation units, coastal defense forces and anti-partisan units. Now the Germans were already familiar with the design. If you remember, the checks created the first versions of this machine gun in the German 792 Mouser cartridge.

 They had captured Czech factories as well and continued to produce those weapons for the Vermacht. So this gun family ended up being one of the most important foreign designs in German service. They saw quite a lot of use in German hands before the MG34 production caught up and then later the MG42 as well.

 But while the MG34 was a highly precise, delicate weapon that struggled to work in dirty battlefield conditions, soldiers fell in love with the Bren design that would fire wherever you put it. They had quite a high regard for it. Early in the war, a British infantry section consisted of eight men.

 You had the section commander, one Bren gunner and his assistant, and five riflemen. Each of those five riflemen carried two Bren magazines on top of their own rifle ammunition. The assistant was the one reloading the weapon and carried six magazines along with the spare barrel. And all of them were trained to use the gun so they could take over if, or better said when, the designated gunner was killed.

 It wasn’t rare for the squad to carry over 30 magazines. So, you see how much they appreciated its automatic fire. And here is the first important thing soldiers learned about the Bren when they were deployed to fight the Germans in North Africa. It was accurate. Besides working perfectly in the desert, which couldn’t be said for many other weapons, the Bren could place its shots with quite remarkable precision.

 Its lower rate of fire made grouping of bursts much better. You see, the gas operated mechanism pushed everything backward and forward in a straight line with no side to side movement that would throw off your aim. And the adjustable bipod combined with the well-placed pistol grip and carrying handle for additional support gave the operator excellent control.

 So, in the hands of a skilled gunner, a Bren could fire a single burst of five rounds that would have almost the same tight grouping as five aimed single shots. It was very effective at silencing or suppressing German machine gun nests to allow infantry to advance. Bren gunners would fire tight three to five round bursts around the heads of the German machine gun team while other soldiers advanced.

 This was unlike most machine guns that would spray bullets over a wider area. Now, British infantry tactics operated on what they called one foot on the ground. One group moved while the other provided covering fire, then they alternated. So the Bren group would suppress the enemy while the rifle group maneuvered forward and then the rifle group would provide covering fire while the Bren group moved up to a better position.

 Soldiers joked that it was too bloody accurate for a machine gun. Because it was so precise, it wasn’t as effective at mowing down massed infantry attacks like other machine guns that would create a cone of fire, hitting more targets across a wider area. Brens were also used in an anti-aircraft roll on a tripod with the Vicar’s Mly Panund round drum magazine and spider sights.

 A little fun fact, the Bren had a small metal stud on the butt that was only needed to lock the gun into anti-aircraft mounts. But the factory kept manufacturing that stud on spare parts until 1976, decades after anyone had stopped using those mounts and the Bren and anti-aircraft roll. It looks like nobody had bothered to update the production list.

 By the way, during the DEP raid, these 100 round drums were tried out for the first time in battle. They failed horribly, like basically everything else on that raid for the British and got many Bren gunners killed because the drums jammed in the worst possible moment. Now, this video couldn’t go without mentioning the so-called Bren Carrier.

 If you ever played good old Company of Heroes, you know what I’m talking about. The vehicle everyone called the Bren carrier was actually correctly called the universal carrier, a tracked light armored vehicle. They built about 113,000 of them across all variants, making it the most produced armored fighting vehicle in history.

 Early models had the Bren mounted to a bracket, but later versions simply rested the gun on a rubber block in the weapon slot. The operator held it in place, expecting it would be quickly dismounted anyway. And besides the standard Bren mounting, carriers were modified to take boys anti-tank rifles, Vicar’s heavy machine guns, mortars, PAT launchers, or even 50 caliber Browning heavy machine guns on Americanbuilt versions.

 There was even the Wasp flamethrower variant. One of the most incredible Bren gun actions of the entire war happened right at the very end in April 1945, just weeks before Germany surrendered. Corporal Thomas Peek Hunter was a 21-year-old Royal Marine Commando, and his unit was attacking German positions in northern Italy.

 The problem was that the Germans had set up a defensive line with nine machine guns and mortars, all covering about 200 yd of completely open ground. So, Hunter grabbed his Bren and just sprinted across that open ground, firing from the hip, while Germans opened fire on him from all directions. He reloaded on the move, made it to the German positions, then cleared out a couple of houses by himself.

 even capturing six German soldiers. But then his troop got pinned down trying to follow him across. So Hunter climbed onto a pile of rubble and deliberately made himself a target. Firing his Bren, he drew German fire onto himself so his men could get moving. He kept firing until he was hit in the head by a German machine gun.

 He earned the Victoria Cross for his action. As for the Bren, the end of World War II didn’t mean the end for its service. Quite the opposite. When Britain adopted the 762 by 51mm NATO cartridge in the 1950s, they had a choice to make. They could either develop an entirely new light machine gun or convert the existing Bren inventory.

 Testing showed that conversion was more cost-ffective and so the L4 light machine gun entered service beginning in 1955. The conversion required quite a lot of changes to accommodate the new rimless cartridge. Most visibly, that curved magazine was no longer necessary with rimless ammunition, so it was replaced by a nearly straight 30 round magazine.

 Only a few thousand L4 series weapons were produced before the beltfed FN mag eventually replaced them in the sustained fire support role. The Korean War saw British and Commonwealth forces deploying old 303 Brens against an enemy that used the same design. Chinese forces carried captured and Chinese manufactured ZB26 guns in 792.

 So both sides were basically shooting at each other with the same gun. The weapons served through Britain’s postimperial conflicts as well. During the Malayan emergency from 1948 to 1960, the Bren’s lighter weight made it preferable to beltfed weapons in jungle warfare. SAS units reportedly deployed L4 Brens during the Dar Rebellion in Oman, where amunition economy was a big problem in extended desert operations.

 But the Indian army maintained the longest continuous use of the Bren design. They had been manufacturing brens at a shadow factory since 1942 and production continued into the 21st century. Photographs from 2009 show Indian soldiers still using domestically produced 762 Brens. The design was finally retired from Indian service in 2012, representing over 70 years of continuous manufacturing