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Home Guard

Great! We have a date - and a very rough indication of where: Home Guard Western Command which means a huge swathe of the country from the north-west down to Gloucestershire and including all of the West Midlands (and Wales).

Chris
 
#349, looks like a Vickers .303, heavy, but may be wrong, my dear Uncle Horace Manton, was a dispatch rider for the Home guard, Handsworth Div, and is in one of the "Birmingham" magazine articles!!
It's the World War One version of the Browning called the "M1917" - It fired the American .30 calibre round. The Americans gave some to the British in WW2. Because of the different ammunition, it was not issued to regular troops, so they ended up with the Home Guard (who also had quantities of American rifles that used the same calibre round). The Americans themselves used the model M1917 throughout WW2 and the Korean War up until the 1970s. It was mostly used in a defensive role, its water jacket meant it could go on firing for long periods. It does look very similar to the British Vickers gun.
 
View attachment 183948
Indeed, the US military had a strange way of allocating names to anything they purchased "M" for "military" then the year it was adopted for each type - Thus there is an "M1917" machine gun and an "M1917" rifle. Completely different yet given the same name. In fact, if you look at the original photo posted - The soldier kneeling on the right is not holding a British Lee Enfield rifle - it's actually one of the American M1917 pattern rifles. - You can tell by the different style of fore-sight and the way the barrel protrudes from the "woodwork". That would make sense since it would mean both the rifle and machine gun would use the same .30 calibre ammunition. Simplifying logistics for this particular Home Guard unit.
 
Indeed, the US military had a strange way of allocating names to anything they purchased "M" for "military" then the year it was adopted for each type - Thus there is an "M1917" machine gun and an "M1917" rifle. Completely different yet given the same name. In fact, if you look at the original photo posted - The soldier kneeling on the right is not holding a British Lee Enfield rifle - it's actually one of the American M1917 pattern rifles. - You can tell by the different style of fore-sight and the way the barrel protrudes from the "woodwork". That would make sense since it would mean both the rifle and machine gun would use the same .30 calibre ammunition. Simplifying logistics for this particular Home Guard unit.
yes i did notice under a mag glass
 
The British army's two primary machine guns were the VickersMark I and the Bren Marks 1 and 2. The Vickers was a water-cooled mediumgun that was mounted on a tripod, while the Brens were air-cooled lightmachine guns usually fired from bipods. Both were considered among thebest of their class of weapons. Only limited numbers of each wereprovided to the Home Guard and photos of them in service were oftenstaged for propaganda purposes.

As production of Vickers and Bren guns got up to speed, the regularforces were able to hand their Lewis Guns down to the Home Guard. Theair-cooled Lewis had been the standard LMG of British forces from 1915until the Bren was adopted in 1938. While on the heavy side, it wasknown for its reliability and was the most common Home Guard automaticweapon.

The Home Guard also received Lewis Mark 2 and Mark 3 aircraft gunsthat had their barrel jackets removed, the buttstock replaced by a spadegrip and used 97-round pan magazines. They were usually retrofitted withmakeshift buttstocks and bipods for ground use. Some American .30 cal.M1918 Lewis Aircraft Guns obtained through Lend-Lease were modified in asimilar manner.

Another veteran of the Great War that was fielded by the Home Guardwas the Mark I Hotchkiss light machine gun. Adopted by the British armybefore World War I, it was air-cooled and featured a quick-change barreland were usually used by mounted troops and on armored vehicles. Many ofthem were fitted with crude metal buttstocks and issued to the Guard.

The U.S. Lend-Lease program provided the Home Guard with additionalmachine guns--obsolete and not. The most useful of the lot was the M1918Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), the standard squad automatic weapon ofthe U.S. Army from 1918 to 1940. While its fixed barrel design and20-round magazine limited its rate of fire, its light weight andfirepower made it a popular infantry weapon.
 
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