The Italian Army in World War II has often been slammed in various histories as being one of the worst armies. I disagree. While the Italian soldier was certainly indiferrently led and poorly equipped and even more poorly supplied, you have to respect the way the Italian soldier kept, soldiering on. If any soldier has ever been poorly served by his service, it has to be the Italians.
I present for your pleasure, the Machine Guns of the Italian Army, 1930-1943.
Our first item is the standard heavy machine fun, the Fiat-Revelli, Model 1914. This is a water-cooled weapon that bears some resemblance to the Maxim/Vickers/Browning family. This 6.5mm weapon uses a delayed blowback system that uses the force of firing to eject and reload the weapon. Like most blowback designs this led to extraction difficulties and a oil reservoir and pump were installed to lubricate the cartridge before it was loaded. It used a magazine that held ten columns, each of five rounds, as each column emptied, the magazine indexes across to bring the next column into line, until the finally, the empty magazine is ejected from the right side of the weapon. Needless to say, the internal mechanism is very complex which is not improved by the oil and dust coating the cartridges it acquired during firing; it is notoriously prone to jamming.
Next is the Breda, Model 1930, the standard Italian light machine gun of the war. It is very difficult to say anything good about this weapon. To start with, it is also a blowback operated weapon, while the 6.5mm cartridge is not as powerful as a .30-06, it is still too powerful for this weapon. The M1930 has a tendency for the neck of the empty cartridge case to tightly expanded against the chamber while the bolt is opening, leading to the case stretching as the case moves out of the bolt. To overcome this, the Breda design team added an oil reservior and pump which sprayed a small quantity of oil on to the cartridge before it was chambered. The magazine is permanently mounted on the right side and is hinged forward to allow it to be reloaded from rifle chargers. In theory, this is a good idea, since it means that the magazine lips, which are critical for correct feeding, are machined within the receiver and are protected from accidental damage. In practise, this leads to a low rate of fire due to the need to reload the magazine instead of just swapping out magazines.
And finally, the Breda Model 1937, the first go-green machine gun! The Italians really tried to correct the issues with their previous designs. First, they replaced the blowback system with a simple gas piston, but failed to design a slow opening movement to start the empty case out of the chamber. The same violent ejection as with every other Italian machine gun took place and....you guessed it! The answer was to add the ole oil reservoir and pump to lubricate the cartridges...and all of the problems that resulted. To add insult to injury, the feed mechanism was unique! The designers took the old Hotchkiss metal strip system which feeds a metal strip holding 20 rounds into the left side of the gun and then strips the cartridge out, loads and cycles the strip out of the right side of the gun. The design team went one better and arranged the system so that when the empty case was extracted from the chamber it was replaced into the strip before the strip cycled. While this system does have the advantage of keeping the gun position tidy, it also has the disadvantage in that the the empty cases must first be stripped out before the metal strip can be reloaded!
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