Quote:
Originally Posted by James Langham
Worthh noting that for many years the L4 was preferred to the L7 by the Royal Marines for arctic warfare as the mag was more reliable than a belt in the snow.
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Interesting! I had read that the RMC preferred the Bren over the Jimpy for artic warfare but the general explanation was that the Bren was better able to cope with artic conditions. However if it's because magazine fed was more reliable than belt-fed then the reason is more that magazine-fed won't drag all the snow/ice/other crap into the feed mechanism rather than the Bren itself was better able to cope with the freezing conditions compared to the Jimpy.
The impression given by the book I read was that the Bren was able to cope with the conditions better than the L7 - that's quite a different situation to the preference for mag over belt!
P.S. For those unfamiliar with British military slang: the MAG58 was produced under licence in the UK as the L7 General Purpose MachineGun AKA GPMG. When said as a word GPMG sounds like "jimpy".