“The sound of the MG42 machine gun was like a zipper. It took the lives of many enemy soldiers,” said Oliver W. Martin Jr., a veteran of the US 13th Armored Division.

When World War II broke out in 1939, the Nazi army had the MG34, a general-purpose machine gun that was reliable and rugged, but it was expensive and took a long time to produce.

The German High Command wanted to equip the army with more machine guns, so it ordered the design of a new weapon that could fire as fast as the MG34 but was cheaper and faster to produce.

The Mauser-Werke factory developed a machine gun that used 7.92 mm ammunition with a 50- or 250-round magazine, which was the MG42.

The MG42 machine gun also uses rolled and welded steel parts using a new technique that reduces production time by 35%.

This machine gun has an effective range of up to 701 m, and a total weight of 11.3 kg. The gunner can change its barrel in a snap.

After many encounters with this powerful machine gun, American soldiers called the MG42 “Hitler’s circular saw”, because of the way it slashed across the formation, causing enemy infantry to fall like straw.

The Soviet Red Army called it “the cloth cutter” because of the wind-cutting sound of the bullets created from the extremely fast firing speed.

The Germans gave it the terrifying nickname “the bone saw”.

Not only that, they also built an entire infantry tactic for units equipped with this weapon.

Many military historians believe that the MG42 is the best general-purpose machine gun ever made.

With some variants of this machine gun, it could fire up to 1,800 rounds per minute, nearly twice as fast as any automatic weapon of any army at the time.

However, this machine gun also had its limitations. With its extremely fast rate of fire, the MG42 consumed a lot of ammunition and could not fire single shots, so it overheated very quickly, causing the barrel to turn red hot.

In the early stages of the war, just hearing the MG42 fire in a salvo was enough to scare American soldiers.

The situation was so bad that the US military had to produce a film to boost the morale of soldiers panicked by the reputation of this gun.

In fact, the MG42 machine gun killed or seriously injured tens of thousands of Allied and Soviet soldiers.

American military historian James H. Willbanks said that the MG42 appeared almost everywhere on the European battlefield, from gun emplacements to pickup trucks and Panzer tanks.

The terrible power of the MG42 machine gun even shaped German infantry tactics in World War II.

While American and British strategists focused only on the role of rifles, considering machine guns as only supporting fire for infantry attacks, the Germans considered the machine gunner as the center of the formation, while other soldiers only played a supporting role.

Each MG42 battery had 6 gunners, including a commander, gunner, a soldier carrying the gun base and three other soldiers carrying replacement barrels, ammunition and other equipment. When Allied infantry attacked the strongholds protected by the MG42, the German gunners would open fire to create a barrage of suppressive fire against the enemy.

In this situation, all the Allied soldiers could do was hide well, wait until the German soldiers changed barrels, or when the guns ran out of ammunition, or wait for the tanks to blow up the enemy machine gun nests. After World War II, the MG42 machine gun continued to be used by West Germany and developed into a new variant, the MG3.