Electronic, Battery & Wind-Up Toys

Machine Gun
What do u think about the Japanese type 92 machine gun in WW2?

Lot of people i talk to that type 92 was the worst weapons the Japanese came up with in WW2. They even laugh that Japan did not even used ammo belt like the US did with the 1917 and 1919. So how was it useful in combat compare the the American-1919 machine gun which was ammo-fed-belt. Also where did japan get this idea from? I checked and researched but i still don’t understand how it was created.

The correct comparison in terms of their tactical employment is not the M1919A4 air-cooled Browning but rather the M1917A1 water-cooled version.

The Type 92 like so many other Japanese weapons was inspired by a French design, in this case the famous Hotchkiss heavy machine gun of WWI fame. That weapon was quaint enough in 1918. Using that same basic design a quarter-century later was positively nutty. The Type 92 was developed from the earlier Type 3 with the major difference being a change in caliber from 6.5×55 to 7.7x57mm.

Tactically the Type 92 was a battalion-level support weapon, designed to be fired from relatively static implaced positions (but still able to rapidly displace and re-deploy when needed) while providing a high level of sustained fire at long range if necessary. The severe bulk and weight of the weapon ensured that rapidly displacing and re-deploying the weapon would not be the easiest. Not such a problem in the largely defensive stance Japan found itself in after 1942 but a real problem in offensive warfare. The low rate of fire and air-cooled barrel meant that a high rate of fire could not be sustained. But that wasn’t such a problem because it was so hard to keep the gun topped up with feed strips without jamming. The reality was a M1919A4 air-cooled Browning could provide about double the real-world rate of fire while an air-cooled M1917 could probably provide 3-4 times the effective rate of fire and at the same or better effective range.