The C2 we could have had

Vincent J. Curtis

5 Oct 23

The squad support light machine gun, or LMG, has been a part of Canadian fighting technique since the Hundred Day campaign of WWI.  Then, an infantry platoon was task organized into one section of Lewis gunners, one section of grenadiers, and two sections of riflemen.  When encountering a German machine gun nest, usually featuring a water-cooled Maxim MG-08, the Lewis gunners would put continuous suppressive fire on the nest, enabling the grenadiers to get close enough to take it out with Mills bombs, predecessor of the 36 grenade.

After the war, Canadian defence went to sleep.  The British, however, closer to the danger, kept awake enough that they had ready to manufacture the Bren LMG and the No. 4 Lee-Enfield.  During the war, Canada’s John Inglis Company manufactured Bren guns, both in .303 British, and, for the Chinese Nationals, in the rimless 7.92x57 mm Mauser calibres.  The Canadian government created Canadian Small Arms, a Crown Corporation, to manufacture No. 4 Lee-Enfield rifles in a factory in Long Branch, Ontario.

When WWII was over, millions of rifles and thousands of Bren guns were left in Canadian hands.  Bolt-action rifles were obsolete, and semi- or fully automatic rifles were the firearms of the next major war.  NATO was formed in 1949 to keep the Soviet Union from invading through the Fulda Gap; and, NATO being a collection of countries, standardization became essential.  One of those standardizations was on the 7.62 x 51 mm NATO cartridge.

No particular design of rifle was chosen as the NATO standard, and Canada settled on the FN FAL pattern, which was dubbed the FN C1A1.

FN in Belgium had been a distributor of Colt Patent Firearms in Europe since 1900.  One of Colt’s designs was the Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, which the United States Army adopted in 1918.  The BAR was never tactically deployed in WWI, but the BAR remained in American service as a squad support weapon.  FN sold commercially a few Colt-made BARs in Europe in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s FN tooled up to manufacture their own pattern BARs.  FN made some improvements, such as adding a pistol grip.

For FN, WWII came and went; their factory was overrun, but the Germans didn’t use the BAR.  A number of militaries were then in the market for new weapons, and FN sold them their improved BAR, named the BAR-D.  The principal improvement to the sturdy and reliable BAR was a quick detachable barrel, making the FN BAR a true LMG.  Anyone who’s changed barrels on the C6 will be familiar with how that detachment system worked, and when the 7.62 mm NATO cartridge came along, the BAR-D1 was chambered in that calibre.

John Inglis hadn’t made a Bren in a decade, and it made no sense tooling up to convert 3,000 Canadian Brens into 7.62.  The factory in Long Brach was also long idle, and it was tooled up to make the FN C1A1 under licence.  The C2 was just a C1, except for a heavy barrel, and a three position change lever, which permitted automatic fire.  Its standard magazine was 30 rounds instead of 20, for the C1; and it was nothing for Long Branch to make a heavy barreled version of their standard production rifle.

The lack of a detachable barrel, and being on the light side for an automatic rifle, made the C2 rather ineffective as a support weapon, and it was uncontrollable in longer bursts.  For a little more money, Canada could have purchased 2,713 BAR-D1s from FN instead, since it also used FN-FAL magazines, and Canada would have had an excellent Bren replacement in the section support role.

Canada, in the C6, did get a BAR, of sorts.  The working parts of the C6 are nearly the same as the FN BAR, except turned upside down for feeding from the top.

The BAR-D1 is the C2 that Canada should have had, but luckily didn’t need.

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