For over a century the M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun, known affectionally among troops as “Ma Deuce,” has been the staple small arms weapon in the United States military arsenal.
While certain enhancements have been made throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the core of the gun has remained relatively unchanged. So much so that a doughboy could likely pick up the modern-day M2 and operate it.
The highly versatile weapon has seen action affixed to the wings of P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51D Mustangs. It has floated down the Mekong Delta on the decks of America’s “Brown Water Navy” aboard patrol boats and river vessels. And it has surveyed terrain mounted atop Humvees during the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
That the M2 has managed to outlast all other small arms weapon is a testament to its maker: John Moses Browning.
The ‘Thomas Edison’ of guns
Born in Ogden, Utah Territory, in 1855, Browning was the son of Mormon gunsmith Jonathan Browning who fathered 22 children with three wives.
John was lucky number 13 and spent much of his youth tinkering in his father’s workshop. By his mid-teens, Browning was a skilled metalworker in his own right and could repair or copy any gun dropped off at his father’s shop.
“As soon as I started to make the gun,” he recalled, “I found my head so full of parts that my greatest difficulty was sorting them out.”
Browning eschewed blueprints in favor of trial-and-error cutting, chiseling, drilling and filing. By 1879 the 24-year-old had filed his first of 128 firearm patents for what would become the Model 1885 single-shot rifle.
The prodigious inventor went on to design seminal military guns such as the Colt M1911 semiautomatic pistol, history’s most enduring semiautomatic pistol design; the Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotgun, the devastating American “trench gun” of World War I that was so effective that it drew diplomatic protests from Germany; the M1895 gas-operated machine gun; the .50-caliber M2 machine gun; and the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle — the BAR of World War II fame.
Author Nathan Gorenstein estimates that roughly 35–40 million firearms have subsequently been patterned after the inventor’s designs, and he even conceded that number is likely low.
“As Henry Ford was to automobiles, and Thomas Edison was to electricity,” the author writes, “Browning was to firearms.”
A war’s on
By 1917, the horrendous “butcher’s bill” of the Great War was already in the millions as a result of numerous technological weapons advancements introduced on the Western Front — from the machine gun, tanks to airplanes.
As American doughboys poured into France, Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, requested the development of a multipurpose heavy machine gun in response to both German 13mm antitank rifles and the emergence of thicker enemy armor, according to the Army.
Browning got to work that summer, teaming up with Colt engineer Fred Moore to create a gun that, per Pershing’s specifications, could shoot armor-piercing ammo capable of traveling 2,700 feet per second.
While Winchester Repeating Arms Company set off to develop the .50-caliber cartridges, Browning worked to exact a prototype to match.
Working off the M1917A1’s base design — Browning’s machine gun that received prodigious use during WWI — the subsequent M1921 would have water-cooled barrels, was recoil operated and fired from a closed bolt. The unique design made the receiver transformable into seven different configurations for all types of roles, from infantry to aircraft.
The first test of what was to become the M2 wasn’t exactly promising, however.
On Oct. 15, 1918, Browning fired 870 rounds in bursts of 100 to 250 rounds. The basic mechanism of the gun was sound, but a host of challenges remained.
The recoil, according to Gorenstein, made it practically impossible” to hold the barrel level.
Postwar development of the gun continued, albeit at a slower pace.
“Work on the 50 caliber going along rather slow,” Browning wrote on April 23, 1920. “I am not satisfied with the new cartridge and afraid it will kick the gun around so it will have no accuracy. … The cartridge we have jumps too much and new one will be 50% worse.”
Browning continued to tweak the gun throughout the 1920s until his death in 1926. Ultimately, the .50-caliber gun that is still in widespread use today was modified by Samuel E. Green, an engineer at the government’s Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, who took over its development in 1927, according to Gorenstein.
“He and his team developed a feed mechanism so that ammunition belts could be loaded from either the left or right side, important if multiple guns were mounted in the confined space of an aircraft wing or fit into a tank turret,” writes Gorenstein.
“He also figured out how to produce a version of the gun for use on land, air, or sea that could be made on a single assembly line. It was officially adopted as the ‘Browning, Caliber .50, M2’ to differentiate it from Browning’s first version. By the end of World War II, more than 2 million M2s had come off American assembly lines, and the gun acquired its still-used nickname, Ma Deuce.”
WWII and beyond
The advent of World War II firmly cemented the M2 as America’s heavy machine gun.
Equipped on both American bombers and fighters, the M2 provided a lethal wall of lead for its plane crews.
In 1941, as Japanese planes strafed American battleships at Pearl Harbor, it was an M2 Browning machine gun that Messman 2nd Class Dorie Miller wielded to defend the USS West Virginia, earning him a Navy Cross — the first Black American service member to receive the award.
As Audie Murphy mounted his tank on Jan. 26, 1945, near Holtzwihr, France, he used a .50-caliber machine gun to hold off advancing German troops in one of the war’s most famous stands.
In the Vietnam War, legendary Marine Corps sniper Carlos Hathcock killed an enemy soldier at a distance of 2,460 yards, writes Matt Fratus. It was not a rifle that notched the nearly mile-and-a-half-long kill, but an M2.
From the battlefields of Mogadishu, Iraq and Afghanistan to present-day Ukraine, the M2 has remained a staple in the U.S. — and the world’s — arsenal.
The machine gun, meanwhile, has come up for reevaluation, and at least four major attempts have been made to develop a lighter gun with less recoil, with only one making it past field tests.
Even in that instance, the weapon was only in the field for a brief time before it was replaced by the old M2, according to Gorenstein.
Roughly 50,000 Browning M2 machine guns remain in use by the American military today.
