17 October 2006

NZLAV-mounted MAG 58s were recently seen in action at Waiouru during a NZLAV Commanders Course, when the students were required to give supporting fire to the field guns of 16 Field Regt.

A “Musorian enemy force” had been located 2km north-east of Westlawn. The 12 course members spent the night inside four NZLAVs in Home Valley and then, just before dawn, moved up to Nursery Ridge where 161 Battery was positioned. They then moved forward of the artillery, driving very carefully on the snow-covered roads down into the Argo Valley, and up to Westlawn.

Here they made a rendezvous with the NZLAV of 161’s forward observer party. Dozens of boxes of 7.62mm ammunition in the FOP’s NZLAV were transferred into the TTT vehicles, and the five NZLAVs then moved cross-country – through snow-covered scrub – to their firing positions.

While the trainee artillery officers calculated their coordinates – and then recalculated them – artillery shells began landing on the hillside in front, and the MAG 58 Platt-mounts and coax guns opened up with supporting fire, the red tracer bullets curving through the snow-laden air as they found their target 1,500 metres away.

The new MAG 58

In recent years, the NZ Army’s aging GPMGs have become increasingly expensive to maintain. They are now being replaced by a fleet of metric MAG 58s manufactured by FN Herstal Belgium.

In 2003, the new NZLAVs arrived in New Zealand equipped with over 200 MAG 58s as coax and Platt-mount guns. Parts of these new guns looked identical to the old, British-origin GPMGs, but were milled to metric sizes. The old guns were made to the imperial inch, creating the potential for parts to become mixed.

While the new gun looks exactly the same as the old GPMG externally, its gas piston is of an improved design, so that the “balancing drill” (test-firing to adjust the rate of fire) is no longer needed.

CAPT Dave Thorsen, senior instructor of Support Weapons Wing at the Army’s Combat School, explained that each gun is pre-balanced by armourers, who add washers to the internal mechanism to adjust the firing speed. “It keeps up its rate of fire during sustained use much better too”, he added. “On the old ones you had to turn the gas pressure dial up higher after a couple of hundred rounds.”

The old L7 GPMG

The Army’s old Gimpy was a British version of a Belgian gun derived from the Browning automatic rifle of World War One.

In the 1950s, the Belgian arms manufacturer Fabrique Nationale (FN) turned the BAR’s basic firing mechanism upside down, modified the parts so that most of them could be made cheaply and precisely from pressed steel, and in 1958 produced their Mitrailleur a Gaz (machine gun of gas), the FN MAG 58.

Then the British got a license to build the MAG 58 as a replacement for their pre-war Bren LMG (light machine gun). Then they developed a sustained fire kit – heavier barrel, heavy tripod and improved sight – to convert it to a medium machine gun, replacing their Vickers MMG. They called it the L7A1.

In late-1964 the NZ Army bought this British-made L7A1 to replace its own Brens and Vickers guns, although there was strong political pressure to buy the American M60. The Army paid £94,400 for 270 guns and 80 sustained fire kits. “I did the first course”, said MAJ GEN Gordon Benfell. “It was a marvellous development from its predecessor.”

Mr Nobby Clarke, fleet manager (weapons) DFM, said that the Army upgraded to the safer L7A2 configuration in the early 1970s when a number of new L7A2s were purchased. They were used in the NZ Army in both the light machine gun and sustained fire roles.

With the introduction of the LSW C9 in 1988, the fleet of L7A2s were temporarily withdrawn from service, and a partial refurbishment undertaken. This upgrade also included the purchase of new C2A1 sights. The GPMG was then re-introduced in the sustained fire role only.

The weapon was known in New Zealand as the “GPMG” or the “Gimpy” – what American soldiers were also calling their M60 general purpose machine gun. However, in the 1980s the Americans abandoned their M60, and they also adopted the MAG 58. They labelled it the M240, and have used it mostly mounted on vehicles. But all these variants are known as MAG 58 in NATO usage.

Image Gallery - Issue 365