MG 42

The MG 42 was a recoil-operated, air-cooled German general-purpose machine gun produced by Grossfuss AG, Mauser Werke and other manufacturers, and it entered German army service in 1942 during the Second World War. The weapon fired at an exceptionally high cyclic rate of roughly 1,200 rounds per minute, close to double the rate of comparable Allied machine guns, a sound distinctive enough that Allied troops nicknamed it Hitler's Buzzsaw. It was also engineered specifically for rapid, low-cost mass production, requiring only about 75 man-hours to build compared with 150 for the earlier MG 34, a design choice that let Germany field the weapon in far greater numbers as the war progressed. The MG 42's stamped-steel construction and rapid barrel-change system influenced postwar machine gun designs across multiple countries, and a direct mechanical descendant, the German MG3, remains in service in the twenty-first century.