Shooting USA: History's Guns: The BB Machine Gun

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[00:00:11]>> If you've never seen this obscure piece of American history, you're not alone.

[00:00:17]With a bit of squinting, this odd little machine gun bears a curious resemblance to the big Browning 30 and 50 cows.

[00:00:26]That's by design, but what might surprise you is the chambering. Caliber.177. [music] That's right. Standard BB.

[00:00:37]>> We have the MacGlashan B-3 aerial gunnery trainer, which is effectively a BB machine gun for the US Army.

[00:00:47]>> You heard him right. This is a government-issue BB machine gun from the Second World War.

[00:00:54]>> It's kind of a fascinating piece in that a lot of people, even people that are into World War II history, not they've never seen that.

[00:01:02]>> Tim Gerlach is the president of the Aviation Heritage Center of Kingman, Arizona, a nonprofit dedicating to preserving Kingman's aviation history.

[00:01:13]Tim's MacGlashan is part of a growing collection of artifacts that the organization [music] will exhibit upon completion of their educational center and museum to be situated on the original grounds of the Kingman Army Air Force Base.

[00:01:28]Here, during the war, 36,000 airmen were trained in the art of flexible gunnery.

[00:01:36]>> In World War II, flexible gunnery was used on the B-17 [music] and on the B-24, and then a lot of medium bombers. And the whole concept there was the guns could be moved. You could track a target that was attacking the aircraft and fire back at it, whether it was behind you, in front of you, or moving alongside.

[00:01:57]>> But before the GI gunners could turn their Browning 50 cows loose on Axis fighters, they had to be trained easily, but efficiently, by the hundreds of thousands.

[00:02:09]Enter the trainer aerial gunnery type E3 of the MacGlashan Air Machine Gun Corporation.

[00:02:16]>> This was a system that everybody that went through Kingman Army Airfield trained on.

[00:02:23]>> In his 1942 [music] novel Bombs Away, John Steinbeck paints us a picture of how the E3 was used in training. Mounted at intervals are little machine guns which operate by compressed air. They fire streams of BBs shot at moving targets. The targets are little planes which move rapidly across a blue background. But when they are hit, they fall backwards.

[00:02:48]>> It was a basically a shooting gallery for the military.

[00:02:53]>> So if by now you're thinking Coney Island style carnival midway, you win the prize.

[00:02:58]>> Paul MacGlashan, who designed this, prior to the war, he was designing BB guns for arcade games or amusement parks.

[00:03:10]>> When the war came, he knew that his gallery systems could give gunnery students lots of initial experience without wasting millions of rounds of precious ammunition.

[00:03:21]But make no mistake, his BB gun was no toy.

[00:03:25]>> He produced this relatively complex machine to fire at 600 rounds per minute at roughly 600 ft per [music] second.

[00:03:34]The ballistics would roughly simulate the ballistics they could expect out of, say, a Browning 50 caliber machine gun, but at a scaled distance. This system fired one BB at a time, and using this mechanism, it would advance one BB into the chamber, cycle, and load the next one and be ready to fire. All of this sophistication of this gun, it didn't come cheap. The gun price was roughly [music] between 180 and $200. That was approximately the same price as a Thompson submachine gun. Which, one of the criticisms of the Thompson was it was too expensive to produce.

[00:04:14]Eventually, the government got the price down on that, but the BB machine gun remained at that price throughout [music] the entire war and its production.

[00:04:25]>> By September of 1945, with about 2,600 guns built, the E3 and its training galleries were declared obsolete in favor of more advanced simulator systems. But, it wasn't the end of the Mac Glashan Air Machine Gun Corporation.

[00:04:42]>> Paul Mac Glashan, after the war, developed his nickel firing pistol. And this was for carnival use. The customer would go up and they would put the nickel, a coin, into the gun and fire it at the target. Well, the carnivals collected all the nickels that were fired and made their money that way.

[00:05:02]>> Under the new name of Mac Glashan Enterprises, a chance meeting with Walt Disney led to Mac Glashan creating designs for a new theme park called Disneyland.

[00:05:14]He would spend the rest [music] of his career creating premier shooting gallery systems for the most renowned theme parks around the world. And even though the E3 has largely faded into obscurity, it can still make an impression.

[00:05:29]>> This is one [music] heavy-duty piece of machinery. It makes a lot of noises you wouldn't think a BB gun would make. It sounds [music] like you're firing a real machine gun and it's just a blast. That's cool.

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