MG42 Feeding

Abwehr · Post by **Abwehr** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 6:36 am

I was watching the History Channel a couple of nights ago in the hotel room and they had a short clip of a German gun crew firing on the Russians. Since it was a short clip, I did notice one thing unusual, the assist. gunner was feeding the belt from the right side.

Did they have the film running from the wrong side in this clip? It sure looked strange.

Post by **MCP** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:49 am

To bad it wasn't long enough or maybe close enought that you could see if there were holes or the long opening on the shroud or their eagles were reveresed on their uniforms. Maybe if someone recorded that segment, they could run it in slow motion. It still seems that the film was reversed when it was transferred.

Easy to do if your not familiar with weapons, or attention to detail.

Abwehr · Post by **Abwehr** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 8:32 am

The segment was very short and the soldiers firing had their backs to the camera. I was able to notice that the feed tray was reversed too. My feeling is that the film was run from the wrong side. I hope someone else saw this one and can comment.

kmw · Post by **kmw** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:42 am

MCP wrote:To bad it wasn't long enough or maybe close enought that you could see if there were holes or the long opening on the shroud or their eagles were reveresed on their uniforms. Maybe if someone recorded that segment, they could run it in slow motion. It still seems that the film was reversed when it was transferred.

Easy to do if your not familiar with weapons, or attention to detail.

or if the scenes you've shown of the Russians were facing the opposite direction. Take note of that, even in a documentary if they're showing two sides of a battle, for the most part one side will face one direction, the other side the opposite. It's an extension of the "180" rule, and editors are really bad about flipping images to obtain this. They think they are paying attention to detail -- film detail. There are plenty of firearms knowledgeable folks in the motion picture industry, but even for those guys doing the film stuff "right" comes first.

Abwehr · Post by **Abwehr** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 1:04 pm

In this short segement, the Germans were in the lower left of the scene with the MG42 pointing tho the right. The camera,man had the entire gun in the picture and the Germans were firing from a depression in the ground. The commentary was discussing them shooting at Russians. You never know about the cemmentaries as I have noticed they use any scene to protray whatever they are talking about. Also, they will use scenes from the early war for late war comments. This is very noticiable from the uniforms they are wearing usually.