Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun?

Fire Teams of the Royal Marines, 1982

In 1943, Royal Marines on exercise in Scotland explain the Bren Gun to US Marines (US National Archives)

For much of the twentieth century, rifle squads came in two flavors. Most armies divided such units into dissimilar elements: a small machine gun team and a larger rifle team. A few forces, however, organized their squads into two or three interchangeable ‘fire teams’, each of which possessed a single automatic rifle and two or three rifles of the ordinary sort.

Thanks to its general purpose machine gun, the machine gun team of a lopsided squad could deliver more fire than a fire team, and do so for a longer period of time. Likewise, the larger size of a rifle team, which could contain as many as eight men, enjoyed more in the way of Stosskraft (‘close combat power’) than a three- or four-man fire team. At the same time, a squad composed of two or, better yet, three fire teams, each of which could, at any given time, either fire or maneuver, offered its leader a greater number of tactical options.

The South Atlantic War of 1982 offered the Royal Marines an opportunity to compare the two approaches to the interior organization of the rifle squad, or, to use the preferred nomenclature of that corps, ‘rifle section’.