AVRE ‘FLYING DUSTBIN’ TANKS DELETED MG-42 NESTS IN ONE SHOT
Normandy coast, June 6, 1944, zero six hundred hours, and Obergefreiter Wilhelm Krause gripped the handles of his MG-42 machine gun inside the concrete casemate designated Widerstandsnest 73, watching the gray waters of the English Channel through the narrow embrasure as the largest invasion fleet in human history materialized from the morning mist, completely unaware that British engineers had developed a weapon specifically designed to delete fortifications like his in a single catastrophic shot, a 40-pound demolition charge that would make two meters of reinforced concrete as useful as cardboard against the specialized Churchill tanks already loading into landing craft.
The MG-42, that beautiful instrument of destruction they called Hitler’s buzzsaw, could spit out 1,200 rounds per minute, creating interlocking fields of fire with the other positions along the Atlantic Wall that Field Marshal Rommel had spent months perfecting, yet Krause had no idea that the British 79th Armoured Division had been training for over a year with modified Churchill tanks mounting 29mm spigot mortars that could lob what they nicknamed the “Flying Dustbin” directly through his firing slit from 80 yards away. The German defensive doctrine built everything around the MG-42, with each ten-man squad essentially serving the needs of that single weapon, carrying ammunition, spare barrels that needed changing every 250 rounds when the gun overheated, and protecting the gunner who controlled the battlefield with sustained bursts of 7 point 92mm rounds that could cut down entire platoons in seconds.
Credit to : WWII Battlefield Memoirs
