Original Item: Original 20 Round Feed strip for the 8mm German M-37 Breda Machine Gun. The Breda Modello 37 was an Italian heavy machine gun (Mitragliatrice Breda MOD.37) adopted in 1937. It was the standard machine gun for the Royal Italian Army during World War II. The M37 was meant as company/battalion support as compared to the more troublesome M1930 meant for squad/platoon support, and proved far more effective in combat.
The Breda M37 was a gas-operated, air-cooled heavy machine gun. The Breda used a larger cartridge than its rivals, the 8 mm x59RB Breda. Unlike other infantry machine guns, the Breda lacked a camming mechanism for initial extraction of the cartridge case after firing, and this meant that each cartridge had to be oiled via an oiling mechanism before being fed into the chamber. This attracted dust and debris, particularly in desert environments such as found in the Royal Italian Army’s World War II campaigns in Libya and the Western Desert.
Another drawback was that the gun was fed by 20-round strips of cartridges. This limited continuous fire, as the gun could only be fired rapidly when a second crew member fed in one ammunition strip after another. The rounds still had to be oiled to stop the cases sticking in the chamber, with all the disadvantages this entailed. Another peculiarity of the design is that the spent cases were…
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