Typical D-Day infantry weapons

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Major Tim Saunders, of the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, is a respected military historian who has written several accounts of D-Day actions. As a specialist on this programme he brought with him a selection of original D-Day infantry weapons to illustrate some of the guns that would have fired the various spent cartridge cases that Time Team uncovered across the sites.

Rifles
The standard British rifle was the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE). Like its German counterpart, the Mauser Gewehr 98, it's a bolt-action firearm. This means that unlike an automatic weapon, each bullet (or more correctly, round) has to be chambered manually by drawing back and pushing forward a bolt after each shot. The Lee-Enfield weighs in at nearly 9lbs (4.1kg) when fully loaded with its 10-round magazine. Likewise, the German five-shot Gewehr 98 had a nearly identical hefty weight. The British rifle fired a .303-inch round compared with the German 7.92mm. Again they were relatively similar calibres. 'The Lee-Enfield was a heavy and very accurate rifle,' says Major Saunders. 'The second world war version was updated from an earlier model, so it was a tried and tested, reliable piece of equipment.'

Submachine guns
Both British and German submachine guns used the same 9mm calibre ammunition, but there the similarity ends. The British Sten Gun was cheaply and simply made from pressed steel parts and was prone to jamming and inconsistent performance. Opposed to this was the German MP40. Often incorrectly known as the Schmeisser (Hugo Schmeisser was a small-arms designer who designed the earlier MP18 SMG and had a hand in the manufacture of the MP40), the MP40 was expensive and highly machined from top specification materials. Both guns carried a 32-round magazine and fired at the staccato rate of around 500 rounds per minute.

Machine guns
Supporting the highly mobile infantry with their rifles and submachine guns were the larger machine guns, which squads would rely on for supporting and suppressing fire. The British version was the .303-calibre Bren Gun. The Bren was fed from a top magazine, which held 30 rounds. Based on an earlier Czech design (the ZB26), the Bren proved to be reliable and possibly the best-performing light machine gun of the war.

Opposed to the Bren was the 7.92-calibre German MG34 (often nicknamed a Spandau because of a manufacturing base there). This general-purpose machine gun was fed by a belt of interlinked rounds, which were fired at the incredible rate of 800-900 rounds per minute. Highly machined out of quality materials, the MG34 was accurate up to 4,000 yards (3,650m). 'The Bren has a steady thumping rate of fire,' says Major Saunders, 'but the MG34 sounds more like a chainsaw, absolutely devastating.'

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