Shots a Second: The Machine Gun

^{National Archives from Marine Corps}

^{Marines with Browning machine gun (center), Thompson submachine gun (front), and M1 carbine (rear) repulse Japanese counterattack in 1944.}

It was July 1, 1916. Nineteen British divisions, the majority of them part of Kitchner’s “New Army,” volunteers so far untested in battle, were poised to effect the breakthrough their commander, Sir Douglas Haig, expected to end the war. The Somme had been a quiet area for the last two years. For the last week, though, it had been anything but quiet. A thousand field pieces, 180 heavy guns, and 245 heavy howitzers had dropped 3,000,000 shells on the German trenches and artillery positions. The no‑man’s‑land and the German positions were a churned‑up mass of shell holes. It looked as if nothing could have survived. To make sure that nothing did, the infantry would be preceded by a “creeping barrage”: the artillery would pound the first German trenches, then as the infantry drew close, it would shift to positions farther away. The attack was expected to consist of a stroll across a field, through the ripped up ruins of what had been a formidable German barbed wire entanglement and into the area that once held German trenches.

The Boer War had taught the British infantry “fire and movement.” Some of the men would rush forward for a short distance then take cover, while the rest, firing from prone or behind cover, would cover their advance with rifle fire. The advanced troops then would fire on the enemy while their comrades rushed forward. This greatly reduced casualties, but it was harder to control the troops. Because his soldiers were so green, and because much German resistance was unlikely, Haig decided to have the troops stay in line and walk to the enemy trenches. Also, if there were enemy fire, the high command was afraid some of the untried troops would flop into shell holes and refuse to advance.

Orders stated that “The assaulting troops must push forward at a steady pace in successive lines, each line adding fresh impetus to the preceding line.”

Nothing turned out as expected. The enormous artillery barrage did not cut the barbed wire. It just tossed the wire up and tangled it more. It was harder to get through than it was originally. Few of the Tommies even got to the wire.

The Germans had dugouts 30 feet below the surface in the chalky soil. They dragged their Maxim machine guns out and cut loose.

A German soldier recalled that attack:

When the English started advancing we were very worried; they looked as if they must overrun our trenches. We were very surprised to see them walking… When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in the hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.

Two British battalions were practically wiped out by a single machine gun.

Many of the troops never got farther from their own trenches than a few feet.

Long‑range machine gun fire killed many others from reserve trenches before they even reached the British frontline trenches. On that first day of the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 of the 100,000 attackers were killed; 40,000 were wounded; and many of the wounded later died.

In spite of that, Haig kept the offensive going for more than four months. It was always the same: No matter how heavily the artillery pounded the enemy trenches, a few German machine guns survived and cut down thousands of attacking infantrymen. The British gained a little ground, but never achieved a breakthrough. For the first two weeks, they didn’t gain an inch. In the middle of September, the British introduced a new weapon: the tank. The tanks gained 3,500 yards, the biggest one‑day advance, but by the end of the day, all 36 tanks had broken down. By November 19, when the offensive was called off, the deep‑est British penetration was 7 miles from their starting point on July 1. They lost 419,654 men. For comparison, that’s more deaths than all United States forces suffered in all of World War II. The overwhelming majority of the dead fell to the machine gun.

The Battle of the Somme was not, of course, the first use of the machine gun in World War I. And World War I was by no means the first war to see machine guns. A practical machine gun, the Gatling gun, had been around since 1862. It had seen a little use in the American Civil War. Although the U.S. government refused to adopt it during the war because its inventor, Dr. Richard Gatling, had been born in South Carolina, General Benjamin Butler bought 12 of them with his own money and used them at the siege of Petersburg. In the Spanish‑American War, Captain Charles H. Parker organized a Gatling battery and showed how massed machine gun fire could facilitate an attack. The British had used Gatlings and other mechanical machine guns in their colonial wars to mow down uncounted hordes of native warriors. Somehow, the British didn’t think machine guns would work in “civilized” warfare.

The Gatling was a mechanical machine gun. It was powered by human muscle – a gunner turning a crank. Hiram Maxim, a mechanical genius from Maine, had a better idea. He once fired a caliber .45–70 army rifle, was impressed by the kick, and thought that energy might be used to reload and fire the gun. What he eventually built was the first automatic machine gun. The recoil of the shot forced back the barrel and breech block. After moving about 3/4 of an inch, the breechblock was separated from the barrel. The barrel stopped moving while the breechblock continued to the rear and ejected the empty shell.

The breechblock’s movement also moved an arrangement of levers that pulled an ammunition belt into the gun a short distance and placed a cartridge from the belt in line with the barrel. A spring pushed the breechblock back towards the barrel breech and chambered it. The striker then struck the cartridge and fired it. It would continue firing until the gunner released the trigger. The Maxim gun could fire up to 600 rounds a minute – 10 shots a second. It had a water jacket around the barrel to keep the gun from overheating. In fact, if you kept the water jacket filled and had an unlimited supply of ammunition belts, you could practically fire the gun indefinitely. In practice, this type of machine gun usually fired about 250 rounds a minute. In combat, some guns have actually fired 15,000 shots an hour.

When the target was small or hidden in bushes, the machine gun functioned like a long‑range shotgun, a somewhat dispersed burst of bullets acting like a charge of buckshot. At shorter ranges, it was easier for a partially trained soldier to use than a rifle. By using tracer bullets or noticing where his bullets kicked up dust, the gunner could see where he was hitting and instantly correct his aim. It was like the difference between throwing a rock at an object or hitting it with a garden hose. And against masses of foot soldiers, it was the most lethal gun ever invented.

Masses of foot soldiers were what the British encountered at Omdurman in Kitchner’s campaign against the Sudanese dervishes. The British had six Maxim guns. The followers of the Mahdi, a self‑appointed Muslim messiah, had thousands upon thousands of spear‑ and sword‑armed warriors. They jogged up to the square of British infantry in a huge mob. The Maxim guns opened fire.

Hardly any of the dervishes got within a quarter mile of the British lines.

“It was not a battle, but an execution,” an eye‑witness wrote. “The bodies were not in heaps, bodies hardly ever are; but they spread evenly over acres and acres.”

Eleven thousand Sudanese were killed, almost all of them by the machine guns. British losses came to 48: 28 British and 20 Egyptians. Officially, Kitchner was leading an Egyptian army. Almost all of the British losses were the result of an extremely foolish cavalry charge in which the young Winston Churchill par‑ticipated, before the big show.

The British Maxims spread bodies all over Africa. So did German Maxims.

As a matter of fact, the Maxim machine gun, used by the British (called the Vickers), the Germans (the Spandau), and the Russians in World War I, is supposed to have killed more human beings than any other gun in history. The French also had a pretty horrendous body count, but they used the Hotchkiss machine gun, one of the first automatic guns after the Maxim. In the Russo‑Japanese war, the Russians used the Maxim and the Japanese the Hotchkiss.

European military attaches noted the destruction these guns achieved, but that didn’t impress their general staffs. Ferdinand Foch believed French elan and the bayonet was the key to victory. Lord Kitchner, who had seen the slaughter at Omdurman, thought that more than four machine guns to a battalion would be a luxury. The British had even used a few Maxim guns in the Boer War, but the Boers were not soldiers – just an irregular rabble. The trouble was that all the European officers had the romantic notion that wars are won by human valor. The machine gun made valor useless.

When war came in 1914, the European military expected a short war of movement and maneuver with heroic charges with the lance and bayonet decid‑ing the outcome. Instead, the machine guns drove armies underground for four years of siege warfare broken only by the tank.