Machine gun

A machine gun is an automatic weapon that fires in bursts of several hundred rounds a minute. In the First World War it was, alongside artillery, the deadliest weapon at the front: heavy machine guns served by crews of several men held the trench lines, while lighter guns gave firepower to attacking infantry and armed aircraft.

Maxim and his descendants

The first practical machine gun that reloaded itself with every shot was built in 1884 by Hiram Maxim. By 1914 every army had versions of it or similar designs: the German MG 08, the Russian Maxim and the British Vickers, as well as the Austro-Hungarian Schwarzlose and the French Hotchkiss. These were heavy weapons, usually water-cooled and belt-fed. The Vickers fired 450–500 rounds a minute from 250-round belts at ranges of up to 4,500 metres, and the German MG 08 had a crew of five.

Before the war many armies still doubted the weapon’s value. In 1914 a British infantry battalion had only two machine guns, and from February 1915 four. The Canadians went overseas with four Colts per battalion, replaced by Vickers guns in 1916.

The defender’s weapon

The Germans were the first to grasp the machine gun’s power in defence: they set their guns in prepared positions with interlocking fields of fire. Infantry advancing in the open suffered enormous losses from such fire, and the machine gun, more than any other weapon, drove soldiers into the trenches. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, German gunners dragged their guns onto the shattered parapets and into shell holes and fired into the lines of British infantry as if on a range. Even so, artillery caused the most casualties in this war, and the machine gun was most dangerous in combination with barbed wire.

Outside Europe the machine gun still gave colonial forces the edge. At Beringia in May 1916 the army of the Sultan of Darfur was broken in 40 minutes by the fire of the guns and Maxims of an Anglo-Egyptian square.

Companies, Lewis guns and aircraft

In time the heavy guns were taken from the battalions and grouped in separate units. In Britain a Royal Warrant of 14 October 1915 created the Machine Gun Corps, which gave every brigade a machine-gun company. 170,500 officers and men served in the corps, of whom 62,049 were killed, wounded or missing. Until July 1917 the tank units also formally belonged to it. Heavy machine guns also fired indirect barrages over the heads of their own infantry onto crossroads and supply trenches.

In the battalions the Vickers was replaced by the light Lewis gun, supplied to the army from July 1915. It could be carried by one soldier and was fed from a 47-round drum. At Pozières the Australians sent their Lewis guns forward with the assault waves. The French had a similar weapon, the Chauchat.

The machine gun also armed aircraft. In the summer of 1915 the Germans received the Fokker with a synchroniser, which let it fire through the turning propeller. Allied Nieuports, which had no synchroniser, fired a Lewis gun mounted on the upper wing, over the propeller. With a Lewis gun loaded with explosive ammunition William Leefe Robinson shot down the airship SL 11 in September 1916.