Angry Planet - How the machine gun brought modern war to the world

Episode Date: October 14, 2015

None of the world’s great powers were ready for the carnage World War I. The armies of 1914 looked a lot like the armies of 1814 … but they didn’t go to war with 19th century weapons. The modern world was born in blood on the battlefields of Europe during the Great War … and the machine gun cut the umbilical cord. This week on War College, we sit down with Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons as he walks us through the Maxim Gun -- one of the earliest machine guns -- and how it changed the pace of war forever.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. The machine gun is really the industrialized 20th century coming out of effectively nowhere and just beating people over the head. And that's kind of what World War I was in every. aspect. In the American Civil War, a veteran soldier could fire his rifle four times in a minute.

Thirty years after that war ended, a British soldier could unleash 550 rounds in the same amount of time. This week on War College, we're talking about one of history's most deadly innovations, the machine gun. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Bruder's opinion editor, Jason Fields.

And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. And today we're talking with Ian McCollum, editor of Forgotten Weapons.com. The site is dedicated to researching and archiving information on historic and unusual firearms. Hi, guys. It's really cool to be here. Cool. All right, Ian. So today we're actually talking about machine guns and the innovation that they were to warfare. I think, and Ian, you obviously stand correctly, but it sort of changed everything, right? I mean, we went from a single shot, slow-to-reload world to, in a relatively short span of time,

these machines that spit out thousands of bullets a minute. Pretty much, yeah. We had a lot of functional machine guns before we really had functional semi-automatic rifles. I know it's a pretty basic question, but what exactly is a machine gun? What's the definition? Well, the basic concept is having a firearm that is able to actually use the energy from firing to run through the whole cycle of reloading. So to extract the empty case, to eject it out of the action, and then to load a new cartridge into the action and fire it. It's kind of interesting. Hira Maxim was actually at one point describing his machine gun to a friend when this was brand new technology, and he described it as a gun.

gunpowder engine kind of along the lines of a steam engine, except this was a mechanical device that would create energy and motion from gunpowder as long as it was supplied with fuel. And Hiram Maxim is the gentleman that invented the machine guns, correct? The first kind of era of them. Yes, he developed the first practical and widespread machine gun. Okay, but we had before machine guns though, like Gatling cannons and that kind of thing. How are the Maxim guns that you're talking about different than those? Well, the difference is that all you had to do was hold a lever,

and the Maxim would fire itself using the recoil energy from firing. What came before that, the best known being the Gatling gun, but there were some others, like the Nordenfeldt and the Gardner guns. Those were guns which used a hand crank. So they had the fireer actually providing all of the energy to run through the reloading process. as you turned this hand crank a series of cogs and wheels and levers would extract cartridges, eject them, load new cartridges, and so on. So, yeah, I typically call those manual machine guns. There isn't really a better word for them in our lingo.

So, I mean, I guess one thing that would be very different would be the rate of fire, right? Actually, not as much as you might suspect. Gatling guns were capable of hundreds of rounds a minute, six or 700 rounds a minute easily, which is, about the typical rate of fire of most true machine guns. Wow. Okay, so I was reading up a little bit on Gatling Guns before we started the show. And one thing I was kind of interested in about them was that they were first introduced right at the end of the Civil War, U.S. Civil War, I should say, because there have been plenty of other civil wars. I mean, that means that there was this capability that had actually been around for a while

by the time we get to the first major European war where we have machine guns, right? Yes, absolutely. In fact, the first Gatling guns were developed in 1862 and were repeatedly rejected by U.S. ordinance officials. In fact, the very first ones, they're similar, but they're not the same as the Gatling guns that we all recognize. The two things you really had to have for a practical, fully automatic modern machine gun were metallic cartridge casings, so that you had a self-contained unit of ammunition that you could jostle around and you could get it wet, and you could mistreat it, and it would still work. Prior to that, people were either muzzle-loading guns where all the components are separate,

and there's really no easy way to mechanize that, or using something like a paper cartridge, which is delicate, and you have to handle carefully. In fact, the first Gatling guns in 1862 came around before they were actually using self-contained cartridges. And the way they worked was actually to have these individual, what were basically steel cartridge cases, that you would hand load with powder and a projectile and a percussion cap, and you'd make a bunch of these up ahead of time, and you'd put them in a hopper in the gun,

and as they fired, the now empty steel cases would fall out the bottom, and you'd have to have someone grab those, and you'd set them aside to reload them. The problem was these steel pseudo-carriages didn't expand and contract the way brass does under firing, so they had a lot of gas leakage. The 1862 Gatling really was not a gun ready for military use. and that's why it was rejected by the U.S. military. In 1865, Gatling had adapted this to modern copper or brass cartridge cases,

and that's when the gun became practical. And it was 1866 that the U.S. military first adopted them. Okay, so actually after the Civil War was the first time they... Yep. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's interesting. Because of the weirdness with U.S. ordinance, especially in the 1860s, there were a number of uses of Gatling guns during the Civil War,

because there were a number of them purchased privately by unit commanders or state governors or simply private individuals who wanted to help fund the war effort. So despite not being an official army weapon, they did see some use in combat. Right. That makes sense since actually entire companies were actually formed by individuals then too. A very, very different era to modern warfare. Do you think you could tell us sort of what the story is behind the machine gun? The gatlings were never all that popular in Europe, but there were a bunch of these other guns that worked kind of along similar principles. And one of the ones that really has a

place in history that influenced European theory was, I'm going to butcher this name, I apologize to everyone who speaks French, the Mitreou. There were a couple different versions of these, but the gist of them was a gun that had a whole bunch of barrels. And by pulling a big lever, you could fire all of the barrels in sequence. The most common ones, the Montigny, was adopted by the French military. It had either 25 or 37 barrels, and you'd stuff all of them full of cartridges and fire them all off. They sound kind of like a popcorn machine going off, and then reload them. And these were a French wonder weapon that was kept extremely secret right up until the advent of the Franco-Prussian War. and the problem was the French, like everyone at the time, considered these guns to be a different type of artillery.

They were mounted on the big-wheeled cannon-type casements. They were situated with the artillery. They were operated by the artillery corps. And so the French set up these guns in the Franco-Prussian War to fire it, Prussian troops. They were like 1,500 yards away like you would do with a cannon. Well, they're firing rifle bullets. They're extremely difficult to aim that far away, and they don't have a lot of. all that much kinetic energy left when they get to 1,500 yards. And the guns were a complete flop.

They just utterly failed to be the super weapon the French were expecting. And this colored a lot of European theory on manually operated machine guns and what would come to be the true fully automatic machine guns in the decades after that. They looked at this and said, well, the French tried those and they sucked. And so we're not going to bother wasting our money on this expensive, frivolous new technology. What eventually happened, the first guy to really figure the machine gun out was Hiram Maxim. And part of this is because he really was a genius. Part of it was no one was going to be able to do it until we had the second of those things that are required for a machine gun, and that is smokeless powder. So until 1886, the gunpowder being used was black powder. It created,

obviously, a big cloud of smoke, and it left a massive amount of residue in gun barrels. So even if you're firing a single-shot rifle, you can't shoot a black powder rifle more than maybe a few dozen times before you really have to clean the barrel out just to get all this dunk and residue out of it. Otherwise, they can explode, right? I mean, you're talking, I mean, the consequences are serious. Yeah, you can literally get so much crap built up in the barrel that the projectiles barely fit, and the pressure spikes way up, and the gun explodes. So in 1886, smokeless powder was developed, and that is the last element that really allowed the machine gun to become a reality. Because all of a sudden, now you have a powder where you could fire 600 rounds in a minute,

and the gun would still work just fine. Hiram Maxim was right on the bleeding edge of this time period. In 1883, he was developing his first experiment. He had this idea that you could use the recoil energy from firing to operate the gun. This was something that was typically viewed as being impractical. People didn't think there was enough energy to actually do that. Oh, wait. Actually, can I interrupt for just one second? I'm sorry. I don't mean to break your flow. But Hiram Maxim, where did he live? Who was he an American?

So, Hiram Maxim was born in American. He was actually born up in Bain. And he was a lifelong mechanical tinkerer and really was a genius. He actually got his start in electricity. His company installed the first electric lights in New York City. He was a serious competitor to Thomas Edison in this area. And frankly, if he had never gone on to do anything else, he would rate a significant place in history just for the work he did in early electricity. However, Edison had a lot of good financial backing, and his Edison's backers took a look at Maxim and decided this whole Edison thing would be a lot easier to make a lot of money on if we could get Maxim out of the picture. So they offered him a pretty ludicrous salary to go to Europe under the pretense of just keeping an eye on European electricity development.

for them. It was something like $20,000 a year. Yeah, massive amount of money. That was in 1881. Yeah. And he does it. He goes over to England, sets up an office in the UK, or in England at the time. He actually does keep an eye on electrical stuff for these guys for a little while. And then he gets bored. This is not a guy who can just do nothing, you know, take the money and sit back and relax. And now this is an apocryphal story. It comes out of his own autobiography, and he was, if nothing, a pretty serious self-promoter. But there's a ring of truth to it that he says in 1883, he was talking to another American expat friend, and he was complaining about not having anything to do. And his friend looked at him and said, and I'll quote here from his biography,

hang your chemistry and electricity, if you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility. And that kind of sparked an idea in Maxim, and he started looking into this notion of being able to use the energy of a gun firing to operate that same gun. So his first experiment was converting a Winchester lever-action rifle into a self-loading rifle. He kind of put like a spring-loaded butt plate on it so that when you fired the rifle would compress into the butt plate and that would operate the lever for you. And it worked. This is a crude prototype, but it was a proof of concept. And by 1884, he had his first working fully automatic machine gun.

Now, at this point, he was still using black powder, so the gun wasn't really militarily feasible. But it was a really great showpiece. It actually worked. That's where Maxim's mechanical genius really shows, is that he was able to take this early concept with inferior ammunition that was available and actually make a very functional prototype. He fired hundreds of thousands of rounds through this prototype gun over the years. Did he develop a gun company to sell machine guns? Yeah, he actually fairly quickly into this endeavor.

He partnered with the Vickers Company, which was a large industrial concern in England. They made ships. They made armor. Like I said, Maxim was a great self-promoter. He made, you know, he was big news in England at the time. He would do demonstrations of his machine guns in his garden in the backyard, basically, or in town squares. and the Vickers company was interested in this new technology, and they partnered together. And that partnership takes some twists and turns over time, but it doesn't really impact the development of the guns.

So around this time, 1886, we get smokeless powder. By 1887, Maxim is out touring Europe, demonstrating the Maxim gun for various militaries and heads of state. And he gets a lot of interest, as you might expect. Interest from who? Like, who are some of the early adopters of the Maxim gun? which countries? Well, the UK was one very early adopter because, of course, the guns were sitting right in their backyard the whole time, and they had very easy access to them, and they saw them developing. Now, one thing we should kind of specify a little bit is the definition of adoption.

Most European companies, when they first saw these guns, would order a couple of them, literally two, three, five, maybe ten, and then they would experiment with them and run them through field trials and tinker with tactics and decide politically if they wanted to deal with something like this. And that's a bit different than what we think of today as formal adoption where the army says, we'll take it and buys 100,000 of something. So there was often, you know, a five or a 10-year time gap between when Maxim might sell his first couple guns to a country and when they would actually formally induct them into the military table of order. And they were still thinking of them, these guns primarily as artillery? Yes. Yeah, primarily. These are still, we're getting to the

point where these guns would be on tripods, but often as not, they would still be mounted on wheeled carriages. When these, when countries had these early guns, they would often, they wouldn't necessarily use them for continental warfare, or they didn't think about it, but they were often given to colonial expeditions. This was seen as, well, you know, you're going to take 25 guys, and you're going to wander into the unknown African jungles, you can take this with you, and it gives you some firepower. You can scare the natives with it, if nothing else. So the British adopted the Maxim in 1889, the Swiss in 1994.

The Germans, ironically, Kaiser Wilhelm was first introduced to the gun by none other than British Prince Albert, who was hanging out with him one time and asked if he was familiar with it, and pretty much all the major crown families of Europe were related. Kaiser Wilhelm saw a demonstration of the Maxim in 1888, and that was actually a competitive demonstration against some of the manual guns of the time. And he took no time to decide that the Maxim was far in away the best of the bunch. He's quoted as saying something like, it is this one, this is the only gun. And he bought a couple right there out of his own pocket.

And those are, like I said, those are the ones that the German army then kind of tinkered with and experimented with. The Germans ultimately adopted the gun formally in 1890. The Russians adopted it in 1896. They followed that up in 1902 with buying an actual license to produce them in Russia. And Russia made a whole ton of these guns. Were these guns expensive? You know, I don't have the pricing numbers offhand. At the time, though, honestly, countries were as concerned not so much about the price of the guns as the price of the ammunition. In fact, I was going to mention this later on, but it fits in very well here. Maxim, most of these guns were rifle caliber guns. guns. Whatever rifle cartridge your country used, Maxim would make this gun to fit your ammunition. That's convenient? Yeah. And the way his gun worked, it was easy to adopt to different cartridges.

But he also developed a 37-millimeter version that fired exploding shells that really kind of was small artillery, or even big artillery. Those things would see some use in World War I as anti-aircraft guns. But it's interesting that while he was demonstrating these, again, right around the turn of the century, late 1890s, Most countries would send someone, or he'd be demonstrating this to a head of state, and they'd look at it, and they would be just dumbfounded by how effective it was. He'd fire bursts. This thing fires at 400 rounds a minute, 37mm, so like inch and a half in diameter, explosive projectiles, and he's shooting them at targets 1,000 yards away.

So he'll fire a burst, and after the gun stops firing, you still see flashes of the shells exploding, and then even after you stop seeing the flashes, you can continue to hear the reports of the shells exploding because the sound takes that much longer to travel than the light. Countries would look at this and they'd say, you know, that's just phenomenal, and it would bankrupt us. The British reportedly realized that a 37-millimeter maxim gun would cost 90 pounds per minute to fire. The King of Denmark is reported to say that, after seeing one of these demonstrated, that it would bankrupt his kingdom in two minutes.

So even with the rifle caliber guns, this was also a concern. They were not used to a thousand rounds of ammunition being gone in, say, 90 seconds. Well, that actually explains a lot and kind of brings us into the next part of what we were going to talk about. When we're talking about World War I, which is, I think, you know, we've talked about some of the prior use, but World War I is when people really think about machine guns, and machine guns come. into conflict with tactics that just don't seem to, you know, the armament and the tactics don't seem to match up in any way. So how come, you know, everybody didn't have machine guns, right? I mean, like all the soldiers. And you're sort of explaining, actually, among other things,

the ammunition would have been too expensive, right? Right. Yeah. For example, the U.S., this is going back a little bit, but the U.S. bought a whole bunch of Gatling guns and then almost never used them. They virtually never were willing to pay for enough ammunition to actually train soldiers to use a gun that fired that rapidly. Now, that's the U.S. Europe isn't quite the same deal, but a lot of the same problems arose. So on the continent, they were typically treating these things like artillery, and they were looking at them as these don't really work. So we may have bought a few of them, but we don't really have that very high expectations of them. And so they'd give them to some colonial expeditions. And these colonial, the leaders of these colonial expeditions would go out

and they're the ones who would actually have, you know, they'd have 50 guys, for example. In fact, 1893, the Matabelli War, there was a British expedition that had 50 guys and four maxim guns, and they ran into a force of 5,000 native warriors who charged them. And this is simply something that would not occur in continental warfare. You'd have 5,000 guys on both sides and they'd be shooting at each other. the Brits did the only thing they could. They set up the Maxim guns, and they proceeded to just mow down these natives by the thousands. And in that way, they discovered what the true practical use of these guns was. And it was something that didn't, frankly, didn't really occur to a lot of the continental commanders. Up until World War I and perhaps a little bit through World War I, there was this perception also that the gun was on gentlemanly, correct? Yeah, the very beginning of World War I, we still have cavalry units as the patriotic, the idealized, and the very fancy unit. When some young man thinks of going off to war, he thinks of being in the glamorous cavalry with a big frilled hat and a sword.

And cavalry commanders didn't take well to this notion that the two guys with the gunpowder engine of a maxim gun could set up on a hillside and just utterly destroy their entire glamorous unit. and their way of dealing with this was basically to just try to forget that machine guns existed. There was one interesting story that I read in a book about the Vickers gun, which was the British version of the Maxim, this junior officer who ran the machine gun section of a cavalry regiment. And during exercises, he really liked the machine guns. He understood what they could do. And so he took his crew and set up on a hillside

and fired like 6,000 rounds of blank cartridges into the masked cavalry below. and then very proud of himself, came down and reported to his commanding officer that he had killed everyone in the unit, sir, and what should he do now? And he was actually reprimanded for having such an incredibly poor cavalry spirit as to have claimed that he could do such a thing, and that he was to turn in his horse and walk back to barracks because he was unfit of the cavalry horse. That unit actually would go into action in World War I. And fortunately for them, they never actually made a cavalry charge against an in-placed defense. After their very first action, they were relegated to be blind infantry like everybody else. So that's one element of the tactics that really just did not work at all.

I mean, obviously, yeah, big animals charging into a machine gun fire. And, of course, the artillery barrages were supposed to be overwhelming. millions literally of shells fired in very quick succession. But if we could talk a little bit just about the tactics that were used by the foot soldiers, did people actually walk into machine gunfire? Yes, they absolutely did. And the reason for it, it's easy to go quickly to blame the World War I generals, and to a large extent they do deserve the blame.

But the notion at the beginning of World War I was that combat was to be of a mobile nature, that the whole key to armies fighting was to outflank your opponent and then destroy them. And this involved moving quickly, taking the right positions, and it was kind of Napoleonic tactics. And that's why troops were getting up and moving. What people didn't anticipate was that as armies came to close, clash together because of the machine guns and the artillery and even simpler things like barbed wire, as warfare stagnated, they would dig in and dig in and dig in.

And once you put machine guns in these improved entrenched positions, mobile warfare was completely impossible. And it took a long time for generals to really get it through their heads that, you know, this next attack isn't actually going to be the one where your troops managed to overwhelm the enemy and then rush through the gap into the back. There were military observers who were able to predict this and see it coming. In the Russo-Japanese War, the Russians had maxim guns, and there were a number of instances where a small number of Russian maxims in a defended position were able to simply wipe out waves of attacking Japanese troops.

The country that came closest to understanding this was probably Germany. They had far more machine guns than anyone else when the war started. They had something like 50,000 maximum guns in inventory at the beginning of World War I. On the other hand, the Germans were the ones doing all of the advancing early in World War I. They weren't trying to be defensive. So their machine guns didn't really make a difference until warfare had stagnated and they started building trenches. You've said, Ian, that the story of the machine gun is a microcosm for World War I. I was wondering if you could explain that.

Well, the way I see it is the machine gun is really the industrialized 20th century coming out of effectively nowhere and just beating people over the head. And that's kind of what World War I was in every aspect. Nobody expected World War I to last four years. Even by the second year, nobody expected that it could possibly last even into a third year. The strain on national economies and on just men's ability to deal with combat. was so great that nobody thought it could keep going. And yet, just like the machine gun, it would keep going until it had utterly ground all the major nations of Europe into powder. So the world changed. Technology changed the world almost overnight, and the world didn't get the memo. Exactly. The technology had been changing for some time, and people didn't recognize it.

They didn't realize it, or they deliberately avoided realizing it. And once World War I got going, it wasn't going to hide itself any longer. And so following on World War I, I mean, as we move closer to the present day, which I think we can only deal with very, very briefly, but now every foot soldier in the world carries some kind of machine gun. The role of machine guns has changed a bit. Because World War I taught pretty much every military leader with any sense at all, that fire and movement is required. You had to develop these tactics that could allow you to overcome a strengthened position.

And so even by the end of World War I, the Germans especially were making great progress in doing this with combined arms, having some guys with light machine guns, guys with flamethrowers, guys with grenades, guys with rifles, all acting in concert to overcome this single position. And once everybody understood how to do that, well now it's not quite so much of a a benefit to have this 100 or 150 pound water-cooled behemoth that, yeah, it can fire forever, but if it gets surrounded and captured, what was the point? So everyone, you know, these days, we don't have water-cooled machine guns anymore like the maxims were. Mobility is much more important. The design of guns has changed significantly as a result. So can I just ask as a dendom? Do you know

what happened to Maxim? Maxim died in 1915. He was, eventually actually knighted by the British. He became a naturalized British subject. And eventually he actually kind of got bored with machine guns. His patent expired in, I believe, 1900. And so other people started copying them. The Germans were able to start making them without needing a license, as were other people. And he actually got into aviation. He'd started in electronics or electrical technology. He moved into guns, and then he ended his career attempting to develop the first powered human flight. And you know what? He came pretty darn close to being a pioneer in that field, too. Didn't quite make it. The Wright brothers and some other people had an edge on him.

But right up to the end of his career, he was making serious experiments in flight. The guy really was a genius. It's interesting, one of his sons went on to invent the silencer, which he developed for both firearms and automobiles, and also found the ARRL, which is to this day the main American organization for amateur radio enthusiasts. It kind of ran in the family. What an interesting legacy. Absolutely. Can I give you one other cool little anecdote?

Oh, yeah, please. In 1893, Dr. Gatling actually filed a patent to connect his Gatling gun to an electric motor and was able to get a rate of fire of 3,000 rounds a minute. And he intended this for use on naval vessels where you could get electrical power from the ship's generators. It never went anywhere, but in the 50s when the Army and the Air Force were developing the Vulcan guns, they actually started with mounting electric motors to original Gatling guns. That's really amazing. That is incredible.

They sat around for so long. I'd love to see one of those. Somewhere, I think I actually posted it on my website. I have a picture from a magazine article at the time. I am going to find that. Do you want to give us the name for the website one more time? Yeah, it's forgottenweapons.com. All right. Well, Ian, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun for us, too. If you like what we're doing here, like us on SoundCloud and iTunes, subscribe to us. The more feedback we get from you guys, the better we can make the show. Ratings that you give us really do matter. The comments you make on iTunes really do matter. And we'd love to make the show visible to more people, and you can really help us do that.

Next time on World's. or college. A big challenge for Putin is whether when military things start to go wrong, he will start to fall victim to the hope of, well, one more push, one more expansion. In other words, try and win the war militarily, which you can't do.