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.
Chapter 28
Block that Kick!: Quick-Firing Field Pieces
It really wasn’t like the movies. In films about the American Revolution or the American Civil War, for example, the muzzle-loading cannons fire, throwing out some smoke, and the gunners, who have been standing beside them and behind them, immediately reload and fire again. Actually, the guns of those days threw out a lot more smoke, because the film-makers don’t use full charges of black powder. And the real gunners didn’t stand behind the cannons and reload as soon as they fired. The recoil of the shot blew the gun back quite a few feet, and standing behind a heavy cannon when it fired was a good way to keep from growing old. The movie cannons don’t recoil, because they really don’t fire shot or shell. Property-owners in the vicinity would take a dim view of cannonballs holing their roofs or shells exploding in their gardens.
Before the cannon could be fired again, it had to be swabbed out with a wet “sponge” (actually a wad of wool on the end of a ramrod) to kill any sparks that might be in the gun. Otherwise, the powder charge might ignite and drive the ramrod through the gunner before he had a chance to load the shell or cannonball. Swabbing took some time. Even more time-consuming was the need to realign the gun. The gun crew had to manhandle the cannon back to its original position and aim it again. Even a comparatively light gun such as the 12-pounder “Napoleon” of the Civil War weighed more than a ton, and aiming the gun usually involved lifting the trail of the heavy carriage to swing the gun around.
By the Civil War, another problem had appeared. Rifles had become so accurate at long range that using artillery at traditional ranges had become almost suicidal. Artillery could no longer be used in the front line with the infantry. The gunners stood in the open, and there was nothing to give them protection from enemy rifle fire. Recoil made it impossible to hide behind the gun.
The latter part of the 19th century was a period of tremendous progress in artillery design. One prime objective was to increase the effective range of cannons. Another was to increase their speed of fire. Achieving both of these objectives meant overcoming recoil.
One way to increase the range was to fire guns at a higher elevation. Most of the cannons until this time were what artillerymen technically call guns — comparatively heavy, long-barreled weapons that have a higher muzzle velocity than the shorter barreled howitzers and mortars and fire their projectiles on a flatter trajectory. If a gun could be elevated to fire on a higher trajectory, its projectiles would go farther. But more of the recoil would be directed down at the carriage. That proved to be too much strain on the old wooden carriages. Gun makers switched to metal carriages, particularly steel carriages. Steel, much stronger than bronze, cast iron, or wrought iron was just starting to become available in large quantities at reasonable prices. Krupp pioneered making gun barrels from steel. Steel barrels could handle heavier powder charges, which also increased range.
Rifling a cannon barrel also increased its effective range. The main problem was getting a hard iron or steel shell or solid shot to “take” the rifling. Various methods were tried, including casting lugs on the shell that would fit in the grooves of the rifling. The method finally adopted was surrounding the projectile with a band of softer metal,
