The Gun

water-cooled gun as its new standard machine gun.¹² This decision would not long hold. There was similar confusion in Britain, even though the British army had adopted the Maxim ten years earlier. Russia had already become a minor machine-gun power. It had embraced rapid-fire arms since the Gatling gun first became available after the Civil War, and had since procured Maxims and distributed them in the field. Otherwise, only Germany kept pressing ahead, manufacturing guns and designing a doctrine to use them in special machine-gun units, which colonels and generals could control, moving them about the battlefield as necessary so firepower could be massed at critical moments and places, roughly as Captain Parker had suggested.¹³ Germany had certain psychological advantages over the other Western powers as it pursued its arming spree. It had not been interested in machine guns until Kaiser Wilhelm II saw Maxim’s gun in 1887; this meant that it began its association with machine gunnery with a weapon that worked well, and it did not have to overcome an internal institutional bias stemming from having invested in Gatlings or Gardners that jammed in the era when ammunition was unreliable.

Elsewhere, as machine-gun salesmen worked European officer clubs and test ranges, armies hewed to their traditions, assuming that when they fought again they would fight much as they had before, perhaps with victory to be carried by a decisive charge. Courage was praised, the philosophies of disciplined unit formations preached. War was seen as an activity to be carried by determined men, whose foes were broken by fright during a stoic advance to the bayonet fight. The attitude was well established in successful military units: Moral force was superior to material might, and men were supreme. In its way, the attitude marked one of the older and more enduring vulnerabilities of military units steeped in their past success and lore. Unleavened by an understanding of the changing tools available for battle, the attitude led men who should have known better to believe that machine guns were mere devices. Years after officers had personally observed the effects of machine guns in war, the brass clung almost mystically to the romance of close-quarter battle and championed tactics that Maxim guns had made obsolete. In their bias some officers even scoffed at the rifle. “It must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel,”¹⁴ one turn-of-the-century British training manual said.

Such were the daydreams. They could not be extinguished, even by clear accounts from distant wars. Military bureaucracies, as they considered incorporating machine guns into their armies, dawdled indecisively in every Western country but Germany. The thinking was fully blinkered. Senior officers recognized the effects of withering bursts of fire upon massed combatants, having heard reports of the felling of heaps of Arabs and Africans who advanced in formation toward machine guns. They were somehow unable to accept what might happen when such fire was directed against their own ranks. And then they were given another chance.

In 1904, after years of competition between the Russian and Japanese empires in the northwestern Pacific, the contest erupted into the Russo-Japanese War. Here machine guns and poor tactics were to combine for the bloodiest results yet. The origins of the war were simple. During the Boxer Uprising, from 1898 through 1901, Czar Nicholas II had dispatched Russian troops to Manchuria. He had not withdrawn them when the uprising ended. Instead, the Russian garrison grew, angering Japan, which saw Russia encroaching on its sphere of influence. Negotiations for a Russian withdrawal led nowhere, and in 1904 Japan struck, attacking the Russian navy at the Yellow Sea harbor of Port Arthur and sending infantry across the Yalu River to push overland for the port. En route, the Japanese divisions met Russian units, which were equipped with Maxim guns, organized into a company per division. Each company had sections of eight Maxims equipped with sixty-six hundred cartridges per gun.¹⁵ The czar’s infantry was not highly regarded. “The Russian soldier, when sober and not brutalized by slaughter, is a great, strong, kind, superstitious child; as good a fellow as ever stepped, but always a child,” wrote the correspondent present for the London Times, who was a former colonel himself. “Given an educated and highly trained corps of officers of a good class, capable of instructing, caring for, and leading him with judgment and skill, the Russian soldier would go far. But there is no such corps of officers in Russia.”¹⁶ No matter the poor reputation, machine guns turned the Russians into lethal defenders of held ground. After a battle along the approaches to the port, a Japanese lieutenant, Tadayoshi Sakurai, examined captured Russian Maxims. The Japanese army had its own collection of Hotchkiss machine guns, and its officers were beginning to use them in effective ways, especially in firing in support of Japanese attacks. But Lieutenant Sakurai had seen machine gunnery from the other perspective. He knew what happened to Japanese units when they faced Maxim guns. He looked upon the captured Russian Maxims as almost otherworldly tools. His description marked one of the earliest first-person accounts of the experience of coming under modern automatic fire. “This was the firearm most dreaded by us,” he wrote:

A large iron plate serves the purpose of a shield, through which aim is taken, and the trigger can be pulled while the gun is moving upward, downward, to the left, or to the right. More than six hundred bullets are pushed out automatically in one minute, as if a long continuous rod of balls was being thrown out of the gun. It can also be made to sprinkle its shot as roads are watered with a hose. It can cover a larger or smaller space, or fire to a greater or less distance as the gun wills. Therefore, if one becomes a target of this terrible engine of destruction, three or four shots may go through the same space in rapid succession, making the wound very large. … And the sound it makes! Heard close by, it is a rapid succession of tap, tap, tap; but from a distance it sounds like a power loom heard late at night when everything else is hushed. It is a sickening, horrible sound! The Russians regard this machine as their best friend, and certainly it did very much as a means of defense. They were wonderfully clever in the use of this machine. They would wait till our men came very near them, four or five ken[5] only, and just at the moment when we proposed to shout a triumphant Banzai, this dreadful machine would begin to sweep over us with the besom of destruction, the results being hills and mounds of dead.¹⁷

Japanese ground forces besieged Port Arthur late in summer 1904. They found that the Russians had prepared. The port was on a peninsula, and the soldiers had spent months fortifying the hills overlooking it. They had also dug extensive trenches and filled the lanes though which the Japanese soldiers might attack with barbed wire. Lights were rigged to cover the approaches in darkness. Maxim guns watched over it all; by one count, thirty- eight Maxims in all.¹⁸ Circumstances were ripe for disaster. The Japanese infantry was fired with a culture in which to die in a battle was a supreme honor, and its officers faced a tactical problem for which their training offered no obvious or doctrinal solution. This was not entirely their fault. Until that time, there were no widely understood tactics for overcoming the types of modern defenses before them; the book on machine gunnery and tactics had not yet been written. The result was a horror. Eager for battle, the Japanese officers ordered human wave attacks across the open ground. One of the attacks, the Ninth Division’s assault on East Panlung, showed war’s new shape.

Sappers were sent first, at night, and managed to breach the Russian wire in several places, cutting open lanes through which the infantry of the Seventh Regiment might follow. The Japanese regimental commander ordered the First Battalion through the wire in the darkness before 5:00 A.M. The soldiers went up the hill without cover and were stopped in place by sweeping machine-gun fire; not a man advanced through the breaches. The regimental commander led the remaining battalion in a second attack over the same ground. He was quickly killed. The Second Battalion suffered the same fate as the first. In the predawn gloom, the division commander tried to watch from afar. He knew nothing of what was happening, beyond that the volume of Russian fire was deafening and the absence of a Banzai call was discouraging. The scene which revealed itself at daybreak was worse than any sense of foreboding had anticipated: “The hillside was thickly strewn with dead and dying, and in front and around the gaps in the wire entanglements the dead bodies were piled three or four high. No progress had been made anywhere, and the small surviving force of the gallant 7th was cut off from retreat by the murderous fire.”¹⁹ The division attacked again by daylight, sending another regiment of men over the same ground, bayonets high. These men, too, were cut down. A night attack ended in the same fashion.

This was but one episode among many. For weeks the Japanese attacked. The Russian garrisons were too isolated to resist indefinitely. In the end, the Japanese soldiers captured the port. But by the time Port Arthur changed hands in early 1905, the Japanese commanders had lost more than forty thousand²⁰ of their army’s soldiers in the war, and they had repeated their tactical mistakes throughout, sending exposed troops forward again and again. Lieutenant Sakurai, whose infantry company was annihilated, summed up the mentality of soldiers sent on a mission understood to be suicidal. “We were all ready for death when leaving Japan,” he wrote.