The Gun

soldier, written a month before he himself was killed in action.

Soon, they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; earth set sudden cups
In thousands for their blood; and the green slope
Chasmed and deepened sheer to infinite space
Of them who running on that last high place
Breasted the surf of bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge.
Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.⁵⁵

More than fifty years after Richard Gatling gave the world the first reliable rapid-fire arms, the basic questions about machine gunnery had been answered. All doubts about their utility had been erased. All serious military powers armed their ranks with them in large quantities and provided the soldiers assigned to them with generous amounts of ammunition. By late in World War I, spurred at last by an understanding of the futility of attacking well-defended trenches and machine-gun bunkers with masses of knife-wielding infantrymen, ideas about firepower and tactics were shifting, swiftly and finally. Machine guns were being put into use in all forms of warfighting that could be waged within the distance that a bullet could fly. Light machine guns were mounted on aircraft to strafe ground targets and to shoot other aircraft down. Heavy machine guns were mounted on turrets and used to pound boats, aircraft, trucks, and cars. Tanks were created in part so that men could move against machine guns, and to defend themselves, tanks had machine guns mounted on them, too. The British Machine Gun Corps, which began with only a few machine guns and a royal warrant, would grow to have more than 170,000 soldiers and officers, and would suffer more than 62,000 casualties, making it an important part of the history of the war.⁵⁶ Infantry tactics changed, moving away from inflexible formations and frontal attacks to approaching the enemy via infiltration and with precision supporting fires. The human wave—or extended line, or whatever euphemism the officers endowed it with—was falling from use in professional Western military units, though it would be seen again in a variety of forms in more centralized or less-developed militaries or guerrilla groups. Drab clothing and camouflage became the necessary standard to improve the odds of a soldier’s survival in the era of automatic arms, especially as tracer rounds, which allowed machine gunners to see precisely where their cone of bullets was flying, came into widespread use. By late 1916, as the Battle of the Somme ended and the understanding of its carnage was settling into military and political minds, and as the imperious and unshaken Sir Hiram Maxim was carried off to his grave, the skepticism about machine guns was gone. By the time of the Armistice, in 1918, another question had moved to the fore: How to make automatic weapons smaller, so that their firepower could be carried by a single man?

The question was not entirely new. Hiram Maxim had sketched out an automatic rifle in his earliest efforts to make machine guns, and he dabbled briefly with a possible design. Since the 1890s, other arms designers had been trying, with great frustration and limited success, to make the first reliable and manageable automatic rifle. The idea had proved to be as frustrating as the Civil War–era efforts to make hand-cranked battery guns. One of the first reasonably successful entries was the Madsen, a short-lived Danish creation that was not issued to its army. But there had been many other efforts at a semiautomatic and automatic rifle: by Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher, by John Browning, by Peter Paul Mauser, and by other arms engineers and gunsmiths.⁵⁷ A Russian armorer, Vladimir Grigorevich Fedorov, began work on an automatic rifle in 1906, and by World War I had produced a working model, though it suffered from problems and was never perfected or moved to mass production. In World War I, a number of machine guns appeared on battlefields at sizes considerably smaller than the big Maxim and Vickers and Colt guns, and had been successful enough in the trenches. These smaller guns, the Lewis among them, hinted at the possibilities of miniaturization. But they remained far too large to be considered rifles, and because they fired rifle-caliber ammunition at a great rate, they were not weapons to be used for any length of time by a single man. The rifle ammunition of the time was large and powerful, capable of propelling bullets out of muzzles at velocities approaching three thousand feet per second. The effect down-range was exactly what ballisticians thought they wanted: a long, flat trajectory for bullets that could strike a man with tremendous force and potential for lethality more than a kilometer away. But one unhelpful and inseparable result was that the heat and recoil associated with firing these cartridges strained lighter-weight weapons and soldiers alike, and made designing small but sturdy automatic rifles, which would blaze though this high-powered ammunition in rapid-fire mode, exceptionally difficult, as Fedorov was finding as he experimented in Russia. And therein was the problem: the ammunition. As long as designers sought to make an automatic rifle that would fire contemporary high-power ammunition, the field of automatic-rifle design remained frustrated by technical problems, and largely undeveloped.

By 1915, after World War I had settled into a siege on the Western Front, Germany took another path toward a portable weapon that could be rushed forward to clear trenches. The underlying concept was the same. Germany sought a weapon that would concentrate fire, but would be small enough to be wielded by a single man, who would carry all of its ammunition, too. With such a weapon, firepower would be as mobile as the infantry, able to go anywhere a man could walk, without much slowing him down. In the narrow confines of trenches, and in the maze of barbed wire in No-Man’s-Land, large rifles were often a hassle rather than a help. German arms designers understood that rifle ammunition was too powerful for small automatics, at least if a solution was to be worked out quickly enough to influence the war. It chose to seek an automatic weapon that would fire the comparatively low- powered and lightweight 9-millimeter pistol round, a class of ammunition that was already in the German inventory and could quickly be produced in quantities necessary for war. The concept had promise for the trenches, and it suggested a style of warfare that had not yet been seen. It would also reduce the weight of a soldier’s ammunition load. The requirements for such a weapon were established by the Rifle Testing Commission in late 1915.⁵⁸ Working from the Theodor Bergmann weapons factory in Suhl, a German designer, Hugo Schmeisser, gave the concept its shape: the Bergmann Maschinenpistole 18, or MP-18, which had a wooden rifle stock for shoulder fire, but a squat, fat barrel that gave it a blocky appearance. It weighed just over nine pounds, could be fitted with magazines that held twenty or thirty-two rounds, and fired its bullets at more than twelve hundred feet per second. In all it was just over thirty-two inches long, a foot shorter than many standard infantry rifles in the war. This was the submachine gun. It became an ideal complement to the evolving German infiltration tactics being worked out by General Oskar von Hutier and the elite Stosstruppen, or shock troops, who before the war’s end would master the tactics of pinpoint attacks and breaches of front lines.

The MP-18 was the first submachine gun to see combat, but similar ideas were being pursued elsewhere. By 1915, the Italian army had already fielded small quantities of the Villar Perosa, a two-barrel automatic weapon that fired 9-millimeter pistol ammunition, though the gun was fired off a bipod and was used as a lightweight machine gun for fighting in the mountains, and not as a submachine gun.⁵⁹ A new company in the United States, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation, was at work on its own weapon for trench warfare. Led by General John T. Thompson, a retired army ordnance officer, the company’s engineers were quietly developing a submachine gun chambered to fire .45-caliber pistol ammunition. The war ended before the result, the Thompson gun, was put to a test.

The era of automatic fire was almost fully developed. Two ends of the automatic-fire spectrum had changed the way that people experienced organized violence. The Maxim gun and its offspring had altered how armies were organized and how war was waged, and had killed men in quantities beyond counting. And the MP-18 had been considered a worrisome enough development after its brief debut that the German military was specifically prohibited from possessing them by the Treaty of Versailles. The next question was obvious. Might not there be something between the great weight and power of a true machine gun and the lightweight and ferocious MP-18? Was it not possible to design an automatic rifle that combined the traits of both? Such a weapon would allow foot soldiers to be as mobile as ever, but more lethal than before. If small-arms design was an evolutionary process, and