SECTION 2: WEAPONS OF WAR

MACHINE GUNS

The machine gun, which so came to dominate and even to personify the battlefields of World War One, was a fairly primitive device when general war began in August 1914. Machine guns of all armies were very heavy and difficult to transport — ill-suited for use by rapidly advancing infantry troops. Each weighed in the range of 30kg-60kg — often without their mountings, carriages and supplies. Estimates of the machine guns firepower varied, with some estimating a single machine gun to be worth as many as 60-100 rifles: a more consensual figure is around 80, still an impressively high figure.

The Machine Gun in 1914

The 1914 machine gun, usually positioned on a flat tripod, required a gun crew of four to six operators. In theory each gun could fire 400-600 small-calibre rounds per minute (a figure that more than doubled by the war's end) with rounds fed by a fabric belt or a metal strip.
But these early machine guns would rapidly overheat and become inoperative without the aid of cooling mechanisms. Cooling generally took one of two forms: water-cooled and, as the war developed, air-cooled. Water jackets (which held around one gallon of liquid) provided for the former and air vents were built into the machine gun for the latter.

British Army Rejection

The British army's dismissal of machine gun in the early 1900s is difficult to understand. But the British army high command could see no real use for the machine gun demonstrated to them in 1885; other officers even regarded the weapon as an improper form of warfare. The German army thought otherwise. They quickly produced a version in large quantities. By the time war broke out in August 1914 the Germans had 12,000 at their disposal, a number which eventually ballooned to 100,000. In contrast the British and French had access to only a few hundred when war began.

Superiority of Defensive Warfare Technology

When established in fixed strong-points to cover potential enemy attack routes, the machine gun proved a fearsome defensive weapon. Enemy infantry assaults upon such positions invariably proved very costly.

The French in particular found to their cost that the technology of defensive warfare was more advanced than that of offensive warfare. The French pre-war military blueprint was founded upon a fundamental assumption of an 'offensive spirit', one based on a rapid war of movement.

The British similarly found to their repeated cost the futility of massed infantry attacks against well-entrenched defensive positions protected by machine gun cover. The first day of the Somme Offensive clearly illustrated this, although the lesson seemed lost on the British high command. On the opening day of the offensive the British suffered a record number of single day casualties, 60,000, the great majority lost under vicious machine gun fire.

The Machine Gun as an Offensive Weapon

Understandably, most historical accounts of the First World War have tended to emphasise the defensive strengths of the machine gun. Throughout the war efforts were made to produce an infantry assault version, such as the Lewis Light Machine Gun, although these efforts were generally unsatisfactory.

Although lighter (around 12kg) they were still considered too heavy and bulky for rapidly advancing infantry. Attempts to transport light machine guns by wheeled carriages or pack animals were ultimately unsuccessful: the infantry invariably outpaced such methods. Although often not truly portable, light machine guns were more readily transported on roads or flat ground by armoured cars.

As the war developed machine guns were adapted for use on tanks on broken ground, particularly on the Western Front (where the majority of machine guns were deployed). Light machine guns were also adopted onto aircrafts from 1915 onwards (for example the Vickers, particularly with the German adoption of interrupter equipment, which enabled the pilot to fire the gun through the aircraft's propeller blades).

In response to the increasing success of machine guns mounted on aircraft it was perhaps inevitable that machine guns would be developed as anti-aircraft devices (in France and Italy), sometimes mounted on vehicles. Similarly machine guns began to be added to warships as a useful addition to naval armaments.