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| American Machine Gunners |
Some books have a tendency to change one’s mind about nearly everything you thought you knew about a subject. The saying goes that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. With machine guns on the Western Front, the Germans, French, British and Americans proved that saying wrong. The late COL George T. Raach (passed during the COVID epidemic) wrote a well-researched and thoroughgoing book about that most pedestrian of late 20th Century military subjects: machine guns. Only, Raach was writing about machine guns in World War One, when these machine tools of death were new to war, and were especially new to the Americans.
The world first witnessed large-scale use of machine guns during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Early in WWI, the British and French considered machine guns as novelties, while the German armies had already integrated them, albeit in small numbers. Britain and France soon caught up, and the machine gun soon had a prominent role in maintaining the stalemates in Europe. The British and later American armies justified having separate machine gun units in part because they treated them like they had light artillery. They were also a great deal more technically sophisticated than most people realized.
From the Preface of A Withering Fire onward, Rasch shows how a single machine gun, tactically, was as devastating as an artillery battery a generation earlier. A single gun could put out enough fire every minute as a platoon of bolt-action riflemen. An MG battalion, which operated as a unit only occasionally, could cover an area the size of a small town with bullets, continuously, for as long as they had ammunition. As the “essence of infantry,” machine guns in trained hands were the other half of the “marriage made in Hell” with barbed wire. Ironically, both the gas- and recoil-operated machine gun and machine-made barbed wire were 19th-century American inventions that the U.S. military practically ignored until WWI.
In “A Theory of Fire,” Raach discusses a manual that the U.S. Army War College published in April 1917, which was a detailed how-to guide for the practical, though not tactical, employment of machine guns in the Army (the Marines used it as well). One should be in awe of Raach’s analysis and discussion of a book that the War College would have to have been working on during Wilson’s prohibition of any planning for war. “One Hell of a Load” covers the sheer mass of these weapons: the lightest of them was over 200 pounds with full gear. But the gun, tripod, traversing-and-elevating mechanism (old machine gunner here) and ammunition weren’t all the crews had to handle. There were also the range finders, the height-finders, the spare parts and tools for the guns, besides the crew’s own gear, food, and the rest of the clobber that soldiers have to haul around. The ammunition alone needed for a “quiet” shift in the trenches could amount to a quarter ton.
Raach shows a certain adoration for the machine gunners, who were the most technically adept and physically fit troops on the battlefield. They had to make calculations for barrel wear and wind drift at night, in a gas mask, after carrying a couple hundred pounds of dead weight several hundred yards, implement those calculations while planning their fire missions and how it would affect the beaten zones, then fire the missions and hope that they were right. While this was going on, the gunner’s ammo carriers often had to find his next position because the enemy artillery and machine guns—or snipers—were going to zero in on the gun in just a few minutes…which was why machine gun units often suffered 50% casualties in most actions.
The last chapters of A Withering Fire explain all of this and more, in subject-matter detail. It’s a lively narrative, but it’s not a battle narrative. The closest Raach came to describing an entire battle was in the Prologue, which has the 7th Machine Gun Battalion of the 3rd Division moving into position at Chateau-Thierry, where it alone with its 24 Hotchkiss guns defended two bridges for two days. It’s a very technical but a highly readable narrative that does more to fill in more blanks of the mechanics of infantry combat than many other works. I highly recommended it for those who are willing to wade through its often excruciating detail and explore this little-known aspect of the Western Front from an American perspective.
John D. Beatty
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