The Great Machine Gun War—It Wasn't Like Any Other

 

Russian Machine Gun, c. 1905

By John Beatty

Prelude: Mukden 1905

From 20 February to 10 March, 2,005 Russian and Japanese machine gunners blazed away at each other, sometimes at point-blank ranges. Among the 270,000 Japanese soldiers engaged were some 200 machine guns, firing 20.11 million rounds during the battle, which was more than the entire German Army fired in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). The Russians, with some 292,000 men in the battle, had just 54 machine guns. The decisive Japanese victory, observed by British, American (including John. J. Pershing), French, and German officers embedded on both sides, demonstrated the power of the machine gun in both the offense and the defense. It is worth noting, however, that most of Japan’s MGs were light and somewhat less than reliable.

French Machine Gunners, 1914

Opening Shots in Europe

There were a meager 12,000 machine guns in Europe by the time World War One broke out in 1914. The level of machine gun issue in the armies of the major powers in 1914 was roughly equivalent, but the most effective user of machine guns in the first year of the war was the German Army. In 1914, each German infantry division comprised two brigades, each of two infantry regiments. A single infantry regiment comprised three battalions plus a machine gun company of six heavy (P08 Maxim) machine guns. The machine guns formed the thirteenth, separate company of each three-battalion regiment. This meant that instead of being distributed piecemeal to the three battalions of the regiment, the machine guns remained under the direct control of the regimental commander, grouped together in action. Besides the machine gun companies of infantry and cavalry regiments, eleven independent machine gun detachments originally meant for conjunction with the cavalry were available to corps commanders. Because of this organization, Allied observers credited the Germans with more machine guns than they possessed. The Germans’ effective use of the guns was in stark contrast to the general prewar tendency for everyone else to underestimate the potential effect of machine gun firepower.

One of the earliest lessons learned was that concentrating machine gun fire at crucial points enhanced their effectiveness. At Tannenberg, the concentrated fire of just six machine guns shattered a Russian counterattack. At Le Cateau, 84 closely massed German machine guns in offensive roles dislodged a larger British force.

Thus, 1914 solidified the role of the machine gun as not merely a defensive weapon to supplement the infantry but as a lighter-weight version of the light artillery that had accompanied the foot soldiers since Napoleon’s day. The changes they would work on ground combat would be so profound that warfare would become irrevocably deadlier than ever before.

German Machine Gunners, 1918

The Marriage Made in Hell

In 1916, when the Western Front had solidified into a siege with barbed wire entanglements spreading for acre after acre, British and their Commonwealth allies developed barrage (indirect) fire that allowed troops to fire over the heads of their own soldiers. Even though pioneered by the Germans, this technique opened up the way for both planned and unexpected attacks and responses to SOS (emergency) calls from the infantry that were quicker than calling for artillery support. Ultimately, machine guns were more effective than artillery because a single machine gun could deliver 200–400 rounds a minute into their killing zone as long as they had ammunition. Some barrages reached into enemy reserve trenches for hours at a time, restricting troop movement. Others pounded obstacles during attacks, and still others formed the marriage made in Hell of machine guns combined with barbed wire to form impenetrable infantry killing zones. The machine gun came to be known as “essence of infantry,” and “the machine tool of death.”

While most guns had an effective range of about 3,000 yards with new barrels (changeable during combat), the French 8 mm Hotchkiss could reach 4,000 yards consistently from the beginning of the war. Late model .303 Vickers guns could reach 4,700 yards under ideal conditions but usually engaged at 3,500-4,000. A single machine gun might have a beaten zone (area of impact) of 5 x 5 yards from 2,000 yards away, putting a bullet in every square foot about every ten seconds. A platoon of eight guns might have a beaten zone of 50 x 50, a company of 16 guns might cover 100 x 100, and a battalion of 36 guns could cover two football fields with bullets every ten seconds and do it for hours on end. Though the last was rare (but the first three were common), it happened toward the end of the war.

By late 1917, the Germans created elite sharpshooter machine gun attachments in their specialized attack (storm) units specifically tasked with destroying enemy machine guns. In that same year, the Germans reported that 90 percent of their small arms ammunition was going into the chambers of their machine guns; it would be no stretch of the imagination to say the French and British could report the same. Machine gunnery became a specialized skill handled by those who developed new firing methods that revolutionized land warfare and infantry tactics.

American Machine Gunners, Marne River, 1918

The Gunner’s Laments

The machine gunner, however, didn’t just mount his gun and pull the trigger. Gunners relied on an assistant gunner and an ammo bearer, at minimum, just to carry the weapons—most weighed over 150 pounds with tripods. Ammunition was heavy; a wooden box of 200 8 mm rounds weighed nearly 70 pounds. But, because machine guns had ranges like light artillery, range and height estimates weren’t good enough—they needed precision, requiring range and height finders. And because the guns broke down and barrels needed changing, each gun needed a tool kit and spare parts. Altogether, each man in a three-man crew might carry a minimum of 100 pounds each, besides his personal equipment and rations.

But that was just the beginning. In quiet periods, a machine gun might have to move every three hours to keep enemy snipers and artillery observers, not to mention their machine gunners, from locating and targeting the guns. During an operation, a gun might move every ten minutes for the same reasons. Gunners had to recalculate their target areas each time. Gun crews had to be both strong and smart. Typically, a machine gunner on the Western Front had a life expectancy of about ten hours’ firing time before he became a casualty. One in five did not survive the war. At the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918, a lone U.S. machine gun battalion halted German attacks for three days practically unassisted, losing half their 730 men and ten of their 18 machine guns in the doing.

Coming Soon:  John Beatty's Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

John Beatty's Steele’s Battalion, due out next April, is a story of how one American soldier learns how different this machine gun war was, and how to use those deadly machine tools to win. Roads to the Great War will review the volume when it is available for purchase and provide information on ordering it.