Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on Forgotten Weapons. There's another video series going on
right now, and will continue to go on for another couple of years, that you really
should check out if you haven't already. It's called the Great War and it's
hosted by a fellow named Indy Neidell. What he does is every week he recounts
history of World War One as it happened a hundred years ago that
week. So if you watch it regularly you get a running update on the war every week. It's a fantastic way to keep
track of this war that really was so complex that it's almost impossible to
really, to understand, or to grasp in a single book or a single narrative.
Being able to stretch it out through literally the same time frame that it originally
took place in its a really cool idea and I really get a kick out of watching it myself. Now I noticed that these guys are
headquartered in Europe and their access to live firearms is. . . well, not as as easy
as mine. So I thought it would be cool to do a video here on the heavy machine
guns of the Great War, something that can kind of supplement the great work that
they're doing over at the Great War channel. So I have with me here today
three of the main machine guns that were used during the First World War,
specifically on the western front. We have a German MG08, Maschinengewehr
08. We have a French Hotchkiss model of 1914, and we have a British Vickers
gun. Now one of the great ironies of the First World War
(dark ironies, but ironies all the same) is that the majority of the machine guns
used worldwide on both sides were invented all by the same man. So the man who invented this gun was Sir
Hiram Maxim. He was an American, born here in the US,
and he was truly an inventive and technical genius. He couldn't help but always be
working on something, tinkering, inventing, you name it. He in fact
made an early name for himself in the field of electronics, or rather
electrical power generation and he was so good at it that he actually was a
legitimate competitor to Thomas Edison. So much so that Edison's financial
backers wanted him out of the way. So they offered him, it's kind of very lucrative fake job. They wanted to pay him to go to Europe for 10 years and keep an eye on the European
electrical developments, but under no circumstances was he to invent anything
himself. They just wanted him out of the way so
that he wouldn't compete with Edison. Well the price they offered him was
twenty thousand dollars a year which was quite the princely sum in 1881, when he
accepted the offer. He trundled himself over to London, set up an office and
immediately got very bored. He was not the sort of guy who could
just take a bunch of money and kick back and relax and live the easy life.
He wanted to be doing something, so he recounted later, this is an apocryphal
story, but he met an American friend in 1882, just happened to run into him, and
was complaining about this and and his friends said, "Hang your electricity and
your chemistry! If you really want to make a pile of
money, invent some device which will allow these Europeans to cut each
other's throats with greater facility!" So this comment by his friend really
kind of sparked an idea with Maxim, and by 1886 he had developed his first
functional prototype machine gun. It was a pretty big ungainly affair, but
you know what? It worked! And it worked remarkably well.
Now the Germans were one of the very first early adopters of the Maxim gun,
and ironically the British were another very early adopter. The Kaiser was so
ecstatic when he first saw the demonstrations of the Maxim gun that he
actually purchased the first few for the German military out of his own pocket. They would go on to adopt various
versions of the Maxim gun, ultimately culminating in the MG08.
Maschinengewehr 1908. So as early as 1892 the Ludwig Loewe
company in Germany had signed a production license agreement to
manufacture Maxim guns for the German military, and they went right on doing that.
Now Ludwig Loewe eventually became DWM, and during the war they manufactured
thousands upon thousands of these MG08. One of the elements that really
distinguishes this German version of the gun from all others was it's mount. This
guy! This is called a sled mount, it was
designed, it was it's an interesting and effective design. The front legs can be
adjusted up and down to elevate or depress the gun, so that depending
on how much cover you have in front of the gun you
can raise the gun up just above it. It has a number of storage compartments
on the back here, for spare bolts, cleaning equipment, spare barrel,
everything you need to run the gun. You can run these front legs perfectly
out horizontal, and then two men can easily carry the gun on its mount. You
can see there's a clamped bracket up here that attaches the gun to the mount.
We have an elevation adjustment which allows us to precisely elevate and
depress the gun. There is also a traverse. *moves MG08* It's a fairly limited traverse but in
World War One tactics the idea was to set up a number of these guns with
interlocking fields of fire covering specific important areas, and utterly
annihilate anyone who walked into those areas. So a wide field of traverse wasn't
really a necessity the way these guns were being used. Now you'll also notice
there's a big chunk of iron on top of this gun. The Germans developed a four-part set of
armor for the guns. Now this only has a single piece. This
has the water jacket shield. It has a little hole here, so you can see
your sights. There originally would have been a face plate up here to protect the
front of the water jacket. That face plate was actually the most popular
piece of the armor, followed by this water jacket cover. The other two pieces
were a big armor plate that sat down below here to help protect the gunner.
And then an even larger armor plate that went up above the top of the gun. Those were issued at the beginning of
the war but it was quickly discovered that they made. . .
Well they were a decent piece of armor. They were an even better target
for enemy artillery and sniper fire. And so those top plates disappeared
pretty quickly. In fact what gunners would often do is
take the top plate armor, and they go set it up somewhere else on the trench where
there wasn't anybody around, and let Allied artillery gunners lose their
shells over there and leave the actual machine gun emplacement untouched. So in broad strokes what is a Maxim or
Vickers gun? Well the idea was to develop a firearm that
could fire functionally as long as it had ammunition supplied. Potentially
indefinitely. Now there are a number of obstacles that
one has to overcome in order to meet that technical goal. The first is to have an action that is reliable.
That as long as you present it with ammunition it will fire it and inject the empty
case. That's something that Maxim did fantastically well. The Vickers gun in
particular, and the Maxim guns in general, are generally regarded as some of the most reliable
machine guns ever developed, even to this day. Now part of the reason they were able to
do that is because they were quite heavy. A Vickers gun here with its tripod and with
its water, which we'll get to in a moment, weighs about a hundred pounds.
The MG08 that the Germans used is even heavier. It's a larger gun, it has more
accessories built onto the tripod and a heavier (not the tripod, but the sled) and
it's a heavier sled in general. That MG08, with all of its accessories ready to go, that's a hundred and fifty two pounds. So
with all that weight it was possible to make very durable components. Now the second problem, or potential
obstacle, in this technical challenge is you have to be able to feed the
gun a lot of ammunition quickly. What Maxim came up with was the belt feed. *pulls belt* So he would use a cloth belt which has
individual pockets for each cartridge. Typical belt length was 250 rounds. This is not quite 27 feet long, but I
have heard people suggest that this belt is potentially the source of the English
slang: "The whole nine yards" as in "give them the
whole nine yards of ammunition!" At any rate, a 250 round belt would last
somewhere around 30 seconds of continuous firing, and it was fairly easy
to load new one. You take the end tab, slide it through
the gun, lock the first cartridge in place, rack the charging handle, and you're
ready to go. So that's how Maxim conquered that
obstacle. The next obstacle is: if you're firing
continuously and these guns ran at 450 to 500 rounds per minute, well you're going to overheat the gun!
The barrel is going to get really hot, it may explode, it's not going to go well.
You have to have some way to cool a gun. And Maxim's method for cooling the gun
was to encase the barrel in this big jacket which would then be full of water. We have a little plug here, you can open it
up, pour water in. That water prevents the gun barrel from getting any hotter
than the boiling point of water. So as long as you can keep refilling this jacket, keep it full of water, the gun stays cool
enough to fire. Between the belted ammunition and the water cooling jacket these guns quite literally could fire
indefinitely. There was some testing done on a Vickers gun when these were
finally put out of service by the British in the 1960s, where a gun was
actually fired for almost seven days and nights continuously. And it worked! The
whole time! And it was still functional at the end of that test! As long as you keep the water and keep
the ammunition coming, these guns will not stop firing. And that's part of what made their use
in the First World War so incredibly bloody, is that the guns
simply worked. So the French had tested the Maxim in the eighteen nineties. In fact
virtually everybody in the world had tested the Maxim gun around that time.
And they were fantastic guns, they were adopted by almost everybody. Obviously the British Empire, the German
Empire, both made the Maxim their standard machine gun. They were very popular in the Balkans.
Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, all had standardized on the Maxim gun. Italy had bought a number of Maxims,
although they would go on to use their own Fiat Ravelli version, or Fiat Ravelli
machine gun during the war instead. The Russian military standardized on the
Maxim gun. China standardized the Maxim gun, although
that wouldn't come until nearly the beginning of World War Two. The guns were extremely popular
worldwide, and France frankly was one of the few major powers that decided not to
use the Maxim. Instead they chose this design, the
Hotchkiss, this is a Model of 1914 Hotchkiss, dates originally back to ... 1897. Now it's kind of (again) darkly ironic is
that this gun was originally invented by an Austrian military officer. Captain
Baron Adolf [Odkolek von Ujezda]. Now Captain Baron Adolf had gone around looking for
potential buyers for his design. Didn't find any until he got to the
Hotchkiss company in France. Benjamin Hotchkiss, the American founder
of the company, was long dead at this point, but the the company was being run
by a couple of very capable designers. And they looked at his patent and they
thought, "There are some pretty serious flaws with it but we see potential." And
so rather than put it into production on a royalty basis they bought this patent
outright from him. They then went about making a bunch of
modifications to it. And what they ended up with was a gun which is air cooled, has a
long gas piston running underneath the barrel, and it's fed by a metallic strip.
So in several fundamental ways this is different from the Maxim gun. The first and most obvious one is out
here cooling the gun. There are problems with water let's just put it that way. You have to
carry your water. You have to be refilling the water jackets as the guns are firing
every so often. You also have the problem of what if a piece of shrapnel hits the
water jacket? That's why we have this armor on the
German MG08. And it was a very real thing. Armies issued patching kits, because
if something punctured that water jacket and the water drained out,
well, the barrel inside there is very thin and without the water it can't fire for very long before it
overheats to the point of not being usable. So the French decided that they
could avoid all of those problems by going with an air-cooled gun. And in
order to make this gun. . . In order to give it the sustained fire capability of
a water-cooled they made the barrel very very thick and heavy, so that it can take
a lot of heat, a lot of thermal energy before the
temperature of the barrel goes up. Now they also added these five very
distinctive donut rings. These are all solid metal and they're simply there to
increase the mass and the surface area of the barrel to increase cooling capacity. Now this still wasn't quite as durable
for sustained fire as the Maxim and it's variants. Official French policy was that
for every thousand rounds fired continuously, you then had to spend four
and a half minutes letting the gun cool and sponging down the barrel with water.
So it's not perfect, but it does legitimately avoid some of the potential
problems of a water jacket. The other practical real-world difference between
the Hotchkiss and the Maxim guns was it's . . . its feed mechanism. Now we've got these belts that were used
by the Maxim guns of all variants. Hotchkiss instead fed these guns
with 30 round metallic strips. They had some pros and some cons. The downside is of course this gun had
30 rounds capacity compared to 250 or potentially even more for the Maxims. so
every 30 rounds the assistant gunner would have to reload the gun. The advantage was that the metal feed
strips didn't have some of the potential problems of belts. It was discovered very quickly that you
have to keep machine gun belts dry. If they get wet the cloth belts tend to shrink
and tighten, and they would often tighten enough that the action of the machine
gun was insufficient to pull cartridges out. That's a problem! And so a lot of work
had to go into making sure that these belts stay dry and usable in these
horrific conditions of war. The metal feed strips of the Hotchkiss on the other
hand are impervious to a lot of these things. They simply. . . . they wouldn't
shrink, tension on the cartridges was always the same, and that made for a
simpler operating mechanism. Unfortunately they also bend. You can't . . . you know,
bending a cloth belt it doesn't matter, it just, it's flexible.
The metal strips were not, and it was possible to bend them and then you'd
have to kind of bend them back into shape to fix them. So there were very
reasonable pros and cons to both of these systems, and ultimately the French
decided on an air-cooled strip-fed gun. The British and the Germans decided to
go with water-cooled belt-fed guns. If you were on the receiving end of these guns
you probably wouldn't tell much of a difference. One of the areas that's not
really all that well appreciated is that these machine guns didn't simply appear
at the beginning of the First World War. These guns were produced and in
widespread use in the eighteen nineties, so 20 full years before the outbreak of
World War One. And there is a question of: What did they do? Why?. . . Why did people go into World War One
not understanding and appreciating the horrific deadliness of these guns when
they had existed for 20 years? And there are some interesting reasons for that. First off, these guns were primarily used
effectively in colonial areas. These guns were not seen as really
representing the true, proper, gentlemanly fighting spirit of how European armies
should act. The continental armies, and this is particularly evident with the
French approach to war at the beginning of the Great War, was much more glamorous
and glorified. It wasn't supposed to be one guy behind a machine gun simply
mowing down the enemy. That's that's not what war was supposed to be. So in Great
Britain in particular, it was colonial commanders who first truly developed an
understanding of how to effectively use the early Maxim guns. They were in a
position where they had very limited manpower, they have limited resources, and
they were fighting vastly outnumbered all the time. And they they were able to
take these machine guns and first really understand how to use them
against large numbers of attacking enemy. Unfortunately for the British these
commanders weren't really all that influential back home, and when they
would come home talking of of the phenomenal firepower and potential
effectiveness of the Maxim guns, they weren't really paid any attention. We also have the Russo-Japanese war
1904 and '05. This was really the first truly mechanized war where machine guns
like the early Maxims and the early Hotchkiss guns were put into use. We actually see entrenched positions
defended by machine-gun emplacements. And they were just as effective then as they
would prove to be in World War One. Now there are military observers from
all the great European states in this conflict, sending back reports, and they
too didn't really get the recognition that they probably should have. Now the German Army took these a little
more seriously. At the beginning of the war the German
Army had the most machine guns and was kind of at the leading edge, as far as
there was such a thing in mainland Europe. But it would take the course of the
war for all of the major powers to vastly multiply the number of
machine guns that they had on hand. No one truly appreciated the
effectiveness of these guns, despite having ample opportunity to have seen
them, no one really understood it, until the
war truly got started. So rather than try to just explain this
lack of understanding of the machine gun, I think I can get the point across
better by relaying some of the words of a [non-commissioned officer] in the British Army named
Edward Spears, who was in the 11th Hussars. A very fine and glorious, glamorous,
cavalry unit in the British Army. They've been in. . . in . . . in the charge of the Light
Brigade and that was the sort of history that this unit had. Well, Spears was put
in command of the machine gun section and he was quite the fan of the
machine gun (probably naively so at the time). He says: "On this occasion the whole brigade was carrying out mounted mass formation
maneuvers under the Brigadier in the Long Valley, and I was in charge of the
brigade machine guns. With the object, I suppose, of getting rid of me and my
tiresome contraptions, which were not ornamental and were apt to get in the
way. I was told to ride off and see if I could put them to some intelligent use."
And Spears idea of an intelligent use was quite different from his battalion
commanders. "Full of enthusiasm and finding a mound (a hill) with a beautiful
view of the brigade moving about in a solid mass of horsemen less than a
thousand yards away, I crept up and mounted my machine guns
there." Goes on to talk about how he set up some lines of retreat in case anyone
happened to, you know, a cavalry troop decided to charge at them to try and
eliminate them. But no one did through this whole exercise. He fired a
few rounds of blanks just to get people's attention and got no attention. "So nothing of the sort happened, no one
paid the least attention to us, so for 10 minutes I fired away at the
nominal rate of 600 rounds per minute, per gun. Then concluding that every one of
the two thousand men of the brigade would have been killed at least twice
over, and it would be a pure waste of ammunition to go on firing, I stopped. Exhilarated at this Holocaust, which
perforce included most of my friends, I cantered up to the brigade commander."
Who he describes as: "A dark and hard looking sort, very stoic,
British Army, old guard sort of commander." Who would apparently later serve with
distinction in the Great War. Anyway, Spears comes up and says to him
very happily: "You are all dead Sir!" Telling him that his
command has all been annihilated. The commander instead glowered at him.
"Expecting in my innocence some congratulations, I realized from this
expression that something had gone wrong. The gallopers sitting on their horses about
the commander looked blank. Then the general spoke at last: Never! he said. Never have I seen a lack
of cavalry spirit more blatantly displayed! Turning to those about him
he rasped out quote: "Here is a young cavalry officer who has the impertinence
to say that the infantry weapons he is so inappropriately carting about has
wiped out the 1st Cavalry Brigade! The finest mounted force in Europe! Get off your horse sir!" he barked at me.
"And hand it over and walk back to the barracks, the proper form of locomotion
for you!" That pretty well describes the general
European attitude towards machine guns. Heavy machine guns like these three
really show us the essence of World War One in microcosm I think. They are truly
the convergence of the industrial capacity to mass manufacture tens of
thousands of machine guns like this, as well as the vast quantities of
ammunition that were fired through them. The truly inhuman scale of killing
that these guns became capable of. You know there were there were elements,
there were areas, these guns were used prior to World War One, but people failed to
really understand ... what capacity they truly had. So I
hope that going forward as you watch Indy on the Great War and
follow the progress of the war, I hope this video helps put some perspective on the machine guns that you
will continue to hear about that will continue to wreak havoc on the
combatants in the First World War, through the end of 1918. Now if you
enjoyed the video of course tune back in to Forgotten Weapons. We'll be taking a look
at some of these in a little bit more detail. I would like to thank the Rock Island
Auction Company for providing me with access to all three of these guns. They are
actually all for sale here in the United States. If you would like to have, well, an
artifact of the First World War, a fully functional artifact of the First World
War in your own collection, I do have some links in the text below.
You can check out the auction pages for these three guns and bid on them
yourself if you're here in the US and would like to own them. Thanks for watching and tune back in again to
Forgotten Weapons. :) [ revised sk cn2 ]
His admiration of these weapons, and compassion for their use.Truly an engaging presenter.
Fantastic video, thanks for sharing.
This guy knows his shit.
He doesn't fire any of them.
I really hope Forgotten Weapons and The Great War do a crossover, where Indy goes to the range and shoots some of the more obscure weapons of WW1.
If you guys like learning about WWI, I suggest listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcasts about it: http://www.dancarlin.com/hh-55/
Shows a lot of ignorance/incompetence on the part of the people in charge back then. Really a shame, because there were a LOT of lives lost because of their ignorance.
Just shows how new the modern rifle was to everyone at that time. They acknowledged it was a useful tool, but didn't want to accept it.
I watched a show on the History channel several years ago about these guns and other tactics in WWI. Pretty gruesome stuff.
Awesome video! Thanks for posting OP.
shout out to /r/TheGreatWarChannel