Small Arms of WWI Primer 105: German MG 08/15

Germany began the Great War with an extreme advantage in machine-gun tactics but by the middle of 1915 the atonte had adapted and even begun using more mobile light machine guns against them now as Germany's turn to play catch-up and they must do it quickly [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this well this right here is an incredibly light gun you can tell by the fact that I didn't grunt this is the machining Gewehr Oh 8 15 a German lightened Maxim let's get it over the white box I had 57 inches in length this gun definitely isn't shorter than the original MgO 8 but it is lighter weighing in only at 39 point 2 pounds when empty of both ammunition and liquids the 3 litre jacket makes for a possible extra 6.6 pounds of water when filled though and it feeds the same Maxim ammunition belts available in 250 round lengths or particularly this gun a man-portable 100 round belt inside an attached box magazine now I do actually have one of those boxes here thank you Jeff for loaning us all this by the way but it is loaded so I can't put it in the gun I kept it topped up just in case of several dozen burglars alright gang we've got another machine gun episode and this one is going to require some context because as you will soon see we've been kind of setting you up for well learning I'm sorry you're going to learn back in episodes 80 and 81 we went through what was actually a condensed maxim gun history recall Hiram Maxim had developed the first successful machine gun in the 1880s but it was heavy large and fitted to a carriage like traditional artillery by the time of World War 1 the design had been shrunk considerably but that was still a heavy affair requiring a separate tripod base and a team of men to move around the battlefield this general sort of machine gun a lighter pseudo artillery piece was the standard around the world by 1914 we certainly saw that in our Hotchkiss episode where the gun was effective and reliable but incredibly heavy and difficult to maneuver honestly everyone seemed to have the same feeling mount the gun and place it well and hold your ground well almost everyone some were a little more forward-thinking and so we've managed to see several important pre-war designs the Hotchkiss portative show Shah Sutter the Lewis gun these were early man portable light machineguns and all of them even trailed behind an extremely forward-thinking Madsen which I'm happy to say we will soon cover for this show if the light machine gun existed before the war well why didn't they see wider adoption in production before the war well mostly because they were not immediately and obviously useful most early testing actually focused around another important role that they would eventually fill which is aviation ground testing didn't always seem to know what to do with them honestly the few armies who really considered the light machine gun generally thought of them as a possible tool for cavalry because other than pairing them with a traditional flanking maneuver why bother using them for regular work the emplaced heavies were better and better crude and man those big guns did do a good job at the start of the war especially for Germany we've covered this before as well but Germany did not have the most machine guns at the start of the war Russia had nearly double their raw supply in France while trailing Germany wasn't that incredibly far behind no Germany's advantage was in tactics and doctrines they knew how to use their machine guns they had put a lot of emphasis on the machine gun at a time when other nations were treating a bit like an odd duck with a limited battlefield role their basic doctrine can be found as far back as 1906 when manuals for the use of German Maxim started to appear mostly written by the way by one man friedrich august oscar von mayer cuts born in Hirschberg in 1876 to a noble family that's about all I have for early biographical information for someone who clearly saw the future he's kind of been lost to the past I suspect but cannot prove that Marquette's had actually been an observer during the russo-japanese war as we have covered before this conflict was a first for machine gun use both with the Japanese and Russians who learned some hard but effective lessons in that conflict both countries would invest further in machine gun production after that war Germany without even being in the conflict also explored the proper effective use of machine guns particularly in entrenched warfare which is why I suspect that Marquette's was present for the russo-japanese war with the German observers that were there or at least an avid reader of their reports because his 1906 work a lesson book for machine gun divisions became what was the backbone of the soon-to-be very effective German machine gun program beaten zones interlocking fire focus on in flawed fire drawing massed infantry into a kill zone these were all explored in the years before war were declared and once it started Germany caught everyone by surprise with their incredibly effective use of an otherwise fairly neglected weapon the staggering losses faced by the aunt on pressing up against that leaden reign of the German Maxim's was world-changing and eventually after that Officer sobering to this day when we think of World War one the first vision foremost is of massed infantry just being cut down by the hundreds and thousands by these odd black boxes that just keep pumping out bullets of course the reality is a little more complicated again much of Germany starting a lead on the machine gun front was from application and not just mere numbers the opposition would adapt and in doing so they would not only near the German tactics but also begin to find a way to crack them fighting fire with smaller more portable fire Germany's first experience with on tanta light machine guns would come from the Hotchkiss portative & Lewis guns in British service they were particularly intimidated by and impressed with that Lewis as a matter of fact they prioritize capturing and REE fielding these guns which they favored in their assault teams experienced both facing the Lewis and firing it told Germany what was on the way and that they could possibly use the same tactics now of course you can't just plan on capturing all your necessary guns from the enemy and then refueling them with also captured ammunition I guess that's insane the Lewis guns were a shadow of a stopgap in the actual stopgap well that was a rapid ad hoc trench mount for the mg o8 yep Germany and austria-hungary would use these just some spikey feet and a cross board melted to the maximum so you could with two men get it in and out of position quickly not ideal but certainly better than nothing that can't last though Germany needed a real solution and so they would turn to an expert that's right Germany's foremost machine gun tactician currently at the rank of captain was put in charge of a team of engineers seeking the wide adoption of a light machine gun now the obvious answer is that Germans love the Lewis gun and in our own experience so far we've declared it sort of the king of World War one light automatics so that's a fair choice right but that never happened well that gun was fairly complicated to make and it took a number of years to get right even in peacetime so Germans weren't gonna tackle that so what about just buying more Madsen's the German army already had a few which they had bought off the Danes but what you won't sell us anymore since we attacked another neutral nation why what have we ever done to you what have you got to worry about you're neutral okay what about the to lighten machine guns already produced and adopted in Germany at this point in the war the pre-war pella realm 1912 adopted as the mg 1913 this is a vicar style lightened an inverted maxim that also had an improved extractor system over the british design or the absolutely on point Bergman 1915 a true light machine gun from Theodor Bergman that worked on the short recoil principle both reasonable options although in hindsight that Bergman would need a little tweaking ticket chips right why didn't he go with either of these ideas or all of these ideas I should say instead of going with with this heavy thing that you see here well let's put it into perspective its 1915 in Germany has spent the past year just pummeling Leon taunt with the maxim the enemy have finally caught up on what to do with heavy machine guns themselves and surprisingly started feeling these lightened automatics that on the attack we're proving to be reasonably effective infantry weapons that could punch back at the big emplaced machine guns both sides recognize this value in both want more of these light guns and both know the other is going to do the same it's a race and you don't just need a good light machine gun need more light machine guns than the other guy and you need them sooner right away we already know what the French did that's the CS RG 1915 we recently covered this in a separate episode and it was designed specifically for rapid production at the cost of reliability accuracy and even a basic understanding of human anatomy the show shot was meant to be everywhere at once especially on the attack giving the French the means to seek out and destroy the emplaced German MgO eighths the show shotgunners would pin the enemy down while the rifle grenades went to work in silence the guns of course that was in the final form of the team late in a war it took a few years to get there and while that was happening what the Germany do while Mark ATS wisely saw that they were already near the peak of industrial capacity the French got around this issue by making a gun that could be produced by a bicycle shop but Jeremy was going with arms makers so they're going to have to expand on the current Arsenal system they could save both time and material another way by sharing as many possible points as they could with the current heavy machine gun production we're not just talking parts that just saves machine time and metal no the new gun needs to run like an mg oh that way you can train up machine gunners on one universal system saving training time and creating less overall confusion the markets also wanted to minimize disruption to secondary industries so ammunition ammo belts and other accessories should be shared as much as possible basically there was no way this wasn't going to be a maxim gun just a smaller and go8 so what did they really do first started as they thin the receiver walls just a bit still plenty strong but overall less material and weight the same was done to many smaller parts basically scaling them down where appropriate this limited interchangeability but was restricted to those things that were easier to manufacture the feed block was one complicated piece that was also shrunk though more noticeably they cut out the top rear and bottom front of the receiver making for an odd notch looking design on the Oh 8 these are dead zones internally space that's not used for any moving parts but retained to simplify manufacture the cartridge ejection tube of the mg OE was simplified into just the hole in the front of the now modified receiver the new light machine gun was fitted with a shoulder stock pistol grip single trigger and manual thumb safety the gun was fitted with an expedient bipod mounted just in front of the receiver near the center point of balance so far these sound like a lot of differences from the OE what stayed the same well basically everything that recoils both guns used identical barrels extensions cross heads links and locks although the MgO 815 did introduce a new muzzle booster and that takes a 7 8 inch diameter muzzle sleeve the new gun would be more mobile and so should be the ammo a 100 round belt wrapped inside a steel drum was developed as the petroleum Costin 16 a bracket for it was hung on the right side of the receiver ok we're getting pretty aggressive now but what about that giant water jacket from the o8 that thing has four litres of water and represents a significant amount of weight the auntaunt has gone air-cooled for basically all their designs well you did sort of give the development over to a fan of the heavy Maksimir katz wants a mobile machine gun and so a lightning machine gun is more of what we're gonna get also developing a reliable air-cooled system is time consuming and something the maxim wasn't readily adaptable to Hiram Maxim himself had tried it and it had been a failure so the water jacket remained however it was shrunk to only three litres resulting in just six point six pounds of water added to the gun right all right where does that put us well the MgO 8 weighed in at just over 40 pounds dry I see this online listed as a much higher number but my most trusted source and a quick trip to the scales say that it's actually a little lower more around 40 to 43 pounds don't forget the image OE itself was already supposed to be a lighting maxim gun Lee wait 15 supposedly weighs in at thirty nine point two pounds on average dry if that doesn't seem like a lot of savings you're right but if you think about it they had to add a stock and some other features to the back that weighed more than the original equipment so you cut off a lot of weight and then you add more back really you're getting more weight savings from ditching the extra liter of water because that gives you back 2.2 pounds or some indecipherable amount of kilograms who understands metric though so it's something this is lighter than the OE sort of and a lot easier to handle I get it it seems insane all that effort just for a pound or three but again recall this gets you a gun that's set up for one man to work with and working without that big heavy tripod which weighs as much as another gun or more depending on which model the real savings is turning that whole crazy mount into just this this on the table is everything I couldn't do that with a no eight fair when we stack this against the competition well this is definitely more of a lightened machine gun than a light machine gun anyway most of the planning is done in 1915 so the new gun is adopted as the machining of arrow 815 although production when its start until 1916 still that's our gun today so we can actually take a moment and get a closer look now guys this is obviously a maxim action rock forward to charge the gun as a matter of fact twice if you actually want to get it loaded up to the chamber and we've got our bounce check right here that's to keep this guy from vibrating and bouncing back off whenever it closes with such extreme force if you wanna know more about how this whole action works I again recommend our Oh 8 episode because it is identical of course the most noticeable change from the o8 to the 15 is this piece of wood sticking out of the back and the inclusion of single grip this guy is just a solid piece of wood sling hole here and at the rear if I can get her into position for you I get some pretty fairly aggressive checkering I mean it that stuff's really deep gets a good tight fix on the shoulder what you need because this thing likes to drag you all over the place now if I get this in the shot here you know what I'm gonna zoom on and all that there we go you can see this a bit better and I've turned the gun around we have a manual safety here there is no select fire so we're either in full auto or we tip this guy forward and she actually is just a trigger block that that's all it does is prevent me from sliding this trigger back it it's a piece of metal that you can probably see let me give you something to sort of reflect against you probably see it just tipping back in there yeah that guy that it's that simple it's just a l-shaped piece of metal more on the side of the gun check it out same old fuzzy cover same old fizzy spring in there this is our tension setting that's controlled by this key up here and not so much rate of fire as balancing for ammo and pressure but you get the idea and again this was seen back in the 8th now while we're here you can see missin a lot of metal from the o8 here and here and what that was is the bolt really only has to travel in the exact path that you see they left like no margin or air gap other than tiny little bit so they could really get that weight down and remove these sections of metal the tube that used to allow the casings to pass all the way up to the front to be ejected well there's just a simple hole right here blammo I'll pop you a picture of that next up we've got this new mount on the right side of the gun right well this thing opens up just like any old Oh 8 again previous episode popped this guy out this is our feed block you guys know this routine now from here this is just dump tailed in and the way to release it is to actually press a button right here my finger is all the way in nice and firmly and then push this guy up she comes right off we don't really want her off though because we have a super cool thing that we have to mount on this gun so give me that second to get that back in I'm doing this blind which means I'm probably missing the key way like a dingus yeah feels good let's just slow down in there we go so she's back in obviously you can do it blind at night and then you would have this particularly cool piece of kit now the belt on this right now is not German which is why it's so confusing but you would just go ahead and pull this guy out lift it clear and pop it on by sliding it right down over it doesn't really lock in it could just bounce right off but you would take this feed it through the feed block if it were there I've taken it out because that keeps me from being paranoid about the fact that there's some live ammo on this at the moment now this is the lock to keep this from unwinding itself do not forget to do exactly that because if you don't do that your gun will Jam almost instantly but with that other way this guy can feed through until you eventually run out of ammunition feeds the belt right out of the box and then you have to roll up another belt into the box of course we also have our super cool bipod mount which we've already seen in our tiga vert episode two versions of these sorts of iPods exist and it can swap between this gun and Thika vert as a matter of fact this is the same owner so I don't even know if he gave us the same bipod back so if I just kind of get the pressure off the feet all you have to do is pull down on a latch and rotate her to pop her off now I know you can't see that latch because it was fun the other way but there she is and this bipod can be equipped in either direction a lot of people like to send us messages that we've put it on the wrong way but realistically there is no wrong answer because it kind of depends on what you're doing with it in this position the spikes sink in but the thing rakes backwards and the other position you get a little bit longer of a footprint it still doesn't really affect the balance much in either direction alright we've got the whole barrel and jacket in frame so couple things this is a water jacket it's a reduced diameter from the big brother oh but we still have the same filler here so you unscrew that to put water in up over on the other side is the same steam fitting that goes the exact same water can that we saw in the O 8 episode so as you run this gun it starts to cook you start to get steam out of this little port no collectin I can on the underside we have a sling swivel point or not swivel point but rather just a loop in order to retain that ban that would go around here so that's new we don't see that on you the big-boy gun and then up at the front we have a new muzzle booster although you can also find these on O eights later on the war this was specifically set up for the O 815 to set that pressure curve a little bit higher to get this whole action driven back nice and reliably gone is the more complicated and more fragile oh eight sight instead we have actually just an oversize tangent Mauser rear sight so you lift push button and slide this up and down in order to set your range and it reads off to the left side of the gun and then down the barrel again so offset slightly to the left but really plenty readable bit of an awkward position but I need to be able to show the camera this opens up just like the old o so I can pop this guy free I can rack this forward the lock comes to the rear and then if I lean this back there's nothing retaining this so it's guys try snap my fingers which is why I want to get my shoulder low and let this up so I pull the lock out just like the OE and then we're up we twist and we're free nothing fancy but what happens it's a little bit different is instead of driving out any cross pins or anything this guy now lifts up see that tab that I pulled up on and if I hold that tab up we can now turn down the back of the action if I let the lock out of the way so that out and boom we flop to open the back of the gun from here again it's exactly the o8 I just start pulling parts all the way to the rear so I've got like a key over here at the fuzzy but to do that I have to press off the fuzzy do all that crazy stuff and you guys already know that drill now as you can tell we've changed up how we film things so that I'm not covered in grease before going on to the next section so this gun is already magically back together at this point the show I would normally kick this over to an animation but I need to be clear with you there's no real mechanical difference between this the OE that we already did an animation slightly different design in the muzzle booster and the fact that we now have our grip and trigger down here which means our sear is tied in at the front instead of at the rear but it's so easy to envision it's just a walk out safety other than that you got nothing there's no real point to going through all that effort you guys understand this system already it's just got a stock on the end of it so let's skip all that and go straight over to May for demonstration [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I want to point out that this is absolutely the head making machine gun oh I'm dizzy now as I said before we kicked off to May production did not start until later in 1916 with relatively low numbers these early guns were marked MgO 815 m k4 MIT Kolb with a shoulder stock it's pretty apparent manufacturer would be undertaken by seven yes seven factories the most prolific would be Spandau with 50,000 estimated guns by Wars and Erfurt would be next in line with 33,000 and from there we have machine and fabric Augsburg Nurenberg Siemens and house Sauer and son raineesha machine in Samara de and a limited production from DWM dojo boffin and munition favicon if that last one seems a bit low that's because it's a very rough estimate because DWM only briefly produced the 815 before being ordered to return to just making pure o8 Spandau would trend the other way eventually producing only mg weight 15s along with an aircraft variant this is the loof machine and Guevara Oh 815 a further lightened gun since it no longer needs a stock nor a water jacket these were also fitted with the clings drum device which was really a series of variant devices that all essentially cycled the entire action when cocking instead of just the bolt the reason for that by the way is to avoid having to do that to hand thing where you pull and crank like you saw you don't have to sit there and tug as you went and if you're a pilot you can't really do that it only really feeds from the magazine on its own when it's recoiling so if you can make it recoil mechanically when you work the crank well then you can get the system to feed itself therefore the claims from device over all these aircraft mg weight 15s did rather well with 23,000 are so made before war's end exclusively by Spandau and by the way those high Spandau numbers are reason why most British would call anything like this let's find out and it would carry on into World War two in some regards but generally if you hear a Spandau you're thinking of the O 815 returning by the way to this ground model while it wasn't that much lighter than the mg OE it was plenty cheaper with an estimated cost of 1875 marks versus the larger 3,000 marks the difference in cost and resource consumption meant squeezing more precious automatics onto the battlefield German leadership desperately wanted more machine guns as a means to slow manpower shortages the idea being that more machine gunners meant a larger force multiplier per individual soldier at a time when individual soldiers were precious German Oh 8 15 teams like the French saw an evolution in my research I saw a few variations on the early teams but basically you would have a gunner and four team members who served as loaders carriers etc together they carried 900 rounds of belted ammunition to separate barrels the water can and other tools and accessories eventually they would also be supported by a team of riflemen who would carry an additional 1200 rounds of belted ammunition in boxes now first they can only manage four of these guns per company which were organized into special detachments within the division this separated them from a battalion or regimental command putting them under the orders of the company commander this sped up their battlefield response time and made them much more flexible for attack and defense they were posted on the frontlines and not behind position independently of the o8 and moved frequently to avoid enemy artillery bombardment that could be indispensable for attack but should not be trusted for accuracy instead they were told to avoid shooting over friendly heads and were used in short overwhelming bursts and attacks a full belt of 250 rounds a full big belt of automatic fire would be considered an excessive and infrequent action 5,000 rounds was basically the maximum ammunition expenditure of any single engagement for the first year of testing these things command felt that 1500 rounds should be sufficient for most combat action the first uses of the new o8 15 were scattered and careful in the fall of 1916 and in early 1917 they would start to see real use at Verdun but still the numbers were limited at this point the Anton leadership might have learned about the new guns at that time but they seemed to be no particular danger they'd feel that blow later during the French nine offensive of April 1917 pressing against the Germans French troops would soon discover that their new counter machine-gun tactics were not especially wilting the enemy fire anymore a report from two assemblyman who observed the battle contains the following we have been told that the Germans now have at their disposal for defense purposes a light machine gun that is superior to our own automatic rifle at least in defense the effects of machine gun fire have never been more cruelly suffered than during this last battle the machine gun nests are too many too easy to conceal and too easy to set up that we can hope to destroy them all that is exactly the effect the Germans wanted to have and it shows that a lot of the MgO a 15 s attack potential was sacrificed in order for it to be in better support of their tactics favouring defense the ability to reposition but also to keep up minimal sustained fire with this success the growing production as more factories sorted out their manufacturer that is oh wait 15 s began to be issued three per infantry company with some select units getting up to six and it was working out well so much so that by the end of 1917 German chief of staff Ludendorff had picked up on how important these light machineguns of work he was especially impressed with the guns role in the Battle of Canberra it was a British assault designed to test a new combined-arms tactic with infantry artillery and even tanks coordinating to break the Germans deeply defended lines and at first it had been an amazing success for the Anton but the unexpectedly fierce ineffective German counter-attack was spectacular and so severe that British almost broke entirely in the sector now how did they achieve this feat well by using a new infiltration method basically take your most experienced troops give them light machine guns and grenades and the best stuff you got open up like a light artillery barrage or wait for nightfall or whatever you can do to create limited confusion or distraction and then let them move up securing forward positions where they can but also leading the enemy into suspecting that at best this is a smaller probing attack where whatever position that they can get out of it they should avoid direct engagement and if they do get into a fight they should overwhelm like one small point something that unlikely to be noticed is suddenly going dark on the front once your guns and men have had time to be posted up and take their good flanking positions now you can release your full infantry force then the defenders try to reinforce their front lines they try to defend against the attack and boom the infiltrators open up on them from behind or from the side I'm greatly oversimplifying this but if you want to look them up in the US they're mostly called who tier infiltration tactics and this German officer may have been the originator but he doesn't get a lot of note in the period from German records whether this was for security and oversight or some other reason I cannot say but this is the man to look up if you want to know more but the o8 15 was perfect for this role of infiltration an almost heavy machine-gun that you can carry into a forward position and deploy with bursts and only somewhat moderated sustained fire while Ludendorff takes notice and he reorients the German infantry around the machine-gun instead of just being a support weapon for the rifleman the rifleman is now support for the light machine gun the mg squad now has two trained Gunners two ammo carriers and was supported by an extra rifle team with a squad leader in seven riflemen this is what's known as a group these griffiths were allowed a lot of free decision-making on the battlefield in order to best to exploit any found vulnerabilities in the enemy lines they were also paired with a new type of shock troop Stross tripping these guys were loaded down with light machine guns of every make and plenty of hand grenades hand guns whatever could do the most damage you'd also find them with things like flamethrowers and briefly at the end of the war the MP 18 one of the first submachine guns more on that another day again instead of using grand plans and scheduled timetables these new group pha's and straw striven were let loose to find the cracks to flow into them like water on a warm winter day which would later freeze and expand and harden cracking the entire front would fade it ready to be scooped up by infantry just tearing it right off the road to keep up the front line infantry company now had to have at least six I run out of fingers here because I've been losing lately of these bad boys by war's end there would be 408 15s for every weight at the frontline in in the army overall 5 light machineguns for every two heavy machineguns objectively the introduction of the O 815 had been a huge success for Germany it fits exactly into the role that they needed nearly as powerful as an original o8 and yet maneuverable enough funny right I picked it up right plus extremely easy to gear up for a large-scale production more so than any other design that they could have introduced so we should remember this gun is a wonder weapon almost not for its inherent design but rather its balance of different needs and restrictions on war time Germany but as we well know a good compromise is one in which no one is truly happy and the German soldier well it wasn't nearly as impressed with the Oh 815 as the German officers these light machineguns were actually quite heavy in the handling was particularly awkward they did adopt a leather carrying strap but mostly when I see period images the soldiers have opted to perch the gun over their shoulder anyway operating this machine gun could be just as fiddly as a no.8 the cartridges needed to be set to the correct depth and the belt and the belts could tangle up fairly easily those two issues were both likely why you had that box over here set up on the side of the gun now I joked before about the bounce from this particular weapon but it was a serious issue German doctrine was to avoid firing over friendly troops with the o8 15 particularly because it was so hard to control the vertical spread most of that comes from the position of this vibrato right here this guy which yes can be turned either way depending but neither direction really relieves the main problem which is that its center point is right here at the center of the gun and I get why they did this you point this at the like you put this guy right here at the rear of the gun and it becomes some muzzle heavy and awkward that you really can't do anything with it except now the gunner doesn't have to move at all in order to sweep it like the fulcrums right here if you put it all the way to the front of the gun it's very easy to control but the gunner would have to like scooch every time you want to turn it just a couple of degrees so if you put it in the middle well great we're right at a compromise and again compromise can not always be a good thing because you end up doing nothing very well that makes this gun very unbalanced when actually firing you're basically constantly teeter-tottering which is exaggerated but just how high this bore axis is from that vent which makes it even worse like a big old revolver it just it's too rocking most frustratingly the burger in 1915 had been given a much better tripod during development this could have shaved off a lot of the mg o8 15s issues if it had been introduced for this gun post-war we'll see bunny pods clamped over the water jacket all the way up at the front of the gun and that will help improve performance a lot even if you have to scoot some there were however some attempts during the war other than that after the war to actually improve this gun the mg 16 was an oh wait 15 with Spade grips and no shoulder stock on a superlight traditional tripod this was an attempt to move even further into a lightened heavy machine gun this obviously did not take off heading in the other direction entirely was the Oh 818 which was a no 815 without a water jacket thereby greatly limiting the sustained fire potential but also lightening the gun further I've read that these were planned to be issued with the Bergman style tripods as well and only up to one thousand were made before the war is over and it's unlikely that any made it to the frontlines to be fair by that point they weren't going to be able to replace the 815 anyway because again they could not handle the sustained fire of a no 815 and Germany wasn't using these quite like normal light machine guns what Marcus and his engineers hit on was the start of the German Universal machine gun program this would ultimately lead to like the mg34 and later 42 and if you look at the tactical lessons it makes a lot of sense the rest of the LMG is from this period favored being an automatic rifle except maybe the Hotchkiss portative and the Lewis gun especially which seems to be the only real on tante attempt at a universal but it still lacks some mounting considerations to make it truly flexible in a very strange way this gun was advanced precisely because of its middle-of-the-road approach design and that strange paradox was not lost on the German soldier that probably the worst light machining on the war was also the best light machining of the war this gun and it's unusual approach actually made it into the German language null acht 50n is a phrase that roughly translates to run-of-the-mill average standard in many cases in the past it had a sort of cynical tinge to it and nowadays you still get a little bit of a wispy exasperation aboard miss sort of like saying c'est la vie there's a disconnect of course it's middling of course it's unremarkable and I guess that's kind of insulting in a way but it can't be the worst insult because when we think of the show Shaw we have nightmares what happens when you design a gun that's so perfectly adequate for what you're doing that it just is that's kind of odd but I suppose I shouldn't be trying to weigh in too much about the experience because that's not my job instead we probably should may in here and get her opinion on what it's like to actually try to use this as an effective weapon in the Great War all right we've made room for May and interestingly we do not have the gun because due to our schedule constraints it's actually already home in between the time we filmed my last segment thank you there's no imaginary mind gun in between our last segment and now it has actually been a couple of weeks for once we usually film these almost exactly the next day but it just worked out this way so we do not have the gun in front of us but that's okay we have plenty of old footage to rely on and I believe Mays memories as sharp as ever which means much better than mine Who am I hmm so why don't you walk us through your experience with the O 815 arguably a light machine gun and just what it felt like to handle that particular devil now obviously this is still a very large light machine gun it's very big it's very cumbersome it's still at like 39 pounds which is a lot and that's that's dry folks that's not even including the water so it's kind of more like a lightened heavy machine gun I guess in that respect but it's very big it's very long I can't really see myself firing this thing from the hip it's obviously very difficult just moving it around on its own so this is a gun that I see myself as taking it somewhere and putting it in place and that's it like I don't want to have to move from that place if I don't have to even though I can pretty rapidly on my own if I need to it's just it's still a little too cumbersome for that but yeah very big very long it's got a lot of stuff going on on both sides I mean it's got it's got the handle on one side it's got that like adjustment spring on the other for adjusting the rate of fire it just it feels like there's a lot of busyness going on at the back when it comes to to loading this gun it loads like the mg oh wait I've got a I've got to rock the handle multiple times I've got to make sure I pull the belt through like it's it's all these steps like involved in it and granted not a lot of steps to it but it's still it's not quite as easy as as things like maybe like the BA R the show show where you just pop in a mag and go it's not quite like the other light machine guns that we've handled so far for the series but you definitely different it's it's got a really nice shoulder stock in the back it's got a really aggressive checkering I noticed and you don't really feel it as in a bad way I personally liked it it's an unusual shoulder stock that kind of wraps around the top of your shoulder and it's it's kind of like um we didn't actually have it on that on the Hotchkiss 19:14 but they do actually have them for them yeah just the one that we shot just really early Hodge kisses had pistol grips and shoulder stocks so that you would have better direct fire control the weapon this ultimately gave way to just sort of that that Spade grip or shovel grip at the end and then they still had the pistol grip so you just sort of you know whatever and then of course a lot of guns have Spade grips because they're just mounted in a you know big old tripod or quad pod of some sort in which you did all the adjustments there and so you only really had to guide the gun there's no need to have that third point of contact so when me is describing those there's just this big wooden stock with these horizontal lines notched into it that just dig aggressively into your shoulder so the gun stays right with you and you direct it you really direct it from the shoulder honestly yeah that is a good point I'm gonna get into that directing the gun in just a moment but I want to keep talking about a little more into the ergonomics so they replaced the effectively we're on the MgO way where the trigger used to be for those little pressing points and instead i've now got the shoulder stock in that place and i've got a normal trigger setup with a pistol grip which is awesome I actually really liked that I thought it was a decent shape it fit well in my hand the trigger I didn't think was necessarily heavy or light I thought it was kind of an older ground there was nothing really remarkable about that and I've got that interesting but yet very simple push thumb safety on the side honestly I didn't find that one difficult to use it was simple it was easy I knew when I was on or off it it did the job so no complaints there the sights weren't really that unusual they were just standard be knotch sight like there wasn't really that remarkable they're pretty tall so that that I could give it for them they were they were a good read I thought the m4 gonna mix the only other thing I wanted possibly is for the loading and then probably getting the bipod in the second but the the loading at least with this one you could have the hundred round drum which I thought was really great because I can pop that on and there's really no concern that I think that that that belts gonna get any sort of snagging or caught up awkwardly it fed that belt in really straight for me so I love that we did have some issues occasionally when we had just the belt on its own where we think that maybe it was pulling one side for the other not causing feeding very easily so you know there comes us pro and cons with that but however if I do shoot from the belt I've got a lot more rounds shoot from the drum I've got a hundred but still a lot of rounds to shoot with last but not least definitely want to mention the bipod so this is interesting there's a lot of good and a lot of bad with it but I want to talk about the good first the good with it is that it's in a position in which I can maneuver the gun so we've moved away from the MgO weight where it's got that sled mount that you've got to turn knobs you got to do a lot to get that thing to to maneuver whereas now with the O 815 I can basically where I shift the gunship so that's where we get into more of the light machinegun territory where i'm the one that's doing the controlling of the movement i'm no longer having to rely on you know i've got it slowly sited in make sure i turn this knob just correctly the downside of that it's right there in the center folks so unfortunately that bounce that was coming with that I mean eius was there our range he could see how that was difficult and it was it was definitely a bad placement if they just taken it forward to the front of the gun man the differences it would have made they would post-war as a matter of fact they would move off that central points so let's back up a little bit because I want to be very very clear about what happened here let's do a rough summary you have the MgO Eden placed heavy machine gun it's a boxy thing but fairly short and it mounts on this big four-legged sled mount that you can carry around with a team of you know three or four men you want to get that down to a two-man operation and with one man really running the gun being capable of doing that so you're trying to get a man-portable mga as an expedient thing they would take MgO eighths and put them on these simple they just bolt right over top of the water jacket and make these I mean sometimes in the field make these caltrop looking feet and they would just have this plank and bolt over and you're just you would just grab the gun itself and run up and slap it down in the mud or dirt or whatever you had available and you just try to direct fire and use that as a sort of make do light machine gun because that role in the emerging battlefield was so important light machine guns were critical in World War one so the problem with that are there's numerous problems one double Spade grips from a fixed point on the ground and just sort of manhandling it through the muck you're all over the place the sights were never really designed to be lined up with the eye Wow behind the gun unless it was on a mount so laying down with it and trying to get sighted in and actually see what you're doing I'm sure they were walking a lot of their shots whenever they could use it successfully so if you think of that and what they do is they take the MgO eight and they take off the Spade grip and they put on a pistol grip in stock and then they pop it up on a bipod and then that weighs too much so they really do a lot of work to slim the weight back down but ultimately because they've added this this you know pistol grip and stock and bipod all these things have been added on well even though they reduced the water jacket and take away steel the gun is ultimately nearly the same way like it's only a little bit lighter overall as a package but you no longer have to carry around that sled and that's a whole other guns worth of weight and equipment so you have reduced the total package weight but the gun itself is about the same way well I would argue you basically reduced it also for a whole nother person because you need another person to assist you carrying that sled you technically don't need somebody else to assist you with carrying around the OLT sort of you can reasonably have two people carry around a man that sled but then using that whole thing and keeping it in place and keeping cover and trying to redeploy in the sort of large target you present that sleds not any good like trying to get that sled to a front-line position and then actually use it and then move it again and use it and move it again it's not gonna cut it and so the idea is we need to get it small enough that the gun itself can be moved easily and then because of that we can also send fewer men along or rather we can send men who are doing other tasks like riflemen who can carry stuff set it down and then start firing with their rifle instead of just paying attention this machine gun so in this regard yes we are filling the light machine gun role but what Germany's really doing is they're knocking at the door of the original Universal machine gun in other words trying to replace both the heavy and the light machine gun with something that can do sustained fire has a water jacket in this case is how they had sustained fire later you'll see small bubble barrels you're having the ability to take a belt so you can have whatever ammo type you want you can have the drum right there with it or you can just take full belts if you're in a more static position the gun can be mounted on aircraft it can be mouth it can be done anything with it's a universal machine gun system whereas what we've previously seen with the auntaunt are automatic rifles so rifles converted to fire fully automatic or we've seen light machine guns which is something that is very specifically designed to be like air-cooled portable short limited bursts of fire and then you get 3 4 or 500 rounds in and they start to lock up the OE 15 can fire thousands of rounds and never lock up so it's not quite what we think of as a regular light machine gun so when we talk about the ergonomics of this it's really important to think of this as compared to the o8 and just hauling that around in the mud because that's really what the Germans were trying to deal with if you compare it to the ergonomics of the Lewes gunner and the others it feels miserable you can't use it from the hip it's very hard to carry around the bipod we'll talk about that more in a moment it's pretty terrible its ungainly there's stuff sticking out in every direction and that's because it really wasn't trying to be specifically Lake Michigan you know I find interesting though they actually had that strap set up for the o8 15 to hopefully help carry it around but and you were telling me earlier that you really didn't find a lot of pictures of men using I see the strap all the time in pictures wrapped around the barrel and it's over the guy's shoulder I've seen posed photos with them with the strap but I have a feeling that since you can't really get much done with it from the hip anyway unless you're very specifically walking over a trench line and using it as a direct assault weapon which I guess could have happened but realistically from the own manuals they say don't do that they say we would much rather post them at the mouth of the trench and not throw them in the trench and so while our guys are going in with rifles pistols knives the machine guns oh wait fifteen should be at the edge of the trench shooting over at the approaching reinforcements so the idea is that the Oh 815 keeps the reinforcements away and does not actually do in trench fighting and so that strap would quickly become pretty useless so while we're on the ground though I'm talking about by that bipod that's really been our big problems and you want to talk about actually shooting the gun on that little bipod on the ground all right guys let's just uh let's take a step back and get behind the gun again so I'm getting I'm behind the gun I'm lining up my sights getting ready for my shot and I'm lining up my sights cuz I can I can read those I can get right behind them without any sort of difficulty or issues and that's actually already a big deal because we have experienced some light machine guns like the show shows where we truly had a very difficult time getting behind those sights they were my face does not fit behind those and this is tangental than anything but I was playing around with an AR somebody told me that they'd seen Kevin my friend told me that they'd seen something to shoot up the floor of an indoor range because they had a to front sight on they are so it popped up in the air and they had a folding Magpul style to position aperture sight on the rear so what they had done is they had left the folded sight down and they could just see through the the one rear aperture position while still folded down so it's way too low so they're looking like they've got their head up to it they look through this they just shot the floor out of the place and he was talking about it I know it I can you do that so I just earlier today it was playing with one to see if I could get my head behind there I had to push my head so hard against the the buffer tube to get my head behind there to see that sight that's telling some friends and they were trying the same thing and they're like who could do this who could use a gun this way and I'm going it doesn't feel any different than using the show shop because I had to just cram my face up against the side that receiver to try to be able to see behind the rear sight like it's that hard so if you want the show show experience fold down like a Magpul site look through the aperture and just really cram your head against that tube that's the show shot experience at home but yes go back to the 15 C for comfortable gentlemen that were truly was um but no getting getting back behind the sights like I said it's it's fantastic I can read them they're nice and tall easy to read boom right there I pull the trigger it's like I said no not that not that heavy not that soft but you know it it's got a good pull to it and then I'm back to this teeter-totter situation where the gun goes up bend down and up and down and no matter what I can I can pull that gun I can pull that shoulder stock deep into my shoulder I mean I can really feel that aggressive checkering then and it's really not gonna make a difference because no matter what you've got that metal that's just gonna slam back into you and it's not that teeter-totter bipod section it's just it's not gonna do you any favors it really isn't you have the muzzle blast you have the recoil itself you're the recoiling parts you have the toggle lock that's breaking into that direction so like all this mass and energy is coming over Center and the balance point is in the center and it's balanced on exactly two tips the tips of the feet of that bipod you really sink it in the mud and it's balanced on a line but it's still one narrow line and the whole thing there's there's nothing you can do for manhandling that both Elias and I have the same experience with that it's there's always gonna be a little bit of rock to it yeah but we have actually seen two guns that did have the potential to Solutions you could have had to it and I mean I'm gonna do the portrait at first so the Hotchkiss portative it's got a tripod in the center of the gun that actually does work that it does surprisingly work and it's got it's interesting we were talking about this before it's it's got its effectively set up so it's got like two knotch not notches or challenges yeah it's got like two hinges up at the top so that when the gun does recoil it's very linear so like it hinges back towards you so it's it's a very handling the gun dry we hated the two hinges because you had a rotating point and then another rotating point below it and then the tripod and we're going what is this double articulated and it feels very odd set it down and basically just be shifting forward and back on you constantly and you think this isn't gonna work there's no way and then sure enough when we came to firing it it was very staple very linear it was fantastic absolutely controllable because we and you know we almost took it for granted because if it was anything else it would be pitching everywhere but because it was double articulate at the center it could recoil back essentially and so instead of just this it was this just a difference of being able to do that versus having to do this was night and day and we didn't appreciate it at the time so thank you a 15 for spelling out how good the portative was exactly which is and by the way why do they want it in the center point we I don't know if we covered that why would you want to try to hold on to that center point well effectively it's really good for moving targets so you are able to do such fast sweeps on that thing like I can I can as long as I can shift my body around I could probably do a full 180 if I was careful enough on that thing right but without having to displace the gun at all like you just shut it down and the gun is static and as long as you can scoot it's like a carousel I can just go around the circle's on that yeah so your ability to watch the flanks is very good no the other solution is to take that thing out for the center point and move it all the way to the front and we see that with the Lewis gun where any unfort even the so the Lewis gun bipod up at the front it had a little bit of flex to it so it actually did technically have even more maneuverability than the O 815 spy pod did and it still wasn't that great no it's a matter of fact when we did project lightning it was the number one complaint on the Lewis gun was basically that bipod being so short and at the end of the gun it meant that you had to sort of do this thing we roll the gun up and kick a foot up in the air and turn the gun and set it back down if you want to change targets more than five degrees and so that could be a real headache in a battlefield especially if you have some narrow surface to work with or you know sinking on one side in the mud or something like it wasn't a favorite that Lewis bipod was not an amazing favorite thing either and actually even during our shoot you could see at one point when I was shooting the Oh a 15 where it had started to sink in the mud on the right side and I tried to fix it but there really wasn't much I could do absolutely one state around out there but anyway know that that's really a big deal and then the the only thing I really want to talk about in the shooting section here is about probably just clearing jams because I want to say the OE 15 is fantastic for clearing jams because you can just as long as you know what you're looking out for in terms of the position of the handle you can just [ __ ] and grab the belt and pull and you can cycle out a few rounds to clear jams if it's so bad that it's a it's that bad of a jam that I need to clear the roundup manually well it's awesome I can pop the top I can rack the handle I can pull out the lock and I can fish out whatever I need to with my hands at that point there is realistically no other gun that I could do that with that easily for the light machine guns that I've shot so far it's it's brilliant it really is and we've had to chase a few rounds out of a couple of guns show Shaw's that short stroke down ejection and the spent case got in there the Lewis gun the good luck if it's got a double fie that's 20 minutes with a knife if you're lucky yeah by the way no one's emailed me the proper way to clear a Lewis gun double feed and I don't know that anybody will I've had that challenge out there for a while a Lewis gun double feed is inherently dangerous because it's just it's a chain detonation and waiting to happen and you can't like it ties up because you get caught in a catch-22 mostly because the way it has a tipping ejector the ejector locks up against where the bolt position is against the fact that the feed will not let you back out one round so once the next round is in the tray you can't back that round out there's no way to collapse the spring and push it back out that I've been able to find and so double feed on Lewis gun is a nightmare and you can't get in there to fix it there's nothing that comes apart that makes it easier short of completely dismantling the back of the gun whereas with the O 815 pop open rack pull stuff out it's it's time really yeah and I think that goes back to it being a universal machine gun rather than just a light machine gun it has some advantages of a static emplaced machine gun it also has some of the disadvantages and so I think I think the description I used earlier a lightened heavy machine-gun that's really truly what it is yeah I agree I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily call it a light machine gun I call it a light into heavy machine gun yep but overall where did it leave you feeling because we haven't really discussed this is a lot of you know to two cents up and three cents down like where where's the balance like do you actually think that this is a serviceable weapon for the great war if you were on a machine-gun team that was given this weapon do you think you'd be able to do any real work with it so yeah it's got its pros and con with it yeah it's like a teeter-totter almost yeah but no uh really and truly it's even though it's it's not exactly what I would consider a light machine gun it is more of a on the heavier side of things so maneuverability is a downside but it's a decent cartridge I've got a lot of rounds to play with the sights aren't too bad the bipod can get annoying but I mean if that's all I really got to deal with I've got a lot of ammo to go through I can I can take out I can maybe take them out in terms of quantity maybe not quality but I am looking at a decent amount of quantity here for my shots so I would yeah I would take it into battle I can't really see turning this down as a no especially but the fact that I can clear those jams so easily if they do occur but otherwise those things do they they're pretty much like tanks I'd be very happy to take one of those into a conflict assuming that I knew who'd given the right position I'll just click the bipod off slap it down on sandbag because we have been able to do just doing it like if you guys want there's an episode of anvil that has Mark and Reed explaining some long-distance sights and in that they just took the mg weight took the bipod off and stuck it down on a sandbag and they were shooting very accurately with it and you noticed there's almost no recoil on it because they had it contained at the front so worst-case scenario I just popped the bipod off and thrown it up on a log I'd be very comfortable with that gun because with the water jacket you get sustained fire you get a lot of ammunition there's no real surprises in the system versus the Oh eight parts are everywhere I honestly think it was a good system I don't know that it was a good system in the long range like if it stayed into the 30s and never been replaced with anything else I'd be laughing you know I'd be like that's a very concept but in the great war where people are still feeling things out and especially because of the the press for time the ability to just turn around and make this thing I think it did quite well I think Germany chose the correct path for their situation I think the Oh 8:15 is a win and they use desu ya know I would if I was German I'd be perfectly what are your choices you're German it's like that in the o8 I mean there's some Madsen's out there there's some Bergman's out there there's a few pair of balam's out there but not really in significant enough numbers and even if they are parts supply and everything else no no you need a universal system that you can go back and get help because the idea is not to survive one day it's to survive many days and so I think it's a beautiful system in that regard is that it becomes a very good piece that fits with an overall organization and so in that regard especially I really appreciate the gun I hate the bipod though my ipod is terrible again just highest bore axis of the war easily I mean well I say that but show Shaw has maybe the highest bore axis I would argue the show shows worse I would definitely take you ever show show though oh so is that leave us anything else to talking about on this gun not especially I think that pretty much covers other than it's it's a bit too bad we didn't get to do any sort of advancement usage with it that would have been kind of fun to try out but yeah but that's a story for another time I really don't want to open that door of trying to reimagine World War one weapons because that's all speculation this is how it was used so that's what we're gonna go with for this series maybe one day we'll start to get to do some more experimental stuff as we get more time so with that I just want to make sure we think Jeff again thanks buddy for loaning us to us and we're glad it got home safe and sound I'd also point out that ever since we filmed all this I did notice frame of that how does that own or handle one of these things I didn't find it anywhere in any of the notes that I saw and yet I found it in one Field Manual so that you know underneath the bipod there's a brass cap you can unscrew that and drain the water out of the gun to dry it out more directly like it's at the very rear the water jacket so if you open that up put it on the bipod and set it down it drains out nice and dry so if your no wait 15 or keep that in mind because it's a very easy way to clean that gun out and since I found that secret I've opened three of them up and all of them had so much dirt in them I know they've never been opened so I think people have forgotten that that's back there I wish I had the gun to show you but just you know where it's at right up under the bipod cool things we learned last minute yep there's always something new so that means even as this episodes done somebody will find something unique about this gun a year or two years from now ten years from now so don't be afraid to reread this stuff check out the books and literature below or anything that comes out afterwards and definitely share any findings yes alright y'all have a good one night guys [Music] hey everyone with ice and I actually have several really cool projects going on at once but none of them are at the point where we can discuss them just yet there have been some YouTube related issues that are Thyssen Carl from in-range will be releasing a video on soon but the short version is keep watching the show tell your friends and if you can support us over at patreon also yes I owe you one more Crozier berry video I have not forgotten it's in the works I promise

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 122,794

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, bf1, battlefield1, worldwar1

Id: GVCtZ14dVyI

Length: 67min 57sec (4077 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2019