Machine Guns Of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal

[Music] i'm indy neidell and this is another great war weapon special now today we're going to be looking at machine guns we're going to be looking at several different categories of machine guns and I'm not going to be the one who's going to tell you about them it's going to be Elias from CN Arsenal who we do all of our weapons specials with and and his channel is awesome so if you haven't been there you should check it out yourself you should subscribe and you should watch it all Oh thighs can you please say hello and tell everybody what we're going to be seeing today hi I'm still Elias and this time we're actually talking about machine guns it just so happened that the way we were doing some of our loading and borrowing would initially get in just the right little ticket to sort of talk about these in a broad categorical sense I can't exactly pile thirty machine guns into one room without having an ATF nightmare here so what I've done is I've tried to get something representative of what I would consider to be the general classes in which case there will be four so after World War one machine gun terminology sort of changes you think of like heavy medium light you think of special roles and all these other things but realistically during the war you only need about four categories that is going to be sort of the heavy or in placed machine guns the kind that you would mount and have a crew to work there'd be the light machine guns which are one-man operable and portable so you could run up and attack with them much easier and then third place we see the emergence for the first time ever of the submachine gun and then fourth is actually just sort of the special stuff for aviation and tanks these are lightened guns that are usually the first category they're usually quote-unquote heavy guns that are then mounted to a special vehicle and then lightened so they can get rid our water jackets or otherwise modified to be better air-cooled and we send them up in the air so we're gonna move from heavy to light or like too heavy well I think it probably easiest to talk heavy to light because that tends to be how the history went so probably recognizable to most people out there if I can get it without snagging anything is this the german mg o 8 now this guy is somewhere in the forty pound territory without necessarily loading up on the water that's gonna add some more weight but this is a beautiful recoil and slightly gas assisted operated system and this thing fires well it has a variable rate of fire but you get the idea it's a big honkin machine gun you mount it you have a couple guys help you out with it and then you just have a nice long peel at whatever front you're on so this was invented by Hiram Maxim it uses a sort of bendy bolt like so you've got a toggle walk looking action in there that recoils a bit while it's locked and then the joint bends and then that allows it to extract and load and their cartridge we have a whole two episodes on this gun in its various forms already out for your enjoyment but basically the idea here is it's a belt-fed automatic crew service weapon that can be sent into a position and used basically one of two ways either with direct fire like sort of letting everything loose and just sort of moving it around like you're used to and pointing it you know whoever's coming over the line or you can use it slightly more annoyingly than that as an indirect fire so you can fire like light artillery up into the air and land your shots in an area where they know that there's enemy activity creating what's called a beaten zone of eight millimeter lead cartridges fall or maybe merely LED bullets falling on whoever happens to be in that region and generally annoying or killing them so extremely effective and pretty much synonymous with the war at this point I don't think of anybody really not recognizing the maxim as the default machine gun of world war 1 because these were used on all sides this one's a German NGO 8 but nearly identically you'll see it in every other army except for maybe the British they had their own earlier maximum design and then kind of skipped this generation and went for the Vickers which isn't inverted and Shrunk Maxim and the French did their own thing because they're the French and they had basically a lot of the French guns look like they're based off of locomotives it's actually quite fascinating and I can't wait to get into the history of those on our channel so we have the maxim this gun was extremely effective before the war for a number of people that were doing sort of colonial activities because when you were up against massed troops that were sort of an experience you would think that somebody would take the time to sort of stop and take a one rifle shot at whoever was shooting this and knock it out of commission but realistically it's very hard to draw a bead on something that is just hucking hundreds of rounds a second at you so or not a second but a hundred rounds hundreds of rounds a minute at you it really does keep the heads down and then in a lot of ways Germany use this probably more effective than other country or more effectively than other countries going into the war a lot of people underestimated this weapon the only real lessons for you know massed infantry machine gun use against modern armies came from the russo-japanese war just before World War one Britain and other countries were used to using them and say Africa where they were not not the most experienced opponents so they got kind of lazy with their use of them they had large amounts they had less trained crew on them whereas if you see Germany and it's weirdly Russia they took them very seriously Japan also took them seriously but they were more mobile and not necessarily as bedded down so you don't see a lot of Japanese machine gun use in World War one so Russia and Germany both go in with probably the most machine guns of any other countries and then Russia unfortunately tells their troops that the gun is worth more than their lives so they start holding the guns back and so while Russia had more machine guns than anybody else available at that time by almost double they did not get a lot of use out of them because they constantly kept them to the rear in order to self preserve whoever was in charge of them the Germans got quite aggressive with these things and where he came very famous for sort of pushing the need for machine gun tactics in the great war can I ask you about the scope for the MgO eight so what about the scope of the MgO eight unlike other nations the Germans actually did fit these with a standard scope this one has lost its over the years along with the mounting bracket for it which is kind of in the way when you don't have the scope we actually featured one over in our series so you can get a better look at the device but basically that was used for being able sight in a target long range and then realistically once you pull the trigger you're not going to be looking through that thing because this guy likes to shake even mounted on a very good German sled mount because of the nature of the action with that sort of toggling thing you you naturally throw masse away from the centerline of the gun so it's going to vibrate there are other machine guns that try to get away from that but this is the going to have a little bit of shake no matter what you do as a matter of fact we could probably take a closer look so I can show you what I'm talking about okay so you guys probably want to see how this works so I'll just pop this lid open we'll lift this feed block out of the way that handles the belt and then if I can get her lined up where you can see I'm going to rack this forward that brings our lock back and you see how it dropped down well that's the heart of the whole operation so I'm just gonna pull that out and there we go so there's basically three positions in this gun the top position is where the rounds are sitting in that feed block ready to be fed in and then once we bring her back it drops down lines it up with a chamber pops it back up we fire it and then when she comes back again she gets dropped down again she gets pushed out the ejection port and that's really all there is to it we have animations over the site or over at our channel so you can see that without having to be completely confusing but it's as simple as that to get you in and out of this gun which is very important because I can keep stripping pieces off this and I can have her down to nothing and just about a minute flat if it were on its mount even faster because this gun is designed in a modular way so that you can replace parts on it as they fail instead of having to take the whole gun off the front so this is a heavy I'm giving you guys some images to work with but basically this would include things like the Hotchkiss 1914 the French 1907 the u.s. Browning 1917 the British got this a little lighter in the vicar's so when we say heavy it doesn't necessarily mean weight we're really thinking about how its emplaced so like the Vickers gun in the US is much lighter than this but it sees the same way we put it on a tripod and we have multiple men crew it and it's sustained fire fixed position very kind of hard to move it's not something that you necessarily attack with you might use it to lead an attack by firing over friendlies to hit the enemy as they approach but you're not really running and gunning with these sorts of guns you are using them sort of thoughtfully ahead of time like a light artillery these also tend to be the guns that you think of when you think of people defending a trench so the enemy has come up over into no-man's land and they're approaching at full march or full run and you're the that image of just sort of gunning them down that's the heavies because those are the ones that can handle that sustained fire for long as you can keep them fed the parts don't break and the water is in the jacket so you or in this case the French they have some they're just so dense and heavy barrel that they can be air-cooled but the ideas that sustained multiple thousands of rounds of firing and the gun still runs light machine guns are going to be another story in this case well I have what may be more considered a medium but it's still considered light for World War one standards this is the lowest gun now this was designed in the US but the US did not take advantage of it instead Britain would be the first to really go oh we need that it was designed around being air-cooled so that's why it has this big crazy jacket with all this serration cut into it that's to give it more surface area and then it has an aluminum fin set inside and the jacket goes out just past the muzzle see if you can see that a little bit but it goes just past the muzzle so that as you fire it creates a vacuum that then sucks air through this jacket and therefore cools the gun even so you can't really sustain a thousand rounds of fire with this thing you're going to keep it in bursts you want to keep it in the hundreds and then give it some time to cool off so these use the pan magazine oh and these came in either single well this is a double stack and then there was like a quadruple stack for aircraft so you could crank up I want to say it's like 47 rounds and then 97 I'm going off a memory there and then it all feeds down into here as a matter of fact let me get over to the zoom I'll let you guys see so you would have your pan mag this would be loaded up with ammunition feeds down into this little guy right here that's got a one-way spring which trips down in the front and then the bolt fires from the open bolt so they get shoved down into this path they sit up in there and then when you fire the bolt is going to I'm going to let this go more carefully they're just full auto the Volt's got fall bang and then it's gonna recoil back and stay locked open staying locked open as the default position allows it to stay cooler and then the top works a lot like an old revolver in some ways you've got little feeder fingers that basically push this guy around in a big circle and that's just how it strips off all the rounds now would this be something that you would most often use on your own or would it still be a 2-person like an a little crew that would use it even though it's portable light machine guns were generally issued to two men so you'd have somebody who is handling the loading and one running the gun that's the general rule for most armies there could be some differences the other thing is with the Lewis gun especially with the British they had a habit of giving these over to groups of one like one or two Lewis Gunners and then they'd have a big ol handful of guys hooking grenades so the idea was that you could take something like this and provide immediate suppressive fire on say a pillbox or other and placed heavy machine-gun and then once you kind of had their heads down the other guys could pull pins and send them up into that nest and that's how you would clear a group of a particular machine gun emplacement so these became very good being used on the attack instead of just on the defense now now let's say you were a crew of two and one of you is firing one of you is in charge of the magazine and stuff how many spares would that person carry would they have ten or twenty or thirty I mean it depends on the gun and the offensive unfortunately but you basically take as many as you can get in terms of these pans we show what it's like to load one pan on our show you don't want to load these in a fight you would have them all pre-loaded and racked in a bag as many as you could carry the gunner would also be carrying some too so they tried to get you know a thousand plus rounds on to the two guys if they could because the more that they can get upfront now that depends they're because if you're going a short distance for a lighter attack maybe you don't want to load down your men but what if you're going a distance and you need to take the trench and then this is the thing a lot of people forget is once you take the trench even if you succeed you blow out the full boxes you take everything you land in there there's going to be a counter attack and so light machine guns become very important in that regard and also the preparedness to have more ammo on hand because once you take that trench you have to immediately defend it and so you don't have time to emplace those heavy machine guns and so you have a defensive disadvantage from before you know you're not as good as you would be if it was a trench that you've had for an entire day and had time to get set up so being able to take these light machine guns and flying spots to quickly place them and quickly defend against counter-attacks would be pretty imperative for trying to move the frontline up and actually keep it moved next we have what was new for once in the war this is a submachine gun this is the MP 18 eye and the eye is a bit of a mystery although I have some theories about it being applied to the rear sight but this is a simple blowback nine millimetre parabellum submachine gun so light handy easy to use matter of fact let me get you a quick close-up so you can see what's going on so it's literally just fires from the open bolt this is the safe position from here if I pull that trigger and this thing is deactivate at the moment this is going through a restoration process so I can do this safely and that's it so it would slam it would immediately fire the cartridge when it closed and immediately get blown all the way back and if I were holding the trigger it would just keep cycling now this does use the same magazine as the German Luger actually l po8 the artillery Luger uses the same 32 round magazine as that gun with a sleeve to help it sort of set a little bit better because it's not as deep of a well as the Luger and so this guy just wraps around and you would use a loader to load this up with 32 rounds and then lock her in and she's ready to go you would carry six or more of these when you were on your assault if you're a German and they just plug straight in with a nice push of the button so click and then release is right there nice big obvious easy to use piece of equipment now when when did these enter service and who is using these and when did they when did they start really making their appearance these became available in 1918 and there's some argument between this and the Beretta 1918 is being the first true submachine gun before this there was something known as the velour / OSA which is a two barrel submachine gun that used a little mount so it's like an ultra light machine gun the hello bipod had twin barrels an excessively high fire rate to the point that it was almost useless and so that is the first sort of pistol caliber automatic that people think of in a battlefield but you could not shoulder it and so this is sort of the this is a hard definition for people is whether or not the Villarosa counts as a submachine gun because we tend to think of as something that your shoulder and therefore use from just walk and fire well this and the beretta would be the first - one way or another the Germans would get this one out 1918 and it's unlikely that very many saw any sort of trench fighting unfortunately for the Germans because they just came a little too late they would have been extremely effective if used earlier they were very good for shock troops extremely good at clearing a trench line not so much in no-man's land very hard to use a pistol caliber out that far but once you close the gap I'm going to tell you you have a hard time defending against something like this at close quarters so submachine gun technology is still very very new at the beginning the war we're gonna have a whole episode on this gun this is actually being repaired by us right now so that it can be put in the use by the way if anybody's curious all these guns are correctly and legally registered in the US and they have gone through the proper channels to get to us all the licensing is in place I just get a lot of comments about people worrying that we're doing something illegal we are not it's all covered we're being very careful now the other classic guns that we haven't really got in studio to show you would be basically the first or second class the heavy or light machine guns modified for air service use so it'd be something like an mg weight with a bunch of holes drilled in it to mount to an airplane or you'd have like the Lewis guns where most of these u.s. made Lewis guns for the US were actually used for aircraft not for ground forces and so you would strip all the extra cooling parts because you're an airplane that winds blowing by you you don't need to really have a water jacket you don't need to have a big aluminum shroud you just let the wind speed cool the gun and you fire it from there the problems become that you need to interrupt your gears or some other method to prevent from shooting through your own propellers there's a whole history there that we're gonna hopefully talk about when we get into the MgO 815 and then you also want to think about or I lost my train of thought here Oh ammunition you want to be able to control your ammunition feed because it's not always easy to load a belt or something while you're flying a plane at the same time and you need ways to be able to sort of clear jams or have a backup gun now if people want to learn more about the machine guns and you've done episodes about a bunch of these things and and more that you haven't discussed today where is a good spot for them to start we have an episode on the maxim and actually technically the episode is episode 80 on the MgO 8 and the 81 on the maxim 1910 that tells the whole story of the big maxim gun and it's also sort of the first successful military machine gun so that gives you a good starting point and from there you can explore through any of the other stuff we've covered we've done the Lewis gun we've done the Browning automatic rifle and we're already in the process of working with the Hotchkiss and some others so there may be more videos by the time this gets edited ok well if I as once again thank you very much for joining us this was fascinating as always say goodbye to everybody alright thank you all for tuning in and come check us out yeah and if you want to see if we hurt I'll tell you what I'm gonna point and here comes the link here's where you can see the MgO 8 episode right there on his channel and you can check out a bunch of his other stuff from there and as for us we'll see you Thursdays for our regular episodes and Mondays for other specials and Saturdays for things like out of the trenches and on Facebook and on Twitter and on reddit and maybe on the street and we will not pretend we don't know you will stop and talk to you about the war because that's what we do see you next time

Channel: The Great War

Views: 392,077

Rating: 4.9578562 out of 5

Keywords: History, History channel, Documentary, Footage, Great War, First World War, World War I (Military Conflict), WWI, 20th Century, 1914 to 1918, British Pathé, Indy Neidell, Wilhelm II, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Winston Churchill, Mediakraft, Original, Battlefield 1, Machine Guns, Heavy Machine Guns, Light Machine Guns, Sub Machine Guns, MG, LMG, SMG, Lewis Gun, MP18, MG08, Maxim Gun, Firearms

Id: 1RM_npZUrIk

Length: 18min 44sec (1124 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 29 2018