Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, and today we're taking a
look at the Vickers heavy machine gun. This is really the Queen of the infantry
battlefield, or at least it was while it was in service, which was almost 60 years. Now the Vickers here is really the final
highest evolution of the Maxim machine gun. The Maxim of course was the first
practical and successful heavy machine gun. (Finnish Maxim belt loader) (Czech 7.62x54R light ball) (Soviet steel Maxim belt) Now when I call this a heavy machine gun, that's
a designation that dates back to World War One, when it was considered heavy
because it wasn't really portable. One guy can't just pick this up and run around
with it like they could a light machine gun. What defined a heavy was typically a
tripod mounted, belt-fed machine gun. In World War Two, with the common introduction of
.50 calibre machine guns, .50s became the heavies. Guns like this were called medium machine guns, and
that's indicated by the fact that they're not really portable, but they're also in a .30 or .32 calibre.
So typically .303, .30-06, 8mm. Those calibres, belt-fed, water-cooled gives
you in World War Two a medium machine gun. Today these are pretty much obsolete,
nobody uses water-cooled guns any more. In fact what's interesting is when the
Vickers was taken out of British military service, it was actually replaced in its tactical role by the
three-inch mortar, because at that point that's what they were using this weapon for was interdiction,
long range area denial, that sort of thing. And it was actually effectively replaced
by a medium or large mortar, pretty cool. At any rate a little bit of background.
This is called a Vickers gun, but it's mechanically very similar to the
Maxim gun. The reason for that is... Well, let's start with the Vickers company. Vickers
basically came into being in the 1820s, and it was a steel ... working company. They got into shipbuilding
and just the steel industry in general in England. And by the 1880s, separately, Hiram Maxim
is inventing the Maxim machine gun, and he knew the father and the
two sons who were Vickers and Sons. And they collaborated a bit, and when
Maxim formed the Maxim Gun Company the three Vickers men were actually
all initial shareholders in his company. In fact, one of them was
Chairman of the Board, I believe. So, they were closely related, and so it's not really
that surprising that in 1897 the Vickers company is looking to expand more into armaments (it's
becoming this huge industrial conglomerate in Britain), wanted to get more into the armaments business,
and it decided to buy up the Maxim company. So this was really cool for Hiram Maxim because
the company became called Vickers Sons and Maxim. Which is kind of like, you know, if I got bought out by GM,
it became like General Motors and McCollum Industries. That's really cool for me because, holy cow,
they're putting my name on a huge company like that. That's kind of what it was like for Maxim at the
time, Vickers was this huge overarching company, really cool to be that associated. And for the
Vickers company it was kind of the same thing, the Maxim gun was the
revolutionary new military weapon, and for them to have Maxim in their
company title really told everyone, "Hey, we're a serious armaments company,
we mean business, we have the Maxim gun". A couple other interesting things. When
Vickers bought out the Maxim company, one of the board members at that point
of Maxim was a guy named Sigmund Loewe. If you look at it as an American
would pronounce it 'Low'. He was the brother of Ludwig Loewe
who formed basically DWM. You know, a lot of the movers and shakers in the arms
industry were closely associated with the Maxim gun. (Turn your volume down now...) So to get back on track,
Vickers buys the Maxim in 1897. Hiram Maxim basically retires from gun design
work in 1901. He's pretty much deaf, he's not that interested. Honestly, he's gotten
kind of bored with guns, because he did that really well, and he went on to dabble in
aircraft and play with that instead. So the Vickers company on its own
introduced a number of follow up patents, improvements, mainly lightening the Maxim gun.
So they had a 1901 model, they had the 1906 model, and then in 1907 they started working on
what would become the Vickers Mark 1. And what they did here, the main difference between the Vickers and the Maxim
is they flipped it upside down. So on the Maxim gun there's a toggle lock in here,
and it breaks downward when the action cycles. This is a recoil operated gun, the barrel
and the action arms come backward, and then this toggle lock is broken downward,
kind of like a Luger, except down. What they did with the Vickers they flipped
that over, so the toggle breaks upward. And by doing that they were able to reduce
the height of this receiver by about 30%. It became a much more compact gun, they made some
changes to the lockwork, made it a little more reliable. Ultimately ... the pre-production Mark 1 Vickers gun
was only 28 pounds, so literally half of the original 56 pound Maxims. Now, once they got
into serious mass production, they had to make some changes for production efficiency and
a production-line Vickers weighs about 33 pounds. But still, this is way better than close to 60. So that's the primary advantage of the Vickers gun,
they took the Maxim, they made it lighter. At this point, well, Maxim himself dies in 1916. The British Government had adopted a
number of different iterations of Maxim, and they tested this new Vickers pattern.
And they ended up adopting this in 1912. What's really cool is they basically
didn't change it until 1968, when it finally was declared completely obsolete
and removed from all the British military roles. So, unlike most guns where we see a lot
of iterative development, in this case all the iterative development
took place on the Maxim gun. Once they got to this point, the Vickers, this was
pretty much perfect, and it just stayed the way it was. That's great news for those of us
who shoot them today, because it means all the parts are pretty much the same. They made them
in World War One, they made them in World War Two, there are lots of parts out there. Nearly a 100,000
of these guns were made just in the UK, so makes it a good gun for shooters today. Now,
originally, this would have been in .303 British calibre, that's the only calibre the British used in the Vickers
(they experimented actually with .280, but didn't end up building any). I currently
have this gun set up in 7.62x54 rimmed, which is a pretty easy conversion. I also actually
have an 8mm Mauser conversion kit for this gun, but we don't have it in there at the moment.
54 rimmed ... it's cheap, easy to use ammunition. Interestingly, we actually have a .303 barrel that
has just been chamber reamed out for 54 rimmed, so it gets this double shoulder on the cases
when they're fired, but it's steel-cased, ... steel cased brass? It's steel cased ammunition.
I'm not going to be reloading it anyway, I don't care if I deform the cases. So a little bit of interesting
background on the Vickers gun. ... When the British went into World War One in
August of 1914, they had 1,846 Maxim guns of a couple different versions that they had purchased
and adopted over the previous 20-some years. And they had a grand total of 111 Vickers guns,
109 in the Army and 2 in the Navy. Now, by the time World War One really got going, of
course you needed a lot more machine guns to equip a vastly enlarged army, and you're
going to be losing these guns in the field. By the mid-point of World War One the British estimated
they were losing 530 Vickers guns every single month. Production had to be 530 of these each month
just to maintain the same level in the army, without trying to increase the ... number of divisions that
you had, or increase the number of guns going to each division. In total they would make just over 75,000
of these guns during World War One alone. Really an Incredible number. And to really put
a point on that, at the time one of these guns without the tripod, without ammo,
without accessories, just the gun itself cost the British government the equivalent
today of approximately 10,000 dollars. These are extremely expensive guns, they are extremely
finely made, they're finely fitted and they're just unbelievably reliable and durable guns. And that's
why they stayed in British inventory for so long. There's an interesting anecdote from right at the
end of the Vickers' service life. Basically it was 1963, the guns were of very limited use at that point, they
weren't being used in the front-line army any more, and the ammunition - they were changing
over to 7.62 NATO, so they had these huge stockpiles of .303 ammunition that they didn't
really need any more - do something with them. And so one of the armourer training depots
decided to take one of its Vickers guns, they gauged [it] out, they made sure everything
was working just like a brand new gun, and then they put 5,000,000 rounds of ammunition
through it in seven days without stopping the gun, except to change barrels. They would have two
man teams that would switch out every half hour. And the barrels on these, ... the combat
rating is about 15,000 rounds per barrel. You have a water jacket that keeps the gun cool,
but friction from the bullet and just wear and tear will wear out the barrels. So these two man
crews of trainee armourers would swap out. They had a guy, they'd shovel away
brass with literal snow shovels. And they put 5,000,000 rounds through
this single gun in just ... belt dumps, 250 round belt dumps,
endlessly for seven days and nights. And when they finished they pulled the
gun apart, gauged it all out, and it was still entirely within working parameters. That's the
efficiency and the durability of the Vickers gun. One other interesting anecdote here. Everyone's
heard of the mad minute from the British army and this incredibly rapid fire Enfield rifle thing,
you'll made the enemy think they were machine guns. What's interesting is it's the Vickers
gun that inspired that to actually happen. So a British major named R.H. McMahon
recognised the importance of machine guns, and he ... saw that World War One was coming,
that war was coming. This was about 1907, and he was in charge of training for the British
military, and he knew they needed machine guns. But he also knew they weren't going
to get them, bureaucratic inertia prevented most of Europe from actually trying
to exploit the machine gun before World War One. He looked at this and he knew: war is coming, our role in
it as the British is going to be largely defensive at first, we're going to want machine guns, the next best
thing is to have extremely well-trained riflemen. And it's then, and for that reason, that he devised
the mad minute, which was a training standard for the British military. And it was
originally 15 aimed shots in 60 seconds. And if I remember correctly, it was I believe
a 36 inch bull (round target) at 300 yards. So, this isn't insurmountable.
Usually when you hear mad minute, it's like 38 rounds or something, you know, the
most any one British soldier was ever able to do. But what you're actually expected - the British standard
of training was 15 rounds in a minute with your Lee-Enfield. And lo and behold, that that rifle skill
really did save the British Expeditionary Force at the beginning of World War One. It wasn't enough,
it allowed them to survive the beginning of the war. Although most of those expert riflemen would
be casualties long before the end of the war. But inspired by the Vickers gun. So throughout World War One the British learned
how to use these machine guns really well. They started out just as, you know, you pull
the triggers and a lot of bullets go downrange. But by the end of World War One they had figured out a
lot of ways to use this as a very versatile and effective weapon. One of those methods is called
the tap. Now the idea was you would have often pairs of guns trying to control a piece
of territory 500, 600, 700 metres away. and what you wanted to do was just maintain
a general spread of fire on this territory so that enemy troops couldn't move
on it or advance across it. And what they developed as a technique for doing
this was the tap. The idea would be you'd fire a burst of about 25 ro unds, that's 3 to 4 seconds, and then you
would gently whack one of the grip handles like this. So you'd have the tension set to a kind of
a standard known value on the pintle here, and with ... a lot of practice and a calibrated tap,
you would adjust the angle of fire about a quarter of a degree, ... which is 15 minutes of angle. That
gives you, at the ranges we're talking about, a couple feet of change of impact area. And that
allowed the gunners to maintain this very easy, steady, controlled, dissipated fire on a large
area. So if you had an area 50 yards wide, you could have two guns. One would start at the left
and one would start at the right, and they would just tap their way back and forth across this piece of ground
to maintain a steady fire on it. Let's take a look at that: and so on. You have a couple guys running ammo
for you, and you can do that for a long time, and nobody is going to want to be down
there moving around outside of cover. So, of course, this was the standard British heavy
machine gun in World War One. Like I said, about 75,000 of them were made during World War One, with
production of course picking up as the war went on. It continued in British service, and it was the British
standard [medium] machine gun in World War Two. Although not nearly as many of them were used there,
... World War Two had a lot more fire and movement, they were mounting these things on vehicles
more often, they didn't go through them as quickly. And ... the British only made about 10,000
or 11,000 of these during World War Two. Now the Australians also made about 10,000 of
their own. This one is in fact an Australian parts kit. Smooth jacket here, the early British guns have a
fluted jacket which allowed them to be a little bit lighter, but more expensive. This one is ... an Australian parts kit, it's actually
built on a Colt produced aircraft Vickers side plate. So, during World War One these things
were also heavily used as aircraft armament, and the Colt company in the United States
manufactured them as well as Vickers in England. And it's interesting, a weird quirk of the US machine
gun registry, a lot of Colt side plates got registered. And so there's not a whole lot you can do with an
aircraft gun. It's got a ventilated, air-cooled shroud, and it's chambered for an 11mm aircraft
round that's really not available anymore. So most of them get rebuilt, like this one, into a World
War One or a World War Two ground gun pattern. The original crew for this would
have been four to six men. Typically you have a gunner and an assistant
gunner, and the assistant gunner's job is kind of to take over as gunner when the gunner gets killed.
But the assistant gunner also does the loading and then the remainder of the team is
pretty much there to transport ammunition. If you have a fire mission that you've been tasked
with, you need guys shuttling ammunition from the depots or, you know, the storage areas in the trenches up
to the gun itself, you have a couple crewmen to do that. And then you have a guy who helps the
gunner load, change barrels. If it's extended fire you will need to pull the barrel and
change it, not because they overheat, but because they actually literally
wear out after about 15,000 rounds. And despite that it can of course be fired by one person
doing all of the jobs, and that's what we're doing today. So the Vickers gun has a set of spade grips.
It has a grip safety here and it has the central trigger. If I push the trigger without lifting
the grip safety, nothing happens. Now most people are going to grab the gun like
this, use your index fingers on the grip safety and your thumbs on the trigger.
The official method however, ... what was taught to all the Vickers gunners,
was to put your index finger over the top of the grip, use your middle fingers there,
and you fire with a grip position like this. Now, to be perfectly honest, I always
prefer to put my fingers underneath because up here, every once in a while, I get
knocked on the knuckle by the crank handle. But official method, up here. So the sights on the Vickers gun have this big
battle sight right here, which is for 400 yards. That's your main aperture. However for
precision fire you've got this incredibly tall ladder. Again, we have an aperture sight right here. It's offset
just slightly, and the front sight is offset to match it. This allows me to loosen the sight and then I can adjust
this elevation from a minimum of 100 yards (in this case), all the way up to 2,900. So if I were
going to be shooting like that, I would ... elevate the gun quite a lot and I use the aperture
sight just like it would normally be used at close range. I hope you guys enjoyed this.
These are amazing weapons really. The level of durability and what they
can do. It's a gun with infrastructure, and that's not something that you really find any more. The need for just literally continuous fire has kind
of been obviated by advances in military technology and a lot more movement in combat, compared
to the static trench lines of World War One. So you don't see guns with this kind
of infrastructure on them any more. And you know what, this thing, this gun, this one
right here, is 98 years old as of the time of this filming. And it is running like an absolute champ,
we have not had a single malfunction with it yet, and I think we're going to go ahead
and close with a 250 round belt dump. I got one target out there, a bad guy,
and we're going to see how well we can ventilate that target
with an entire non-stop 250 round belt. Now I'm going to fire a couple of
singles first to make sure I'm on target. That looked pretty much there. Alright, here we go. (had an empty space in the belt - oops) There you go guys, 250 rounds. Hang the lock, and we'll go take a look at the target. Our terrorist buddy here, I'm not sure ... the
British ever used a Vickers on a guy like this. But he has approximately 40 bullet
holes in him, which is not bad considering I did not have the gun sandbagged down,
so it was bouncing around quite a lot. This guy got turned into terrorist Swiss
cheese, and that's what the Vickers does.
Ian's channel is superb.
Great quote from a great book.
Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he’d been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn’t seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn’t even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
In Shaftoe’s post-high-school experience he had found that guns had much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched the slow progress of the Vickers’ bullet-stream across the roadblock. Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the base of a fire. Then he picked out a few bits of the roadblock that he suspected people might be standing behind and concentrated on them for a while, boring tunnels through the wreckage of the vehicles until he could see what was on the other side, sawing through their frames and breaking them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside trees behind which he suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.
As this is WW1 related, I feel obligated to mention the youtube channel The Great War
If you haven't heard of it. They make one episode each week, talking about what happened that week 100 years ago in WW1. They started in 2014, and will (spoiler alert) continue into 2018.
It's a fantastic channel!
That is awesome!