Inventions of the Great War

by A. Russell Bond

Courtesy of "Scientific American"

An elaborate German Machine-Gun Fort

It was a new Browning model; or, rather, there were two distinct models. One of them, known as the heavy model, weighed only 34½ pounds, this with its water-jacket filled; for it was a water-cooled gun. Without its charge of water the machine weighed but 22½ pounds and could be rated as a very light machine-gun. However, it was classed as a heavy gun and was operated from a tripod. The new machine used recoil to operate its mechanism. The construction was simple, there were few parts, and the gun could very quickly be taken apart in case of breakage or disarrangement of the mechanism. But the greatest care was exercised to prevent jamming of cartridges, which was one of the principal defects in the other types of machine-guns. In the test this new weapon fired twenty thousand shots at the rate of six hundred per minute, with interruptions of only four and a half seconds, due partly to defective cartridges.

There was no doubt that the new Browning was a remarkable weapon. But if that could be said of the heavy gun, the light gun was a marvel. It weighed only fifteen pounds and was light enough to be fired from the shoulder or from the hip, while the operator was walking or running. In fact, it was really a machine-rifle. The regular .30-caliber service cartridges were used, and these were stored in a clip holding twenty cartridges. The cartridges could be fired one at a time, or the entire clip could be fired in two and a half seconds. It took but a second to drop an empty clip out of the gun and replace it with a fresh one. The rifle was gas-operated and air-cooled, but no special cooling-device was supplied because it would seldom be necessary to fire a shoulder rifle fast enough and long enough for the barrel to become overheated.

After the Browning machine-rifle was demonstrated it was realized that the army had been perfectly justified in waiting for the new weapon. Like the heavy Browning, the new rifle was a very simple mechanism, with few parts which needed no special tools to take them apart or reassemble them; a single small wrench served this purpose. Both the heavy and the light gun were proof against mud, sand, and dust of the battle-field. But best of all, a man did not have to have highly specialized training before he could use the Browning rifle. It did not require a crew to operate one of these guns. Each soldier could have his own machine-gun and carry it in a charge as he would a rifle. The advantage of the machine-rifle was that the operator could fire as he ran, watching where the bullets struck the ground by noting the dust they kicked up and in that way correcting his aim until he was on the target. Very accurate shooting was thus made possible, and the machine-rifle proved invaluable in the closing months of the war.

Browning is unquestionably the foremost inventor of firearms in the world. He was born of Mormon parents, in Ogden, Utah, in 1854, and his father had a gun shop. As a boy Browning became familiar with the use of firearms and when he was but fourteen years of age he invented an improved breech mechanism which was later used in the Winchester repeater. Curiously enough, it was a Browning pistol that was used by the assassin at Serajevo who killed the Archduke of Austria and precipitated the great European war, and it was with the Browning machine-gun and rifle that our boys swept the Germans back through the Argonne Forest and helped to bring the war to a successful end.

THE MACHINE-GUN IN SERVICE

Although the machine-gun has been used ever since the Civil War, it was not a vital factor in warfare until the recent great conflict. Army officials were very slow to take it up, because they did not understand it. They used to think of it as an inferior piece of light artillery, instead of a superior rifle. The Gatling was so heavy that it had to be mounted on wheels, and naturally it was thought of as a cannon. In the Franco-Prussian War the French had a machine-gun by which they set great store. It was called a mitrailleuse, or a gun for firing grape-shot. It was something like the Gatling. The French counted on this machine to surprise and overwhelm the Germans. But they made the mistake of considering it a piece of artillery and fired it from long range, so that it did not have a chance to show its worth. Only on one or two occasions was it used at close range, and then it did frightful execution. However, it was a very unsatisfactory machine, and kept getting out of order. It earned the contempt of the Germans, and later when the Maxim gun was offered to the German Army they would have none of it. They did not want to bother with "a toy cannon."

It really was not until the war between Russia and Japan that military men began to realize the value of the machine-gun. As the war went on, both the Russians and the Japanese bought up all the machine-guns they could secure. They learned what could be done with the aid of barbed wire to retard the enemy while the machine-guns mowed them down as they were trying to get through.

A man with a machine-gun is worth a hundred men with rifles; such is the military estimate of the weapon. The gun fires so fast that after hitting a man it will hit him again ten times while he is falling to the ground. And so it does not pay to fire the gun continuously in one direction, unless there is a dense mass of troops charging upon it. Usually the machine-gun is swept from side to side so as to cover as wide a range as possible. It is played upon the enemy as you would play the hose upon the lawn, scattering a shower of lead among the advancing hosts.