These conditions led to the development of machine guns along two separate lines—the heavy type machine gun, which must be capable of long sustained fire, and the automatic rifle, whose primary requisite is extreme lightness. These requirements brought the ultimate elimination from ground use in France and in the United States of guns of the so-called intermediate weight as being incapable of fulfilling either of the above requirements to the fullest degree.
The machine gun produced by the American inventor, Col. I. N. Lewis, was a revelation when it came to the aid of the allies early in the great war. This was an air-cooled gun which could be fired for a considerable time without excessive heating, and it weighed only 25 pounds, no great burden for a soldier. The Lewis machine gun was hailed by many as the greatest invention brought into prominence by the war, although its weight put it in the intermediate class, with limitations as noted above.
Along in the first decade of the present century the Benét-Mercié automatic machine rifle was developed. This was an air-cooled gun of the automatic rifle type and weighed 30 pounds. Light as this gun was, it was still too heavy to be of great service as an automatic rifle, since a strong man would soon tire of holding 30 pounds up to his shoulder, and it was therefore in the intermediate class.
The Germans had apparently realized better than anyone else the value of machine guns in the kind of fighting which they expected to be engaged in, and therefore supplied them to their troops in greater numbers than did the other powers, having, an early report stated, 50,000 Maxim machine guns at the commencement of hostilities. The Austrian Army had adopted an excellent heavy type machine gun known as the Schwarzlose whose chief feature lay in the fact that it operated with only one major spring.
Such was the machine-gun situation, although incompletely set forth here, at the beginning of the great war. The nations, with the exception of Germany, had been slow to promote machine gunnery as a conspicuous phase of their military preparedness. In our Army we had a provisional machine-gun organization, but no special officers and few enthusiasts for machine guns. We were content with a theoretical equipment of four machine guns per regiment. The fact was that in no previous war had the machine gun demonstrated its tactical value. The chief utility of the weapon was supposed to lie in its police effectiveness in putting down mobs and civil disorders and in its value in other special situations, particularly defensive ones.
The three years of fighting in Europe before the United States was drawn in had demonstrated the highly important place which the machine gun held in modern tactics. Because of the danger of our position we had investigated many phases of armed preparedness, and in this investigation numerous questions had arisen regarding machine guns. The Secretary of War had appointed a board of five Army officers and two civilians to study the machine-gun subject, to recommend the types of guns to be adopted, the number of guns we should have per unit of troops, how these guns should be transported, and other matters pertaining to the subject. Six months before we declared war this board submitted a report strongly recommending the previously adopted Vickers machine gun and the immediate procurement of 4,600 of them. In December, 1916, the War Department acted on this report by contracting for 4,000 Vickers machine guns from the Colt Co. in addition to 125 previously ordered.
The Vickers gun belongs to what is known as the heavy type of machine gun. The board found that the tests it had witnessed did not then warrant the adoption of a light-type machine gun, although the Lewis gun of the intermediate type was then being manufactured in this country. The board, however, recommended that we conduct further competitive tests of machine guns at the Springfield Armory, in Massachusetts, these tests to begin May 1, 1917, the interval being given to permit inventors and manufacturers to prepare equipment for the competition.
The war came to us before these tests were made. On the 6th day of April, 1917, our equipment included 670 Benét-Mercié machine rifles, 282 Maxim machine guns of the 1904 model, 353 Lewis machine guns, and 148 Colt machine guns. The Lewis guns, however, were chambered for the .303 British ammunition and would not take our service cartridges.
Moreover, the manufacturing facilities for machine guns in this country were much more limited in extent than the public had any notion of then or to-day. Both England and France had depended mainly upon their own manufacturing facilities for their machine guns, the weapons which they secured on order from the United States being supplementary and subsidiary to their own supplies. We had at the outbreak of the war only two factories in the United States which were actually producing machine guns in any quantity at all. These were the Savage Arms Corporation, which in its factory at Utica, N. Y., was nearing the completion of an order for about 12,500 Lewis guns for the British and Canadian Governments, and the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation, which had manufactured a large number of Colt machine guns of the old lever type for the Russian Government. The Colt factory in the spring of 1917 was equipping itself with machinery to produce the 4,125 Vickers guns, the order for 4,000 of which had been placed the previous December by the War Department on recommendation of the Machine Gun Board. None of these guns, however, had been completed when the United States entered the war. The Colt Co. also held a contract for Vickers guns to be produced for the Russian Government.
It was therefore evident that we should have to build up in the United States almost a completely new capacity for the production of machine guns. Nevertheless, we took advantage of what facilities were at hand; and at once, in fact within a week after the declaration of war, began placing orders for machine guns. The first of these orders came on April 12, when we placed a contract with the Savage Arms Corporation for 1,300 Lewis guns, which, as manufactured by that corporation, had by this time been overhauled in design and much improved. This order was subsequently heavily increased. On June 2 we placed an order with the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation for 2,500 Colt guns, these weapons to be used in the training of our machine-gun units.