The Social History of the Machine Gun [Reprint ed.] 0801833582, 9780801833588

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THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF

Machine Gun

John §Jlis

A

PANTHEON BOOKS

A Division of Random H ouse, New York

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Fint American Edition Copyright© 1975 by John Ellis All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House. Jnc. , New York, and simu,ltancously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, T oronto. Simultaneously publi!hed in Great Britain by Croom Helm Ltd .. London.

The illustrations are reproduced by courtesy of Illustrated Newspapers group, pages 9, 21, 52, 46, 47, 60, 67, 79, 81, 85, 86, 87 and 93: Browing, page 41 ; Imperial War Museum, pages 59, 115, 117 and 119; The Tate Gallery, page 112: Associated Press, pages 154, 156, 169 and 170; Homer Dickens Foundation, pages 161and162

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publitation Data

Ellis, John. The Social History of the Machine Gun. Bibliography:

p. 181.

Includes index. I. Machine-guns- History. 2. Military art and science- History. 3. War and society. I. Title. UF620.A2E58 1975 355.8'2 74-26204 ISBN 0-394-49665-9 ISBN 0·394-73124·7 pbk.

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,~contents

I New Ways of Death

9

ll Industrialised War 21 Ill Officers and Gentlemen

47

IV Making the Map Red · 79

v

The Trauma: 1914-18

111

VI A Symbol of the Times

149

Vil New Ways of War Bibliography Index

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167

181

183

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Acknowledgements I am most grateful to the following for their permission to reproduce extracts from the various works named below: Mr.G.T.Sassoon for portions of 'The Kiss' and 'The Redeemer' by Siegfried Sassoon. Gerald Duckworth Ltd. for a portion of 'The Modern Traveller' by Hilaire Belloc. Peter Newbolt for a portion of'Vitai Lampada' from Poems Old and New by Sir Henry Newbolt. Mrs.G.Bambridge and Macmillan and Co. for portions of 'Pharoah and the Sergeant' from The Definitive Edition ef Kipling's Verse, 'The White Man's Burden' and 'The Lesson' from The Five Nations, all by Rudyard Kipling. I am also grateful to the following for their help in finding and their permission to use certain of the illustrations in this book: The Browning Company of Morgan (Utah) Mr. William] .Helmer, author ofTiu Gun That Made the Twen ties Roar. Illustrated Newspapers Ltd . and Mr.H.E. Bray of the Copyright and Archives Department. Associated Press and Mr. Ray Pereira of tbe Photograph Library.

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I New UUys ofDeath Fear not, my Friends, this Terrible Machine, They're only Wounded that have Shares therein. Anonymous pamphleteer, 1718.

Machine guns are now commonplace. The indis ensable aid the offer to soldiers, policemen and terr · · or gi:ante . e 1s acceptance as not come ~sily. The reasons for this are numerous, but most of them are much more than a simple evaluation of the machine gun's technical merits. The following pages will show that the general aspirations and prejudices of particular social groups are just as important for the history of military technology as are straightforward problems of technical efficiency. Guns, like everything else, have their social history. In this book it will be seen that the anachronistic ideals of the European officer class, the messianic nature of nineteenth-century capitalism, the imperialist drive into Africa and elsewhere, and the racialist assumptions that underpinned it, were more important to the history of the machine gun than any bald assessment of its mechanical efficacy. The history of technology is part and parcel of social history in general. The same is equally true of military history, far too long regarded as a simple matter of tactics and technical differentials. Military history too can only be understood against the wider social background. For as soon as one begins to discuss war and military organisation without due regard to the whole social 9 01gitized by

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process, one is in danger of coming to regard it as a constant, an inevitable feature of international behaviour. In other words, if one is unable to regard war as a function of par ticular forms of social and political organisation and particular stages of historical development, one will not be able to conceive of even the possibility of a world without war.

Bejort Their Time Only a hundred years ago machine guns were generally regarded as being little more than mechanical gimmicks, of no real value on the conventional battlefield. In the beginning this lack ofinterest in the potential of sustained automatic fire was quite understandable. I t was always theoretically · o conceive of a n that wo ew oiit -vast numbe of bullets or w v r 1n av ime. ut for undreds of years men lacked the technological expertise with which to translate such visions into reality. There were no metals that could withstand the pressures of regular mass or sustained fire. Nor were manufacturing techniques sufficiently well advanced to enable individual craftsmen to work to the fractional tolerances demanded for every part of such a complex gun. The first efforts in the field of increasing the firepower of an individual piece were limited to trying to multiply the volume of each discharge rather than increasing a gun's rate of fire. Since the very introduction of gunpowder, in fact, there had always been those who were keen to make such an improvement. The earliest efforts in this direction were the ribauldequins, or 'organ guns'. T hese ponderous contraptions consisted of varying numbers of barrels laid out in parallel layers, each of which could be ignited almost simultaneously by one or two gunners. The first mention of such a weapon was in 1339, and they seem to have soon achieved considerable popularity. I n 1382 the army at Ghent had two hundred of these guns in the field, whilst in 1411 the Burgundian army.is reputed to have had some two thousand of them. I n 1457 the Venetian general, Colleoni, employed organ guns at the battle of Picardini as a mobile auxiliary to his armoured cavalry. They were also used against the French by Pedro Navarro, who placed thirty carts of multi-barrel guns in front of his infantry. These devices had some impact on the French, and Louis XII (1498 - 1515) is said to have had at his disposal at least one gun of fi(ty barrels, so arranged that they could all be fired simultaneously. But such guns had severe limitations. Even assuming that all barrels fired without mishap, the initial effect of the volley was severely dissipated by the inordinate length of time it 10 01gitized by

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took to muzzle-load each individual barrel. The advantages gained by the ability to deliver concentrated fire were nullified by the inability to maintain a sustained fire. Similarly, the guns were so unwieldy that it was almost impossible to manoeuvre them to positions on the battlefield where they might be most needed. For hundreds of years in fact gunnery was a very crude and unreliable science. Up to the sixteenth century, for example, the actual firing of a gun depended upon the bringing of some form of fire, usually a slow match, into contact with the powder in the firing pan. After the sixteenth century the process was streamlined somewhat and made a little more reliable. From this date the initial ignition was achieved by striking together flint and roughened steel to produce a spark. Such flintlocks were the standard infantry arm until the invention of the percussion cap in 1807. In neither period was it technically feasible to produce a reliable gun that could produce either a concentrated or a sustained fire. In both cases such a gun would be bedevilled by the same problem of the prolonged loading period that had so detracted from the value of the organ guns. Similarly, the chronic unreliability of both loading methods would not guarantee any multi-barrel gun much more than a fifty per cent fire rate; whilst the combination of this same unreliability, the instability of many charges of gunpowder packed into one piece, and the possibility of serious flaws in the barrels due to crude casting techniques, could make any such gun a potential death trap for those called upon to fire it. Even so, the very idea of being able to produce a gun that had a significantly superior firepower occasionally drove an inventor to the drawing board. Either from ignorance or blind faith each went to work thinking that for him at least the constraints of an as yet inadequate technology would count for nothing. One such visionary, in the sixteenth century; came to see Sir Francis Walsingham, then the Secretary ofState. W.i.!.h..~ a Jette&. that pro.claim~d !Mlits bearer, a Gerl'l}an, 'among:otber excellent qualities which he hath~ can ..make an harquebus that shall contain balls or pellets -of lead, all of which shaJfgo· off one..afte1 anotner, havi'ng once given fire, so that with one harqu ebus one may - !