There are times when weapons of war significantly change the way things are. One of them is the machine gun. One of the difficulties of most guns of the 19th century was the inability to fire a lot of bullets at the same time. Several guns were developed to try to take care of this, all based on the current technology of the time. One was like a large revolver with a large drum of bullets, but issues with the barrel heating up made that impractical. It was also mechanically actuated by the gunner turning a crank. A design that helped to get around this was one that had multiple barrels so the issue of overheating was not a problem. This, of course, is the Gatling gun. Still, it required the gunner to turn a crank and the Gatling was not all that mechanically reliable or accurate.

In took a Maine inventor by the name of Hiram Maxim to come up with a useful design. Maxim realized that for an invention to be successful, it had to economically viable in addition to working as advertised. Maxim was as much a genius as you'll find and thanks to developing and patenting a practical incandescent light bulb and a current generator ahead of Edison, was pretty much set in terms of money. Edison's backers hired him as a 'roving technical advisor' for ten years with the stipulation that he cease working on electricity and power devices for that period of time.

Since he was basically free to do what he wanted and had the means, he moved to London, England and returned to one of his earlier ideas of developing a machine gun. His design used a water jacket to keep the barrel cool. This jacket used the heat developed in firing to circulate water from an external tank into the water jacket around the gun. Operation of the gun would cause steam to come from the external tank and it would need to be replenished from time to time. He used the blowback from firing the cartridge to eject the spent cartridge and bring the next one into play.  Of course the needed to develop a proper cartridge belt and this took some time as well. Eventually, by the mid 1880s, he had a working gun that was a sensation when it was shown.

This interested the British military who basically got the ball rolling in terms of making modifications to bring it up to requirements. Eventually Maxim was able to produce these very expensive, heavy and reliable guns for the British Army. The guns were also licensed to several different countries and lighter versions were also developed. When the number of orders got to be more than his small company could handle, he went in with Vickers. Eventually Vickers bought out Maxim's stake in the gun and made their own modifications to the gun.

The Vickers-Maxim gun was also mass produced in Germany by Spandau, and provided in much greater numbers than the British, so that when WWI got well underway, you had the unusual situation of both sides using the same machine gun. The gun was devastating against troops and when properly used, made any attempts at using frontal assaults pure suicide. The British had a tactical advantage with the start of the war as the gun had been used against the Boers in South Africa so they had developed some decent tactics, but were lacking in the large numbers that the Germans had. The Germans learned quickly, however.

The Maxim was not only used during WWI, but also in many of the smaller wars and in WWII. WWI issue Maxims were used as late as the Korean War by the British army. The last gun was withdrawn from British service in 1968. To help expend some of the now unneeded belts of ammunition, one gun was chosen and fired non-stop for seven days, using up 5 million rounds of ammunition without a fault. The gun fired 250 round belts and every 1 to 1 1/2 hours, the barrel would be changed, but that was it. Crews were rotated during this period of time.

Rarely is a weapon in service for so long, but the Maxim is one of them. In this book, the author tells of the previous history leading up to the developement of the Maxim gun as well as any modifications made to the gun. Its use from the late 1880s until the finale in the late 1960s is also covered with stories of the gun's effectiveness helping to tell the tale. A few things I found interesting were that this gun was developed for aircraft without the cooling jacket and was quite successful in this role. I also found it interesting that these guns were used for barrage fire before an attack. With tens of thousands of bullets falling on enemy troops in a trench, the experience had to be frightening at most. I also found it interesting that the gun was not the best in tanks as a hole in the water jacket would soon put the gun out of commission. For those purposes, a Lewis gun, which wasn't as effective, but was cheaper to produce, was the gun of choice.

In all, a most interesting read and one that I have no trouble recommending to you.

June 2013

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