If you survived as a machine gunner in World War I, you were considered one of the lucky ones.

But surviving meant living with what you did with that gun for the rest of your life.

This is the story of the men who operated the deadliest weapon of the Great War, but who everyone on the battlefield was trying to kill.

So, as we always do, let’s go back to where it all actually began for machine guns.

In the time of musketss and muzzle loaders, the first attempt at greater firepower was bunching several barrels together into what were called volley guns.

But these were far from what you could call machine guns since they fired a single volley and then had to be completely reloaded.

But then came Richard Jordan Gatling with his, you guessed it right, Gatling gun.

Now, although it wasn’t quite a machine gun, it was the first thing that actually fired like one.

It was purely mechanical, using a hand crank to rotate multiple barrels.

And as they rotated, they went through positions of loading, firing, and extracting, all driven by that same mechanical motion.

It was basically a very quick firing boltaction rifle rather than a true machine gun.

Armies were skeptical at first, but for the first time in history, a single soldier or a small team could deliver an incredible rate of fire.

Major powers began equipping themselves with Gatling guns, but they were more like artillery.

Big and clumsy, mounted on carriages, they were difficult to keep up with infantry and what was then considered mobile warfare.

But then came Hyram Maxim, and he was about to turn military tactics upside down with his creation.

Here’s what he did.

He realized that the energy wasted in that powerful kick could be harnessed for something revolutionary.

Instead of letting all that recoil force go to waste, he could use it to automatically cycle the weapon’s action, reloading and firing again without any human intervention.

Rather than requiring an operator to provide the energy, his gun used the recoil force from each fired cartridge to automatically eject the spent casing, load the next round, close the [music] breach, and do everything again for the next shot.

All the operator needed to do was hold down the trigger.

Between 1883 and 1885, Maxim patented gas, recoil, and blowback methods of operation, covering every possible variation and protecting his invention from imitators.

And look [music] at this.

The prototype was designed and demonstrated in 1884, still a full year before the invention of smokeless powder.

All of Maxim’s early work was done with black powder cartridges, which produced massive fouling and smoke.

That he achieved reliability under those conditions is genuinely impressive.

He [music] fired over 200,000 rounds through the prototype guns with minimal problems.

The prototype could even be set to fire at any rate from one round per minute all the way up to 600 rounds per minute using a unique hydraulic rate of fire control lever like an accelerator pedal for the gun.

Military trials demonstrated that a single maxim equaled the firepower of 60 riflemen firing simultaneously.

Unlike the Gatling’s gravity-fed hoppers that were prone to jamming, Maxim’s gun fed from 250 round fabric belts that could be linked together for extended fire.

This was a major innovation that finally allowed truly sustained shooting.

Continuous automatic fire generated tremendous heat that would quickly crack or deform a conventional barrel.

So, Maxim solved this with a cylindrical brass or steel water jacket surrounding the barrel holding about one gallon of water.

During firing, the water absorbed the barrel heat and began to boil with steam condensing through a hose into a separate canister.

This prevented the gun’s position from being revealed by rising steam clouds.

With proper water supply, the Maxim could fire continuously for hours, though the water would begin evaporating noticeably after about 750 rounds.

The complete Maxim system weighed about 117 lbs, [music] including the gun, tripod mount, and water in the jacket.

A crew of four to six men typically operated the weapon.

You had a gunner, loader, and additional men to carry the gun, the ammo, water, and spare parts.

While a single soldier could technically fire it, efficient operation demanded teamwork.

It’s also interesting to mention that there was a scaled up version of the Maxim for 37 mm rounds, which the British rejected.

But the Bors of South Africa bought some of these and nicknamed it the Pom Pom.

When the conflict with the British began, the Bors basically used Britain’s own weapon against them to horrific effect, hiding these guns near British artillery batteries and decimating quite a few.

Not the topic of this video, but still interesting to mention as a side note.

Okay, so at first, armies were skeptical about adopting the weapon.

Opinions ranged from it being useless for what was considered modern warfare to being too costly because it spent too much ammo to simply not understanding how it could even be used on a battlefield.

But slowly but surely it gained interest and the major powers began adopting it.

Everyone felt something big was coming.

However, no one could have even imagined how big it was going to really get and just how deadly Maxim’s creation was about to become.

Now, the Maxim design spawned three major variants that would define the First World War.

Germany’s MG08 was chambered in the 7.

92x 57 mm Mouser round.

Britain’s Vicers in the 303 British cartridge which earned legendary status for reliability [music] like when it delivered sustained fire to deny Germans a certain area during one operation firing for 12 hours straight.

They used 100 barrels to fire nearly 1 million rounds without a single breakdown.

The Vicers actually remained in British service until 1968 when it was ceremonially retired with a full military funeral.

The Russians had their Tula arms version chambered in 7.

62 62x 54 mm with a distinctive two- wheeled cart and attached gunshield.

And these variants are still seen every now and then in the Russo Ukrainian war deployed on both sides for some reason.

But while everyone adopted the Maxim design, the French actually went with the air cooled hotchkiss and for an interesting reason.

There were initially tensions with Britain over territory in Africa and the French army wanted something lighter than the Maxim.

But more importantly, they didn’t want a water cooled system because they expected to fight in the desert where a steady water supply was impossible.

The Hotchkiss had rings on its thick barrel that dissipated heat and it could reach about 400° C without damage.

At that point, the barrel would be literally glowing dark red.

The Hotchkiss was actually gas operated rather than recoil operated like the Maxim.

However, the biggest trade-off was its feeding system of 24 round strips compared to the Maxim’s 250 round belt.

The American Expeditionary Force actually used the Hotchkiss for quite some time when they entered the war until they developed their own machine guns.

So, going back to these new machine guns everyone now had, they still weren’t tested in real combat.

And everyone, no matter how sick this sounds, but we humans are quite a strange species, was excited to try them out on other people.

First came the colonial bloodbaths where the maxim would begin its history written in blood.

During the first Matabelli war about 700 men of the British South Africa company’s paramilitary force faced 5 [music] to 6,000 indel warriors.

The column possessed five maxim machine guns and when the matabelly launched their surprise night attack.

The maxims opened fire.

The effect was described as the warriors being mowed down like grass.

Around 1 and a half thousand warriors were killed while the British lost four men.

One week later at Benbees, 2,000 Matabelli riflemen and 4,000 warriors attacked again.

About 2500 more were cut down by the Maxims.

There were quite a few more such examples of what a few Maxim guns could do to a mass infantry attack.

However, for some reason, this was written off because they were fighting the less developed armies of colonial states.

It was deemed that in what they called civilized European warfare, [music] things wouldn’t be like that.

Even the Russo-Japanese war wasn’t a strong enough warning for how the machine gun was making old charging tactics obsolete and incredibly costly.

They still thought that fighting in Europe wasn’t going to be like that.

Spoiler alert, it is about to be much, much worse.

When the guns of August 1914 opened fire, every major power expected everything would be over by Christmas.

The generals planned for a short, decisive war of maneuver.

Military doctrine remained wedded to the offensive, and pre-war theorists believed that victory would come not from superior tactics or even superior weaponry, but through superior will.

And no one could even imagine just how wrong they were about to be at the expense of millions of young soldiers lives.

You see, the technology of defensive warfare had advanced far beyond the technology of offensive warfare.

Machine guns combined with rapidfiring artillery when used with trenches and barbed wire gave a decided advantage to the defense.

When the Great War began, attacks were linear in nature and based on pre-war theories that didn’t account for the machine gun.

Each battalion advanced shoulderto-shoulder with a screen of skirmishes out front.

Once the main force made contact with the enemy, reserves were fed into the battle to fill gaps created by casualties.

The advancing force was trying to suppress enemy fire and inflict enough casualties to make the opposition waiver.

Then theoretically, a bayonet charge would deliver the final blow.

And now, how do you think this looked like when a machine gun was on the other side of this mass of men bunched up together, advancing across open ground? The first months of war produced casualties on a scale that shocked everyone.

In just the first couple of months as the Great War began, the waring sides collectively suffered over three million casualties.

That quick decisive war that would end by Christmas, as everyone talked about, couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Along with artillery, the machine guns had a huge part in this.

The British Expeditionary Force arrived in France with just two Vicar’s machine guns per battalion.

The Germans had six machine guns per regiment, or one for every 750 men.

But by 1918, they would have one machine gun for every 50 men, while the British army went from two guns per battalion to 36.

After the Battle of the Man in September 1914, where combined casualties approached 500,000, the German armies retreated to the A River and dug in on the high ground, both sides then attempted to outflank [music] each other to the north in what became known as the race to the sea.

But it wasn’t a race at all.

It was a series of overlapping engagements where each failed flanking movement pushed the front line further north until it reached the Belgian coast.

By the end of November 1914, the war that many had expected to be swift and decisive had become a stalemate.

An unbroken chain of trenches stretched from the Alps to the North Sea.

About 25,000 mi of trenches were collectively built by all sides during the conflict, and soon machine guns alongside artillery became the rulers of the battlefield.

In some sections, there were over 30 machine guns per kilometer of the front.

The primary reason the machine gun caused trench warfare was that the weapon was useful pretty much only for defense.

They were heavy and crew served with four to eight men working around the gun, so you couldn’t quite go Rambo style, firing the maxim from your hip during an advance.

However, this was about to change exactly because of that when new versions of machine guns emerged specifically for this purpose.

But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Okay, so let’s first explain how machine guns were actually used in practice during World War I.

The standard became placing machine gun nests every 250 yards along the frontline trenches, each with interlocking fields of fire.

These guns were positioned behind multiple lines of barbed wire fronted by ground cleared of any cover and protected in concrete reinforced [music] pillboxes if possible.

Now, when firing in sustained bursts, the rounds don’t follow the same path due to vibration, ammunition variation, and atmospheric conditions.

Bullets spread into a cone-shaped pattern going from the muzzle, creating an elliptical area called the beaten zone.

This was an oval approximately 2 m wide where bullets impact when the gun is positioned.

So, this cone of fire is nearly parallel to the ground at ranges up to 600 m, machine guns could create what was called grazing fire.

That means bullets traveling no higher than a man’s head for the entire distance from gun to target.

Anything within this zone that stood upright would be hit.

Groups of guns positioned to interlock their fire ensured overlapping [music] coverage, denying safe access to areas of the battlefield extending 3 km or more.

This interlocking fire pattern meant that even if one machine gun was knocked out, the others on either side could still cover the space between trenches.

Attackers found themselves shot at from multiple directions simultaneously, making it impossible to find cover.

Enalade fire, which means shooting along the length of enemy formations rather than at their [music] front, proved particularly devastating because each bullet had the chance to hit multiple men in a file.

Wire was laid out at night in belts 15 m deep [music] or more to slow and funnel infantry advances, ensuring attackers spent maximum time exposed to machine gun fire.

The mud only made everything worse.

Artillery bombardments had torn up the land, and rain created thick mud, sometimes deep enough that soldiers could become stuck and drown.

The dominance of the defensive machine gun was the single greatest contributing factor to the grinding attrition and staggering casualties of the First World War.

While artillery caused about 60 to 70% of Western Front casualties, machine guns were responsible for an estimated 20 to 40% of battlefield deaths.

So, how did life for the machine gun crew actually look like? Well, not quite relaxing or anywhere safe, but one thing is sure, it was exciting.

And by exciting, I mean terrifying with severe post-traumatic stress disorder if you were lucky enough to somehow survive the war.

The crew consisted of the gunner who aimed and fired.

The loader sat to his right, feeding belts into the gun.

Additional men carried ammunition, water, and spare parts, and helped with whatever was needed around the gun.

When water was short, soldiers urinated into the gun to keep it going.

Two entire infantry companies were assigned simply to ferry ammunition for guns during extended firing.

Barrel changing was required about every hour during prolonged operations.

Guns demanded constant cleaning and attention, and stoppages had to be cleared as quickly as possible because every second the gun is not firing gives the enemy time to come closer.

And under trench conditions with mud, dirt, and debris everywhere, keeping a machine gun functioning was a constant battle in itself.

Machine gunners and their positions were the highest priority targets on the battlefield.

Artillery bombardments specifically targeted them before attacks, while snipers tried to take out gunners or disable guns during the attack.

Infantry assault tactics were devised specifically to destroy machine gun nests, and grenades became the primary tool for this.

German stormtroopers had grenaders, soldiers carrying only hand grenades for taking out machine gun positions, trying to come to them from the sides or rear.

The British created the first tanks specifically to counterb barbed wire and take out the machine guns.

So, you see just how much they were bothering all sides.

And all while everyone tried to kill them, the crew of machine gun had to keep firing at [music] any cost in order to keep their line from falling when under heavy attack.

The British Machine Gun Corps earned its horrible nickname because of this.

Of the 170,500 men, 62,000 became casualties.

So, the core got called the suicide club.

They served well in advance of the front line as part of defense in-depth tactics, [music] making them particularly vulnerable.

They were stationary targets exposed to everything from artillery to rifle fire, and replacements stepped into positions knowing full well that their predecessors had died in the same spot, with them now facing the same odds.

Germany developed the Sappen Panza trench armor for their gunners.

The armor proved effective against low velocity fragments and shrapnel, though it offered no protection against direct rifle fire at close range.

Now imagine how horrible it looked when an attack began.

A machine gun has opened frantic continuous fire to break off the enemy charge.

[music] He is literally firing until he gets shot at which point the next man takes over the gun immediately.

He knows that this moment would come and that someone before him came to replace the fallen gunner and most likely someone is about to replace him as well any moment now.

and he is going to be replaced by someone else when killed.

[music] It’s just terrible if you think about it.

Machine gun warfare devastated both those behind the guns and those charging against them.

Individual machine gunners killed many hundreds of men advancing before their guns, wrecking the soldier mentally and emotionally after hours of unrelenting slaughter.

Even if you survive, you have to live with mowing down hundreds of people, looking at them on the open ground, and watching how they fall as you shoot.

There’s no time to think about that in the moment, but there are going to be some longinking knights and dreams for the rest of your life.

And these were the quote unquote lucky ones who survived the war.

As discussed earlier, no one could find a way to make machine guns effective in offense.

But the war was now going on for quite some time, and all sides were trying to break the deadlock.

Armies began looking for ways to make them more mobile.

So, this brilliant defensive weapon could also be used in attack roles.

Germany attempted a solution with the MG0815.

They added a pistol grip, rifle style buttstock, and bipod while reducing weight to about 48 lb with ammunition and water.

But after testing it in combat, it wasn’t looking promising.

Then came Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis with a design for a new air cooled machine gun.

It had a distinctive wide barrel shroud that drew cool air across the barrel after each shot, a radiator principle that eliminated the need for heavy water jackets.

The gun weighed 28 lb, roughly one quarter the weight of water cooled designs with a 47 or 97 round pan magazine at top the receiver.

See how Tommy Shelby used it in his firefight with the Italian mafia.

Jokes aside, it was among the first machine guns truly portable where one man could carry and fire the weapon.

Though a two-man team was standard practice, this enabled new rush tactics for infantry assault where soldiers could fire from the hip while advancing and provide mobile fire support during offensive operations.

Then we have some other not so successful designs.

And when I say less successful, I mean almost horrible.

The French tried to achieve this with the Shosha, which was actually the war’s most produced automatic weapon.

But that didn’t mean it was good.

The Shoa’s reliability problems became [music] infamous.

The 20 round curved magazine was made of thin stamped metal and open on one side to show the ammunition count, which let mud into the mechanism and caused about 75% of all stoppages.

It fired at a low rate of about 250 rounds per minute, so it was more controllable.

However, under ideal conditions, the gun jammed after about 300 rounds.

Under trench conditions, jams came after roughly 100 rounds.

So, not quite something you’d like to trust with your life.

American forces received versions of the Shosha converted for the 306 cartridge that were even worse with reliability, if that’s even possible.

However, the Americans were lucky to have one of the greatest gun designers ever to live, the legendary John Moses Browning.

When tasked with creating a weapon for this new walking fire concept everyone was talking about, he created something that went on to be used extensively even in the next global war and beyond.

The BAR or Browning automatic rifle about 3 lb lighter than the Shaw.

This gas operated aircooled design fired the powerful 306 cartridge from a 20 round detachable box magazine at about 500 rounds per minute with both semi-automatic and fully automatic fire modes.

It was much more reliable and a far better design, and it was kept as a highly guarded secret, so it wouldn’t fall into German hands.

It was held back from fully deploying on the front line, saved for the planned next year of the war that never came, but it would prove itself i\\\\\\\\\\\ n the next war.

We have a whole video on the BAR that you can watch later if you want.

Then there was the problem of clearing trenches and those horrific close quarter fights that inevitably ended in hand-to-hand combat.

Armies were yet again looking for ways to use machine guns for this as well.

That led to what later became known as the submachine gun or machine pistol as the Germans put it.

They actually created the first submachine gun, the MP18.

Chambered in 9 mm, it armed their elite stormtroopers who were terrifying the Allies in rapid surprise attacks, penetrating [music] deep into their lines.

We have a whole video on them as well, so take a look on the channel if you’re interested.

The experience from World War I gave priority to more mobile air cooled machine guns, and these took over after the war.

They would characterize the next war with models unique for extreme rate of fire like the German MG42 or heavy destructive power like the American M2 Browning in 50 caliber.

But the war of machine guns is certainly the first world war.

\