The Gun (15 page)

By this time, Gatling had refined the basic operations of his gun and embarked on the process of miniaturization. Gatlings of the time weighed 224 pounds, the carriage an additional 202 pounds, and the limber another 200.
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With a reasonable load of ammunition, the weapon, ready for movement about the battlefield, weighed more than a half ton. To expand markets, the Gatling Gun Company offered a smaller and more portable model, sold under the name Camel gun. The Camel gun was made not for forts or warships, but for overland patrols and expeditions. It fit into a case that could be lashed to the back of a pack animal. A portable tripod completed the kit, and allowed the gun to be set readily on the ground most anywhere required. These were essential developments. In the short term, they allowed Gatling guns, first created to ride on a timber between large wheels, to get off the roads and level ground and out into the infantry’s terrain. In the long term they marked the first step toward the shrinkage of rapid-fire arms, which would make them available to a much longer list of users.

By 1892, the Gatling gun was down to 74 pounds.
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In 1895, the Maxim Nordenfelt Company took miniaturization further, down to 40 pounds—25 pounds for the gun and 15 more for a tripod, the pair fitting together in a pack.
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These smaller guns were not mainstays in the fighting.
But they established, change by change and pound by pound, that rapid-fire arms could be reduced in mass.

The Maxim’s success in the field, and the interest of many nations, helped the company’s prospects for raising capital or finding partners. Hiram Maxim’s actual state of affairs were not rosy. Maxim was a difficult man—cantankerous, arrogant, impulsive, rude—and he was a designer by personality, not a manager. His company’s affairs were sloppy, and by this time he was extremely deaf. One of his directors, to communicate with him, had to pull on Maxim’s earlobe, lean close, and bellow. The company had factories at Crayford, Erith, Dartford, Birmingham, and Stockholm, but Maxim was regarded as so disruptive that the company barred him from entering the assembly-room floors, and set aside a workshop for him where he might spend his time without wasting everyone else’s. The company itself had been a far-flung and overcapitalized concern, and equipment was often idle. A directors’ report in 1890 noted that one factory had three to four times the necessary capacity. The company had a product that was gaining reputation and generating enthusiasm. But it leaked money.
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Nonetheless, the product was good enough that the firm would survive mismanagement and all of the disruptions Maxim would muster. Vickers purchased the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company for 1.35 million British pounds in 1897, becoming Vickers, Son & Maxim, and helping the Vickers family to position itself against their rivals in the armaments trade, Armstrong.
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By this time, Maxim’s patterns were being turned into guns in England, Germany, France, Spain, and Sweden, and Maxim expected them to be made in the United States. “The automatic system has now been adopted by nearly all nations, great and small,” he said proudly at a public lecture. “We are now giving employment to a large number of men. Our works are fully employed.”
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And this did not mention the manufacture of Maxims abroad, in Germany, where a firm had astutely arranged a licensing agreement that passed the full technical drawings of a Maxim gun to German possession. Step by step, the demonstration before the kaiser was leading to its result:
trenches bristling with machines guns in World War I. The gun works at Spandau would provide the German armies with thousands of the Maschinengewehr 08, a Teutonic Maxim knock-off, for the start of the war.

Two battles at the close of the nineteenth century showed, once and for all, what machine guns could do when supplied with well-made ammunition and properly employed.

The first was in July 1898, when the American army landed in Cuba with intentions to oust the Spanish. Although the Maxim gun was supplanting all other machine guns in Europe, the American army had not purchased any. As war with Spain approached, its main rapid-fire arm remained the Gatling, which it had accepted for service thirty-two years before. The army gathered and provisioned itself in Tampa, where the man who was to show the army how to use its guns at last, Second Lieutenant John H. Parker, arrived with the Thirteenth Infantry. Machine guns had been invented by Americans. They were a quintessentially American product. But aside from limited use against the Native American populations in the western territories, the American guns had scarcely been put to a combat test. Lieutenant Parker had been studying machine guns and the available literature on them, and had spent his brief career working out theories for their use. He had been born in Missouri in 1866, the same year the Gatling gun was officially, and belatedly, accepted in the United States Army. He found it scandalous that decades had passed since the weapons’ introduction, to such little effect. The army’s tactical mind, he concluded, was moribund, beholden to nonsense it had heard from European circles. “The rules of war established by pen soldiers do not form the basis of actual operations in the field,” he wrote. “Deductions based on the drill-made automatons of European armies are not applicable.”
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Lieutenant Parker, at thirty-one, was sure-footed beyond his experience and years. Up to this point, his military record had been undistinguished. He had ranked forty-ninth of the sixty-two graduates of the United States Military Academy’s Class of 1892,
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and he had neither previous combat service nor connections in civilian circles or the army’s senior leadership, which he was given to deriding. Not much about him suggested he could bend the army to his will. “He was, apparently, a safe man to ignore or snub if occasion or bad temper made it desirable to
ignore or snub somebody, and, above all, had no political friends who would be offended thereby.”
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Not much suggested that the army was any more ready for machine guns than it had been when General Ripley was thwarting Richard Gatling’s sales efforts during the Civil War. From 1872 through 1890, the American army had issued to its forces 253 Gatling guns in three different calibers, plus 32 other machine guns, including Gardner, Lowell, and Hotchkiss guns. On one level, this was impressive. The army had shrunk to fewer than thirty thousand men;
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considering its small size and the fact that it had been through decades without fighting a modern conventional foe, it was well equipped with rapid-fire arms. Yet almost no one knew how to use them effectively, and few people were interested in finding out. “Distributed, apparently according to no considered plan, to the various military establishments then existing throughout the continental United States, their maintenance was the duty of the local Ordnance officer,” an official historian of the subject found. “The post commander appears to have been without specific instructions as to their employment, and, unless he possessed a native curiosity concerning their characteristics (which was rarely the case), they remained wholly unused from the beginning of his tour of duty to the date of its termination.”
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Up to this time, the most intensive use of a machine gun on record had been at a territorial prison in the desert near Yuma, now in Arizona, where a Gatling had been mounted by the guards above the penitentiary walls. In 1887, a group of inmates, many incarcerated for stagecoach robberies and other violent frontier crimes, organized a prison break. Two prisoners overpowered the warden as he walked through the yard, breaking his skull and shooting him with one of his own pistols. Simultaneously, another twenty attacked the prison office, which fell under their control. Now equipped with the collection of rifles and pistols taken from the office, the inmates tried to fight their way out. A dozen managed to escape through the gate and into the desert. Their freedom lasted only as long as it took to get the Gatling aimed and cranked; three-quarters of the fleeing men were promptly knocked down.

No Gatling gun was ever worked more rapidly and unerringly than that on the penitentiary walls at that time, and the Winchesters in the hands of another guard on the walls fired a ball every three seconds.
Nine of the fleeing convicts dropped wounded in their tracks. Three more threw up their hands as a sign of surrender and walked back to the prison yard.
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The United States did not have the problems with machine-gun cartridges that had plagued Europe; its Gatlings, though bulky, worked well. And by the start of the Spanish-American War, the army had smokeless powder, which made the guns harder for any enemy to spot when they fired. But still they had little support. Colonel Custer’s attitude toward the guns—that they were not worth their weight and hassle—remained a common view. A few voices did rise on behalf of the weapons, but they were mostly boosters in the local or scientific press. The
Times
of London had come to the not especially difficult conclusion that with a Gatling gun “a continuous shower of ounce bullets can be poured upon the spot where the enemy is the thickest, swept along the line of troops or scattered over the field like a jet of water from a fire hose.”
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Other newspapers noted similar Gatling gun properties, even if the analysis they derived from what they saw could be a stretch. “So destructive has its efficiency been made that it may almost be termed a peace preserver rather than a demolisher,” the
Washington Post
declared. The
Indianapolis Sentinel
went further, invoking deterrence with the certitude of those who would later embrace the security of mutual assured destruction in the nuclear age. “We believe the Gatling gun will change the whole aspect of war in due time,” its editors wrote. “When six guns can pour a steady stream of bullets at the rate of 3,000 a minute into the enemy, it is easy enough to see that 100 guns would make it prudent not to advance an inch; but on the contrary, retire as soon as possible. With a few hundred Gatlings on both sides, armies would melt away like dew before the sun, and men would soon learn to settle their disputes by arbitration, or some other means less destructive of life.” The
London Broad Arrow
took a position closer to reality, seeing not deterrence, but a full list of practical uses. “The new model Gatling is a terrible instrument, capable of awful doings on occasion, as for instance, when it is desired to sink a torpedo boat, or enter the embrasures of a fort, mow down a column, sweep the streets in a riot, clear a bridge or drive back a skirmisher swarm.”
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The army still had no experience with the weapons in a major battle. Gatling use had been limited to six skirmishes with Indians, the defense
of forts and boats, and, by one account, the possible pot-shooting of a grizzly bear.
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The misapprehensions of the tactical potential and roles of rapid-fire arms fit neatly into the historical precedents. To produce and field these new weapons, a nation would need industrial capacity and a modern bureaucracy; this was because the costs of production were high, and maintaining a large and reliable supply of ammunition was demanding. But possessing these qualities, and distributing the new weapons to military commanders, did not mean that armies were ready for them. It was not merely that armies were often caretakers of tradition, and therefore fundamentally conservative institutions, or that they were led by the oldest members, whose battlefield experience was often dated and who might be the least likely officers to innovate. They were also fragmented within, prone to rivalries between services and competing ideas of how budgets should be spent.

Lieutenant Parker saw the army’s lack of vision as a waste. He was a seemingly fearless and hot-blooded young officer, and clever, too. Six months before the outbreak of war, before he was garrisoned to Tampa, he had written the War Department and proposed with characteristic self-promotion and confidence “the first correct tactical outline of the proper use of machine guns ever filed in any War Office in the world.” For good measure he had included drawings and specifications for a new machine-gun carriage, which would move the guns and their ammunition over varied terrain at the pace of the infantry. The War Department, he claimed, “did not even acknowledge receipt.”
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The war brought fresh chances to revisit the question. As the forces gathered in the damp heat, Parker lobbied to assemble a specialized machine-gun unit, an organization the United States had never previously sent to war. Yet he managed to prevail and was placed in charge of a section of Gatlings with thirty-seven men selected from multiple units. The result was a detachment that had the feel of a theoretical crusade; his was a personal project, conducted “without proper equipment, adequate instruction, or previous training, in the face of discouragements and sneers.”
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The lieutenant brought the guns ashore in Cuba in late June and began moving forward with the infantry and cavalry on the march toward Santiago. The force halted for four days just short of the Spanish trenches, and in the wait for battle Lieutenant Parker drilled his soldiers for several hours a day. They practiced loading and reloading so that they
might make continuous fire over a long period of time, and they worked on clearing jams, so that any gun that malfunctioned could be brought quickly back into the fight.

The lieutenant had more ambitious ideas for his Gatling than defending held ground. He wanted to push the guns to the fore and pour bullets onto the enemy positions as the infantry and cavalry advanced. He believed that when the time came for a charge, the guns should be right there, providing covering fire. Machine guns were modern killing tools, and tools that spread fear. Why leave them behind at a decisive time, when heavy fire was needed? Thirty-five years had passed since General Butler bought a dozen Gatling guns in Baltimore and marched them onto Confederate soil. No one had tried what Lieutenant Parker proposed. He insisted his detachment was ready. On July 1, the Americans went into the attack.