The Gun (18 page)

The marketplace, though, was enthused. Even before machine guns shaped the outcome of closely watched battles, Maxim guns had been finding customers near and far. Demand meant opportunity. Other designers wanted market share, too. New weapons emerged. In 1889, John Moses Browning, a second-generation American gunsmith whose father had operated a small gun works in Utah, began trying to harness another form of energy from a bullet’s discharge: the muzzle blast. Like almost anyone who had fired a rifle, Browning had noticed that the report of a rifle was accompanied by the rush of gas that followed the bullet out of the muzzle. He had seen how the blast knocked aside bulrushes in marshes in Utah. This represented unused energy. Browning wanted to put that energy to work. But how to capture gas rushing through a barrel, especially with a bullet in the way, moving at more than two thousand feet per second? Browning held a series of firing experiments,
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and ultimately made a prototype weapon with a vent inside the barrel, near the muzzle, to provide an alternative route for a portion of the expanding gases; essentially, a tap. In this system, in the tiny fraction of a second after the bullet passed the vent but before it left the barrel, gas whooshed at high pressure through the vent and forced a rod backward, down the length of the gun, toward the trigger. The excess gas was animating a lever. Now it was only a matter of mechanics for that pulse of energy to be converted to the work once done by hand: extracting the spent casing, loading and locking a new cartridge into the chamber, and, as long as the trigger remained depressed and ammunition available, firing the next round to start the cycle anew. By late November 1890, the Browning Brothers Armory, in Salt Lake City, had offered this new design to Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Company in Hartford. Five years later, a gas-operated automatic
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sold under the name Colt Model 1895 entered the market.
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All the while, as Maxim’s guns were heading out on colonial expeditions, other weapons were being assembled in gun works around Europe.
In Austria, a grand duke and a colonel had created the Skoda machine gun, which a factory in Pilsen produced in many calibers. An Austrian captain had designed another gas-operated machine gun by 1893, and the Hotchkiss firm in France purchased the patent. Nordenfelt introduced a true automatic in 1897, and by 1902 the Madsen automatic machine gun was being touted by the Danes; soon it was tested by the British and the Americans.
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The German gun works at Spandau, prodded by the kaiser, was busily producing its own Maxim knock-offs. Arms firms saw machine guns as weapons of the future. The era of the hand-cranked gun—the Gatling and its brethren—was all but over, even if a few Gatlings and Gardners remained in military armories. Richard Gatling died in 1903 at the age of eighty-four, at his son-in-law’s home in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, after returning from a meeting at the editorial offices of
Scientific American.
His business had gone bust. His capital was gone. He had kept his entrepreneurial spirit to the end. Recently he had accepted five hundred dollars from one of his sons to help underwrite a new venture in agricultural plows.
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But the armaments industry had moved on. Rapid-fire arms had entered the automatic age.

Military officers, especially senior officers, took longer to catch up. The gap between what the arms industry could see and what professional military circles could not created one of the most baffling chapters in the intertwined histories of military technology and tactics. As the services pondered machine guns, traditionalism permeated most Western officer corps. Old prejudices endured. Old arguments continued, though not quite as fiercely as in decades past; the sheer volume of killing at Omdurman had shown that machine guns had a place in battle. It was not because of hostility so much as because of conservatism, along with administrative disarray and sluggishness, that tactics did not adequately shift. The ignorance was not as total as sometimes portrayed.
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Many armies exchanged their bright uniforms of the nineteenth century for dull-colored field uniforms in khaki or gray. In such attire, soldiers became more difficult for enemy soldiers to spot in rifle and machine-gun sights. And soldiers were instructed to spread out in battle, five paces between each man, to avoid being struck in large numbers by single artillery rounds or bursts of fire. But these changes should have been obvious enough. The blindness that afflicted the senior officer class was extraordinary. In addressing the more difficult questions of developing tactics and doctrine for fighting
with and against modern automatic arms, institutional inertia trumped individual intellect. For a range of reasons related to how armies often work, the brighter officers, the gadflies, and the converted who advocated for a material and intellectual investment in machine gunnery were not heard. Some of these officers recognized the potential of concentrated firepower. Others saw the obsolescence of nineteenth-century battlefield tactics and the cherished traditions that adhered to them (one well-known officer observed that “the only advantage in cavalry is the smarter uniform”).
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Some were simply curious, enlivened by tangible shifts in technology or assessments of battles past. Evidence had shown that modern weapons had become sufficiently lethal that opposing soldiers rarely were able to maneuver close enough to one another for a hand-to-hand fight; combatants were getting shot or torn by shrapnel before they could engage in those old-fashioned scrums. One French officer noticed from a review of war records that of sixty-five thousand German casualties listed in the Franco-Prussian War, swords had killed six men.
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But many advocates of machine gunnery either were of junior grade or had achieved their experience in colonial campaigns in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Having used machine guns on practice ranges or to turn back aboriginal rushes, not professional armies, they were regarded as insufficiently schooled in the ways of war between European states.

In the United States, John H. Parker, now an army captain, had published two books on machine gunnery and proposed tactics for the offense and defense. By the early 1900s, he was busy testing a cart that could carry the guns, equipment, and ammunition swiftly about battlefields.
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He had also proposed an organization for a separate machine-gun service, with units dedicated solely to automatic guns. This followed a kernel first put forth in 1880 by William W. Kimball, an American navy officer, who had recommended selecting American sailors for duty with machine guns for shore defense, for firing from ship to ship, and for pummeling the types of close-in targets that the navy anticipated facing, such as a hostile landing party or torpedo boat. Lieutenant Kimball and Captain Parker were radicals. They sketched out the notion of a professional machine gunner, a specialist who would work within a team. In their visions, these men were to be selected for their stamina, daring, and smarts. “In order that the gun may work up to its full effectiveness, the machine gunners must have a very considerable degree of intelligence, and the
utmost steadiness; compared with infantrymen armed with single loading shoulder pieces, they must be as clever mechanics are to common laborers—they must be capable of working with a killing machine instead of a killing tool.”
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These officers’ precise organizational proposals would never be accepted, but their underlying idea was sound. Professional machine gunners, with separate training and distinct duties, would in time become common. But not yet.

In the early twentieth century, the idea did not take hold. The military bureaucracy moved bureaucratically. Ordnance officials in the United States continued to test machine guns, and while there was a sense that machine guns had a place in battle, no one was quite sure where. One army major, commanding a battalion at Fort Leavenworth, requested a pair of machine guns for his battalion and the army provided them;
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this hardly signaled that the army as an institution was fully invested in trying to find the weapons’ ideal use. Enthusiasm was further dampened by lingering worries about reliability. The American army had purchased Colt’s Model 1895 guns and used them in the war in the Philippines, but they were air-cooled and tended to overheat; officers in the field found them fussy. This enduring reputation for unreliability undercut the advocates’ cause. Worries about ammunition consumption were also an obstacle. How was an army supposed to supply units with guns that fired 500, 600, 700, or 800 rounds a minute? The answer, which eluded the quarter-masters and generals, was that technical rates of fire were theoretical. In practice, machine gunners fired in short bursts. When facing machine-gun fire, targets were either knocked down or scattered. No target presented itself for very long. Ammunition consumption did pose new logistical challenges. That was irrefutably true. But these challenges were not the impossible demand that detractors imagined them to be.

Richard Gatling, an inventor of killing technologies who cast himself as an idealist, had been a crusader for rapid-fire arms as instruments for peace. Hiram Maxim, the self-taught engineer and mischief-maker from backwoods Maine, became a premier vendor of machine guns in nearly perfected form and converted Gatling’s dream into wealth. Under their hands, machine guns had sprouted from the industrial conditions of nineteenth-century America to become global products that allowed armies to arm themselves for killing on a prodigious scale. But machine gunnery in the United States military remained a haphazard field. The
American military entered the twentieth century with inventories of weapons of different calibers and designs, without a machine-gun doctrine, and with neither a standard arm nor a clear training plan. In 1903, the army held new tests and selected a Maxim water-cooled gun as its new standard machine gun.
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This decision would not long hold. There was similar confusion in Britain, even though the British army had adopted the Maxim ten years earlier. Russia had already become a minor machine-gun power. It had embraced rapid-fire arms since the Gatling gun first became available after the Civil War, and had since procured Maxims and distributed them in the field. Otherwise, only Germany kept pressing ahead, manufacturing guns and designing a doctrine to use them in special machine-gun units, which colonels and generals could control, moving them about the battlefield as necessary so firepower could be massed at critical moments and places, roughly as Captain Parker had suggested.
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Germany had certain psychological advantages over the other Western powers as it pursued its arming spree. It had not been interested in machine guns until Kaiser Wilhelm II saw Maxim’s gun in 1887; this meant that it began its association with machine gunnery with a weapon that worked well, and it did not have to overcome an internal institutional bias stemming from having invested in Gatlings or Gardners that jammed in the era when ammunition was unreliable.

Elsewhere, as machine-gun salesmen worked European officer clubs and test ranges, armies hewed to their traditions, assuming that when they fought again they would fight much as they had before, perhaps with victory to be carried by a decisive charge. Courage was praised, the philosophies of disciplined unit formations preached. War was seen as an activity to be carried by determined men, whose foes were broken by fright during a stoic advance to the bayonet fight. The attitude was well established in successful military units: Moral force was superior to material might, and men were supreme. In its way, the attitude marked one of the older and more enduring vulnerabilities of military units steeped in their past success and lore. Unleavened by an understanding of the changing tools available for battle, the attitude led men who should have known better to believe that machine guns were mere devices. Years after officers had personally observed the effects of machine guns in war, the brass clung almost mystically to the romance of close-quarter battle and championed tactics that Maxim guns had made obsolete. In their bias some officers
even scoffed at the rifle. “It must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel,”
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one turn-of-the-century British training manual said.

Such were the daydreams. They could not be extinguished, even by clear accounts from distant wars. Military bureaucracies, as they considered incorporating machine guns into their armies, dawdled indecisively in every Western country but Germany. The thinking was fully blinkered. Senior officers recognized the effects of withering bursts of fire upon massed combatants, having heard reports of the felling of heaps of Arabs and Africans who advanced in formation toward machine guns. They were somehow unable to accept what might happen when such fire was directed against their own ranks. And then they were given another chance.

In 1904, after years of competition between the Russian and Japanese empires in the northwestern Pacific, the contest erupted into the Russo-Japanese War. Here machine guns and poor tactics were to combine for the bloodiest results yet. The origins of the war were simple. During the Boxer Uprising, from 1898 through 1901, Czar Nicholas II had dispatched Russian troops to Manchuria. He had not withdrawn them when the uprising ended. Instead, the Russian garrison grew, angering Japan, which saw Russia encroaching on its sphere of influence. Negotiations for a Russian withdrawal led nowhere, and in 1904 Japan struck, attacking the Russian navy at the Yellow Sea harbor of Port Arthur and sending infantry across the Yalu River to push overland for the port. En route, the Japanese divisions met Russian units, which were equipped with Maxim guns, organized into a company per division. Each company had sections of eight Maxims equipped with sixty-six hundred cartridges per gun.
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The czar’s infantry was not highly regarded. “The Russian soldier, when sober and not brutalized by slaughter, is a great, strong, kind, superstitious child; as good a fellow as ever stepped, but always a child,” wrote the correspondent present for the
London Times,
who was a former colonel himself. “Given an educated and highly trained corps of officers of a good class, capable of instructing, caring for, and leading him with judgment and skill, the Russian soldier would go far. But there
is no such corps of officers in Russia.”
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No matter the poor reputation, machine guns turned the Russians into lethal defenders of held ground. After a battle along the approaches to the port, a Japanese lieutenant, Tadayoshi Sakurai, examined captured Russian Maxims. The Japanese army had its own collection of Hotchkiss machine guns, and its officers were beginning to use them in effective ways, especially in firing in support of Japanese attacks. But Lieutenant Sakurai had seen machine gunnery from the other perspective. He knew what happened to Japanese units when they faced Maxim guns. He looked upon the captured Russian Maxims as almost otherworldly tools. His description marked one of the earliest first-person accounts of the experience of coming under modern automatic fire. “This was the firearm most dreaded by us,” he wrote: