When World War I began in August 1914, few at the time anticipated the prolonged bloodletting that eventually produced the deaths of tens of millions of men fighting on land, sea and in the air in the global conflict. The horrendous “butcher’s bill” of the Great War, as the 1914-18 conflict was known to contemporaries, was the result of numerous technological weapons advancements in the years just prior to and then during the war as military planners looked to new and more lethal ways to break the battlefield stalemate.
While World War II ushered in the atomic and jet age, World War I arguably made those advances in lethality possible through the widespread use of aircraft, submarines, poison gas, armored vehicles, and improved artillery weapons and fire control. World War I also was notable for numerous innovations in small arms, “killing technology” that brought greatly increased death and misery to the mud-soaked battlefields of the Western Front in Europe and to other theaters of the war.
RAPID-FIRE KILLING MACHINES
The main small arms killer of World War I was, of course, the machine gun. While it was already in the arsenals of the world’s great powers and had been used in numerous conflicts, European armies didn’t truly encounter the devastating killing power of this new weapon until the outbreak of the First World War.
The concept of rapid fire had been proposed since the earliest days of firearms, but early pioneers in weapons design were hindered by the fact that muzzle-loading guns were slow to load. Designers thus sought multi-barrel weapons, and one of the earliest attempts at a “machine gun” was born out of such a design when Richard Jordan Gatling patented the first controlled, sequential fire weapon in 1861. (See Forgotten History, p. 18.) Named for its inventor, the Gatling gun saw limited use in the American Civil War and the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, but it unveiled the potential for sustained rapid fire. The Gatling subsequently saw use in various colonial engagements as well, but it was a later invention by Sir Hiram Maxim that truly had an impact on future conflicts.
Invented in 1884, the Maxim gun was the first self-powered machine gun. Rather than being hand-powered by a crank mechanism like the Gatling, it used the recoil power of the previously fired bullet to automatically reload a new bullet into the chamber. This enabled a much higher rate of fire than was possible with earlier designs, yet it also came with numerous shortcomings – notably, that the Maxim’s single barrel could overheat very quickly. To resolve this issue, Maxim introduced the use of water cooling via a water jacket shroud that surrounded the barrel. His design proved so successful that it was widely adopted, and derivative designs were used by all sides during World War I.
Germany manufactured the Maxim gun under license as the Maschinengewehr 08 (MG08), and the weapon served as the primary heavy machine gun of German infantry divisions. The MG08 had a practical range of 2,000 meters and an extreme range of 3,600 meters – more than enough to mow down advancing lines of infantrymen in no-man’s-land.
While it has been widely argued that military planners didn’t foresee the machine gun’s killing potential, the fact that the Germans had 12,000 MG08s available for battlefield operations in August 1914 indicates that German planners did know what the weapon could do.In fact, in 1914 some 200 MG08s were produced each month, and by1916 the number increased to 3,000 a month. A year later, that number reached an astonishing 14,400 per month. Clearly, the age of the machine gun had arrived.
The British recognized the machine gun’s potential, as well. Britain’s imperial forces had relied on the Maxim during its colonial wars, where the weapon proved highly effective. The British developed their own version of the Maxim in the years just prior to World War I, and the result was the Vickers (Vickers purchased the Maxim Company outright in 1896). The Vickers design reduced the gun’s weight, simplified the action and introduced components made of high-strength alloys. Yet these improvements led to shortages of the weapon when the war broke out, and thus many British units were still equipped with older Maxims.
The French, who also get criticized for being a bit behind the times in 1914, had in fact been undertaking military reforms when the war broke out. Their baptism of fire in World War I’s opening months accelerated numerous changes that were already in the works. Just as the French army had been looking at uniform and helmet designs prior to the war, it also had been experimenting with small arms. Asa result, when the war started, the army was relying on a number of machine-gun designs, including the largely forgotten Puteaux ModelAPX 1905 machine gun, which was a disastrous attempt at “changing what wasn’t broken” with the Maxim’s proven design.
Another French design was the St. Étienne Mle 1907, a gas-operated, air-cooled machine gun that fired the 8 mm Lebel bullet of French infantry rifles. The St. Étienne Mle 1907 was an update of the Puteaux, but it too proved unsuccessful and was pulled out of action in favor of the Mle 1914 Hotchkiss machine gun. The 1914 Hotchkiss was the last version of a series of nearly identical designs that dated back to the Mle 1897. It was sturdy and reliable, and it remained in active service with the French army until the early 1940s.
Yet the machine-gun design that proved to be a true game changer was a late arrival to the battlefield. The American-designed M1917 Browning machine gun served through both World Wars, the Korean War, and even saw limited use in Vietnam. The .30-caliber, belt-fed, water-cooled machine gun also led to the development of the air-cooled Browning M1919 and the larger .50-caliber M2 machine gun, which today is still the standard heavy machine gun of the U.S. military and other world armies.
BIRTH OF THE ASSAULT WEAPON
While the first true “assault rifle” wasn’t created until Germany developed the StG44/MP44 during World War II, the world’s first assault-style weapons actually were developed prior to and during World War I. The requirement for rapid-fire assault weapons grew out of the need to provide attacking infantrymen with highly mobile firepower. Although machine guns were excellent defensive weapons, they were not exactly mobile. The Maxim, weighing nearly 100 pounds even without its heavy mount, could not be moved easily to keep pace with advancing infantrymen (the vast majority of whom were armed with bolt-action rifles).
French military arms designer Colonel Louis Chauchat had considered the problem and designed a “light machine gun” prior to the war. His prewar design was refined, and the result was the 8 mm Lebel caliber Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915 CSRG, commonly known as the Chauchat. Today, this firearm has a reputation for being unreliable and even poorly designed. However, this could be due to the fact that the Chauchats supplied to American troops in 1918 were mainly well-used models past their prime. The firearm was actually reasonably reliable if properly maintained and cleaned.
Moreover, due to wartime constraints, the Chauchat’s construction had been simplified to facilitate mass production, and the weapon was often produced using low-quality metal components. Likewise, its open-sided magazine (designed to allow the shooter to see how many bullets remained) often became jammed with mud and dirt. Yet the weapon had innovative features that would be incorporated in future “assault rifles,” to include a pistol grip, in-line stock, detachable magazine and selective fire capability. The Chauchat weighed just 20 pounds and could be fired from the hip and while moving. In many ways, it was arguably the first true assault weapon, even if not the first “assault rifle.”
The British also sought a more mobile machine gun to serve as an assault weapon and developed the .303-caliber Lewis automatic machine gun, or simply the Lewis gun, which featured a distinctive wide tubular cooling shroud and a top-pan magazine. This gas-operated machine gun had a rate of fire of 500-600 rounds per minute and weighed 28 pounds – somewhat heavy but still manageable by advancing infantrymen. The Lewis gun was issued to British infantry battalions on the Western Front as a replacement for the heavy Vickers machine gun, yet it achieved its greatest success as a machine gun for combat aircraft.
While the American Expeditionary Forces had to rely on the Chauchat and to a lesser extent the Lewis gun, John Browning was already working on an assault weapon that was truly innovative. The .30-06 caliber Browning automatic rifle (BAR), which only reached American soldiers in the closing months of the war, weighed less than 20 pounds, was designed to be carried by advancing infantrymen and could be fired from the hip. The BAR also could be used as a light machine gun and fired from a bipod, introduced in later models. Although the BAR saw limited service in World War I due to its late appearance in that conflict, it was used extensively in World War II and the Korean War and saw some use early in the Vietnam War.
SUBMACHINE GUNS
The BAR, Chauchat and Lewis gun provided some mobile assault weapon firepower to infantrymen, but by the end of World War I the machine gun had truly been reduced in size. With this innovation came the birth of the submachine gun, a much smaller automatic weapon designed to fire pistol-sized cartridges. In fact, Germany created the concept and called it a “maschinenpistole,” or machine pistol.
Hugo Schmeisser, whose name erroneously has been tied to the World War II MP38/40 submachine gun, created the first true submachine gun in World War I. While working for the Bergmann Waffenfabrik firm, Schmeisser, along with Theodor Bergmann, developed the Maschinenpistole 18/I, more commonly known as theMP18. The Germans used this submachine gun during the final stages of World War I, and its design was so successful that it directly influenced later submachine guns.
What made the MP18 unique was that it featured an open bolt blowback action and fired pistol rounds. Originally, it was designed to use the unwieldy “snail drum” of the Luger artillery model pistol, which provided soldiers with 32 rounds of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition. The downside to this, however, was that reloading the drum magazine required a special tool. After the war, the MP18 was modified to use a straight magazine.
Post-World War I Germany was forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to manufacture the MP18, yet production continued in secret. The weapon was improved in 1928 when a selector was added for single shot or automatic fire. The MP28 was subsequently used in World War II and was even copied by the British as the Lanchester submachine gun.
While the MP18 was the first true purpose-designed submachine gun, the Italians designed the Villar-Perosa as a dual-barrel light machine gun for use with aircraft. It, too, fired pistol rounds rather than rifle rounds to increase the rate of fire and to provide “more rounds per pound” for carrying in military planes. The 9 mm pistol rounds,however, proved inadequate to shoot down aircraft, and the gun was later issued to ground troops in a single-barrel configuration.
The French army also experimented with lighter machine guns and attempted to remedy some of the flaws of the Chauchat with a“pistolet-mitrailleur” (or submachine gun) that originally was intended to provide protection for French tank crews. Yet the weapon never entered mass production, and today it is largely forgotten.
The Americans scored a major design success with the Thompson submachine gun, although it came a little too late for use in World War I. General John T. Thompson, the weapon’s namesake, originally envisioned the gun as a semi-automatic rifle to replace the World War I bolt-action infantry rifle. Later, he decided it should be a “one-man, hand-held machine gun” – a “trench broom” to sweep enemy troops from the trenches.
The gun’s principal designers (Theodore H. Eickhoff, Oscar V. Payne and George E. Goll) designed the weapon as a true submachine gun that fired a .45 ACP round (a bullet developed for the Browning-designed M1911 semi-automatic pistol). Originally known as the Annihilator I, it was officially renamed the Thompson submachine gun – the first small arm to incorporate “submachine gun” in its name.
The Tommy gun, as it was often called, of course never saw service in the trenches. It appeared too late and only entered production in 1921. However, it was ubiquitous on the battlefields of World War II and the Korean War and it saw some use in Vietnam.
Peter Suciu, a freelance business writer, is the author of the book “Military Sun Helmets of the World.” He has collected military helmets and uniforms for more than 30 years, and his ideal vacation includes visits to military museums around the world.
Originally published in the May 2015 issue of Armchair General.
