And this is imperial military conflict. Even any kind of full auto weapon is seldom seen on anyone not government within the United States.
I guess the lesson here is don’t attack a trained machine gun group on horseback and without cover.
What the article doesn’t mention is that the machine gun’s inventor, Hiram Maxim, was the father of Hiram Percy Maxim (W1AW), who in turn invented the silencer for firearms.
People Utilizing Maxim’s Machine Gun Slaughtered Hundreds of Thousands of People
Horrific scene in War Horse with a calvary charge mowed down with a machine gun.
Wow, it sounds like psychopath. I hope they gave it the chair!
Come to think of it, how many people did the chair kill?
Wrong, Paul Richard Huard, you mewling little homo liberal.
MILLIONS were slaughtered. BILLIONS even, Mercilessly. Often they were only 2 month old infants. And they held kittens, who were also slaughtered, and there were hummingbirds on the kittens shoulders, who also were slaughtered. The hummingbirds attracted butterflys, who were also ripped asunder by the terrible Maxim bullet, which is designed to cause maximum pain before death.
And the red-hot spent shells would rain down on some beautiful roses and daffodils, which instantly withered.
And the horrible men who would fire these evil weapons simply laughed, uproariously, and praised Satan for their death-dealing powers.
What an appalling level of slaughter! FOUR Brits! Horrors!
The machine gun played a significant role in the spread of liberalism.
Robert Pirsig, in his book LILA, makes the point that WWI destroyed the Victorians and The Victorian Age. It was Victorian leaders who convinced the Soldiers to crawl out of the trenches and into the carnage of machine gun bullets. The survivors of WWI went home and revolted against everything Victorian. Here in the US, we had The Roaring 20s.
It was not the Victorian “prudishness” that caused the deaths on the battlefield. The Doughboys didn’t charge the Germans because the Germans were too risqué. They charged because of the Groupthink of their leaders. It is a problem the US admirals and generals still suffer from.
A machine gun will butcher untrained combatants. So will rapid fire, breech-loading artillery firing exploding shells. So will chemical weapons. So will airplanes delivering weapons from above.
It is critical to take away the right lessons learned from history. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” The lesson from WWI isn’t that Maxim was a dirty war profiteer. If he hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. The lesson wasn’t that Victorian values caused slaughter.
The gun was a select fire (adjustable cyclic rate in the prototype; auto only in the production model). belt fed. recoil operated weapon. The majority of maxim's ground guns were water-cooled; guns adapted for aircraft were air-cooled. Maximum rate of fire was 666 rounds per minute.
Prior to World War I, the water-cooled Maxim was adopted by many of the major combatants:
United States as the Vickers M1916 in .30 cal. (Vickers was a modified Maxim design).
British Commonwealth (UK, Canada, Australia) as the Vickers heavy machine gun in .303 cal.
Germany as the Spandau in caliber 7.92x57.
Russia as the Maxim M1910 in 7.62x54R.
When he was 60 years old, Maxim became a British citizen in 1900. He died in 1916, two years before WW1 ended. The British Army only declared its Vickers HMG obsolete in 1957. It was, in many respects, “the Devil's paintbrush”.
I miss the old days, when as Hillair Belloc put it " Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not. "
ping for later read