1

Developing Technology and Social Change: The Story Behind the Barnes County Historical Society’s Maxim Machine Gun

Robert E. Kibler

The poets of the day conveyed the sense of loss felt by the European world after the Great War of 1914. "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” wrote William Butler Yeats, and “everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” (Yeats 158) "God, how the shadows of dead men... grin" at us, wrote Alfred Noyes, because of so much human loss for so little human gain. (Noyes 306-308) How shall we mourn for those, asked Wilfred Owen, who died "in herds as cattle [do]." (Owen 44) Never such innocence. . . .never such innocence again," (Larkin 28) wrote Philip Larkin. Social historians agree. The world before World War I was dramatically different from the world that came afterwards. (Marwick 11) Something had been lost.

Part of what had been lost was a sense of certainty, a sense that individuals and nations possessed both the moral right and the necessary will to control both their own destinies as well as the destinies of others. The war effectively broke the body and spirit of Europe, and made participating individuals and nations feel smaller, and far less certain about their sense of cultural superiority than they had in the past. But why had this happened? There had always been wars, and wars devastate both individuals and nations participating in them. And yet for centuries, men and woman have risen out of the devastation of war in order to begin life again in a way that those participating in the Great War were collectively less able to do.

What made the Great War particularly devastating was its large-scale deployment of mechanized weaponry in an age that did not quite understand that machinery. Before 1914, soldiers, not machines, had dominated battlefields. Yet as the social historian John Ellis notes, the Great War “represented the culmination of years of industrial progress." (Ellis 11) This industrial progress resulted in war machines whose lethal potential had never been put to a full-scale test before 1914. As a result, those who gleefully joined the fighting ranks never could have imagined how different their war experience would be from what past reports of war had told them they should expect. (Ellis 16-17)

Narrative descriptions of nineteenth-century military campaigns suggested that war was to be waged by men as if on a non-mechanized field of honor. The Napoleanic, the Crimean, and the Prussian Wars--all of them comparatively low-tech wars--continued to serve as the models for European military tactics and training well into the 20th century. Accordingly, the 20th century European soldier was trained to cross open terrain, charging the enemy on foot or on horseback, firing small arms, or brandishing lances and sabers. And indeed, World War I started out in just this way. (Ellis 17) It very quickly progressed, however, into a muddy defensive war of attrition, where men fought one another out of 500 mile long parallel systems of trenches, mercilessly pitted against newly invented tanks, fighter planes, chemical weapons, and other types of what in the early going of the war were referred to as “accessories.” (Baker 8) Men were hardly a match. They especially were no match for the infamous Maxim machine guns. (Bruce 79)

Interestingly, one of these World War I machine guns is part of the Barnes County Historical Society’s permanent collection, and is on display in the Society’s showroom in Valley City, North Dakota. How it came to be in North Dakota is a secret lost to time, but its role in the Great War is not. The Valley City model is a Model MG-08/15 German-made Maxim Machine Gun. This model was mass-produced in Spandau, Germany, in 1918. Spandau was the site of Germany's largest armory both before and during the Great War. It produced better than 12,500 (HMG, 3) Maxims before 1914, and had already planned the manufacture of 50,000 more before the outbreak of hostilities. (Chinn, 149) Spandau eventually produced 72,000 Maxims for battlefield use. (Bruce, 15) Like all of the Maxims, the MG-08/15 is fully automatic. Each fired cartridge drives the gun barrel backwards three-quarters of an inch. This action starts a mechanical sequence that ejects the spent shell, feeds the new one into the chamber, then cocks and fires another cartridge--all in about 1/60th of a second.

The MG-08/15 model weighs 45 pounds with its water jacket filled, and fires 7.92 millimeter belt-fed, armor-piercing rounds at a rate of 700 rounds per minute. It can fire 500 rpm all day and night long, and its effective lethal range is 1200 meters. (Chinn 141) In its day the MG-08/15 Maxim was durable, reliable, and deadly--the perfect weapon of war. Its engineering specifications were of the same standard as that of its predecessor, the heavier MG-08. Its American inventor, Hiram Maxim, had successfully fired 200,000 rounds from the MG-08 before announcing his invention to the world in 1884. (Chinn 131)

When the Germans first tested Hiram Maxim's new machine gun in July 1888, the results left Kaiser Wilhelm nearly speechless. At 200 and 400 meters against a standard ring target, 30 shots fired in 3 seconds all made direct hits. At 600 meters, 40 rounds fired in 4 3/10 seconds made direct hits. At 1000 meters, 40 shots, fired in 4 seconds, produced 36 direct hits. Further, after having fired 20,000 rounds, the accuracy of Maxim's gun remained undiminished (Chinn 141). “This is the gun,” the Kaiser told Maxim. “There is no other."(Chinn 138)

There were of course several other types of machine guns available by 1914--all of them the result of 19th century technological advances. (Ellis 34) The American Richard Gatling submitted his machine gun to the U.S. patent office in 1862. His gun had six rotating barrels, and had to be hand-cranked to fire. It was heavy, took several men to operate, and nearly always jammed. The French produced their own heavy, inaccurate mitrailleuse, and the Swedes produced the Nordenfelt. The Nordenfelt had ten separate barrels, and fired shots when a crank was turned. Like the Gatling gun, the Nordenfelt depended on human strength and speed on the crank, so lacked the sheer lethal efficiency of the Maxim. (Ellis 35) The Americans produced models by Browning, Colt, and Thompson. The British produced the Vickers, the Hotchkiss, the Lewis, and the Gardner. Collectively, the development of all these weapons of war pointed not only to the increasing speed with which technology was coming to hold dominion over human creativity, but also to the growing desire in early 20th century Europe for a large scale show of strength, for some kind of military action.

The British and the Germans, especially, desired some kind of action--but for very different reasons. British journals and newspapers before the start of the war often suggested a certain fatigue resulting from prosperity and ease. As the dominant European and world power at the turn of the century, the British were apparently suffering from better than 60 years of peace, supreme power, and economic success. British essays, poems, and newspaper articles often bemoaned the faltering will of the British people, and suggested that some kind of call to action was necessary to rescue the nation and empire from lethargy. Charles Hamilton Sorley epitomizes this general concern in Britain in his poem entitled “Call to Action,” written in 1912, two years before the war. He writes:

We preach and prattle, peer, and pry,

And fit together two and two:

We ponder, argue, shout, swear, lie—

We will not, for we cannot, DO.

Pale puny soldiers of the pen,

Absorbed in this your inky strife,

Act as of old, when men were men,

England herself and life yet life

(Stephen 37)

By contrast, the Germans did not seek to “act as of old.” They were the new people of Europe. Their national sovereignty had only been established in 1871 with the successful conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war. (Ecksteins 71) From their national beginning, Germans identified with everything that was new, fast, dynamic, and technical. The late nineteenth-century German cult of Technik, which put its emphasis on scientism, efficiency, industrialism, and management, produced dramatic results. While the Imperial British were lamenting their status as the unchallenged military and economic powerhouse of Europe, German industry was quickly overtaking the British edge in very practical ways. In the 1870s, for example, British steel production was four times that of Germany. By 1914, German steel production equaled that of Britain, France, and Russia combined. (Ecksteins 68) In 1900 for example, British output of sulphuric acid-- necessary for the manufacture of fertilizers, explosives, textiles, and dyes--was double that of Germany. By 1913, German firms were producing 1.7 million tons of sulphuric acid to Britain's 1.1 million. (Ecksteins 68) More than any other nation, the new Germany embraced technology, and while the British were complaining about the "curse of inactivity," the Germans in the 1890s adopted a different approach. They would make a Flucht nach vorne," a flight forward, into the next century. […] It is little wonder, then, that they would have placed the largest order for the very best and newest weaponry--Maxim machine guns.

The capabilities of Maxim's gun far surpassed that of its competition as a result of its single barrel design, and its ability to harness the surplus gas from fired cartridges to produce a smooth and speedy automatic recoil action. The best engineers of Maxim's day had dismissed the idea of harnessing cartridge gasses in order to automate weaponry. (Chinn 129) But Maxim was self-educated, so continued his attempts at automation unhindered by professional bias. And he was an inventor. He had already invented an electric lamp, a fire-activated sprinkler system, and a better mousetrap before turning his attention to developing a machine gun. In his London lab, he tested the possibilities of gas-recoil until he could control it. He then depended on the latest developments in precision engineering to produce the parts. Amazingly, his machine gun worked the first time Maxim tried it, firing all three test rounds in an instant. The mechanism that he originated "worked so [well] that even today, the principles of machine gun fire remain basically the same as those tested by Maxim in the 1880s." (Chinn 123)

When Maxim announced his invention in London, the world was cautious. Many arms makers were making big unsupportable claims for their weapons. The marketers for Nordenfelt, for example, had done a particularly good job of selling their inferior product. Many nations had placed large orders for a weapon that could not do half of what was promised. But news of Maxim's fully automatic gun spread. Soon every nation in Europe wanted its representatives to have a look. Sir Donald Currie of Britain was the first person of prominence to see the weapon fire. A day of so later, the Duke of Cambridge came to Maxim's workshop. Lord Wolsey, accompanied by high-ranking officers of the British War Office, came next. Wolsey told Maxim to simplify the gun so that "components could be taken out, examined, and cleaned with no other instruments than the hands." (Chinn 131) Maxim quickly redesigned all of the moving parts so that they could be replaced within 6 seconds. (Chinn 131) In 1887, he took his gun to an international competition held in Switzerland, and tried it against the Vickers, the Gardner, and the Nordenfelt. None could compare to the Maxim.

In another test, the Italians insisted that Maxim submerge his gun in the sea for 3 days before testing. Pulled from the sea bottom, without cleaning of any kind, "the gun performed as well as it did before subjection to the unusual [Italian] demand."(Chinn 137) All of the European nations soon placed their orders and Maxim sold licenses of manufacture to them. He became rich, but the world, as we know, paid a horrible price. From 1914 through 1918, over 65 million fighting men went to the first large-scale machine gun war. Of these, 37.5 million--better than half--either died or were wounded within a four-year span of time. Entire towns and cities were destroyed, and whole towns and villages of men marched off to war together, never to return.

Massive human losses directly attributed to the Maxim began in 1886, when the British Colonial Forces fired on the warring Matabele tribe of the Northern Transvaal, in what was then called Rhodesia. 5,000 Matabele warriors charged 50 colonial soldiers five times within a little more than an hour’s time. But the soldiers happened to have four Maxims with them, and so the Matabele left 3,000 dead on the field. The same thing happened to the Ashantis and to the Zulus during the African wars of the 1890s. It happened to the rebellious Afghani mountain tribes in 1895, and to the Sudanese of the African desert in 1898, when British Colonials killed no fewer than 20,000 wildly charging dervishes within minutes. Three-fourths of these deaths were directly attributed to the four Maxim machine guns that the British force had with them. British casualties, by contrast, amounted to less than 2 percent. The Colonials soon came to depend on the Maxim to keep imperial order, and colonial soldiers returning to Britain praised it as a weapon. Yet oddly, very few people listened. (Chinn 142) They did not want to acknowledge the effectiveness of the Maxim, or the changes that its deployment in the field of battle would necessitate. As General Haig noted during the war, he still believed that innovations such as the machine gun were mere accessories on the battlefield to men and horses.

Even as late as 1916, British resistance to the Maxim—and to innovations in military technology generally--resulted in the most dramatic machine gun massacre of the war--the Battle of the Somme. In that battle, British troops charged across "no-man's land," and directly into the sights of German Maxim machine guns. After two years of trench warfare, even the Germans were stunned to see them coming. Of the 110,000 British who climbed out of their trenches on July 1 at 7:30 in the morning, 60,000 were killed or wounded on the first day--many within the first hour. (Fussell 13) It took days before the wounded and dying, trapped in No-Man's Land, stopped screaming. (Fussell 13) All told, British casualties along the twelve-mile front of the Somme exceeded a quarter-million men. (Ellis 139) Ninety percent of these casualties were the direct result of machine gun fire. (Bruce 79)