Machine Gun.

This is coolbert:

"Whoever it was that said the pen was mightier than the sword obviously has not encountered automatic weapons!!" - - D. Mac Arthur.

How so very true!! Intuitively so!!

Perhaps no weapon more epitomized the Great War [WW1] than the machine gun.

Prodigious numbers of the automatic-firing machine gun dominated the battlefield of WW1.

An industrialized, mechanized, mass-assembly, by-the-numbers type of warfare - - impersonal destruction most exemplified by a death-dealing MACHINE!!

British troop from the era of the Great War manning his Vickers machine gun. Firing six hundred rounds per minute and VERY reliable. Gunners attempting to surrender during WW1 were normally shot dead on sight by enemy riflemen.

Lines of advancing infantry on the offensive, out in the open, no cover, crossing "no-mans'" land with the intention of getting their grips on the enemy, "mowed down" on the battlefield in a manner as would have been a crop harvested by a reaper, a mechanical apparatus having only a modicum of human intervention!! MOWED DOWN!!

In his book, "The Face of Battle", Sir John Keegan describes the machine gun and the analog of same to an industrial process:

"the most important thing about a machine-gun is that it is a machine, and one of a quite an advanced type, similar in some respects to a high-precision lathe, in others to an automatic press. Like a lathe, it requires to be set up, so that it will operate within desired and predetermined limits . . . by adjusting the angle of the barrel relative to its fixed firing platform, and tightening or loosening its traversing screw. Then like an automatic press, it would, when actuated by a simple trigger, begin and continue to perform its functions with the minimum of human attention, supplying its own power and only requiring a steady supply of raw material [ammo] and little routine maintenance to operate efficiently throughout a working shift."

It should be noted too that a tripod-mounted and sighted machine-gun, being used defensively, did not even need to be aimed! Grazing fire being employed, the operator of the MACHINE-GUN only being required to traverse the gun from left-to-right, right-to-left and back again, over and over, regularly firing bursts of ammunition as the traversing process occurs, a properly sighted machine gun designed to deliver grazing fire having the rounds be no more than a meter high at a range of 400 meters!!

"Grazing fire is . . . defined . . . as 'Fire approximately parallel to the ground where the center of the cone of fire does not rise above one meter from the ground.'”

Machine-guns too having an inherent design feature of advantage to the gunner, again, making the job of firing and hitting the target that much easier, the "cone of fire"!

"most light machine guns are not designed for repeatability of aim or accuracy. Most are designed with a small degree of inaccuracy, in order to lay down a field of fire. This is referred to as the 'cone' of fire, because the rounds spread out."



The machine-gun of the WW1 era in a machine-like fashion - - again - - as a harvester reaping a crop in a field. The crop unfortunately being advancing infantrymen walking into a "wall of steel"!

This particular drawing by the famous German artist Otto Dix is entitled: "Machine Gunners Advancing". Please note that the mountain consists of human skulls, one German troop apparently totally revolted by what he is seeing!! Dix himself spent four years at the front as a member of a machine gun crew! Very evocative - - is it not!!

coolbert.