Saul has slain his thousands; But David his tens of thousands
In view of yesterdays report (that the Army has run out of machine guns), perhaps the time is now right to scour our many military museums for suitable replacement weapons & lets be honest, with the possible exception of the greatest light machine gun ever produced, nothing screams stout bulldog like the venerable Vickers medium machine gun. Deploy a few of those to the North West Frontier & the Pathans heads would be kept well & truly down in the gutter
Yes, it harks from a different much happier age & indeed it was in 1881 when Hiram Maxim, was attending a Paris exhibition that he was told that if he was to achieve pay parity with Croesus he was going to need
to invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.
Sensing the commercial opportunity, he wisely set up shop in London’s Hatton Garden, an area long noted for its very very commercial outlook &
between 1883 & 1885 patented almost every process by which automatic fire could be produced. In 1884 a press report stated "Hiram Maxim, the well known American electrician has made an automatic machine gun with a single barrel, using the standard .45 rifle cartridge, that will load and fire itself by energy derived from recoil at a rate of over 600 rounds a minute."
The bulldogs adopted the Vickers.303 (basically a go-faster version of Maxim’s original machine gun with a slightly reduced rate of fire) in 1912 & its crew of six could produce the equivalent weight of fire of 40 well drilled riflemen.
The following tale related by Ian Hogg gives you an idea of just how good a weapon this was
The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on August 24, 1916.
This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men’s drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds between them.
One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968.
Sadly, I have never had the opportunity for fire this most quintessentially British of weapons. However in light of the current shortages of both men & material, I don’t discount being recalled to the Colours at any time (heaven help us all) & indeed, if I were to find myself east of Suez equipped with one of these fine old pieces ...
... I wouldn’t be too disappointed
Comments
I well remember firing this weapon on the ranges at Catterick as a cadet in our school Combined Cadet Force. Absolutely awesome - so accurate and yet so easy to use (given the presence of a skilled belt feeder alongside).
This was back in the 1950s.
Posted by: nostalgic | February 8, 2008 9:46 AM
When I was called up for a service in 1983, they were trying to get troops to volunteer for Vickers courses with the "promise" that we'd never walk another patrol, and be left in camp as static guards - needless to say we didn't believe them any more ......
I would've loved to fire one, though.
Posted by: Oubaas | February 8, 2008 12:26 PM
Sic transit gloria mundi.....
Posted by: Gweilicus | February 8, 2008 1:01 PM
U.S. Ordnance INC. Sells semi auto versions for $4,500. Now the bad news, Sales suspended until further notice, While their busy cranking out GPMG's for Uncle Sam.
Posted by: Larry Graham | February 8, 2008 10:23 PM
I have to mention that the Vickers is a hell of a weapon, I think the Browning M2 .50 is a better weapon as it has been used for over 60 years and will long be in the arsenal of the US Armed Forces for some time to come
Posted by: Dan | February 8, 2008 11:14 PM
I'd like to challenge convention here, the M2 having been improved by Manroy Eng, is a better weapon for direct fire but we still teach indirect fire with the L7 GPMG. It is an innefficient weapon when used thus. If we werent to rebarrel the old warhorse then there is little reason for us not to employ water cooled Vickers guns in fire support. With allegedly just a brrel change they can fire 7.62 x 54R Russian ammo and that is definetly still available in quantities. If the .5 Browning was water cooled (and it has been in the past) there is no reason it can keep up the same sustained rate of fire, only in a direct role though!
Posted by: TimC | February 9, 2008 8:44 AM
I had the pleasure of numerous opportunities to fire this gun as a boy, with a serving infantry commander father. You could crank out just about the exact number of rounds you wanted at will.
Have to agree with Dan about the Ma Deuce though. Never got to fire one myself, but my son who was a USMC .50 gunner on a hummvee said you could hit the parachute flares with it.
Posted by: 45govt | February 10, 2008 2:34 PM
I watched some National Guard teams compete with us civilians at an Albany Rifle Range MG shoot ... They had three teams with that gawdawful Maremont M-60 ... they couldn't keep them running.
They were all trounced by a gentleman from Portland shooting a Vickers ...
Posted by: Kristopher | February 11, 2008 1:50 AM
A few weeks ago, I had a chance (at Knob Creek, KY) to watch a gentleman saw an old clothes dryer in half with a Vickers gun. I thought, "thats why there will always be an England..."
Posted by: hUGHJIMBISSEL | February 11, 2008 2:43 PM