A Rifleman Went to War

by Herbert W. McBride

  I collected quite a lot of those innovations and still have several. One which is now before me is: “The Machine Gun Officer’s Protractor,” by Capt. H. K. Charteris, Hythe Staff. It reminded me, very much, of the mil-rule which had been introduced to our (U.S.) army a few years previously. In one respect it is an improvement on the type of mil-rule I had seen in that it has a small metal disc at the end of the sighting string, with a little aperture through which one sights. The graduations are called “graticules” instead of mils but the purpose is the same in that they are supposed to be of use in determining any given range. Theoretically these instruments, including the mil-rule, are all to the good and their use in schools of instruction may be justified because of the mental exercise and training which resulted from picking out and identifying certain visible objects in the landscape; but when it comes to the matter of their practical use in warfare; well, so far as I can see, they are simply excess baggage. Even if it were possible for a man to stand out in the open, during an engagement, long enough to take any careful sights with one of the blamed things, it seems to me that the only thing they do is to substitute a lot of uncertainties for one good guess – in other words, a man has a darn sight better chance to make one good guess at the range, without messing around with one of those things, than he has of getting a reliable answer to all the ifs and maybesos which their use entails. For instance: how tall is a man? (He may be a six foot Guardsman or a member of the Bantam Brigade.) How high is a tree, or a house, or a church? How long is a wagon or a truck or a boxcar? How far is it between telephone poles? If you can supply the right answer to any of these questions, then you have to contend with the fact that hardly any two men can sight through the same aperture and see exactly the same thing. The variations in keenness of sight itself, the degree of steadiness with which the instrument is held and the character of the light, shadows, etc., all combine to preclude the probability of uniformity in the results obtained by different persons. This was conclusively proved to me during the Small Arms Firing School, at Camp Perry, in 1918, when, out of a class of thirty-odd officers, it was seldom that one-fourth of them could arrive at the same result, even when sighting on a water-tower, the height of which was known to a foot.

  When I went to Canada, I took with me one of the Hitt-Brown Fire Control Rules, thinking it might be useful. However, I was disappointed, as the printing on it is so fine that, even then, when my eyesight was excellent, I could not read the letters or figures without the use of a magnifying glass. Anyway, all the dope on it was for the U.S. 1906 ammunition, so not adaptable to the British .303. That Charteris gadget did have some useful information inscribed on it – angles of elevation and descent, cones of dispersion, etc. – all of it useful at times, but I soon discarded it, as I had all those tables on a celluloid protractor which I found more suitable for my work of compiling firing data. In all our work, designating targets, making corrections in range, etc., we used degrees and minutes of angle – as did the artillery. I have been acquainted with this “mil” business ever since it was introduced in the U.S. Army, but, up to this present year of our Lord, 1932, I must confess that I have never been able to form the slightest idea as to the why of it, and if there is any real and practical advantage in its use, the same has never been explained to me or in my presence. Every rifleman in the United States and in the British possessions is familiar with the minute, as a measure used for changes in elevation or horizontal deflection. Probably some of them do not know that it is just the sixtieth part of a degree or that an angle of one minute, extended to the distance of one mile, equals eighteen inches, but they all do know that a change of one minute is equal to one inch for every hundred yards of range. (The mile being 1760 yards and the minute equaling eighteen inches at that distance, it is plenty close enough for all practical purposes.) And whenever we have to make up a real army, for war, we will take in men from every walk of life; but, no matter what their normal vocation, they will have a general idea of the structure of the circle and its divisions, used by astronomers, navigators, engineers and surveyors, the world over – and really understood by the nucleus of shooting men with whom we would have to start out. What is the advantage in trying to make them learn something altogether different and which cannot, in my humble opinion, increase their efficiency in the slightest degree? The time for training and preparation will be all too short, at the best, so why complicate matters any more than necessary?

  The ingenuity, the time and the money wasted by educated theorists would, if properly applied, win most any war. I could not attempt to enumerate all the marvelous and amazing devices that came to my notice, both in the British and American services, during the war. Why, they even issued to us a lot of carefully made cloth masks and neck coverings of a similar khaki-colored material – to be used when on night raids. Nobody ever used them, of course, a smear of mud being much better and easier to apply. Then there were the steel shields, mounted on two little truck wheels, which men were expected to push before them when advancing to the attack. I saw them at various places behind the lines but never up at the front, as it was obviously impossible for men to trundle them across the tom ground of no-man’s-land. The most expensive of range finders – useful in their proper place – were frequently seen, in all their glittering glory of a meter of bright and shining brass, sticking in the mud alongside the trenches where they had been thrown by the misguided individuals who had laboriously carried them up from the rear.

  When we finally got up to the front, opposite Messines, we had a chance to work up some practical dope on machine-gun firing – indirect firing, I mean. The German position was along the Messines Ridge and ours on a similar height across the valley of the Douve River. The range, from crest to crest, was about a mile, but the front line trenches of both sides were advanced so that they were but some three hundred yards apart. From carefully concealed observation posts, along the crest, we were able to locate several important dumps and points of rendezvous within the enemy lines. The machine gun officer of the outgoing Surreys had begun this work and we took it up where he left off. There we used but one strafing gun, located just far enough back from the crest of the hill to be safe from direct enemy observation. Our maps were the accurate, official maps of the district, upon which had been printed a “grid” with squares of 1,000 yards further divided into quarters and these five-hundred yard squares marked with hatch-marks along the lines which were to be indicated by numbers, from one to ten, both horizontally and vertically, when describing the location of a target. By this system we could locate any target within a space of fifty yards and, by using an additional series of numbers, could bring this down to five yards. The contours were in meters.

  Before doing any actual firing, we made range charts by using one of the regular maps and drawing on it the lines running from the gun position to the various targets, which were indicated by letters of the alphabet. The lines of sight were determined by compass and checked, whenever possible, by sending a man to the rear, where from some commanding height he could see both gun and target. Then another man, crawling out in front of the gun, drove a stake at the spot indicated by the observer, in a direct line from gun to target, and the letter of the particular target was plainly inscribed on the stake. The outgoing Surreys had already located several important points within the German lines. One of these, which we named “Cooker’s Halt,” was the place where the field or rolling kitchens came at night with the next day’s rations for the men in the front lines and where the ration parties gathered soon after dark every night. This was our first objective, and our initial night’s strafing was highly successful, as was evidenced by the dead horses and men and overturned cookers and limbers which were plainly visible there in the morning. That must have been a hot spot for Heinie for a few minutes. The shouting, screaming and general racket was plainly heard by the men in our front line and reported by them. From that time on their cookers never came over the hill, and we had to search for other
targets. Occasional working parties were located and dispersed, and this furnished about all the entertainment; until, one afternoon, while scanning the enemy lines from one of our observation posts, I discovered a long string of motor trucks moving into the yard of a farmhouse where they unloaded boxes and bales of supplies, the character of which could not be determined at that distance.

  After a little hurried work in figuring the range and direction we opened fire on them at a range of about 1800 yards – and how they did scatter. One truck, probably disabled, was left in plain sight but all the others quickly made their way back and over the hill, leaving some men lying on the ground.

  During all the months that followed, both there and at other places along the line, we always maintained one or more strafing guns.

  Practice with these not only inflicted a certain amount of damage upon the enemy but it qualified the men operating the guns for the more important work of delivering a harassing fire upon the enemy’s lines of communication during an engagement.

  In connection with this strafing business I recall a funny incident. One day an officer of the Yorkshire Regiment happened to come down the communication trench just as I was entering it from a side trench which led to one of our strafing-gun positions. As I knew him to be the Emma-Gee officer of his unit, I invited him to go back with me and inspect the position, and I there explained to him just what we were doing in that line. Now he was a newcomer, recently out from England, and, while he had heard, in a vague way, of this kind of machine-gun work, he had never seen it tried out. I explained everything to him very carefully, showing our maps, range-charts and instruments. He had, it seemed, all the necessary equipment, and, becoming very enthusiastic, he vowed that he would surprise his commanding officer by starting something of the same kind in his outfit.

  Well, he did, all right for that evening, just before dark, as I was passing along the trench which separated their sector from ours, I noticed a group of men mounting a machine gun some fifty yards behind their front line trench. Curious, I stopped to watch, and soon discovered my officer, busily engaged in giving instructions for the mounting and laying of the gun. He soon noticed me and came over. He was fairly bubbling over with enthusiasm and told me that he had received information from the F.O.O. of the local battery that they (the artillery) were going to strafe a certain cross-road at seven o’clock and that he was going to join the party with the gun which was just now being set up. On his map he showed me the location of the target and also all his firing data. I studied it awhile and then took a look at the terrain in the direction of the target, but said nothing. However, I made it a point to be around at seven o’clock and stood by while they fired four belts (1000 rounds) into the side of “Picadilly Hill,” about two hundred yards away. In figuring his firing dope he had made no allowance whatever for the difference in elevation. His target was on a high flat, some ten meters above his gun position, and with the edge of the flat – the hill mentioned – directly in front of the gun. With the gun and ammunition he was using it would have been a physical impossibility to hit the designated target from that point. Our guns, that is, our strafing guns, were located from three to five hundred yards behind our front line and on ground nearly or quite as high as that occupied by the enemy.

  This machine-gun strafing was but one of the many innovations introduced by the Canadians. It was quickly taken up by all the others and soon became an established practice. Some units only used it occasionally, but we (of the 21st Battalion) made it a regular part of our business, and, having six guns instead of the regulation four, we were able to man all the usual front line positions and still have two guns left for strafing work. I hope that these lines may come to the notice of some of the men who were instrumental in providing those two extra guns, that they may know that their gift was a direct and important contribution to the fighting strength of the battalion.

  All our original guns were Colts. I imagine I can hear some sniffs and horse-laughs. You think the Colt is a poor weapon, eh? Well, just let me tell you something for your information and instruction. That gun is the best and safest ever invented for firing, at a low elevation, over the heads of your own troops, probably because of the heavier barrel. Whatever the reason, it will fire bursts of ten to twenty shots with less dispersion on the target than any other gun which I have seen. It has its faults – they all have – but to offset them it has a lot of good points. For instance, you don’t have to lug around a condenser, to say nothing of the difficulty of finding water when it is most needed. Many a gun jacket has been filled with the individual and personal contributions of urine by members of the crew, just as a sock saturated with the same liquid has done duty as a gas-mask, but dependence on this source of supply is not recommended. The comparatively slow rate of fire of the Colt is not, in my opinion, a serious detriment. It will rarely happen that troops will advance in masses, and for the scattered and loosely-connected groups which usually make up the modem battle line an exceedingly high rate of speed in firing is not only unnecessary but means merely a waste of ammunition. One bullet is quite enough to stop a man – and I have seen some hit by five or more before they had time to fall. Often we used our Colts for firing single shots – sniping – and that is practically impossible with any of the other and faster kinds. From many tests on the ranges, in both Canada and England, we found that we could sight in by firing single shots and then leave the gun in position and go back later and fire a burst which would split the bull’s-eye. This proved to be an important point when we had the gun mounted in some position which was within view of the enemy, because we could sight in with single shot and no one would think it was anything but a rifle.

  We had breakages, of course, but probably no more than the fellows who were using the Vickers. Most of these troubles were caused, I believe, by faulty ammunition. Cartridges developing an excessive pressure will nearly always break something, and when you are using stuff which has been made in a hundred different little and hastily equipped factories and by girls who never before knew the difference between a bullet and a bodkin, why, what the hell can you expect? By experiment you adjust the retracting springs for some well-known and reliable brand of ammunition and the first thing you know, right in the midst of a fight, you get a bunch of the phoney stuff, and all at once something goes “flooey” and it’s a case of blow the whistle and take time out for repairs. Even the difference of a small fraction of an inch in the thickness of the rim of the .303 cartridge would break extractors as fast as they could be replaced. Various other irregularities, so small as to be un-discoverable with the naked eye, would cause stoppages and breaking of small parts. For the first few months, spare parts were practically unknown, and it required the utmost ingenuity on the part of the gun crew to improvise – and with what materials could be found on the spot – or replace some of the small but essential parts that went to make up the mechanism of the gun.

  We utilized parts of cream separators, sewing machines, baby carriages, bicycles and parts of farm machinery found abandoned and lying around those Belgian farms. A bit of work with hacksaw and file and there was our spare part; the members of the gun crew put in many long hours filing out those parts which experience had taught would likely break, and it soon became common belief that we could make any part of a machine gun except the barrel. The French had a great many military bicycles in their organization and these were fitted with a rifle carrier. There was a certain bolt on this carrier which was an exact duplicate of an important part of our guns, so whenever we found one those old broken bicycles which had been abandoned, we would take the time to remove this bolt and carry it along for emergencies. I remember a few bolts which were taken out of bicycles not broken, also.

  All automatically operated firearms are naturally very delicately balanced mechanisms, whether gas or recoil operated. The ammunition used must give just the proper power to overcome the normal friction of the working parts, eject the empty cartridge case, reload the chamber
properly, fire it and continue the cycle as long as the trigger is kept pressed. Ammunition which does not give the proper pressures, or cartridges which through faulty manufacture cause undue friction either in being seated or ejected, will soon cause a “jam.” Also, ammunition which develops too much pressure or creates too little friction will cause breakages on account of the excess jar and hammering.

  Hence we soon learned to test out all ammunition and find just how it was going to work before anything important was pulled off, either by ourselves or by the Germans. We would load up a few belts of a certain lot of ammunition and fire them at comparatively unimportant targets such as sweeping the top of the German trenches at morning stand-to, or a short burst in strafing work at night. This soon gave us the number of that particular batch of cartridges and if they were good we promptly took the necessary steps to obtain a reserve supply of that ammunition and store it away for use during the prolonged firing of a drive against us, or for covering fire over our own troops during an advance.

  No, I’ll tell you fellows: we just had to make up this game as we went along. It was not easy either. Many better men than I am, spent their lives in trying to teach the rest of us how to do it. I wish I could remember the names of some of those men of the Twentieth Canadian Battalion Machine Gun Section; you know they alternated with us – relieving one another – all through that winter of 1915-16. The machine guns always went in ahead of their infantry. Well, anyway; we “Emma-Gees,” as they called all the machine gunners in the British service, went in and learned the game in the only way any game can properly be learned – by playing it.