Accounts of the carnage were accumulating. More than 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg, nearly 35,000 at Chickamauga, another 30,000 at Chancellorsville. And as arms and ordnance plants churned out new developments, the medical arts had not kept pace. Even the lightly wounded faced agony. Anesthesia was only beginning to enter widespread use, which, as one chronicler noted, often meant that “nine-tenths of surgical skill was speed.”31 Amputations were performed in tents and commandeered buildings at battle’s edge, at times by surgeons who sawed off shattered limbs from one partially sedated soldier while his wounded comrades queued up and watched, waiting their turns.32 This was also before the causes of infection were known. Working in ignorance of bacteria, the surgeons who accompanied the soldiers into battle often did not wash their hands or change instruments between patients, many of whom either expired from putrefying infections after their wounds were sutured or arrived at convalescent hospitals away from the front feverish, weakened, and at risk. “Our house is one of constant death now,” the chief nurse at the Union Hospital in Washington had written to her mother in New England, as Gatling was seeking his patent in 1862. “Every day some one drops off the corruption of a torn and wounded body.”33 Two days after Gatling’s patent was awarded, she lamented of laboring to save the wrecked and infected men in the hospital’s dim halls and cold rooms, an environment beset by “universal depression.” “When the day dawns one of my men has gone, and before the hour of supper time comes we close the eyes of two more, one the only son of his mother!”34
The names of these lost sons filled lists in the newspapers around the land, North and South. By the time Gatling wrote Lincoln, about half a million Union and Confederate soldiers were dead, by far the largest toll that the nation had ever suffered in war, and ever would. Hundreds of thousands more men had been wounded. These were staggering numbers for a nation with a population of 31 million. (The proportionate equivalent would be roughly 5 million dead Americans in the first three years of the most recent war in Iraq.) They were even more staggering considering that neither the Union nor the Confederate tallies included civilian tolls. Gatling offered to help end the bloodletting through a counterintuitive means: more efficient slaughter. He hoped that President Lincoln would see that his weapon—“very simple in its construction, strong and durable and can be used effectively by men of ordinary intelligence”—was “providential, to be used as a means in crushing the rebellion.”
The decision to seek the president’s attention was not unwise, but it was poorly timed. In June 1861, at the outset of the war, Lincoln had expressed enough of a personal interest in the Union Army’s weapons that he had agreed to meet with the salesmen of the Union Repeating Gun, designed, depending on which patent application one believes, by either Wilson Ager, Edward Nugent, or William Palmer.35 Its vendors were no strangers to overstatement. They called their offering “an Army in six-feet square.” It was a single-barreled weapon with a revolving cylinder set just behind the stationary barrel, which made it more like a huge revolver than Gatling’s eventual development. The cylinder was turned via the working of a hand-crank. And as each of the .58-caliber projectiles flew from the thirty-five-inch barrel, at a rate of 120 rounds a minute, new paper cartridges rolled into place from a metal box mounted above.36
Lincoln believed in technology, and he thought that the right weapons, made with the Union’s industrial advantages, might hurry the fighting along toward victory. When the Repeating Gun’s salesmen arrived from New York and checked into the Willard Hotel in Washington, the president ventured down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to participate in a demonstration in the loft of a carriage house. Empty cartridges were used, but Lincoln, manning the crank himself, was able to see the cartridges cycle from the box above, through the cylinders, and drop out below. It was the first time a head of state had such a personal encounter with a rapid-fire firearm—a sales phenomenon that within a few years would become common practice in Europe. Lincoln was impressed. He called the weapon the “Coffee Mill,” a homespun nickname coined at the sight of cartridges falling from the hopper and out onto the ground through the movement of a handle, which made the contraption vaguely reminiscent of a grinder.37
A few days later the president attended a firing trial with live ammunition at the Washington Arsenal. By the year’s end he had instructed the army to order sixty of the guns. The first fifty were bought for $612.50 apiece, plus 20 percent, the following July.38 With that order, J. D. Mills, the salesman, became the first arms dealer to sell a machine gun,39 a career path many would follow. Gatling hoped to be next.
The mood for revolutionary weapons in Washington, however, was different in early 1864 than it had been in 1861. More than two years of intense fighting had passed since Mills’s sales coup, and no fewer than twenty-five different “machine-gun devices,” as one American military officer called them, had been submitted to ordnance officials.40 Lincoln had pushed for another early machine gun, known as the Raphael Repeater, but General Ripley had stymied that weapon, too. And the Coffee Mills that Lincoln had managed to urge into service, and Butler’s Gatlings, had been of little consequence, for many reasons. Some were the weapon’s fault, others not. Paper cartridges were prone to failure. Coffee Mills had seen combat under Colonel John W. Geary in Middleburg, Virginia, in 1862, when they pushed back a Confederate cavalry squadron.41 But the colonel later returned the guns to Washington and complained they were inefficient and unsafe. The single barrel, firing heavy bullets and exposed to the bullets’ friction and the great heat of the powder that propelled them, was prone to overheating. The loads of ammunition required to supply the weapons were a heavy burden for the men and draft horses needed to move the weapon into position for a fight. There were also reports that the weapons’ parts broke, causing the entire system to fail. The rebels’ Requas had also not redeemed themselves. The Confederate volley gun weighed nearly fourteen hundred pounds and tended not to work when its ammunition was exposed to moisture. Rapid-fire weapons were too new, and the army’s officers too unfamiliar with them, for machine gunnery to find a place in the war.
Worries about logistics and performance were not the only factors that had dampened enthusiasm. An absence of imagination played a part. The federal and Confederate officers had been unable to conceive of an essential tactical role for these new weapons. Officers were simply not sure what to do with them. They regarded them as offshoots of artillery, not as infantry arms. Rapid-fire arms stood garrison duty. They watched over bridges. Butler dragged them along as his unit walked across the South. They were not pushed to the center of battlefield duty, and, as near as the surviving records and accounts of the fighting tell, were never used in the offense. No one quite knew how, and no one was advocating for them from within.
Gatling sensed what he was up against. His claim to Lincoln—that the gun he offered was of no ordinary character—was certainly true. Unlike the guns his competitors sold, his weapon was showing signs in field trials that it did not overheat and was a step closer to making the elusive goal of rapid fire real. He wanted Lincoln to know that what he offered was not another curio, and far surpassed the lackluster machine that had intrigued the president almost three years before. He included a postscript in his letter: “I have seen an inferior arm known as the ‘Coffee Mill Gun’ which I am informed has not given satisfaction in practical tests on the battlefield. I assure you my invention is no ‘Coffee Mill Gun’—but is entirely a different arm and is entirely free from the accidents and objections raised against that arm.”
Performance did not matter. The Confederacy by 1864 had both bloodied the Union’s formations and become so weakened by the materially superior federal troops that the promise of a swift victory brought on by a new and terribly efficient weapon was neither as inviting, nor as believable, as it might have been before. Gatling waited for an answer from a president whose attention had drifted. Lincoln did not intervene on Gatling’s behalf. There is no record that he t
roubled to reply.
The time was not spent idly. Work on the Gatling gun line continued. Gatling had initially had his weapons manufactured in Cincinnati. In 1864, upon making another model with many refinements, he commissioned the Cooper Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, of Pennsylvania, to build an improved prototype. The new model was much more reliable and efficient. Gatling’s sales agent, General John Love, a well-connected retired army veteran and graduate of West Point, offered the weapon for trials to the Army Ordnance Department in January 1865. General Ripley, who had thwarted Gatling from the beginning, had retired. His eventual replacement, Brigadier General Alexander B. Dyer, was twenty years younger than his former boss and more amenable to examining new submissions. The latest Gatling’s performance was of a much higher order, and new developments in ammunition meant the weapon now fired metal cartridges, rather than the paper cartridges used in the earlier guns. Trials were ordered. The army’s ordnance corps began to see its potential. “Dr. Gatling’s gun seems to possess all the good qualities claimed for it,” a test supervisor wrote. “It is therefore merely a question of whether such a piece would be of use in actual service.”42
The Gatling gun had largely missed the war that spurred its creation, but it had found official support at last. Machine guns were no longer the fancies of men like Puckle. They were nearing commercial success, and were soon to be put to use.
CHAPTER 2
Machine Guns in Action
Merely a Life-Exterminating Weapon1
ON AUGUST 24, 1866, THE AMERICAN ARMY ENTERED A CONtract to purchase one hundred Gatling guns, signed under the hand of General Dyer, who had assumed command of the Ordnance Department two years before.2 Much had changed in the short time since General Dryer ordered the improved Gatling guns to be put through performance trials. General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. President Lincoln had been assassinated at Ford’s Theater. The Gatling Gun Company had entered an agreement with the Colt Patent Firearms Company, in Hartford, Connecticut, which gave Gatling the manufacturing capacity to handle large orders. And the army had turned much of its attention westward, to the resumption of subjugating Native American populations and tightening the government’s hold on the vast wilderness territory that it claimed.
The latest army tests had led to enthusiastic reports. The weapon now had inside backing. “The moral effect of the Gatling gun would be very great in repelling an assault, as there is not a second of time for the assailants to advance between the discharges,” a report noted in 1866. The chief tester found as well that the weapon was suited for the demands of the field. “The machinery of this gun is simple and strong, and I do not think likely to get out of order. I had the oil rubbed off this gun, drenched it with water, and then exposed it for two nights and a day to the rain and the weather, but though it was quite rusty, it was fired 97 times in a minute and a half, one man turning at the crank. In my opinion this arm could be used to advantage in the military service.”3 Positive reviews accumulated in the navy, too. “From the examination made of the gun, and the report the tests hereto appended, the board is of opinion that, as an auxiliary arm for special service… it has no known superior.”4
Parallel developments had made Gatling’s weapon more reliable. The improvements to the weapon proper in 1865 had been matched by advances in ammunition manufacturing, which made cartridges with solid metal casings available. The new gun, with the new casings, was an altogether more effective system. Gatling in time admitted that perhaps his earlier sales efforts had been rushed. When he had written Lincoln, it seemed, he had been peddling an unreliable weapon. “The machine gun was not of much practical use until the metal cartridge had been perfected,” he said, “and that was not till after the war was ended.”5
The end of the war also brought an end to an American embargo on exporting arms. The American army was small, and with a large recent order, Gatling knew that there were natural limits to domestic sales. He also knew that the more nations that fielded Gatling guns, the more appealing they might become to others. With the export ban lifted, he searched for business overseas. He enlisted the help of international sales representatives, offering salaries and commissions. Company officers, including Gatling, went abroad. At their urging, trials were held in Holland, Berlin, Versailles, Vienna, and Denmark. Sales started slowly. But the efforts hinted at the new markets’ prospects. In 1867, the company sold the rights to Russia to make guns for its own use, and sold one gun to the Argentine Republic and another to the Royal Bavarian Arsenal. The Dutch bought two more, and the following year, in 1868, the royal Danish government ordered three. Word was spreading of the weapon’s potential, reaching those controlling the purse strings of several governments.
Then came a break. Czar Alexander II of Russia was trying to exert his empire’s influence over distant lands and indigenous populations. He sought arms, the best available, and in 1865 the czarist bureaucracy in Saint Petersburg assigned Colonel Alexander Pavlovich Gorloff to be the empire’s military attaché in England and the United States. Colonel Gorloff, an arms-design expert from the Russian artillery, was directed to canvass arms and ordnance circles in the West and see what might be procured. Russia has long produced able military agents, and Colonel Gorloff, given wide latitude by his country, was one for his time. He had refined manners, spoke exquisite English, and had experience as the former secretary of the nation’s Artillery Commission, where he had helped design Russian cannon. Upon arriving in the United States, he found himself drawn in particular to two systems: Smith & Wesson revolvers and Gatling guns. He introduced himself to American companies and comprehended the potential of repeating weapons with remarkable speed. By 1867 he convinced the czarist government to enter an agreement with the Gatling Gun Company to allow the Russian government to manufacture Gatlings.6 In May 1869, Colonel Gorloff submitted an order to have seventy guns made in the United States; within months he ordered thirty more. Russia was moving quickly. While the prevailing attitude among officers of almost all professional armies was to dismiss machine guns as nearly useless, the czarist military distributed them without an agonizing or time-consuming debate. Within a year, every Russian artillery brigade would field a battery of eight Gatlings made for Russian-caliber cartridges.7
Russia’s officers seemed much more determined to use Gatling guns than the inventor’s own countrymen. Even after General Dyer and other ordnance officers recorded the Gatling’s curious new powers and placed orders, the United States Army could not figure out what to do with them, aside from the obvious use in guarding forts and other fixed points. Some officers shunned them. “Against my wishes I was detailed to command them,” wrote Edward S. Godfrey, a recent graduate of West Point assigned to the Seventh Cavalry in Kansas in 1867 and ordered to oversee “four Gatlings hauled by two mules each.” He knew next to nothing about them, and had trouble finding soldiers to man them; this detail, like many others, apparently had been neglected since the guns had been delivered to Seventh Cavalry’s post. “The only Gatlings I had ever seen were in the ordnance museum at West Point,” Godfrey groused.8
The Russian purchases were made before Gatling himself knew just how powerful and well made his weapon had become. A test in Vienna, on July 9, 1869, showed the new weapon’s ferocious capabilities. At a distance of eight hundred paces, a Gatling crew took three trial shots and then opened fire with a Gatling gun of half-inch caliber. The target, fifty-four feet wide by nine feet high, simulated the sort of large enemy presence—a formation of soldiers, perhaps, or a boat or an artillery piece—that gunners would fire upon by traversing their weapon slightly and distributing fire for maximum effect. The crew took 216 shots. Two hundred and thirteen bullets struck home. At twelve hundred paces, a larger Gatling gun fired 191 shots for 152 hits.9 The results should have led to a self-evident conclusion: This was a weapon that could cut down the massed formations—the columns, lines, and squares of tightly grouped infantrymen—common in tha
t day.
The following month, another test, at Karlsruhe, Prussia, pitted one hundred well-drilled infantry soldiers equipped with the zundnadelgewehr, a breech-loading rifle known as the “needle gun,” against a single half-inch-caliber Gatling. This time the target was seventy-two feet across but only six feet high. The competitors were given a minute each to fire as accurately and often as they could manage from a position eight hundred paces away. The one hundred Prussian riflemen produced a rolling barrage displaying the effects of what until that time had been seen as rapid firing: 721 shots, roughly one aimed shot per man every nine seconds. An examination of the target showed that much of the shooting had, in effect, been little more than noise. Only 196 projectiles struck the target, a success rate of 27 percent. The Gatling gun fired 246 shots and recorded 216 hits, or nearly 88 percent.10 Gatling’s gun had almost achieved its creator’s vision: Two men, not one, had done the work of one hundred men and with only about one-third the ammunition. The first part of Gatling’s theory about efficiency was proving correct. Technology was rendering the conventional infantry tactics of the era obsolete, although the conventional infantry did not yet know it.
The Gun Page 5