The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  A newly formed concern, the Maxim Gun Company, was ready to market his product, and it quickly became evident that there were advantages to not being first: The sales groundwork laid by Gatling and Gardner had made his path easier. So had the uneven performance of the Gatling gun at Ulundi, and the failures of the Gardner at Abu Klea, and then the massacre at Dogali. In 1885, Maxim’s gun was fired for the public at an inventors’ exhibition in South Kensington, and next were a series of trials in England and France, and in Italy, where the gun was submerged in the sea for three days and put to tests without cleaning. Upon watching a test in Vienna, Archduke William called it “the most dreadful instrument I have ever seen or imagined.” And placed orders with its inventor.

  No matter the Maxim’s superior performance, it faced clever interference. At one shooting trial between Maxim’s guns and those of his competitors, a sales agent for the Nordenfelt gun lingered among the reporters waiting outside the test-range gates. The Maxim beat the hand-cranked Nordenfelt handily, but could not defeat the agent’s guile. The competitor’s agent addressed the reporters in a hasty news conference. “The Nordenfelt—it has beaten all others,” he told them, and so the stories read the next day.32 Maxim also could not attract attention across the Atlantic; his competitors and potential partners in America barely replied to his mail. “I wrote to all the prominent gun and pistol makers in the States telling them that the automatic system would soon be applied to firearms of all sizes from pocket-pistols up, and advising them to work my system, which had been broadly patented in the States,” he said. “I did not receive a single favourable reply.”33

  The American army was similarly unimpressed, in part because it was in a period where it was under orders to buy American-made arms, but also because early tests raised concerns about reliability and durability.34 Nonetheless, a few officers were scolding the others for not paying developments in machine gunnery adequate mind. “There can be no question that these guns will prove an all-important factor in deciding war, and the nation which best employs them, and fully understands their working and organization, will come off the victor,” one artillery colonel wrote in an article in a leading tactical journal. The colonel, Edward B. Williston, pilloried the ignorance permeating the American officer corps. “Generally speaking, not one officer in a hundred has any special knowledge of the subject of machine guns, and very little is known of their construction, capabilities or proper uses,” he wrote. “The guns issued to the Army are either used to ornament posts … or they are carefully housed and greased to prevent rusting.” A terrible tool had appeared, to snickers. “It has been the fashion,” he said, “to decry the guns.”35

  In 1887 Maxim submitted guns to the British for naval trials, and the navy bought three. Royal enthusiasm for the gun ran so high that Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, recommended it to his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany, who requested a demonstration competition between a Gatling, a Nordenfelt, and a Maxim. The Germans already had tested machine guns, but were not satisfied with them; they had yet to design ammunition casings sturdy enough to bear the strain of rapid fire. The Maxim worked flawlessly, firing 333 rounds in less than thirty seconds. The kaiser approached the gun and placed his finger on it.

  “That is the gun,” he said, “there is no other.”

  At that moment, Hiram Maxim had effectively achieved what he would be most remembered for. The companies he was affiliated with would sell more guns to many buyers, and he would continue his inventing, and would try to design an airplane. With uncanny martial prescience, he would predict aerial bombing before airplanes had even been made. But the demonstration for the kaiser was his moment. Once the kaiser had seen the efficiency and ease of use of the automatic machine gun, Maxim had offered his weapons for sale to the powers that would become the central military actors in World War I.

  While Europeans placed their initial orders, the most important test results were trickling back—from battle. A Maxim gun was first used in 1887 in the jungles along Africa’s western coast, about sixty miles inland from Freetown, against a small, recalcitrant tribe. As colonial episodes went, the uprising was minor. But it proved to anyone watching closely what a Maxim could do. The insurgent tribesmen, whom the British called the Yonnies, occupied a network of crude forts in the jungle, from which they had been raiding neighboring towns and threatening the area’s trade. The colonial administration sent to London for help. Sir Francis de Winton was dispatched from England, and arrived to marshal a small force: four hundred men from the First West India Regiment, a hundred local Sierre Leone police officers, and a few dozen sailors from the sloop HMS Acorn. The sailors had brought along a small artillery piece and a Maxim, which they carried ashore.

  The force marched for Robari, the insurgents’ stronghold. When they arrived, they found a tiny fortress, less than eighty yards across, ringed by a deep ditch and a mud wall. Eleven watchtowers looked down over the approaches. The Yonnies were confidently inside. Against enemies with primitive equipment, the Robari defenses might have proved sturdy. But the fort’s builders had never seen the type of weapons the British dragged down the trail. The invading force stopped on the opposite bank of a stream, took stock of the defenses, and went to work. From a distance of less than five hundred yards, they leveled the artillery piece and fired into the buildings and walls. The tribesmen scrambled to the roofs to remove the thatch and contain the risk of fire, and unwittingly presented themselves as targets to a weapon they had not known existed. The result was reported by MacMillan’s magazine.

  The Maxim, which here administered rather than received its baptism of fire, was turned on them, and they dropped off the roofs by dozens. …When the leading troops entered the gate on the Mafenbeh side there was not a living Yonnie left in the town, although there was no lack of their dead.

  The British saw the rout for what it had been: “a complete, if not particularly glorious, victory.” Then they ransacked Robari. Three days later, de Winton began to move on the tribe’s smaller forts, where he repeated the slaughter. The destruction of Ronietto made for a particularly ugly account. A Yonnie waved a white flag of surrender, and yet the tribe fought on. The British reply was so overpowering that MacMillan’s compared it to cleaning out a nest of wasps. This was a new kind of war. Point a machine, and killing men was like killing bugs.

  The gates were flung open, and the defenders came streaming out. The Maxim was planted opposite one gate at a distance of little over two hundred yards, and under the frightful rain of bullets that it poured upon that narrow entrance not one of the hapless wretches that came out escaped alive. The slaughter of the war-boys on this occasion was greater than at any of the other towns. It was necessary to give them a lesson to respect flags of truce, and in any case one severe example is with the savages the most merciful in the end.36

  The growing interest from buyers, combined with the results of field tests and in West Africa, brought more interest from potential partners. It was obvious that the Maxim gun outperformed all the manual guns of the era, and one competitor realized it was better to join efforts with Maxim than to be pushed out of the field. In 1888 Maxim joined with Thorsten Nordenfelt, an arms dealer, financier, and steel producer from Sweden, to form the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company Limited. The firm manufactured his patterns from a factory in Crayford, a short drive to London’s east. Nordenfelt’s switch from Maxim rival to Maxim partner signaled the beginning of the end for sales of manual machine guns. With the association of his new partner, Maxim also picked up the sales support of Basil Zaharoff, a corrupt and mercurial arms salesman with an array of contacts in the war ministries of Europe. It had been Zaharoff, known in his time as the Merchant of Death, who had tricked the journalists after the firing trials in Vienna. Now he was on Maxim’s team. His black arts would be used on Maxim’s behalf.

  As its inventor’s business prospects were brightening, the Maxim gun continued making the rounds in Africa. In 1893, in wha
t became known as the Matabele War, the British South Africa Corporation moved to put down a rebellion by Ndebele people, an offshoot of the Zulu nation in the area that would become Rhodesia, and then Zimbabwe. The corporation had at its disposal fewer than one thousand police officers, soldiers, and mercenaries in all. The forces of the opposing king, Lobengula, outnumbered the whites by many times. While they were not as uninformed as the defenders of Robari and Ronietto—the Ndebele had knowledge of the power of the colonial columns’ other weapons—they began the war without the benefit of knowing about a Maxim gun.

  As one of the British columns moved toward the capital, Bulawayo, the Ndebele picked at it along the way, trying to ambush or surround it. Each time the Maxim helped push them back. George Rattray, a British gunman who had traveled to Matabeleland in his late teens,37 had joined the expedition, and sent a detailed account of several skirmishes home to his mother in Surrey. By his description, the British with their Maxims were all but invincible. They moved across the countryside toward the capital, razing villages along the way.

  We continued our march straight for Bulawayo capturing cattle as we went, burning every Kraal we came near and destroying the grain, the niggers having left everything behind. I suppose we have burned about some six thousand huts.

  About twenty miles short of the capital, the column met resistance from two experienced Ndebele regiments. A skirmish became a larger clash as the regiments pressed near. This time the Maxim did more than hold the attackers off. The Ndebele, Rattray said, were “mown down just as if with a scythe.” The events showed how far machine-gun and ammunition technology had advanced since the 1879 Zulu War. Rattray’s long letter home described Ulundi in reverse. Rather than depending on the support of the infantry’s rifles to assist in battle between jams, the machine guns left little work for the infantry to do.

  Our two foot regiments, the redoubtable foot sloggers, were ordered out with fixed bayonets to clear the bush. This they did in about twenty minutes, the firing on both sides being heavy but strange to say not a man of ours was hit while the Matabele dropped in all directions. The enemy then retired leaving over 1500 dead.38

  Accounts of this sort accumulated, including the most lopsided tally perhaps ever recorded to that time—a claim that about four dozen policemen with four Maxims withstood repeated charges, killing more than three thousand African men in front of a police station. The round numbers are suspicious. But the larger point is unmistakable. A few hundred men with a few Maxims had subdued a king and his army, and destroyed the enemy’s ranks. Hiram Maxim’s business was secure.

  This was obvious in the market as well, where the Maxim’s rise signaled the Gatling’s decline. In 1876, after weathering worries over debt and sales, the Gatling Gun Company had been solidly in the black. Its $31,000 in debt had been paid down,39 and the company had sales that year of seventy guns, signaling the start of a period of profit. Gross receipts for the fiscal year were $81,290. Profits were $47,495.40 Then came Maxim. By the end of its 1889 fiscal year, the Gatling Gun Company had grossed $13,006.48 on gun sales, and had only $1,794.55 in hand. It sold thirty-seven guns that year, a small fraction of what it had sold fifteen years before.41 The American army had tested the Maxim at least twice—in 1888 and 1890.42 In 1888 it had been intrigued, but the gun was withdrawn by the owners before follow-on tests were held. In 1890, the Maxim was found to be less reliable and more prone to rusting in endurance tests than the Gatling, which by then had been largely perfected. But by 1894, the U.S. Navy testing board had recommended the Maxim for acceptance for the fleet over the Gatling and several other weapons.43 With the prospect of obsolescence looming, the Gatling Gun Company was developing a means to relieve gunners of the chores and risk related to turning the crank.44 Its proposed solution was to attach an electric motor to keep the barrels spinning.

  By this time, Gatling had refined the basic operations of his gun and embarked on the process of miniaturization. Gatlings of the time weighed 224 pounds, the carriage an additional 202 pounds, and the limber another 200.45 With a reasonable load of ammunition, the weapon, ready for movement about the battlefield, weighed more than a half ton. To expand markets, the Gatling Gun Company offered a smaller and more portable model, sold under the name Camel gun. The Camel gun was made not for forts or warships, but for overland patrols and expeditions. It fit into a case that could be lashed to the back of a pack animal. A portable tripod completed the kit, and allowed the gun to be set readily on the ground most anywhere required. These were essential developments. In the short term, they allowed Gatling guns, first created to ride on a timber between large wheels, to get off the roads and level ground and out into the infantry’s terrain. In the long term they marked the first step toward the shrinkage of rapid-fire arms, which would make them available to a much longer list of users.

  By 1892, the Gatling gun was down to 74 pounds.46 In 1895, the Maxim Nordenfelt Company took miniaturization further, down to 40 pounds—25 pounds for the gun and 15 more for a tripod, the pair fitting together in a pack.47 These smaller guns were not mainstays in the fighting. But they established, change by change and pound by pound, that rapid-fire arms could be reduced in mass.

  The Maxim’s success in the field, and the interest of many nations, helped the company’s prospects for raising capital or finding partners. Hiram Maxim’s actual state of affairs were not rosy. Maxim was a difficult man—cantankerous, arrogant, impulsive, rude—and he was a designer by personality, not a manager. His company’s affairs were sloppy, and by this time he was extremely deaf. One of his directors, to communicate with him, had to pull on Maxim’s earlobe, lean close, and bellow. The company had factories at Crayford, Erith, Dartford, Birmingham, and Stockholm, but Maxim was regarded as so disruptive that the company barred him from entering the assembly-room floors, and set aside a workshop for him where he might spend his time without wasting everyone else’s. The company itself had been a far-flung and overcapitalized concern, and equipment was often idle. A directors’ report in 1890 noted that one factory had three to four times the necessary capacity. The company had a product that was gaining reputation and generating enthusiasm. But it leaked money.48

  Nonetheless, the product was good enough that the firm would survive mismanagement and all of the disruptions Maxim would muster. Vickers purchased the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company for 1.35 million British pounds in 1897, becoming Vickers, Son & Maxim, and helping the Vickers family to position itself against their rivals in the armaments trade, Armstrong.[2] By this time, Maxim’s patterns were being turned into guns in England, Germany, France, Spain, and Sweden, and Maxim expected them to be made in the United States. “The automatic system has now been adopted by nearly all nations, great and small,” he said proudly at a public lecture. “We are now giving employment to a large number of men. Our works are fully employed.”49

  And this did not mention the manufacture of Maxims abroad, in Germany, where a firm had astutely arranged a licensing agreement that passed the full technical drawings of a Maxim gun to German possession. Step by step, the demonstration before the kaiser was leading to its result: trenches bristling with machines guns in World War I. The gun works at Spandau would provide the German armies with thousands of the Maschinengewehr 08, a Teutonic Maxim knock-off, for the start of the war.

  Two battles at the close of the nineteenth century showed, once and for all, what machine guns could do when supplied with well-made ammunition and properly employed.

  The first was in July 1898, when the American army landed in Cuba with intentions to oust the Spanish. Although the Maxim gun was supplanting all other machine guns in Europe, the American army had not purchased any. As war with Spain approached, its main rapid-fire arm remained the Gatling, which it had accepted for service thirty-two years before. The army gathered and provisioned itself in Tampa, where the man who was to show the army how to use its guns at last, Second Lieutenant John H. Parker, arrived with the Thirteenth Infan
try. Machine guns had been invented by Americans. They were a quintessentially American product. But aside from limited use against the Native American populations in the western territories, the American guns had scarcely been put to a combat test. Lieutenant Parker had been studying machine guns and the available literature on them, and had spent his brief career working out theories for their use. He had been born in Missouri in 1866, the same year the Gatling gun was officially, and belatedly, accepted in the United States Army. He found it scandalous that decades had passed since the weapons’ introduction, to such little effect. The army’s tactical mind, he concluded, was moribund, beholden to nonsense it had heard from European circles. “The rules of war established by pen soldiers do not form the basis of actual operations in the field,” he wrote. “Deductions based on the drill-made automatons of European armies are not applicable.”50

  Lieutenant Parker, at thirty-one, was sure-footed beyond his experience and years. Up to this point, his military record had been undistinguished. He had ranked forty-ninth of the sixty-two graduates of the United States Military Academy’s Class of 1892,51 and he had neither previous combat service nor connections in civilian circles or the army’s senior leadership, which he was given to deriding. Not much about him suggested he could bend the army to his will. “He was, apparently, a safe man to ignore or snub if occasion or bad temper made it desirable to ignore or snub somebody, and, above all, had no political friends who would be offended thereby.”52

  Not much suggested that the army was any more ready for machine guns than it had been when General Ripley was thwarting Richard Gatling’s sales efforts during the Civil War. From 1872 through 1890, the American army had issued to its forces 253 Gatling guns in three different calibers, plus 32 other machine guns, including Gardner, Lowell, and Hotchkiss guns. On one level, this was impressive. The army had shrunk to fewer than thirty thousand men;53 considering its small size and the fact that it had been through decades without fighting a modern conventional foe, it was well equipped with rapid-fire arms. Yet almost no one knew how to use them effectively, and few people were interested in finding out. “Distributed, apparently according to no considered plan, to the various military establishments then existing throughout the continental United States, their maintenance was the duty of the local Ordnance officer,” an official historian of the subject found. “The post commander appears to have been without specific instructions as to their employment, and, unless he possessed a native curiosity concerning their characteristics (which was rarely the case), they remained wholly unused from the beginning of his tour of duty to the date of its termination.”54