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May 20, 2021 · Machine guns were one of the most important weapons of World War I. In particular, the First World War was primarily a defensive war in that countries established defensive trench systems where they stopped enemy advances. The machine gun was vitally important to this defensive strategy, and gave the defending army a large advantage.
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- Rifles
There were a meager 12,000 guns by the time the war broke out in 1914. That number, however, would explosively grow to become 100,000 guns in a very short time. By 1917, the Germans were reporting that the majority of their small arms ammunition, 90% to be exact, were going into the chambers of their machine guns. This was a sobering thought.
May 26, 2024 · The Lewis Gun used by British and American forces weighed 13 kg and could be carried by a single soldier. The French Chauchat was even lighter at 9 kg. While less powerful than heavy machine guns, these weapons gave the infantry a crucial source of mobile automatic fire. *A British soldier with a Lewis gun in 1918.
Jul 18, 2022 · The best known of these were derivatives and copies of Mikhail Kalashnikov's (1919-2013) AK-47 assault rifle developed into modified versions to serve as light machine guns. The DP series of light machine guns were replaced with Kalashnikov's RPD light machine gun and later the RPK light machine gun. Kalashnikov also invented the PK machine gun.
- Overview
- Technology of war in 1914
The planning and conduct of war in 1914 were crucially influenced by the invention of new weapons and the improvement of existing types since the Franco-German War of 1870–71. The chief developments of the intervening period had been the machine gun and the rapid-fire field artillery gun. The modern machine gun, which had been developed in the 1880s and ’90s, was a reliable belt-fed gun capable of sustained rates of extremely rapid fire; it could fire 600 bullets per minute with a range of more than 1,000 yards (900 metres). In the realm of field artillery, the period leading up to the war saw the introduction of improved breech-loading mechanisms and brakes. Without a brake or recoil mechanism, a gun lurched out of position during firing and had to be re-aimed after each round. The new improvements were epitomized in the French 75-millimetre field gun; it remained motionless during firing, and it was not necessary to readjust the aim in order to bring sustained fire on a target.
Machine guns and rapid-firing artillery, when used in combination with trenches and barbed-wire emplacements, gave a decided advantage to the defense, since these weapons’ rapid and sustained firepower could decimate a frontal assault by either infantry or cavalry.
The planning and conduct of war in 1914 were crucially influenced by the invention of new weapons and the improvement of existing types since the Franco-German War of 1870–71. The chief developments of the intervening period had been the machine gun and the rapid-fire field artillery gun. The modern machine gun, which had been developed in the 1880s and ’90s, was a reliable belt-fed gun capable of sustained rates of extremely rapid fire; it could fire 600 bullets per minute with a range of more than 1,000 yards (900 metres). In the realm of field artillery, the period leading up to the war saw the introduction of improved breech-loading mechanisms and brakes. Without a brake or recoil mechanism, a gun lurched out of position during firing and had to be re-aimed after each round. The new improvements were epitomized in the French 75-millimetre field gun; it remained motionless during firing, and it was not necessary to readjust the aim in order to bring sustained fire on a target.
Machine guns and rapid-firing artillery, when used in combination with trenches and barbed-wire emplacements, gave a decided advantage to the defense, since these weapons’ rapid and sustained firepower could decimate a frontal assault by either infantry or cavalry.
Between 1914 and 1918, the machine gun played an ever-increasing role on the battlefield. Today, even though artillery was responsible for the majority of deaths, the machine gun is the weapon most commonly associated with the First World War in the popular imagination. This overestimates its importance, but also fails to comprehend real advances made in the field of automatic weapons during ...
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The 1914 machine gun, usually positioned on a flat tripod, would require a gun crew of four to six operators. In theory they could fire 400-600 small-calibre rounds per minute, a figure that was to more than double by the war's end, with rounds fed via a fabric belt or a metal strip. The reality however was that these early machine guns would ...
