During a gun amnesty in the 1960s an elderly woman pushed a large pram into a police station in Cambridge. It contained a very well maintained working Vickers Machine Gun. She told the desk sergeant that it belonged to her husband who had just died and she would come back with the ammunition the next day. There were tens of thousands of .303 rounds in boxes. Turns out her hubby was in the Machine Gun Corp in WW1 and some how managed to steal it and bring it home from France. He even had it set up in their bedroom facing out of a window for most of WW2 in case an invasion happened. She complained that he gave much more attention to that bloody gun than he ever did to her and she was glad to be rid of it.
"She complained that he gave much more attention to that bloody gun than he ever did to her and she was glad to be rid of it." Well then, she should probably have given more attention to his 'other' weapon!
Why on earth would you give away something like that, imagine being her grandkid knowing you could be in posession of such a thing but she gave it away. Bloody stupid woman.
@@Thewoodyrg It was stolen from the army and illegal to own. If her grandkids had inherited it and the police found out they would spend 5 years in prison. She did the right thing. It is probably in a museum now.
I became a qualified Vickers instructor in my high school cadet unit in Australia in the 1950s. Got to prepare, set up and fire the gun on the range on several occasions. An unforgettable xperience.
I did the same on the Bren in the late 60's just before the cadets were issued with the SLR. I still love the .303 British. In the early 70's I used the No4 .303 and an Omark 44 in 7.62mm at Malabar but I always preferred the .303.
@@JohnWilliams-iw6oq First time I used the .303 I remember the instructor telling me to bury it in my shoulder. It left my shoulder black with bruising. Mind you I was 12.
The gun I used for 18 years was the M61a2 20mm gun.........mounted on the F-15E. You might say it had just a little more punch than the Vickers, lol! Maybe just a tad more difficult to carry around without the plane, of course. 🙂
Down at Bandiana I had to unpack, clean, test and regrease and repack some vickers back in the early 90's. still being kept for use. well.. at least 30 years ago they were ;)
You didn’t even have to see the enemy, although it helped, this could be indirect, almost arcing fire, I’ve seen it done with the GPMG in Canada, huge “beaten zone” tumbling rounds could do massive damage…but as an ex Gunner, it was Artillery that forced men into the trenches not the machine gun, and certainly made Armies reconsider alternative headgear, I.e. metal helmets…such was the carnage that shelll fragments could do.
my grandfather was in the machine gun regiment in ww1. in 1917 he was made a pow and ended up in a prison camp in merseburg. i still have copies of the letters he sent home.
My grandad was in MGC and was gassed out near Armentieres in 1918, we’ve photos of him with a Vickers, MG08 and French Hotchkiss MG in training in UK. Most of the MGC (machine gun corps) records were destroyed during the Blitz so if you have any info it’s worth getting in touch with their historian (see their webpage) as you might be able to fill some holes.
Interesting. Some accounts, at least on German side, say that MG gunners sewed on their qualification badge loosely, so that if on point of capture could take it off easily, as otherwise might not be taken prisoner. Same with assault pioneer flamethrower operators on German side ..and snipers
@@vanpallandt5799 we still have grandads brass MGC badges, presumably they could be removed. The cloth badges we have are for the regiment he came from (Cheshires)
@@lifeintheolddog5768 thanks..i think German badges were sewn on at wrist..they of course didnt have cap badges once they stopped using pickelhauben and no what are called collar dogs or v. distinctive epaulette badges except for one or 2 units
One feature that isn't mentioned is the ability of the Vickers MMG to provide long range indirect fire, like an artillery piece. Jonathan talked about direct fire out to 1000 yards, but in the indirect fire role, firing at elevation to produce a beaten zone of plunging fire, this could be up to 4500 yards. That is something modern machine guns do not do, even in the sustained fire role.
Thats right Philip aboutlong range indirect fire my father was number one on the Vickers before ww2 and served 14 years, and used it on the way back to Dunkirk to great effect against the Germans and told me how he could shoot over hills like artillery as you say ,he made through the war ok ,i think he had special sights for indirect shooting .
There are still firing tables for the L7 GPMGs for indirect fire, and it has been used for this role (albeit the last time I know it was definitely used was the Falklands in 82). It’s simply that, with the development of mortars, grenade launchers etc it’s less necessary.
I remember watching something that pointed out that when it was finally phased out, the role it was doing wasn't replaced by a machine gun but with a mortar.
old and modern machine guns can also do that and they still do i mean there are even cases of this happening in ukraine right now. in ww1 both sides did this as well because why not. you aim your mg towards a location where there are enemies most of the time (supply route, road, . . .) and if you shoot you dont even realy need to hit enemies because you can just use it do disrupt the enemy supply and maybe even exhaust the enemy before they are even at the front. and who knows you might even hit something
In 1963 in Yorkshire, a class of British Army armorers put one Vickers gun through probably the most strenuous test ever given to an individual gun. The base had a stockpile of approximately 5 million rounds of Mk VII ammunition which was no longer approved for military use. They took a newly rebuilt Vickers gun, and proceeded to fire the entire stock of ammo through it over the course of seven days. They worked in pairs, switching off at 30 minute intervals, with a third man shoveling away spent brass. The gun was fired in 250-round solid bursts, and the worn out barrels were changed every hour and a half. At the end of the five million rounds, the gun was taken back into the shop for inspection. It was found to be within service spec in every dimension.
There are a lots of tails like this. Most are BS and exaggeration. You would need more than 7 days to fire 5 million rounds with one Vickers gun. That is assuming it is firing 24 hours a day with no stoppages or breaks.
@@BedfordGunner You may have a valid point that this is an exaggeration. Quick calculation: Wikipedia states 'In practice, it was expected that 10,000 rounds would be fired per hour,'. So 5 mln rounds would take 500 hours or almost 3 weeks. Still, with the same numbers, In 1 week they could have spent an impressive amount of 1,68 million rounds.
Yeah, it was a popular mechanics story. I've heard a few different versions. But it involved continuous firing for a week. I also like how it could be used as an indirect fire weapon and be zeroed in on targets up to 4km away. I can believe that also.
@@BedfordGunner no it’s not exaggeration. 550 rounds a minute times 60 minutes is 33,000 rounds in 1 hour. Now 33,000 rounds per hour timed 23= 769,000 rounds per 23 hours. 23 hours because an hour for belt changes and barrel changes. Ok now 769,000 rounds times 7 days is…… Yep, you guessed it……5,313,000. Keep in mind they had some bad primers in there that didn’t fire. I don’t care what kind of round it is, there are duds that leave the factory with volume like that. So with the more than 5 million rounds it could fire, with time deduced for tasks to keep it operating it’s 100% possible, and even more likely to be done in 6 days and 6 hours or so. 7 days at 23 hours firing is 5,313,000. 6 days 6 hours is 5 million flat The only thing I doubt is that the stockpile was actually 5 million. Best I can realistically guess is 480 rounds a minute average rate of fire coming to 4,636,800 rounds fired, and that’s the same formula as 480RPM X 60= X rounds per hour. X x 23hours = rate per day. Rate per day rimes 7=4,636,800
I believe machine gunners often made tea from the cooling water after firing. My grandfather was a Lewis gunner in WW1, at Ypres and on the Somme. He won the MM at the age of 19 when half his crew were wounded and he maintained fire. He told me he rested it on one of his crew's back and swept backwards and forwards against row up row of Germans. This is April 1916.
My grandfather was a gunner in the MGC in WW1. In Mesopotamia and on the Western Front. I have his photo album. An extraordinary peep into that world. Seeing and hearing this gun fire here was visceral. Another glimpse into granddad's past. Thankyou.
My father was in Tobruk with the Australian 9th Div. He hardly mentioned the war, but one day he got hold of a 303 rifle. I had only seen him use a 22 by that stage. He slipped back into the trenches in his mind I think. The way he worked the bolt was like grease lightning! I think my eyes must have popped out of my head. It was a real eye opener.
@@petercastles5978 German commander Erwin Rommel was quoted as saying: "If I had to take hell, I would use the Australians to take it and the New Zealanders to hold it.
My father said this weapon made a lovely cuppa tea at about 1,000 rounds. In Burma it cut down trees. It was an excellent weapon and helped keep the peace in Europe for 50 years. Although it and weapons like it was used extensively in the European empires
@@bastogne315Many blacks were saved from the likes of the Mau Mau, the ever-advancing Zulu empire destroying all the tribes that stood in their way, they stopped the Muslim slave traders, you'll have to explain the Irish one?
@@SnoopReddogg Ironically his name is Bastoigne, a place in Belgium (I've been there oddly enough). The attroicities Belgium commited in their colony the Congo just before World War 1 are well known. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State
I fired one of these when I was in the Army for a display at Bisley. We had WW1 uniforms and were trained for a week before on the drills. I will never forget how heavy it was. Total respect to the soldiers who used this for real. Great bit of kit 👌
We still used them in 1963/4 in Sarawak, Borneo, with 40 Commando They were set up covering the River close to the Border with Indonesia in North Borneo and in other locations on Sarawak. They were manned by members of Support Company, Heavy Weapons. In 62 we were on exercise in Aden and whilst doing an Assault were fired in by in the Vickers. A brilliant sight watching the tracers bouncing all in over the place. We had the GPMG but Vickers were still in use.
Dad was an instructor and in New Guinea. He said the dumbest question asked by a trainee was after he pointed out that even with the rate of fire there is 70 feet between bullets as they go down range. "So why can't the enemy run between the bullets?".
The question isn't totally stupid, though the trainee was definitely asking it the wrong way around. Anyway, the higher the firing rate, the less soldiers an MG will miss on a sweep, and the less it will miss in a burst before everybody hits the ground a split second after. In fact, this exact observation from WW1 was one of the reasons the MG42 was developed with its higher ROF. Of course, you also have to remember that the Germans used their MG as a primary killing tool rather than relegating it to just providing suppression.
Thanks Dan, Jonathan and team. Firing that Vickers must be really uncomfortable indoors - I see Jonathan was wearing both earplugs and ear muffs. Still it is great to see him getting some trigger time within the remit of his social media duties.
I am still impressed with the test where they put five MILLION rounds through a single Vickers gun in a seven day period. At the end of it, it was still fully operational.
@@ghostsmoke11 They knew that, the point was to see if it could mechanically do it. Other then needing a new barrel and a through cleaning (along with minor maintenance) it was essentially no worse for wear.
That has to have been at Catterick garrison upon the change to 7.62 NATO. Five Million rounds in the stores & someone has a great idea to dispose of it. Could a Vickers have been converted to 7.62 & a disintegrating-link belt? I think perhaps not. My God nothing else would have dealt with Taliban or IS fighters better than a monsoon of lead from a Vickers. "Try running through THIS, you bastards"! The Germans with their MG3's might have a contrary opinion. Shut up Fritz.
My dad was trained in the Vickers in WW2, he loved it; said you could set that up and come back hours later and it would still punch the bullets as a cluster round the bullseye of a target.
1980's Australian army still had them in 'strategic reserve' storage. My ammunition depot had to get rid of aged belt ammo, so we got one out of storage, and let it rip on our range. Full day of firing, no stoppages, no change to the beaten zone. Beautiful weapon.
SFMG Platoon in 3RAR (Aust Army) reintroduced these in the mid 1980s as they were available, very effective in the sustained fire role and the ammo was plentiful but approaching end of life.
I remember at LWC Canungra in the 80s being on the sharp end of these - they were setup on the hills to either flank of the exersize area, firing live rounds well over our heads. The sound was obviously different to any M60 or AR that we were used to, really stood out as something different. The relatively slow rate of fire, but with long drawn out continuous hammering was completely unnerving to be under that sort of fire. Dunno - maybe if you were cross posted to 10 IRC from 3RAR for a couple of weekends, could have been you shooting at me :)
Its first use wasnt WW1 but against natives in the Matebele War 1893-94, and later at Omdurman, and it was first adopted by the British Army in 1889, but its devastating, early use is still kept rather quiet.
Glad you mentioned this, as the early Maxim-Vickers were black powder cartridges. Once smokeless powder became the norm, the destructive power of the Maxim was greatly amplified-John in Texas
@@alasdairmmorrison74 No, they had them at Omdurman in 1898 The British infantry regiments were armed with the Lee-Metford bolt action magazine rifle. Each battalion had a Maxim gun detachment.
Small wonder that at the battle of Nemy bridge near Mons, in August 1914, Pte Sid Godley was able to single handedly hold back two German infantry battalions for two hours with a Vickers. His stand enabled his Coy to safely withdraw from their position along the Conde canal.
To be fair, the Germans couldn't cross the canal even when under rifle fire. One brave German private managed to get to the swing gate on the footbridge and open it, before he was killed. Then others were able to cross and the fight was over. Private Godley was, nevertheless, one hell of a soldier.
What's even more amazing is that the US government thought it too expensive, so Maxim sold it to whomever it impressed, including Kaiser Wilhelm-John in Texas
The other side of the Vickers coin is the MG08; it did the same job from the German side of the trenches, chambered for 7.92x57mm, more commonly known as 8mm Mauser.
@@chrisfoster9080 Spandau Ballet was the term used for the men accused and hung on piano wire in the attempt to kill Hitler. Their legs would kick out (dancing) , this happened at Spandau prison. Robert Elms the music journalist saw it written on a wall in Berlin and he suggested to his mate Gary Kemp to name is band Spandau Ballet.
@@addevries8163 the short answer is neither: because they were almost the same gun. Both MG platforms were Maxim-derivatives, and the Vickers action was inverted and lightened compared to the mg08. Germany was paying English mfg conglomerates a licensing fee for each mg08 manufactured in Germany. They stopped paying at the outset if WW1 with the implication that if they won the war, they would never have to pay the countries they conquered. They obviously lost, and as part of reparations, had to pay the fees for the tens of thousands of mg's they made during WW1.
Superbly designed and unrivaled machine gun. Still very much in evidence in the South African defence force right up to the 1980's. Tricky to get started, but once on the go could carry on indefinitely with its unique rhythm.
I was on NP8901 we had lots of older weapons in the armoury...a Lewis Gun and a Vickers to name a few. These were both excellent machine guns the Vickers in particular. The more modern GPMG was however the best of both worlds. In a permanent static position a water cooled Vickers cannot be beaten for consistent and prolonged rate of fire.
In 1994 a WW2 vet in West Virginia got fired at by an intruder (who missed) and when they recovered the pistol they could trace it despite its numbers being filed off. The pistol had been taken from that same guy by the Germans when he was POW in Italy and somehow got back into circulation and found its way back the States. That's my favourite gun story.
I'm glad that whenever you all do these weapon videos, you make sure to emphasize the human cost and the horror that their use brought. I think it's super important to not glorify these weapons, but I know it's a tough balance to produce content around them.
These weren’t meant for killing you know trench warfare when this was used was for area denial that’s what all machine guns are used for in the armed forces these are too inaccurate to kill too many people by itself most kills on enemy combatants would be with the lee enfield rifle it was far more accurate than even modern equivalents of this vickers
The human cost wasn't brought on by the machine gun as much as it was by people blindly following government. The machine gun is a tool of the soldier, but the soldier is a tool of the government. Don't be a tool.
@@deejayimm It sounds like you're blaming those soldiers for their own deaths, as if it was their fault. I know that's probably not what you meant, but that's how it comes across. It is never as simple or easy as simply choosing to not trust whatever government is in power. Sometimes the government is right, sometimes it's wrong. The final judgement is for the historians.
@@deejayimm I don't consider any of the lads who I served with as "tools". Especially not those who didn't make it home. As idealistic as we'd like to be, unfortunately we still have a need for a military. People enlist for many reasons, secure employment and to feed their family being one of the largest motivators, considering not all of us have the privilege of receiving higher education, inherited wealth or a chance at social and economic mobility.
@@Cailus3542 Let alone it's never that simple. Who cares if the government is wrong or not, if an enemy is slowly pushing towards your home to conquer you; well, you should probably volunteer if you can. Doesn't matter if the government is fucked or not at that point. Let alone maybe there weren't any other opportunities but to join the Army during the war etc.
In 1883 a friend told him, "Hang your electricity. If you want to make your fortune, invent something to help these fool Europeans kill each other more quickly!" Maxim took the advice. By 1885 he'd invented the first single-barrel machine gun. This "Maxim Gun" fired 666 rounds a minute, and it changed warfare. The Russo-Japanese War was a storm warning of the slaughter we'd see a decade later in WW-I. The Maxim Guns (and nastier guns that followed) made Maxim's name. They also gained him an English knighthood. By then he was an English citizen and a friend of royalty.
One of the most insane fact about the Vickers machine gun was in August 1916 at High Wood. Ten of those guns were positioned at 2000 yards from German lines. So imagine a German soldier under a "rain" of .303 rounds coming from 2000 yards *for twelve hours!*
They fired over a million shots between them, with hardly an issue, only pausing to replace the barrels. The ammo and water carriers didn't have a moment to sit down and rest ...
@@rotwang2000 no they didn't, the unit's own war diary records that they fired just under 100,000 rounds during the action, not the 1 million rounds claimed by the commanding officer. It's still a lot of ammunition though, given that belts had to be reloaded in the field by the gunners and were not factory pre-packed.
I have a German 98/05 bayonet scabbard that was found in the switch trench area of high wood in the early 1970's. It has 13, yes 13, bullet holes in it. The direction of entry suggests it might well have been worn at the time, and there was no bayonet in it. Very thought provoking. Anybody wearing that scabbard would have been literally shredded.
My father told me that during WWII, Vickers MGs would be set up for indirect fire, similar to artillery. For example, he would deduce what road was being used by the enemy for resupply, and position the guns to fire on it, preferably enfilade. They would then keep this going all night. What would have been unnerving is that the enemy would hear nothing except for bullet strikes. It used far less resource than artillery, although he said that artillery support when needed was superb in speed of reaction, accuracy, and as heavy as desired.
Many years ago, I got to fire one of the last Vickers machineguns used by the NZ Army. We were then using the GMPG/BREN but I couldn't give up the opportunity to try out the Vickers. Amazing feeling of "Power" when you pressed the button. An "Old hand" with the Vickers I think told me that there were 47 different types of stoppage with the Vickers and you needed to know IA [Immediate Action] drills by heart so that clearing was automated. I still think there is a place for it still. It was one of the few [or only] weapon that could hit the enemy in defilade positions due to the bullet drop at extended ranges.
My Great Grandfather was a CSM in charge of the Battlion machine gun company for 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers during WW1 a highly decorated soldier, unfortunately never got to come home, he had been in the army since 1909 so a professional soldier, the machine gun was an amazing piece of engineering but the ultimate killer.
When one watches achieve film of the wars of the twentieth century The sounds recorded are those that imprint on the mind., more so on those who endured it...WW1 'IS' the rattling sound of a machine gun, in WW2, perhaps a diving Ju87. in Vietnam the thud, thud ,thud of the Huey helicopter.... the sounds of war lingers long after they are over..
The level of courage required to climb up out of a trench knowing that these or their counterparts were facing you is mind-boggling to me. Especially when they did it for the second, or fifth time. You'd really understand what could happen to you after the first, probably, and the second definitely. To know that and get up to do it anyway, potentially again and again, I can't help but simultaneously feel huge levels of respect and pity for those that had to do it, the poor bastards.
There's the story from Ian McCullum of one of these having several million rounds shot through it non stop by teams at an army depot as the Vickers was being taken out of service. They just wanted to see how durable and reliable the gun was.
This was an experiment conducted when the bullets were going out of service as the .303 was being replaced by the NATO round. The ammunition was surplus, but the impressive aspect was that. after a week's constant operation, all the parts of the gun were re-examined and found to be within manufacturing tolerances. It's part of the lore of the gun.
I worked at the Armouries for over 2yrs..... and Yes I fired that very Vickers shown, with Jonathan funnily. I've lost track of the number of firearms I've fired over the years, even artillery guns. This to date was the only Gun that genuinely "scared me" due to the sheer raw power and proximity.
While I was a 2nd lieutenant serving in the army of Taiwan in '80 on Matzu Island, we had one of this 30 caliber machine gun. It's actually a preferred one to be used for warning shots to any enemy ship closing in, due to its stability from the swivel and tripod.
The Vickers/Maxim and the Browning 1917 set the standard for over 50 years, and lasted close to 100. Still an effective weapon for dug in emplacements and use on vehicles.
standard but not everywhere: in France the main machine gun was the Hotchkiss Mle 1914 8mm Lebel (air cooled) : 47000 of them was built...similar design was use from the Japanese up to end WW2...
Just a slight criticism. They're really talking about the .303 rifle cartridge that does all the damage, the machine gun just puts a lot of them down range quickly.
Hmm, I don't agree. One has to get the bullets down range in large numbers and to do that you either need a machine gun - ideally two set up to cross fire - or a few hundred soldiers with rifles. It's a combined effect, you need all the components, the designers, the factories, the logistics, the gun team, the gun, the ammo, the cooks ..........
It's hard to imagine what it would like to be on the receiving end of fire from that or the German equivalent in WW1, or any War. While in the TA in the 1980's, I was in the butts maintaining the targets at 600 yards for a Gimpy team. Initially, they were firing low until they got settled. The rounds were breaking up the concrete lip of the butts and the sound of rounds overhead was quite awesome. One wouldn't have wanted to have been in the open.
Fantastic video sir 👍, from muzzle loaded smooth bore muskets to recoil operated machine guns in one century scary stuff 👍 thanks Dan and Jonathan for a great showcase of world war 1 machine guns
In the early 80's The 8/9th battalion RAR machine gun platoon was still using Vickers .303 MG . I helped them carry a jerry can of water and their heavy brass tripod up a large hill on Execise Kangaroo 81.
I was in the MG platoon for that exercise.:) If I recall that was Lemon tree hill. Thanks for the help mate. Bloody good gun but a buggar to carry around.
My Battalion was still using these in the 80s. Albeit modified versions. They were still used on the Battlefield Innoculation ranges in the 90s. Great gat, VERY distinctive sound. Especially on an open range with now trees or features about.
My great grandfather made The Vickers Machine at their factory in Crayford, Kent. He was therefore entitled to have a house in the newly built estate in Northumberland Heath built entirely for all those who worked for Vickers. The estate was built in 1914 but in those days they would leave houses for a year to dry-out. Him and his wife, my grandmother walked down the street with my grandmother (she was aged 1 yrs old) and 4 other of her siblings in-toe (eventually there was a total of 7) and he simply pointed to the house he wanted. They had many years of trials and tribulations, in the Second World War on 6th January 1940 my grandmother was 2 weeks away from getting married, hall hired, wedding dress hung up ready to go when her fiancé’s merchant navy ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German U-boat and was killed. My grandmother bless her, had enough and had to get away so joined The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was based at RAF Benson, Oxfordshire where she met my grandfather. Then back to house in on The Vickers estate on New Years Day 1945 a bomb dropped and blow-up a house across the road which the shock of it killed my great grandmother who happened to be looking out of the window. All my grandmothers siblings, her brothers were either away fighting or her sisters were mothers themselves. So my grandmother was sent for via telegram to nurse her father as he had lung problems from working at Vickers all those years before. So my grandmother had to give up being in WAAF. After WWII my grandfather joined my grandmother in that house where they raised my mum and my auntie.. we eventually moved my grandmother out and into care in 1996 aged 82. So she lived at that Vickers house as part of the only family to do so after 81 years living there. I drive past it these days and it’s in a shabby state and I bet no one in that street has a clue of it’s history and what it went through.
During the Attack on Vimy Ridge, the Canadians used these in an indirect fire role to literally rain lead on the roads that fed supplies to the german fortifcations. basically we starved them for 2 weeks before the actual attack and it made life total hell for the defenders because they were not expecting that. And now in Ukraine these guns have been puled out of storage, the Russian M1910 version mostly in defensive positons due to their weight. ALSO most of thr casualties in ww1 and every war after it were casued by artillery. Artilery could get you anywhere.
An amazing bit of kit, that said in the opening battles of WWI when faced by British army professional Soldiers using the Lee Enfield rifle, their rate of fire was such many thought they were facing Maxims.
Yup. At Mons the tiny professional BEF held up the German Schlieffen Plan mass conscript army 'til they were ordered to join the Allies retreat back to the Marne. After the 11/11/18 armistice the German officers openly admired the "magnificent little army" they faced at Mons.
Good god, the absolute effort to present this gun as somehow more terrifying or “horrifying” than being shot with a rifle. It’s the exact same bullet, Dan. It sucks just as much to get shot by coming out of a Lee enfield or a Maxim
It's amazing that the bulk of firearm advancements happened from the 1880 - 1905 time period. Self contained smokeless powder, repeating magazines, semi and fully automatic firearms. Just about every modern sporting bolt action rifle made today, is essentially a M98 Mauser.
I saw one of those at a local shooting range. My girlfriend got to shoot it. Every one on the range was jealous. The guy that owned it had gone to great effort to restore it to working state.
Kinda sad they didn't talk more about indirect versus direct fire as the VMG teams by the end of the war were operating in a very similar capacity to the Royal Artillery. No longer simply in a trench but behind the front line providing a screen of fire that made it impossible for anyone to manoeuvre.
I've read of the Machine Gun Corps firing barrages for hours at the time; millions of rounds were fired in these barrages. Enemy trenches would be under a veritable rain of bullets.
I fired a Vickers in the school cadets. Very noisy and lots of smoke. The gun firing next to me lost its water plug! lots of steam resulting. This gun also had about 30 possible ways it could jam. We had to know how to fix each one.😅
There was a battle in WW1, can't remember where, there was a British machinegun battalion (yes, an entire battalion of machinegun teams), that used their machineguns in indirect fire (can't see the target, firing over hills and buildings), and over the course of like 48 hours, fired something like 1.2 million rounds of .303. Imagine, you're a couple miles back from the front, you think you're safe, and all of a sudden it starts raining .303 rounds. For two days. Continously. Friggin' terrifying. Traverse and elevation tripod, and a lenstatic compass can be bad juju.
I think this is the first video I've seen on youtube that actually properly conveys just how horrifyingly damaging 'modern' firearms are. Sobering stuff, even for someone that has had some experience with more recent machine guns. (M-60 in this case.)
I read an account of an attack preparation barrage by the Machine Gun Corps during WW1 where over a million rounds were put down range at the enemy by continuous fire ,over a long period, covering a large indirect fire target area, (dont ask which book that is long gone from memory)
As you say, this was a weapon that could not have been fully developed before the last decade of the 19th century. Firstly, it required self-contained cartridges, then a reliable priming system for those cartridges, then drawn brass (and later steel} cartridges that did not jam like the earlier coiled brass or paper cases did, finally smokeless powder so that barrels did not become clogged with soot and the smoke did not obscure the gunner's view. Yes, I know that several earlier automatic* machine guns used rimfire cartridges filled with black powder or coiled brass or paper cartridges and even early .303 cartridges used compressed black powder, but none were capable of reliable, sustained rapid fire until the modern centrefire rifle cartridge evolved. *As against hand-cranked or electrically-driven guns such as the Gatling. When you recall that the Germans, Russians and several other combatants in WWI were also armed with variants of the Maxim gun with equally powerful ammunition, it explains why the carnage was so terrible on both sides. If anyone wants to argue about the relative power of the .303, 8x57mm, 7.62x54R, even the latecomer .30-06, then all I can say is that if you were hit by any of them you wouldn't know the difference.
Well what was your alternative given the technology of the day? The British particularly were only too keen to take up any technical advantage - tanks, the creeping barrage and so forth. So, there is wire, and mgs placed in front of you in enfilade. You have infantry and artillery, and relatively slow communication. List the options? They make a pretty short list. There was one mistake - fire and manoeuvre in sections, which came in later than it should have done. It wasn't used (but rarely) in the earlier days because it was felt that the new Army couldn't be trained effectively in its use in the time. However, one unit on the Somme did use it. Incidentally, the single greatest cause of casualties was not the machine gun, but artillery.
@@meyrickgriffith-jones3908 i don't know. I was thinking about this last night when I was watching another documentary. It just seems like callousness on part of the commanders to order men to charge across no mans land. I would have a hard time sending my troops to do something that has proven senseless and ineffective. I was thinking last night, what about a landing behind German lines in Belgium? 🤷♂️
@@pkt1213 Well landings post Gallipoli were not fashionable. We looked at this one in some detail while at Staff College. The French were taking huge casualties at Verdun and desperately needed assistance, and operationally there weren't any other alternatives. They didn't have the resources to go over, you couldn't go under meaningfully, though shelter in caves was provided. I think they believed that these big barrages would cut the wire, at least initially. I think on the Somme, the preparations were intense, so much so, that HQs couldn't believe that much had failed. Having said that, did the Somme fail? Did it relieve Verdun, yes. Did it destroy the German army, much of its morale yes, and according to German commanders, it never recovered. Was it a victory? On the day probably not. In the long term, yes, I suppose so. Was it worth it? Well the public at the time thought so.
@@meyrickgriffith-jones3908 and hindsight is always 20/20. We can sit here a centery later look at it but it was something completely new in warfare. They were used to standing in rows and shooting at each other from across a field.
Meanwhile in ww1 soldiers where mostly engaged and killed by artillery. Long range rapid fire artillery is there since the 1860s, with the US civil war just missing out on progress
My grandfather was an electrical engineer on the tramways. He joined the army and was selected to be in the motor machine gun service. Have lots of photos not sure what to do with them, would be a shame if they are lost.
We see it here being fired directly forward, but in the direct fire role, most were operated in pairs, covering a couple hundred yard frontage of trench. Each would shoot diagonally, making a large extended X in front of the trenches. That way, advancing troops were enfiladed and caught in a crossfire. Any rounds that missed one man continued through the advancing troops from the side, hitting someone else.
My grandfather fought with the Canadians in the great war. Survived and had a good life afterwards. I didn't know him. He was decorated for bravery. Twice. One of the things the family told me, very casually, was that the troops never took machine gunners prisoner. Never.
A cousin of the Vickers, the 1910 Russian Maxim MG, has seen combat this year in Ukraine. If you need to hold a fixed position, the WWI era Maxim designs are still useful!
They even use 2 Maxims interlinked, connected to a anti aircraft computer to identify, predict movement, target and shoot down drones automatically. Absolutely wild a weapon over 100 years old still has practical purpose in modern war.
I can not imagine being told to leave the safety of a trench and walk towards the enemy being defended by 2 of these in a crisscross formation. How anyone survived is beyond me. These guns are really what coined the term "no mans land".
I’ve a friend who has a very illegal Vickers, he found it in a shed when he bought a rural property. It wasn’t working when he found it and he has rebuilt it comprehensively now, to the extent that he could build a brand new one now. He has both the original feed mechanism and a new one he designed and built. Every now and again he will shoot it way out the back of his property, it’s a bit expensive in ammo, but he reloads.
I've read that when the British Army changed to a new GPMG, an armory crew took a Vickers and brought it within factory spec. They took it to the range and fired it continuously (I mean Continuously!!) for 7 days and 7 nights. They changed the barrel per the operators manual and changed the crew every hour/hour-and-a-half. At the end, they had fired 5 million .303 rounds and the Vickers was still within all factory specs. Frankly, I'd like to believe this but find it hard to accept. Is there any independent confirmation of this? I see Dylan G has the same story, but Id like confirmation from the factory, the arsenal or the actual crew. Thanks!!
The key to this is that you need to keep the water jacket filled and keep oiling the gun in the firing. With that done, yes the guns will do it. You will need a new barrel about every 15,000 rounds, basically the rifling will be worn away. You may need to swap out the breach block as well. The barrel takes a few minutes to change on this gun, the other major component groups seconds. During WW1 there was an area that the Brits did not want to have any movement by the Germans, so they set up a pair of these guns which then were fired at a 45 degree base angel to the front line. Again those guns ran for days. No problems, just millions of bullets flying across that area.
I believe that the British army did a test of the Vickers machine guns reliability and fired it continuously for 6 days with no ill effects on the gun. It was the standard army heavy machine gun into the 1960s.
I looked that up and they fired 5 million rounds day and night continuously and had a crew rotate out every 30 minutes. The base needed to dispose of their stockpile of 5 million .303 British. They would switch barrels every hour and a half that became worn out. The gun survived and the whole gun was inspected by the armorer on the British military base and all parts were fully operational and in spec. For more information search for “Ian McCollum Vickers 5 million.”
You're talking about the standard british army .303 rifle round in a fully automatic sustained-fire weapon. Of course it's shockingly powerful. I can't imagine there'd be much left of you if you copped a burst of that.
Woytek! That's absolutely hilarious! But is it not also possible the poor block was just trying to surrender in its own way? If it could talk, it might have said, " Look, you guys! You've shot me enough times already! I give up! "😅
There was a WW2 documentary I watched years ago which involved machine gun fire by the Japanese in the Pacific island battles and one of the soldiers said he saw people being cut in half by concentrated fire and that the official film teams deleted all that type of material.
During a gun amnesty in the 1960s an elderly woman pushed a large pram into a police station in Cambridge. It contained a very well maintained working Vickers Machine Gun. She told the desk sergeant that it belonged to her husband who had just died and she would come back with the ammunition the next day. There were tens of thousands of .303 rounds in boxes.
Turns out her hubby was in the Machine Gun Corp in WW1 and some how managed to steal it and bring it home from France. He even had it set up in their bedroom facing out of a window for most of WW2 in case an invasion happened. She complained that he gave much more attention to that bloody gun than he ever did to her and she was glad to be rid of it.
"She complained that he gave much more attention to that bloody gun than he ever did to her and she was glad to be rid of it."
Well then, she should probably have given more attention to his 'other' weapon!
so be aware to carefully read your entire newspaper, not only the sheep news so you woun`t miss those articles like "WAR IS OVER!!"
Why on earth would you give away something like that, imagine being her grandkid knowing you could be in posession of such a thing but she gave it away. Bloody stupid woman.
She could have decommissioned it and kept it at home
@@Thewoodyrg It was stolen from the army and illegal to own. If her grandkids had inherited it and the police found out they would spend 5 years in prison.
She did the right thing. It is probably in a museum now.
I became a qualified Vickers instructor in my high school cadet unit in Australia in the 1950s. Got to prepare, set up and fire the gun on the range on several occasions. An unforgettable xperience.
I did the same on the Bren in the late 60's just before the cadets were issued with the SLR. I still love the .303 British. In the early 70's I used the No4 .303 and an Omark 44 in 7.62mm at Malabar but I always preferred the .303.
@@JohnWilliams-iw6oq First time I used the .303 I remember the instructor telling me to bury it in my shoulder. It left my shoulder black with bruising. Mind you I was 12.
@@captainbuggernut9565 about the same age as I was when I fired an old single barrel 12G. The words "Shaken, not stirred" ring a bell.
The gun I used for 18 years was the M61a2 20mm gun.........mounted on the F-15E. You might say it had just a little more punch than the Vickers, lol! Maybe just a tad more difficult to carry around without the plane, of course. 🙂
Down at Bandiana I had to unpack, clean, test and regrease and repack some vickers back in the early 90's. still being kept for use. well.. at least 30 years ago they were ;)
I see Jonathan Ferguson, I click the video. Guy is a national treasure!
So did i
Me too - always watch his critiques of the depiction of guns in video games.
You can tell he is on a fancier show, as he is wearing a tie, rather than his geeky t-shirts for the Gamespot videos.
@@leemarshall6955 hahaha so true! No Resident Evil shirts on HH
I see Dan Snow and move on. He is such a lightweight.
Thank God for Johnathan Ferguson, managed to rein in the drama queen and point out that the majority of casualties in WW1 were from Artillery.
Only just
@@jonesalex565 most causalities from war are from artillery and disease
You didn’t even have to see the enemy, although it helped, this could be indirect, almost arcing fire, I’ve seen it done with the GPMG in Canada, huge “beaten zone” tumbling rounds could do massive damage…but as an ex Gunner, it was Artillery that forced men into the trenches not the machine gun, and certainly made Armies reconsider alternative headgear, I.e. metal helmets…such was the carnage that shelll fragments could do.
The other guy is also an extreme leftist and thus believes in mass murder for the sake of it.
Absolutely. In most cases WW1 artillery doesn't get the "credit" it deserves as far as causing casualties.
my grandfather was in the machine gun regiment in ww1. in 1917 he was made a pow and ended up in a prison camp in merseburg. i still have copies of the letters he sent home.
So was my GF. He was in the AIF at Gallipolli and Poziers.
My grandad was in MGC and was gassed out near Armentieres in 1918, we’ve photos of him with a Vickers, MG08 and French Hotchkiss MG in training in UK. Most of the MGC (machine gun corps) records were destroyed during the Blitz so if you have any info it’s worth getting in touch with their historian (see their webpage) as you might be able to fill some holes.
Interesting. Some accounts, at least on German side, say that MG gunners sewed on their qualification badge loosely, so that if on point of capture could take it off easily, as otherwise might not be taken prisoner. Same with assault pioneer flamethrower operators on German side ..and snipers
@@vanpallandt5799 we still have grandads brass MGC badges, presumably they could be removed. The cloth badges we have are for the regiment he came from (Cheshires)
@@lifeintheolddog5768 thanks..i think German badges were sewn on at wrist..they of course didnt have cap badges once they stopped using pickelhauben and no what are called collar dogs or v. distinctive epaulette badges except for one or 2 units
One feature that isn't mentioned is the ability of the Vickers MMG to provide long range indirect fire, like an artillery piece. Jonathan talked about direct fire out to 1000 yards, but in the indirect fire role, firing at elevation to produce a beaten zone of plunging fire, this could be up to 4500 yards. That is something modern machine guns do not do, even in the sustained fire role.
Thats right Philip aboutlong range indirect fire my father was number one on the Vickers before ww2 and served 14 years, and used it on the way back to Dunkirk to great effect against the Germans and told me how he could shoot over hills like artillery as you say ,he made through the war ok ,i think he had special sights for indirect shooting .
There are still firing tables for the L7 GPMGs for indirect fire, and it has been used for this role (albeit the last time I know it was definitely used was the Falklands in 82). It’s simply that, with the development of mortars, grenade launchers etc it’s less necessary.
I remember watching something that pointed out that when it was finally phased out, the role it was doing wasn't replaced by a machine gun but with a mortar.
All SF platoons train for map predicted indirect fire. Its quite something to watch when an entire platoon is firing with 1 in 5 tracer.
old and modern machine guns can also do that and they still do i mean there are even cases of this happening in ukraine right now. in ww1 both sides did this as well because why not. you aim your mg towards a location where there are enemies most of the time (supply route, road, . . .) and if you shoot you dont even realy need to hit enemies because you can just use it do disrupt the enemy supply and maybe even exhaust the enemy before they are even at the front. and who knows you might even hit something
In 1963 in Yorkshire, a class of British Army armorers put one Vickers gun through probably the most strenuous test ever given to an individual gun. The base had a stockpile of approximately 5 million rounds of Mk VII ammunition which was no longer approved for military use. They took a newly rebuilt Vickers gun, and proceeded to fire the entire stock of ammo through it over the course of seven days. They worked in pairs, switching off at 30 minute intervals, with a third man shoveling away spent brass. The gun was fired in 250-round solid bursts, and the worn out barrels were changed every hour and a half. At the end of the five million rounds, the gun was taken back into the shop for inspection. It was found to be within service spec in every dimension.
There are a lots of tails like this. Most are BS and exaggeration. You would need more than 7 days to fire 5 million rounds with one Vickers gun. That is assuming it is firing 24 hours a day with no stoppages or breaks.
@@BedfordGunner You may have a valid point that this is an exaggeration. Quick calculation: Wikipedia states 'In practice, it was expected that 10,000 rounds would be fired per hour,'. So 5 mln rounds would take 500 hours or almost 3 weeks. Still, with the same numbers, In 1 week they could have spent an impressive amount of 1,68 million rounds.
Yeah, it was a popular mechanics story. I've heard a few different versions. But it involved continuous firing for a week. I also like how it could be used as an indirect fire weapon and be zeroed in on targets up to 4km away. I can believe that also.
@@BedfordGunner no it’s not exaggeration. 550 rounds a minute times 60 minutes is 33,000 rounds in 1 hour. Now 33,000 rounds per hour timed 23= 769,000 rounds per 23 hours. 23 hours because an hour for belt changes and barrel changes. Ok now 769,000 rounds times 7 days is……
Yep, you guessed it……5,313,000. Keep in mind they had some bad primers in there that didn’t fire. I don’t care what kind of round it is, there are duds that leave the factory with volume like that. So with the more than 5 million rounds it could fire, with time deduced for tasks to keep it operating it’s 100% possible, and even more likely to be done in 6 days and 6 hours or so. 7 days at 23 hours firing is 5,313,000. 6 days 6 hours is 5 million flat
The only thing I doubt is that the stockpile was actually 5 million. Best I can realistically guess is 480 rounds a minute average rate of fire coming to 4,636,800 rounds fired, and that’s the same formula as 480RPM X 60= X rounds per hour. X x 23hours = rate per day. Rate per day rimes 7=4,636,800
Ooo
I believe machine gunners often made tea from the cooling water after firing. My grandfather was a Lewis gunner in WW1, at Ypres and on the Somme. He won the MM at the age of 19 when half his crew were wounded and he maintained fire. He told me he rested it on one of his crew's back and swept backwards and forwards against row up row of Germans. This is April 1916.
Thats how you get asbestos AND lead poisoning. They used asbestos to seal the barrel and jacket.
A Lewis gun was man portable; it was often used in much the same way as an automatic rifle.
I would’ve made Ramen noodles
They did that in WW2 tanks with these machineguns mounted. It wouldn't surprise me if they did this in the trenches as well.
What an absolutely terrible tragedy that war was.
My grandfather was a gunner in the MGC in WW1. In Mesopotamia and on the Western Front. I have his photo album. An extraordinary peep into that world. Seeing and hearing this gun fire here was visceral. Another glimpse into granddad's past. Thankyou.
Watching a trained soldier operate a vickers is amazing, clearing stoppages, making adjustments and firing , highly technical.
My father was in Tobruk with the Australian 9th Div. He hardly mentioned the war, but one day he got hold of a 303 rifle. I had only seen him use a 22 by that stage. He slipped back into the trenches in his mind I think. The way he worked the bolt was like grease lightning! I think my eyes must have popped out of my head. It was a real eye opener.
@@petercastles5978 German commander Erwin Rommel was quoted as saying: "If I had to take hell, I would use the Australians to take it and the New Zealanders to hold it.
a bit technical to be precise. 😀
Stoppages? Not with the Vickers.
Give you a stiffy did it?
My father said this weapon made a lovely cuppa tea at about 1,000 rounds.
In Burma it cut down trees. It was an excellent weapon and helped keep the peace in Europe for 50 years. Although it and weapons like it was used extensively in the European empires
The British Empire was built on cups of tea.
@@bastogne315 yep.... and in that order of importance. Deal with it.
@@bastogne315Many blacks were saved from the likes of the Mau Mau, the ever-advancing Zulu empire destroying all the tribes that stood in their way, they stopped the Muslim slave traders, you'll have to explain the Irish one?
@@SnoopReddogg
Ironically his name is Bastoigne, a place in Belgium (I've been there oddly enough).
The attroicities Belgium commited in their colony the Congo just before World War 1 are well known.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State
That's a myth, the water was full of oil and asbestos
I fired one of these when I was in the Army for a display at Bisley. We had WW1 uniforms and were trained for a week before on the drills. I will never forget how heavy it was. Total respect to the soldiers who used this for real. Great bit of kit 👌
We still used them in 1963/4 in Sarawak, Borneo, with 40 Commando
They were set up covering the River close to the Border with Indonesia in North Borneo and in other locations on Sarawak. They were manned by members of Support Company, Heavy Weapons. In 62 we were on exercise in Aden and whilst doing an Assault were fired in by in the Vickers. A brilliant sight watching the tracers bouncing all in over the place. We had the GPMG but Vickers were still in use.
Per mare, per Terram, We sort them out!
Cheers Mate!
Dad was an instructor and in New Guinea. He said the dumbest question asked by a trainee was after he pointed out that even with the rate of fire there is 70 feet between bullets as they go down range. "So why can't the enemy run between the bullets?".
The question isn't totally stupid, though the trainee was definitely asking it the wrong way around. Anyway, the higher the firing rate, the less soldiers an MG will miss on a sweep, and the less it will miss in a burst before everybody hits the ground a split second after. In fact, this exact observation from WW1 was one of the reasons the MG42 was developed with its higher ROF. Of course, you also have to remember that the Germans used their MG as a primary killing tool rather than relegating it to just providing suppression.
I would reply that only the "Flash" could do it but he as a comic book character!
Thanks Dan, Jonathan and team. Firing that Vickers must be really uncomfortable indoors - I see Jonathan was wearing both earplugs and ear muffs. Still it is great to see him getting some trigger time within the remit of his social media duties.
I am still impressed with the test where they put five MILLION rounds through a single Vickers gun in a seven day period. At the end of it, it was still fully operational.
that's almost 30k rounds and hour every hour for seven days...the barrel would certainly be shot out by then
@@ghostsmoke11 They knew that, the point was to see if it could mechanically do it. Other then needing a new barrel and a through cleaning (along with minor maintenance) it was essentially no worse for wear.
The same guns which surived WW1 were later used in WW2 and even after that sold to other countries for continued use. Used right up until the 80s.
That has to have been at Catterick garrison upon the change to 7.62 NATO.
Five Million rounds in the stores & someone has a great idea to dispose of it.
Could a Vickers have been converted to 7.62 & a disintegrating-link belt? I think perhaps not. My God nothing else would have dealt with Taliban or IS fighters better than a monsoon of lead from a Vickers.
"Try running through THIS, you bastards"!
The Germans with their MG3's might have a contrary opinion. Shut up Fritz.
In the case of the Russian Maxims, still wreaking havoc in 2023 in Ukraine...
My dad was trained in the Vickers in WW2, he loved it; said you could set that up and come back hours later and it would still punch the bullets as a cluster round the bullseye of a target.
1980's Australian army still had them in 'strategic reserve' storage. My ammunition depot had to get rid of aged belt ammo, so we got one out of storage, and let it rip on our range. Full day of firing, no stoppages, no change to the beaten zone. Beautiful weapon.
SFMG Platoon in 3RAR (Aust Army) reintroduced these in the mid 1980s as they were available, very effective in the sustained fire role and the ammo was plentiful but approaching end of life.
I remember at LWC Canungra in the 80s being on the sharp end of these - they were setup on the hills to either flank of the exersize area, firing live rounds well over our heads. The sound was obviously different to any M60 or AR that we were used to, really stood out as something different.
The relatively slow rate of fire, but with long drawn out continuous hammering was completely unnerving to be under that sort of fire.
Dunno - maybe if you were cross posted to 10 IRC from 3RAR for a couple of weekends, could have been you shooting at me :)
Like for having Jonathan Ferguson explaining things. As well as the Vickers.
Its first use wasnt WW1 but against natives in the Matebele War 1893-94, and later at Omdurman, and it was first adopted by the British Army in 1889, but its devastating, early use is still kept rather quiet.
Glad you mentioned this, as the early Maxim-Vickers were black powder cartridges. Once smokeless powder became the norm, the destructive power of the Maxim was greatly amplified-John in Texas
Different design
@@alasdairmmorrison74 No, they had them at Omdurman in 1898 The British infantry regiments were armed with the Lee-Metford bolt action magazine rifle. Each battalion had a Maxim gun detachment.
Small wonder that at the battle of Nemy bridge near Mons, in August 1914, Pte Sid Godley was able to single handedly hold back two German infantry battalions for two hours with a Vickers. His stand enabled his Coy to safely withdraw from their position along the Conde canal.
To be fair, the Germans couldn't cross the canal even when under rifle fire. One brave German private managed to get to the swing gate on the footbridge and open it, before he was killed. Then others were able to cross and the fight was over. Private Godley was, nevertheless, one hell of a soldier.
wouldnt have been a vickers but a .303 maxim gun i believe. There were only just over a hundred vickers guns made before ww1
What's even more amazing is that the US government thought it too expensive, so Maxim sold it to whomever it impressed, including Kaiser Wilhelm-John in Texas
We had one in my School Cadets in Australia in 1965 plus three Brens.
The other side of the Vickers coin is the MG08; it did the same job from the German side of the trenches, chambered for 7.92x57mm, more commonly known as 8mm Mauser.
The Spandau ballet.
That's not what the phrase "other side of the coin" means.
@@chrisfoster9080 Spandau Ballet was the term used for the men accused and hung on piano wire in the attempt to kill Hitler. Their legs would kick out (dancing) , this happened at Spandau prison. Robert Elms the music journalist saw it written on a wall in Berlin and he suggested to his mate Gary Kemp to name is band Spandau Ballet.
Which was better? The Mauser or the Vickers? I'm curious.
@@addevries8163 the short answer is neither: because they were almost the same gun. Both MG platforms were Maxim-derivatives, and the Vickers action was inverted and lightened compared to the mg08. Germany was paying English mfg conglomerates a licensing fee for each mg08 manufactured in Germany. They stopped paying at the outset if WW1 with the implication that if they won the war, they would never have to pay the countries they conquered. They obviously lost, and as part of reparations, had to pay the fees for the tens of thousands of mg's they made during WW1.
Superbly designed and unrivaled machine gun. Still very much in evidence in the South African defence force right up to the 1980's. Tricky to get started, but once on the go could carry on indefinitely with its unique rhythm.
Its a beast but if you look at the mg42 is still in use as the mg3 with small changes.
I was on NP8901 we had lots of older weapons in the armoury...a Lewis Gun and a Vickers to name a few. These were both excellent machine guns the Vickers in particular. The more modern GPMG was however the best of both worlds. In a permanent static position a water cooled Vickers cannot be beaten for consistent and prolonged rate of fire.
Useful in Ukraine . God bless them . I am a pimple on the bum of history compared to these people .
In 1994 a WW2 vet in West Virginia got fired at by an intruder (who missed) and when they recovered the pistol they could trace it despite its numbers being filed off. The pistol had been taken from that same guy by the Germans when he was POW in Italy and somehow got back into circulation and found its way back the States.
That's my favourite gun story.
I'm glad that whenever you all do these weapon videos, you make sure to emphasize the human cost and the horror that their use brought. I think it's super important to not glorify these weapons, but I know it's a tough balance to produce content around them.
These weren’t meant for killing you know trench warfare when this was used was for area denial that’s what all machine guns are used for in the armed forces these are too inaccurate to kill too many people by itself most kills on enemy combatants would be with the lee enfield rifle it was far more accurate than even modern equivalents of this vickers
The human cost wasn't brought on by the machine gun as much as it was by people blindly following government.
The machine gun is a tool of the soldier, but the soldier is a tool of the government.
Don't be a tool.
@@deejayimm It sounds like you're blaming those soldiers for their own deaths, as if it was their fault. I know that's probably not what you meant, but that's how it comes across.
It is never as simple or easy as simply choosing to not trust whatever government is in power. Sometimes the government is right, sometimes it's wrong. The final judgement is for the historians.
@@deejayimm
I don't consider any of the lads who I served with as "tools". Especially not those who didn't make it home.
As idealistic as we'd like to be, unfortunately we still have a need for a military.
People enlist for many reasons, secure employment and to feed their family being one of the largest motivators, considering not all of us have the privilege of receiving higher education, inherited wealth or a chance at social and economic mobility.
@@Cailus3542 Let alone it's never that simple. Who cares if the government is wrong or not, if an enemy is slowly pushing towards your home to conquer you; well, you should probably volunteer if you can. Doesn't matter if the government is fucked or not at that point. Let alone maybe there weren't any other opportunities but to join the Army during the war etc.
Both an ominous, and magnificent piece of engineering… 👍🏻
In 1883 a friend told him, "Hang your electricity. If you want to make your fortune, invent something to help these fool Europeans kill each other more quickly!"
Maxim took the advice. By 1885 he'd invented the first single-barrel machine gun. This "Maxim Gun" fired 666 rounds a minute, and it changed warfare. The Russo-Japanese War was a storm warning of the slaughter we'd see a decade later in WW-I.
The Maxim Guns (and nastier guns that followed) made Maxim's name. They also gained him an English knighthood. By then he was an English citizen and a friend of royalty.
One of the most insane fact about the Vickers machine gun was in August 1916 at High Wood. Ten of those guns were positioned at 2000 yards from German lines.
So imagine a German soldier under a "rain" of .303 rounds coming from 2000 yards *for twelve hours!*
They fired over a million shots between them, with hardly an issue, only pausing to replace the barrels. The ammo and water carriers didn't have a moment to sit down and rest ...
It was known as a “beaten zone” for good reason.
@@rotwang2000 no they didn't, the unit's own war diary records that they fired just under 100,000 rounds during the action, not the 1 million rounds claimed by the commanding officer. It's still a lot of ammunition though, given that belts had to be reloaded in the field by the gunners and were not factory pre-packed.
I have a German 98/05 bayonet scabbard that was found in the switch trench area of high wood in the early 1970's. It has 13, yes 13, bullet holes in it. The direction of entry suggests it might well have been worn at the time, and there was no bayonet in it. Very thought provoking. Anybody wearing that scabbard would have been literally shredded.
My father told me that during WWII, Vickers MGs would be set up for indirect fire, similar to artillery.
For example, he would deduce what road was being used by the enemy for resupply, and position the guns to fire on it, preferably enfilade. They would then keep this going all night. What would have been unnerving is that the enemy would hear nothing except for bullet strikes. It used far less resource than artillery, although he said that artillery support when needed was superb in speed of reaction, accuracy, and as heavy as desired.
Many years ago, I got to fire one of the last Vickers machineguns used by the NZ Army. We were then using the GMPG/BREN but I couldn't give up the opportunity to try out the Vickers. Amazing feeling of "Power" when you pressed the button. An "Old hand" with the Vickers I think told me that there were 47 different types of stoppage with the Vickers and you needed to know IA [Immediate Action] drills by heart so that clearing was automated. I still think there is a place for it still. It was one of the few [or only] weapon that could hit the enemy in defilade positions due to the bullet drop at extended ranges.
Yes you could indetify the stoppage by the position of the crank handle.
My Great Grandfather was a CSM in charge of the Battlion machine gun company for 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers during WW1 a highly decorated soldier, unfortunately never got to come home, he had been in the army since 1909 so a professional soldier, the machine gun was an amazing piece of engineering but the ultimate killer.
Brutal weapon.. can't imagine what it was like to go up against it , god rest their souls 🙏
When one watches achieve film of the wars of the twentieth century The sounds recorded are those that imprint on the mind., more so on those who endured it...WW1 'IS' the rattling sound of a machine gun, in WW2, perhaps a diving Ju87. in Vietnam the thud, thud ,thud of the Huey helicopter.... the sounds of war lingers long after they are over..
The level of courage required to climb up out of a trench knowing that these or their counterparts were facing you is mind-boggling to me. Especially when they did it for the second, or fifth time. You'd really understand what could happen to you after the first, probably, and the second definitely.
To know that and get up to do it anyway, potentially again and again, I can't help but simultaneously feel huge levels of respect and pity for those that had to do it, the poor bastards.
Like most of the machine guns, I guess... Better to use it than to be in front of it !
It's no more brutal than getting hit with a regular rifle. Probably more pleasant than getting hit with jagged half pound of artillery shell.
Brutal more than compared to what? A spoon. All combat weapons are designed to kill and maim in different ways...they all lead to both.
There's the story from Ian McCullum of one of these having several million rounds shot through it non stop by teams at an army depot as the Vickers was being taken out of service. They just wanted to see how durable and reliable the gun was.
I imagine if the water was continuously cycled, it would last much longer than any air-cooled contemporary machine guns.
This was an experiment conducted when the bullets were going out of service as the .303 was being replaced by the NATO round. The ammunition was surplus, but the impressive aspect was that. after a week's constant operation, all the parts of the gun were re-examined and found to be within manufacturing tolerances. It's part of the lore of the gun.
Listening to Ian tell the story and fill in the smaller details was great, but I first read it in primary school in the '80s in a book on WW2 weapons.
As a young recruit (many years ago) i heard the same story, but i was also told they ran out of ammo before the gun jammed........
5 million rounds over 7 days. Also 10 were fired in battle continuously for 12 hrs. Just short of 1 million rounds between them.
I like how the guys firing this are dressed like they're going to a cocktail party.....
I worked at the Armouries for over 2yrs..... and Yes I fired that very Vickers shown, with Jonathan funnily. I've lost track of the number of firearms I've fired over the years, even artillery guns. This to date was the only Gun that genuinely "scared me" due to the sheer raw power and proximity.
“Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.”
Gen. Douglas MacArthur
The pen is only mightier than the sword when the sword is extremely small and the pen is very sharp.- Sir Terry Pratchett
On the other hand, the pen was used to design the weapons in the first place...
Says the man who's words resonate down through history.
Johnathan Ferguson is a Gem of the British Empire!
While I was a 2nd lieutenant serving in the army of Taiwan in '80 on Matzu Island, we had one of this 30 caliber machine gun. It's actually a preferred one to be used for warning shots to any enemy ship closing in, due to its stability from the swivel and tripod.
Turned the men who manned them into absolute killing machines !!
The Vickers/Maxim and the Browning 1917 set the standard for over 50 years, and lasted close to 100. Still an effective weapon for dug in emplacements and use on vehicles.
Still using a version of it in ukraine and its very effective in defensive positions
standard but not everywhere: in France the main machine gun was the Hotchkiss Mle 1914 8mm Lebel (air cooled) : 47000 of them was built...similar design was use from the Japanese up to end WW2...
The air-cooled M1919 Browning is still used by the forces of some smaller nations today. Vietnam is one such country.
Royal Australian Armoured Corp... 4 ball 1 Trace... Ranging burst =2 trace Killing burst = 4 trace! Lots of bullets!
Just a slight criticism. They're really talking about the .303 rifle cartridge that does all the damage, the machine gun just puts a lot of them down range quickly.
Hmm, I don't agree. One has to get the bullets down range in large numbers and to do that you either need a machine gun - ideally two set up to cross fire - or a few hundred soldiers with rifles. It's a combined effect, you need all the components, the designers, the factories, the logistics, the gun team, the gun, the ammo, the cooks ..........
It's hard to imagine what it would like to be on the receiving end of fire from that or the German equivalent in WW1, or any War.
While in the TA in the 1980's, I was in the butts maintaining the targets at 600 yards for a Gimpy team. Initially, they were firing low until they got settled. The rounds were breaking up the concrete lip of the butts and the sound of rounds overhead was quite awesome. One wouldn't have wanted to have been in the open.
Fantastic video sir 👍, from muzzle loaded smooth bore muskets to recoil operated machine guns in one century scary stuff 👍 thanks Dan and Jonathan for a great showcase of world war 1 machine guns
Michael Bolton is into guns? and British? I jest. Great video, terrifying weapon for it's day. Still relevant to a degree.
i was asking for ballistic gel in the last video...and here it is 😂those exit wounds are brutal
What a wonderful and terrifying peace of kit the Vickers was .... thanks for sharing
"Wonderful"??? That's a gross thing to say.
I love how the firing range looks like an office basement.
In the early 80's The 8/9th battalion RAR machine gun platoon was still using Vickers .303 MG . I helped them carry a jerry can of water and their heavy brass tripod up a large hill on Execise Kangaroo 81.
I was in the MG platoon for that exercise.:) If I recall that was Lemon tree hill. Thanks for the help mate. Bloody good gun but a buggar to carry around.
The rearguard in Donbass appear to have wheeled out the old maxim guns - even fitted with red dot sights
My Battalion was still using these in the 80s. Albeit modified versions. They were still used on the Battlefield Innoculation ranges in the 90s. Great gat, VERY distinctive sound. Especially on an open range with now trees or features about.
The Americans used the comparable M1917 Browning into the 1960's. The air cooled M1919 version is still used in some countries today.
My great grandfather made The Vickers Machine at their factory in Crayford, Kent. He was therefore entitled to have a house in the newly built estate in Northumberland Heath built entirely for all those who worked for Vickers. The estate was built in 1914 but in those days they would leave houses for a year to dry-out. Him and his wife, my grandmother walked down the street with my grandmother (she was aged 1 yrs old) and 4 other of her siblings in-toe (eventually there was a total of 7) and he simply pointed to the house he wanted. They had many years of trials and tribulations, in the Second World War on 6th January 1940 my grandmother was 2 weeks away from getting married, hall hired, wedding dress hung up ready to go when her fiancé’s merchant navy ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German U-boat and was killed. My grandmother bless her, had enough and had to get away so joined The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was based at RAF Benson, Oxfordshire where she met my grandfather. Then back to house in on The Vickers estate on New Years Day 1945 a bomb dropped and blow-up a house across the road which the shock of it killed my great grandmother who happened to be looking out of the window. All my grandmothers siblings, her brothers were either away fighting or her sisters were mothers themselves. So my grandmother was sent for via telegram to nurse her father as he had lung problems from working at Vickers all those years before. So my grandmother had to give up being in WAAF. After WWII my grandfather joined my grandmother in that house where they raised my mum and my auntie.. we eventually moved my grandmother out and into care in 1996 aged 82. So she lived at that Vickers house as part of the only family to do so after 81 years living there. I drive past it these days and it’s in a shabby state and I bet no one in that street has a clue of it’s history and what it went through.
During the Attack on Vimy Ridge, the Canadians used these in an indirect fire role to literally rain lead on the roads that fed supplies to the german fortifcations. basically we starved them for 2 weeks before the actual attack and it made life total hell for the defenders because they were not expecting that. And now in Ukraine these guns have been puled out of storage, the Russian M1910 version mostly in defensive positons due to their weight. ALSO most of thr casualties in ww1 and every war after it were casued by artillery. Artilery could get you anywhere.
I read the title of this and said to myself “fucking very”.
Brilliant. Could we see the tumble/why it exits so badly.
Pls
An amazing bit of kit, that said in the opening battles of WWI when faced by British army professional Soldiers using the Lee Enfield rifle, their rate of fire was such many thought they were facing Maxims.
Yup. At Mons the tiny professional BEF held up the German Schlieffen Plan mass conscript army 'til they were ordered to join the Allies retreat back to the Marne. After the 11/11/18 armistice the German officers openly admired the "magnificent little army" they faced at Mons.
Good god, the absolute effort to present this gun as somehow more terrifying or “horrifying” than being shot with a rifle.
It’s the exact same bullet, Dan. It sucks just as much to get shot by coming out of a Lee enfield or a Maxim
It's amazing that the bulk of firearm advancements happened from the 1880 - 1905 time period. Self contained smokeless powder, repeating magazines, semi and fully automatic firearms. Just about every modern sporting bolt action rifle made today, is essentially a M98 Mauser.
I saw one of those at a local shooting range. My girlfriend got to shoot it. Every one on the range was jealous. The guy that owned it had gone to great effort to restore it to working state.
Kinda sad they didn't talk more about indirect versus direct fire as the VMG teams by the end of the war were operating in a very similar capacity to the Royal Artillery. No longer simply in a trench but behind the front line providing a screen of fire that made it impossible for anyone to manoeuvre.
I've read of the Machine Gun Corps firing barrages for hours at the time; millions of rounds were fired in these barrages. Enemy trenches would be under a veritable rain of bullets.
I really like the Lee Enfield no.4 Mk 1. Lots of power, good accuracy and very nice bolt action, the peep sights are easy to use.
I fired a Vickers in the school cadets. Very noisy and lots of smoke. The gun firing next to me lost its water plug! lots of steam resulting. This gun also had about 30 possible ways it could jam. We had to know how to fix each one.😅
There was a battle in WW1, can't remember where, there was a British machinegun battalion (yes, an entire battalion of machinegun teams), that used their machineguns in indirect fire (can't see the target, firing over hills and buildings), and over the course of like 48 hours, fired something like 1.2 million rounds of .303.
Imagine, you're a couple miles back from the front, you think you're safe, and all of a sudden it starts raining .303 rounds. For two days. Continously.
Friggin' terrifying. Traverse and elevation tripod, and a lenstatic compass can be bad juju.
"Could kill a man at 1000 meters" Misses the target completely at 20 lmao
There are plenty of stories of men loosing arms, legs, and in some cases getting cut in half by the continuous fire. Chilling stuff.
I think this is the first video I've seen on youtube that actually properly conveys just how horrifyingly damaging 'modern' firearms are. Sobering stuff, even for someone that has had some experience with more recent machine guns. (M-60 in this case.)
I read an account of an attack preparation barrage by the Machine Gun Corps during WW1 where over a million rounds were put down range at the enemy by continuous fire ,over a long period, covering a large indirect fire target area, (dont ask which book that is long gone from memory)
Can you get a hip holster for one of these ? Chuck Norris wants to know.
Norris freehands two and shot both "from the hip".
As you say, this was a weapon that could not have been fully developed before the last decade of the 19th century. Firstly, it required self-contained cartridges, then a reliable priming system for those cartridges, then drawn brass (and later steel} cartridges that did not jam like the earlier coiled brass or paper cases did, finally smokeless powder so that barrels did not become clogged with soot and the smoke did not obscure the gunner's view. Yes, I know that several earlier automatic* machine guns used rimfire cartridges filled with black powder or coiled brass or paper cartridges and even early .303 cartridges used compressed black powder, but none were capable of reliable, sustained rapid fire until the modern centrefire rifle cartridge evolved.
*As against hand-cranked or electrically-driven guns such as the Gatling.
When you recall that the Germans, Russians and several other combatants in WWI were also armed with variants of the Maxim gun with equally powerful ammunition, it explains why the carnage was so terrible on both sides. If anyone wants to argue about the relative power of the .303, 8x57mm, 7.62x54R, even the latecomer .30-06, then all I can say is that if you were hit by any of them you wouldn't know the difference.
Judging by its length of service, I’d say quite a bit
I've Fired the M60,and brengun..it's very satisfying
Both sides had these...but still just sent thousands of men charging into enemy machine guns. Just crazy.
Well what was your alternative given the technology of the day? The British particularly were only too keen to take up any technical advantage - tanks, the creeping barrage and so forth. So, there is wire, and mgs placed in front of you in enfilade. You have infantry and artillery, and relatively slow communication. List the options? They make a pretty short list.
There was one mistake - fire and manoeuvre in sections, which came in later than it should have done. It wasn't used (but rarely) in the earlier days because it was felt that the new Army couldn't be trained effectively in its use in the time. However, one unit on the Somme did use it.
Incidentally, the single greatest cause of casualties was not the machine gun, but artillery.
@@meyrickgriffith-jones3908 i don't know. I was thinking about this last night when I was watching another documentary. It just seems like callousness on part of the commanders to order men to charge across no mans land. I would have a hard time sending my troops to do something that has proven senseless and ineffective. I was thinking last night, what about a landing behind German lines in Belgium? 🤷♂️
@@pkt1213 Well landings post Gallipoli were not fashionable.
We looked at this one in some detail while at Staff College. The French were taking huge casualties at Verdun and desperately needed assistance, and operationally there weren't any other alternatives. They didn't have the resources to go over, you couldn't go under meaningfully, though shelter in caves was provided. I think they believed that these big barrages would cut the wire, at least initially. I think on the Somme, the preparations were intense, so much so, that HQs couldn't believe that much had failed.
Having said that, did the Somme fail? Did it relieve Verdun, yes. Did it destroy the German army, much of its morale yes, and according to German commanders, it never recovered.
Was it a victory? On the day probably not. In the long term, yes, I suppose so.
Was it worth it? Well the public at the time thought so.
@@meyrickgriffith-jones3908 and hindsight is always 20/20. We can sit here a centery later look at it but it was something completely new in warfare. They were used to standing in rows and shooting at each other from across a field.
Meanwhile in ww1 soldiers where mostly engaged and killed by artillery. Long range rapid fire artillery is there since the 1860s, with the US civil war just missing out on progress
My grandfather was an electrical engineer on the tramways. He joined the army and was selected to be in the motor machine gun service. Have lots of photos not sure what to do with them, would be a shame if they are lost.
Maybe contact the imperial War museum, they may well be interested.
@@Captain_Lockheed They had no interest when I contacted them several years ago
Try the museum for the MMGC mechanical machine gun corps . 🐝😷
@@ianlevitt6920 I’m surprised at that. How about his old regiment? Maybe they would be interested.
@@ianlevitt6920 the MMGC turned in to the tank corp then the royal tank regiment. You could try the tank museum at bovington.🐝😷
Jonathan Ferguson, the man the Legend
The bullet effect on the gelatin was absolutely horrifying. I've never seen anything as frightening as that.
@@mkfleopard253 I can't. I'm too afraid.
@CrispinBell Please stop it! I'm getting PTSD!
The MA2. It was fun watching R. Lee Ermy use one to cut a concrete block wall in half on the show he had back in the day.
I have.
The effect of a speeding train on a human body.
Or, what is left to be found.
When I saw the Vickers MG: Hmm, nice.
Then I saw Jonathan Ferguson: AWWWWWWW YIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Clickbait, Dan doesn't fire anything.
We see it here being fired directly forward, but in the direct fire role, most were operated in pairs, covering a couple hundred yard frontage of trench. Each would shoot diagonally, making a large extended X in front of the trenches. That way, advancing troops were enfiladed and caught in a crossfire. Any rounds that missed one man continued through the advancing troops from the side, hitting someone else.
My grandfather fought with the Canadians in the great war. Survived and had a good life afterwards. I didn't know him. He was decorated for bravery. Twice.
One of the things the family told me, very casually, was that the troops never took machine gunners prisoner. Never.
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”- Hilaire Belloc
A cousin of the Vickers, the 1910 Russian Maxim MG, has seen combat this year in Ukraine. If you need to hold a fixed position, the WWI era Maxim designs are still useful!
They even use 2 Maxims interlinked, connected to a anti aircraft computer to identify, predict movement, target and shoot down drones automatically. Absolutely wild a weapon over 100 years old still has practical purpose in modern war.
I can not imagine being told to leave the safety of a trench and walk towards the enemy being defended by 2 of these in a crisscross formation. How anyone survived is beyond me. These guns are really what coined the term "no mans land".
Great presentation, well done. You make a good team, can we suggest a series?
I’ve a friend who has a very illegal Vickers, he found it in a shed when he bought a rural property. It wasn’t working when he found it and he has rebuilt it comprehensively now, to the extent that he could build a brand new one now. He has both the original feed mechanism and a new one he designed and built. Every now and again he will shoot it way out the back of his property, it’s a bit expensive in ammo, but he reloads.
Remind me never to tell you a secret 😉.
That sound is fantastic.
I think I make a ringtone of it.
I've read that when the British Army changed to a new GPMG, an armory crew took a Vickers and brought it within factory spec. They took it to the range and fired it continuously (I mean Continuously!!) for 7 days and 7 nights. They changed the barrel per the operators manual and changed the crew every hour/hour-and-a-half. At the end, they had fired 5 million .303 rounds and the Vickers was still within all factory specs. Frankly, I'd like to believe this but find it hard to accept. Is there any independent confirmation of this? I see Dylan G has the same story, but Id like confirmation from the factory, the arsenal or the actual crew. Thanks!!
The key to this is that you need to keep the water jacket filled and keep oiling the gun in the firing. With that done, yes the guns will do it. You will need a new barrel about every 15,000 rounds, basically the rifling will be worn away. You may need to swap out the breach block as well. The barrel takes a few minutes to change on this gun, the other major component groups seconds.
During WW1 there was an area that the Brits did not want to have any movement by the Germans, so they set up a pair of these guns which then were fired at a 45 degree base angel to the front line. Again those guns ran for days. No problems, just millions of bullets flying across that area.
Maxim gun. The First Matabele War in 1893 was the first wartime use of a Maxim gun by Britain and it proved to have a decisive impact.
I believe that the British army did a test of the Vickers machine guns reliability and fired it continuously for 6 days with no ill effects on the gun. It was the standard army heavy machine gun into the 1960s.
I looked that up and they fired 5 million rounds day and night continuously and had a crew rotate out every 30 minutes. The base needed to dispose of their stockpile of 5 million .303 British. They would switch barrels every hour and a half that became worn out. The gun survived and the whole gun was inspected by the armorer on the British military base and all parts were fully operational and in spec. For more information search for “Ian McCollum Vickers 5 million.”
@@ElectricPhantasmagoria thanks for that, will read up.
You're talking about the standard british army .303 rifle round in a fully automatic sustained-fire weapon. Of course it's shockingly powerful. I can't imagine there'd be much left of you if you copped a burst of that.
OMG! Is that Jonathan Ferguson keeper of firearms and artillery at the royal armories museum?!
In slo mo it looks like gelatine block decided to run away :)
Woytek! That's absolutely hilarious! But is it not also possible the poor block was just trying to surrender in its own way? If it could talk, it might have said, " Look, you guys! You've shot me enough times already! I give up! "😅
Fascinating! But one might have nightmares after watching this.. 👍
There was a WW2 documentary I watched years ago which involved machine gun fire by the Japanese in the Pacific island battles and one of the soldiers said he saw people being cut in half by concentrated fire and that the official film teams deleted all that type of material.
My Great uncle Norman was in the Machine gun Corp.
He was killed on the 3rd of December 1917 at the Battle of Cambrai.
Advancing towards that beast was sheer madness.
Dan Snow should do an episode with GarandThumb if he really wants to be horrified.