A Better Rifle at Halloween

[Ramontxo]

At this stage in the war, I’m fairly sure if you ask the entente which LMG they want of the chauchat, lewis or F-Beardmore, the answer would be either “YES” or “OUÏ”

There is also an money factor. I read (lots of years ago, so take it with a pinch of salt...) that while the Lewis (Fucki*** good weapon) need less man/hours than the Vickers (even better weapon) to be made it was actually more expensive (by reason of licenses). So if there is a less expensive alternative it may be taken. That said, have I mentioned that the Lewis was an fucki** good weapon?

 

[diesal]

There is also a money factor. I read (lots of years ago, so take it with a pinch of salt...) that while the Lewis (Fucki*** good weapon) need less man/hours than the Vickers (even better weapon) to be made it was actually more expensive (by reason of licenses). So if there is a less expensive alternative it may be taken. That said, have I mentioned that the Lewis was an fucki** good weapon?

The Lewis was a good LMG for the time, that being said it was heavier, somewhat prone to stoppages and expensive as noted above. If you watch the three videos the BF LMG looks the most polished of the three Farquhar is able to fire it effectively and he is an older and I assume frailer man than Gun Jesus. I totally agree that the answer will be yes to all three. If anything we may see fewer vickers guns made, they also made a pretty good LMG during the 1930’s and might want to get in on the action.

 

[diesal]

The Lewis was a good LMG for the time, that being said it was heavier, somewhat prone to stoppages and expensive as noted above. If you watch the three videos the BF LMG looks the most polished of the three Farquhar is able to fire it effectively and he is an older and I assume frailer man than Gun Jesus. I totally agree that the answer will be yes to all three. If anything we may see fewer vickers guns made, they also made a pretty good LMG during the 1930’s and might want to get in on the action.

The other thing is the brigades equiped with the smle will likely get the Lewis, if Farquhar hill develop a LMG it would logically go to those units with the same calibre rifle. Two possibly 3 different calibres in the same section would be horribly complex . So that much won’t happen, also the FH weapon might be more of a heavy barrelled automatic version of the FH rifle more like a bar than a Lewis gun type LMG.

 

[Sqdn19]

Also, if it hasn’t been mentioned already, I heartily recommend watching Project Lightning by C&R Arsenal on YouTube for an excellent review of WWI LMGs

 

[diesal]

Also, if it hasn’t been mentioned already, I heartily recommend watching Project Lightning by C&R Arsenal on YouTube for an excellent review of WWI LMGs

I intend to, I haven’t watched as much of their stuff as forgotten weapons but still enjoy it.

 

[MarcH]

Another thing to point out is that an LMG as a concept doesn't really exist right now. With Machine guns sustained fire is a very desirable attribute.

Any weapon being looked at in the context of being adopted in 1914-15 will be looked at from that perspective. It was tactical developments during WW1 that got the LMG as a concept worked out. the Chauchat was an automatic rifle as was the BAR. The Lewis was a lighter MG than a Vickers but was still being designed around the same requirements. Any true LMG, with attributes desirable in an LMG will not be looked on favourably compared to the existing designs that are more familiar to period thinking.

 

[pjmidd]

If anything we may see fewer vickers guns made,

Why? If you want to defend a fixed position or supress an enemy trench from a covering position for more than a few minutes during an attack, then an LMG is not what you want. The two guns are not rivals, they compliment each other with being strong were the other is weak. Magazine fed is not good for sustained fire compared to a belt fed, belt fed will always struggle with weight. The key is proper tactics and organisation so each is used properly.

 

[MarcH]

Why? If you want to defend a fixed position or supress an enemy trench from a covering position for more than a few minutes during an attack, then an LMG is not what you want. The two guns are not rivals, they compliment each other with being strong were the other is weak. Magazine fed is not good for sustained fire compared to a belt fed, belt fed will always struggle with weight. The key is proper tactics and organisation so each is used properly.

This, there are only a few ways we see fewer Vickers guns made. The first is the earlier introduction of Mortars and proper tactics for their use. The second is a shorter war.

 

[diesal]

Why? If you want to defend a fixed position or supress an enemy trench from a covering position for more than a few minutes during an attack, then an LMG is not what you want. The two guns are not rivals, they compliment each other with being strong were the other is weak. Magazine fed is not good for sustained fire compared to a belt fed, belt fed will always struggle with weight. The key is proper tactics and organisation so each is used properly.

The vickers was an excellent Machine Gun for Trench Warfare, it is likely that the front lines will freeze into immobility ITTL on the western front, but the pressures on the German and Austrian Armies will be higher than OTL, so the war will probably be shorter, additionally if greater mobility can be maintained, more bite and hold operations, more artillery, less supply constraints, we may see an automatic rifle in action. Truly effective LMG's didn't really exist till the Bren type guns, the British SA80 LSW was a modern example of the BAR/Chauchat Section automatic rifle. If the war is more mobile, I think we will see a driver for more automatic rifles /LMG precursors, if it is as static as OTL it will be water cooled maxim derived guns. Interestingly it appears that the Ukrainian's are bringing there old soviet maxims back into service, so the argument in their favour still holds.

 

[Ammonios]

Hello,

Considering what is happening to the Central powers on both the eastern and western fronts, Germany will be grasping for any solution that can help their infantry formations, especially in light of the alternate debacles hitting them now.

So the notion is whether or not the Germans are now worried enough to accelerate these developments...

Bergmann M.P.18,I submachine gun

Last Gasp of the German Maxim: the Air-Cooled MG 08/18 – Surplused

surplused.com

 

[Coulsdon Eagle]

Why? If you want to defend a fixed position or supress an enemy trench from a covering position for more than a few minutes during an attack, then an LMG is not what you want. The two guns are not rivals, they compliment each other with being strong were the other is weak. Magazine fed is not good for sustained fire compared to a belt fed, belt fed will always struggle with weight. The key is proper tactics and organisation so each is used properly.

The Vickers MG was also used in an interdiction role, similar to artillery, by firing way over the enemy's front line onto the second line IIRC one Vickers (or was it one squadron) fired over a million rounds in one day. The Lewis would not have the range and, being air-cooled, not be able to sustain such a rate if fire for hours.

 

[MarcH]

The vickers was an excellent Machine Gun for Trench Warfare, it is likely that the front lines will freeze into immobility ITTL on the western front, but the pressures on the German and Austrian Armies will be higher than OTL, so the war will probably be shorter, additionally if greater mobility can be maintained, more bite and hold operations, more artillery, less supply constraints, we may see an automatic rifle in action. Truly effective LMG's didn't really exist till the Bren type guns, the British SA80 LSW was a modern example of the BAR/Chauchat Section automatic rifle. If the war is more mobile, I think we will see a driver for more automatic rifles /LMG precursors, if it is as static as OTL it will be water cooled maxim derived guns. Interestingly it appears that the Ukrainian's are bringing there old soviet maxims back into service, so the argument in their favour still holds.

Bite and hold tactics weren't the answer on the western front, they were actually worse than break through attempts.

There were a few problems with bite and hold tactics.
The first is that for them to take enough ground to be effective you need to launch a massive number of them. Lets be generous and say that each one could capture territory to a depth of 1000 meters, a number higher than historically possible, then to get from the most eastern point of Belgium to Cologne will take 60 attacks. They simply aren't capable of capturing the depth of of enemy held territory to be an effective way of waging war.
Secondly they are very resource intensive, both in terms of munitions but also time and men (more on the last one in a second). This is a self evident problem even if the manpower cost is ignored.
Thirdly the Enemy knows where you are. When you are capturing at most one or two trench lines then the Enemy already has them mapped and can shell the area with ease. This was shown in full at Passchendaele, there the British used a combination of Breakthrough attempt attacks and Bite and Hold attacks. While the Bite and Hold attacks worried the Germans more in general they also cost the British a lot more casualties. Basically trying to break through the enemy lines was the better option from a preserving manpower perspective.

In reality the only way to break the trench warfare stalemate was true combined arms warfare. Without that the trench stalemate is inevitable.

 

[jlckansas]

Lewis guns for the cavalry/armored cars carrying troops, Vickers guns for the armored cars that are for fire power. This way you can dismount the Lewis guns to work with the troops. Post WW1 the USMC understood the value of the BAR in the "Banana Wars" that they fought and the other powers in the colonial type environments might discover their value also.

 

[pjmidd]

Bite and hold tactics weren't the answer on the western front, they were actually worse than break through attempts.

There were a few problems with bite and hold tactics.
The first is that for them to take enough ground to be effective you need to launch a massive number of them. Lets be generous and say that each one could capture territory to a depth of 1000 meters, a number higher than historically possible, then to get from the most eastern point of Belgium to Cologne will take 60 attacks. They simply aren't capable of capturing the depth of of enemy held territory to be an effective way of waging war.
Secondly they are very resource intensive, both in terms of munitions but also time and men (more on the last one in a second). This is a self evident problem even if the manpower cost is ignored.
Thirdly the Enemy knows where you are. When you are capturing at most one or two trench lines then the Enemy already has them mapped and can shell the area with ease. This was shown in full at Passchendaele, there the British used a combination of Breakthrough attempt attacks and Bite and Hold attacks. While the Bite and Hold attacks worried the Germans more in general they also cost the British a lot more casualties. Basically trying to break through the enemy lines was the better option from a preserving manpower perspective.

In reality the only way to break the trench warfare stalemate was true combined arms warfare. Without that the trench stalemate is inevitable.

Pretty simplistic view on Bite and Hold and actually seems to miss a couple of key points.
First the German response to an attack that took ground was nearly always a rapid counter attack, this meant advancing further than artillery could support was a good way to be knocked back with losses for nothing.
Second the idea was for the attacks to methodically weaken the enemy, in many cases it was destroying the ability for the enemy to fight that was the objective, not just taking ground.
Third the Bite and Hold was just a phase of the overall plan. A series of attacks was meant to culminate in a position that caused the enemy to have to fall back or be destroyed. Then a breakthrough attack could be launched as they were either in flux or stretched thin and mobile warfare take over.
It can be argued that the British Army still uses Bite and Hold tactics today( as part of a larger toolbox ). Certainly Normandy in WW2 has large parts that are similar.

 

[MarcH]

Pretty simplistic view on Bite and Hold and actually seems to miss a couple of key points.
First the German response to an attack that took ground was nearly always a rapid counter attack, this meant advancing further than artillery could support was a good way to be knocked back with losses for nothing.
Second the idea was for the attacks to methodically weaken the enemy, in many cases it was destroying the ability for the enemy to fight that was the objective, not just taking ground.
Third the Bite and Hold was just a phase of the overall plan. A series of attacks was meant to culminate in a position that caused the enemy to have to fall back or be destroyed. Then a breakthrough attack could be launched as they were either in flux or stretched thin and mobile warfare take over.
It can be argued that the British Army still uses Bite and Hold tactics today( as part of a larger toolbox ). Certainly Normandy in WW2 has large parts that are similar.

On the first point your right and this is why the Germans were more worried about Bite and Hold rather than the Breakthrough attacks. The problem the Germans ran into is that in order to defeat each type of attack required a different response. If they got it wrong then the response would be a failure, gift the British a substantial victory and likely result in large and unnecessary casualties.
The Breakthrough attacks were "easier" for the Germans to deal with is that they were a continuation of what the Germans were learning to defeat for the previous two years. The rapid counterattacks being a part of the whole plan to beat back an attack and cause casualties. As a way to defeat the counter attack the Bite and Hold was a good idea but it had negatives.
As you point out in your second point it was an attrition tactic that would wear down the enemy's ability to fight, the problem it ran into was that it also wore down the British ability to fight. The increased casualties over more traditional Breakthrough attacks were statistically significant for the British. Without the ability to fight a true combined arms battle the Bite and Hold tactics were wasteful for the British and were only really effective when combined with Breakthrough attempts. In fact had the weather not turned at Passchendaele then the Germans had planned to withdraw several miles to newly prepared defensive positions as the pressure from the combined types off attack built. It was not one or the other that was producing results it was the variety.

 

[Orry]

8th October 1914, Brussels

The prisoners had been led out from the guardhouse, they were an ill-assorted group, several were socialist agitators, one was a nurse, another a Belgian Bishop, two were Congolese who had come to Brussels as students sponsored by the Anti-Slavery society.

They had all been rounded up by the Germans, several were hostages, others had been convicted by a drumhead court martial. The socialists had been captured when an illegal press was raided, the literature had been deemed anti-german propaganda. The Nurse was arrested when the hospital was searched for those deemed associated with the riots and her vociferous objection to the arrest of a man who was already dying from his wounds had condemned her doubly so when her British identity was revealed.

I assume the Nurse was

Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a British nurse, working in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. She helped hundreds of British, French and Belgian soldiers escape the Germans and was arrested, tried and executed in 1915.
Edith was born in the village of Swardeston, Norfolk. She was the daughter of a rector and worked as a governess in Belgium, before training to be a nurse in London. She worked in hospitals in Shoreditch, Kings Cross and Manchester and then accepted a position in Brussels as Matron in Belgium's first training hospital and school for nurses. There was no established nursing profession in Belgium at the time of Edith's appointment, and her pioneering work led her to be considered the founder of modern nursing education in that country. She was in Norfolk visiting her mother when the First World War broke out in 1914. On hearing of the threat to Belgium, from the advancing German troops, she felt it was her duty to return to Brussels immediately.

Who Was Edith Cavell?

Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was a British nurse, working in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. She helped hundreds of British, French and Belgian soldiers escape the Germans and was arrested, tried and executed in 1915.

www.iwm.org.uk

 

[Coulsdon Eagle]

On the first point your right and this is why the Germans were more worried about Bite and Hold rather than the Breakthrough attacks. The problem the Germans ran into is that in order to defeat each type of attack required a different response. If they got it wrong then the response would be a failure, gift the British a substantial victory and likely result in large and unnecessary casualties.
The Breakthrough attacks were "easier" for the Germans to deal with is that they were a continuation of what the Germans were learning to defeat for the previous two years. The rapid counterattacks being a part of the whole plan to beat back an attack and cause casualties. As a way to defeat the counter attack the Bite and Hold was a good idea but it had negatives.
As you point out in your second point it was an attrition tactic that would wear down the enemy's ability to fight, the problem it ran into was that it also wore down the British ability to fight. The increased casualties over more traditional Breakthrough attacks were statistically significant for the British. Without the ability to fight a true combined arms battle the Bite and Hold tactics were wasteful for the British and were only really effective when combined with Breakthrough attempts. In fact had the weather not turned at Passchendaele then the Germans had planned to withdraw several miles to newly prepared defensive positions as the pressure from the combined types off attack built. It was not one or the other that was producing results it was the variety.

I agree with pretty much all you say, but would note that the casualty rates were the highest in the open warfare (breakthrough!) battles in 1914 and the 100 Days in 1918.

 

[pdf27]

Important note here: the bite-and-hold attacks were combined arms attacks as well.

• Bite-and-hold isn't about how you're fighting, instead it sets the limit of exploitation in an attack as that which can still be supported without moving your artillery. This was the critical lesson the British learned on the Somme: infantry fighting without artillery support (i.e. a combined arms battle at a basic level) can't hold a position.
• Combined arms means that your various arms and branches of service are co-operating towards a single objective. In a WWI context, that means infantry, artillery, engineers and air are all working together as part of a larger combined plan. This is incredibly hard at the size of forces involved, and the British didn't really get this working perfectly until the Hundred Days although they were working towards it from day one of the war.

Fundamentally, it comes down to where you lose your artillery support and what the force-to-space ratio is. In the battles of the Hundred Days, the German army was falling apart at the seams so the force-to-space ratio came down and the troops didn't have to be shot onto the objective by the artillery and supported on arrival.
Before that, artillery was essentially unable to fight a mobile war except for a few weeks in 1914 where the Horse Artillery was still just about surviving. There were two critical problems that they didn't really solve until the 1930s:

1. Moving guns forward across a battlefield which has been smashed to pieces by artillery and is still under harassing fire and possibly gas is incredibly difficult when you're reliant on horses. Even a short advance of the bite-and-hold type will be a couple of miles and that'll take several days to move artillery and shell supplies forward. Essentially that sets the tempo of your advance - your front line can move forward as fast as the horses can drag the guns and ammunition across the battlefield.
2. Wireless communication was in it's infancy. In WW2 your forward observer can radio a target to your gun battery and they can engage it fairly rapidly. In WW1 that wasn't possible - they were limited to the field telephone, which in practice means that any advance is out of contact for some considerable time until the wires can be laid and connected up to the new gun battery positions. That means you're reliant on pre-planned fire or whatever reconnaissance aircraft can pick up and can only provide very limited support to the troops on the ground.

Tanks were initially an attempt to get around this problem - a means of bringing light (very light) artillery forward over the battlefield to a position where they are in voice contact with the infantry. That worked remarkably well, but the tanks were nowhere near as reliable as people think and by the end of the Hundred Days they had nearly all broken down and were out of the fight.

 

[MarcH]

I agree with pretty much all you say, but would note that the casualty rates were the highest in the open warfare (breakthrough!) battles in 1914 and the 100 Days in 1918.

I was talking specifically about the Battle of Passchendaele and comparing the Attacks of Gough and Plumer. As a microcosm of two competing styles of Trench warfare offensive it is a good place to look. As part of a wider picture then yes the open, mobile warfare produced the highest casualties.

 

[yulzari1]

Lewis guns for the cavalry/armored cars carrying troops, Vickers guns for the armored cars that are for fire power. This way you can dismount the Lewis guns to work with the troops. Post WW1 the USMC understood the value of the BAR in the "Banana Wars" that they fought and the other powers in the colonial type environments might discover their value also.

This was exactly how the cavalry were working with their Hotchkiss Portables LMGs. Move with the horses, dismount and attack as infantry supported by the Hotchkiss and horse drawn field guns.