Vickers machine gun

Vickers Medium Machine Gun
Vickers Medium Machine Gun
	Vickers MMG and crew
Type	Medium machine gun
Place of origin	United Kingdom
Service history
In service	1912–1968
Used by	United Kingdom, Commonwealth
Wars	World War I, World War II, Korean War
Production history
Designed	1912
Manufacturer	Vickers
Produced	1912–1968
Specifications
Mass	15 to 23 kg all-up
Length	1,100 mm
Barrel length	720 mm
Cartridge	.303 British
Action	recoil with gas boost
Rate of fire	450 to 600 round/min
Effective firing range	2,440 ft (740 m)
Maximum firing range	4,500 yards (4100 m) indirect fire
Feed system	250-round canvas belt

The Vickers machine gun or Vickers gun is a name primarily used to refer to the water-cooled .303 inch machine gun produced by Vickers Limited, originally for the British Army. The machine gun typically required a six to eight-man team to operate: one to fire, one to feed the ammunition, and the rest to help carry the weapon, its ammunition and spare parts.

The gun had a reputation for great solidity and reliability. Ian V. Hogg, in Weapons & War Machines, describes an action that took place in August, 1916, during which the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps fired their ten Vickers guns continuously for twelve hours. They fired a million rounds between them, using one hundred new barrels, without a single breakdown. "It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one."^[1]

History

The Vickers machine gun was based on the successful Maxim gun of the late 19th century. After purchasing the Maxim company outright in 1896, Vickers took the design of the Maxim gun and improved it, reducing its weight by taking out all unnecessary parts , and adding a muzzle booster.

The British Army formally adopted the Vickers gun as its standard machine gun on 26 November 1912, using it alongside their Maxims. There were still great shortages when the First World War began, and the British Expeditionary Force was still equipped with Maxims when sent to France in 1914. Vickers was, in fact, threatened with prosecution for war profiteering, due to the exorbitant price it was demanding for the gun. The price was slashed as a result. As the war progressed, and numbers increased, it became the British Army's primary machine gun, and served on all fronts during the conflict. When the Lewis Gun was adopted as a light machine gun, and issued to infantry units, the Vickers guns, redefined as heavy machine guns were withdrawn from infantry units and grouped in the hands of the new Machine Gun Corps (when 0.5" calibre machine guns appeared, the tripod-mounted, rifle calibre machine guns like the Vickers became medium machine guns). After the War, the Machine Gun Corps (MGC) was disbanded and the Vickers returned to infantry units. Before the Second World War there were plans to replace it; one of the contenders was the 7.92 mm Besa machine gun (a Czech design), which eventually became the British Army's standard tank-mounted machine gun. However, the Vickers remained in service with the British Army until 30 March 1968. Its last operational use was in the Radfan during the Aden Emergency. Its successor in UK service is the L7 GPMG.

The Vickers became standard weapons on all British and French military aircraft after 1916, including the famous Sopwith Camel and the SPAD XIII. The gun was usually fitted with a form of synchronizer gear to allow it to fire through aircraft propellers, and slots were cut in the water jacket so that it was cooled by air flow instead of water, a common practice on WWI airplanes.

As the machine gun armament of fighters moved from the fuselage to the wings in the years before WW2, the Vickers with its fabric belts was generally replaced by the faster-firing Browning Model 1919. Several British bombers and attack aircraft of WW2 mounted the Vickers K machine gun, a completely different design.

Variants

The larger calibre (half-inch) version of the Vickers was used as an anti-aircraft gun on British ships as the 0.5"/62 Vickers Machine Gun Mark III. These were typically four guns on rotating (360°) elevating (+80° to −10°) mounting. The belts were rolled into a spiral and placed in hoppers beside each gun. The heavy plain bullet weighed 1.3 oz and was good for 1,500 yd (1,400 m) range (1,300 m). They were fitted from the 1920s onwards but in practical terms proved of little use.

Foreign service

The Vickers was widely sold commercially and saw service with many nations and their own particular ammunition. It was also modified for each company and served as a base for many other weapons. For example:

6.5 mm Italian
6.5 mm Arisaka
6.5x54R Dutch
7x57 Mauser
7.5x55 Swiss
7.62x51 NATO
.30-06 Springfield
7.62x54R Russian
7.65x53 Mauser
8 mm Lebel

The Vickers MG remains in service with the Indian, Pakistani, and Nepalese armed forces, albeit as a reserve weapon, intended for emergency use in the event of a major conflict.

Specifications

The weight of the gun itself varied based on the gear attached, but was generally between 25 and 30 pounds (11 and 13 kg), with a 40 to 50 pound (18 to 23 kg) tripod. The ammunition boxes for the 250 round ammunition belts weighed 22 pounds (10 kg) each. In addition, it required about 7.5 imperial pints (4.3 L) of water in its evaporative cooling system to prevent overheating. The heat of the barrel boiled the water in the jacket surrounding it. The resulting steam was taken off by flexible tube to a condenser container—this had the dual benefits of avoiding giving away the gun's location, and also enabling re-use of the water, which was very important in arid environments.

Rimmed, centrefire Mk 7 .303 inch (7.7 mm) cartridge from WWII.

In British service, the Vickers gun fired the standard .303 inch (7.7 x 56 mm) cartridges used in the Lee Enfield rifle, which generally had to be hand-loaded into the cloth ammunition belts. There was also a 0.5 inch (12.7 mm) calibre version used as an anti-aircraft weapon and various other calibres produced for foreign buyers. Some British tanks of the early Second World War were equipped with the 0.5 inch (12.7 mm) Vickers.

The gun was 3 feet 8 inches (1.1 m) long and its cyclic rate of fire was between 450 and 600 rounds per minute. In practice, it was expected that 10,000 rounds would be fired per hour, and that the barrel would be changed every hour—a two-minute job for a trained team. Firing the Mark 8 cartridge, which had a streamlined bullet, it could be used against targets at a range of approximately 4,500 yards (4.1 km).

Use

The Gun and its tripod were carried separately and were both heavy. The original design did not anticipate its being carried up jungle-covered mountains on men's backs, but such was the weapon's popularity, that men were generally content to man-pack it to all manner of difficult locations. The tripod would be set up to make a firm base, often dug into the ground a little and perhaps with the feet weighted down with sandbags. The water jacket would be filled with water around the barrel. The firing of the gun would make the barrel heat up, and conducted heat would then boil the water in the jacket, and steam would be carried away down a rubber pipe, to condense in a metal can. The condensed water could then be poured back into the jacket to top it up, but another function of the condenser tin was to hide the emissions of steam, that might give away the gun's position. This cooling system, though heavy, was very effective, and enabled the gun to keep firing far longer than air-cooled rival weapons.

The loader sat to the gunner's right, and fed in belts of cloth, into which had been placed the rounds. The weapon would draw in the belt, push each round out of the belt and into the breach, fire it, and then drop the brass cartridge out of the bottom, to gather in a pile of spent brass underneath the weapon, while the cloth belt would continue through to the left side and wind up on the ground.

One very unusual feature of the Vickers .303 MMG (medium machine gun) was that it was often used to fire indirectly at targets, whereas other weapons of similar type would only be used for direct fire. This plunging fire was used to great effect against road junctions, trench systems, forming up points, and other locations that might be observed by a forward observer, or zeroed in at one time for future attacks, or guessed at by men using maps and experience. Sometimes a location might be zeroed in during the day, and then attacked at night, much to the surprise and confusion of the enemy. New Zealand units were especially fond of this use. A white disc would be set up on a pole near the MMG, and the gunner would aim at a mark on it, knowing that this corresponded to aiming at the distant target. There was a special back-sight with a tall extension on it for this purpose.

A British World War Two Vickers MMG platoon typically had one officer in command of four guns, in two sections of two, each with a crew and a small team of riflemen whose job was to protect the gun, and keep it supplied with ammunition.

Notes

^ Hogg, Ian V. (1976). Weapons & War Machines. London: Phoebus. pp. p. 62. ISBN 0-7026-0008-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
"The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on August 24, 1916. This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men’s drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds between them. One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968."

External links

Gallery of images

British Vickers gun team in action at the Battle of the Somme. Both are wearing gasmasks
Rear view of Vickers gun team in action at the Battle of the Somme
Vickers machine-gun of the 1st Manchester Regiment in Malaya, 1941
British Vickers gunners in action in Holland during Operation Market Garden. All are wearing the Mk III Turtle helmet
View of the breech of a Vickers gun showing brass feed ramp
Dorsal view of a Vickers gun showing fluted water-cooling tank

[1] Hogg, Ian V. (1976). Weapons & War Machines. London: Phoebus. pp. p. 62. ISBN 0-7026-0008-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
"The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on August 24, 1916. This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men’s drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds between them. One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968."

[1]

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