One million rounds from six Vickers machine guns in 12 hours?

[Richard Fisher]

It's been a while since I've been on this forum but I'm sure this will be of interest to readers.

 

Many of you will have read of the account of one million rounds being fired by six Vickers machine guns in 12 hours. This was during the actions at High Wood on 23/24 August 1916.

 

It's something that has been cited in many, many books since Hutchison (the Officer Commanding 100 Machine Gun Company) wrote about it in 1919 and then 1938. Something didn't sit right about it though so Rich Willis got in touch with me in winter 2017/2018 and we researched it in a lot more detail.  This has culminated in a paper published in the First World War Studies Journal - a peer reviewed academic journal. That's now been published, in time for the 103rd anniversary next week, and we're able to share a bit more about it.  This includes a copy of the 'preprint' for those that don't have academic access.

 

So that all the information is in one place, I've created a page on the Vickers MG website (which I hope you'll all know!) but feel free to ask questions here or in the comments on that page. It's certainly an interesting read that may well change the presentations of many Battlefield Guides and other visitors to the Somme.

 

https://vickersmg.blog/2019/08/13/one-million-rounds-fired-in-12-hours/

 

Rich Fisher

[phil andrade]

Richard,

 

There was a big thread on this forum about that claim several years ago.

 

It was a good thread.

 

If memory serves me, we tended to agree that the arithmetic seems feasible, if we allow for rate of fire per gun extended over twelve hours, but the logistics of over heating and ammo supply etc make the story doubtful.

 

The officer was notorious for tall stories, too.

 

Phil

[Richard Fisher]

I remember it Phil. I can’t remember whether I engaged in it or not though. Once you look at the war diaries it tells you the reality of the situation rather than just the accounts.

 

Hutchison certainly is well know for his tall stories and we wanted to get this researched and peer reviewed so it would stand the test of time and be cited by others hopefully more widely.  

[phil andrade]

Rich, 

 

Was it just six guns ?   I’ve just googled an article and it states that there were ten.

 

The winning team were given a reward of five franks per man, and their gun was said to have fired 120,000 rounds.

 

In theory it all seems hunky dory.....the sums are all too simple.

 

But the hassle....the running around to change worn out barrels, the over heating, the constant ammo replenishment : it does make you think.

 

I’ve always been astonished by such claims for artillery : Verdun’s opening barrage, for example, 1,200 German guns firing one million shells in twelve hours. That implies about one and a half rounds per minute per gun, relentlessly , for half a day.

 

If an artillery piece can sustain an average of 1.5 per minute, then a MG can manage 150.

 

Over simplifying things is a good way of dealing with controversial claims !

 

Phil

 

 

[Richard Fisher]

In one of Hutchison's accounts it's six guns and in the other it's ten so he contradicts himself between 1919 and 1938. If you have a read of the article, we looked at the accounts, then the war diaries and then I used the technical information to establish how it could be done. It's feasible and not too much water or too many barrels are needed; however, the belt-filling preparation would have taken about a week and absorbed about 3% of the Western Front's small arms allocation at the time.

 

I built a small model in excel to extrapolate the data which I'll add to the ResearchGate page shortly.

 

The War Diary says 99,500 rounds which is much more likely and achievable without significant impact, and was pretty standard at the time.

 

The Machine Gun School has quite an efficient 'lessons learnt' process it seems which reported back important actions for others to be taught about. This action doesn't feature in the key text they produced (available here: https://vickersmg.blog/manual/machine-gun-training/) and it's not in the intelligence notes used either. Given the lesson on logistics that would have come from it, I'm sure that it would be there if it had happened.

 

Richard

[r.m.willis]

When I first started researching the story I came across the thread on GWF started a few years ago. It didn’t seem to come to a final conclusion & left a number of interesting questions unanswered.

 

I was at a stage of knowledge where I was pretty clueless about whether it was technically feasible, hence why I contacted the Vickers expertise of Rich Fisher.

 

What I could do was to collate all of the war diary entries for the Division/ Brigade /battalions involved in the attack & cross-check them to see what it uncovered (if anything).

 

One of the surprising things I found was that most of the key evidence is there if you look for it. But no one had done so before me & just taken the story at face value.  So over the years it had grown into one of major stories of the machine gun corps.

 

 

 

 

[ejwalshe]

So simple to comprehend.  With each gun idle half the time, there is more than time to expend 1,000,000 rounds.

 

Fact.

[Keith Woodland]

How many rounds were in a belt of ammo at this time? At 250 as per a Browning that's a lot of boxes and each gun would have needed somewhere to put 150 thousand spent cases and the used belts.

[phil andrade]

This troubles me : the arithmetic says YES....the physical faff and hassle says NO.

 

Phil

[Richard Fisher]

The conclusion we came to is that, yes, it could have happened, but the evidence, once critically analysed, says it didn't happen. This is what we've worked through in the paper.

 

14 hours ago, ejwalshe said:

So simple to comprehend.  With each gun idle half the time, there is more than time to expend 1,000,000 rounds.

 

Fact.

 

It is a fact that the cyclic rate of fire does allow it and the practical rate of fire does allow it as well, yet the logistics of preparation and support is what led us to question it to start with. Then, when the war diaries were examined, it's apparent that it didn't happen. The paper does examine the necessary preparations required though.

 

9 hours ago, Keith Woodland said:

How many rounds were in a belt of ammo at this time? At 250 as per a Browning that's a lot of boxes and each gun would have needed somewhere to put 150 thousand spent cases and the used belts.

 

It was 250 throughout the life of the Vickers. It certainly is a lot of belt boxes and ammunition. The belts were reusable, and would have had to have been given the numbers employed. The spent cases would have created quite the pile as well.

 

5 hours ago, phil andrade said:

This troubles me : the arithmetic says YES....the physical faff and hassle says NO.

 

Phil

 

Absolutely Phil. The numbers allow it but practicalities, without significant preparation, don't.