Vickers 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 One, World War Two |
| Production history | |
| Designed | 1912 - |
| Manufacturer | Vickers |
| Produced | 1912 - |
| Specifications | |
| Mass | 33 to 50 kg all-up |
| Length | 1,100 mm |
| Barrel length | 720 mm |
| Cartridge | .303 British |
| Calibre | .303 (7.7 mm) |
| 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 (7.7 mm) machine gun produced by the Vickers company, 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, and many of its gun crews became very devoted to the machine, spending off-hours lovingly maintaining each piece at highest efficiency.
According to Ian V. Hogg in Weapons & War Machines, during an action in August, 1916 the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps once fired their ten Vickers guns continuously for twelve hours, firing a million rounds between them and 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
Vickers produced the original Maxim guns and therefore had an unrivalled knowledge of its operation and manufacture. After purchasing the Maxim company outright, Vickers took the design of the Maxim gun and improved it, mainly in reducing weight. A new innovation that was included was the use of a muzzle booster which increased the available gas energy from the propellant to operate the mechanism.
The British Army formally adopted it on 26 November 1912 using it alongside the Maxim until it replaced the latter completely during the First World War. Before the Second World War there were plans to replace it; one of the contenders being the 7.92 mm BESA (a Czech design) but it proved its value and 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 machine gun.
The machine gun became standard weapons on all British and French military aircraft after 1916, including the famous Sopwith Camel. 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.
As the machine gun armament of fighters moved from the fuselage to the wings in the years before WW2, the Vickers with its cloth belts was replaced by the Browning Model 1919 with metal clips in some aircraft, especially fighters. However, the Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber used the Vickers machine gun in the Second World war.
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 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. for example
- 6.5 mm Italian
- 6.5 x 50 mm Japanese Type 38
- 6.5 x 54R Dutch
- 7 x 57 mm Mauser
- 7.5 x 55 mm Swiss
- 7.62 x 51 mm NATO
- .30-06 United States M1906
- 7.62 x 54R Russian
- 7.65 x 53 mm Mauser
- 8 mm Lebel
The Vickers was used by Pakistan in its wars against India after leaving service with the British Army.
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 litres) 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 desert environments.
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 of ammunition 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 kilometres).
Popular culture
Science fiction/cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson described the operation of a Vickers gun, and the bystanders' awestruck reaction to it, during a World War II scene in his 1999 novel Cryptonomicon.[2]
See also
- Vickers K Machine gun
Notes
- ^ Weapons & War Machines, p62. Ian V. Hogg & John Batchelor. Pheobus, 1976. (ISBN 0-7026-0008-3)
"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." - ^ Stephenson, Neal, Cryptonomicon, Avon Books paperback ed (2002), pp333-336 (ISBN 0060512806)
Further reading
- Anon, Vickers, Sons and Maxim Limited: Their Works and Manufactures. (Reprinted from 'Engineering') London (1898).
- Plates showing the mechanism of the forerunner of the Vickers gun, the Vickers Maxim gun as well as numerous plates of the factories in which they and other arms were made.
External links
See also
