The Gun (19 page)

A large iron plate serves the purpose of a shield, through which aim is taken, and the trigger can be pulled while the gun is moving upward, downward, to the left, or to the right. More than six hundred bullets are pushed out automatically in one minute, as if a long continuous rod of balls was being thrown out of the gun. It can also be made to sprinkle its shot as roads are watered with a hose. It can cover a larger or smaller space, or fire to a greater or less distance as the gun wills. Therefore, if one becomes a target of this terrible engine of destruction, three or four shots may go through the same space in rapid succession, making the wound very large. ... And the sound it makes! Heard close by, it is a rapid succession of tap, tap, tap; but from a distance it sounds like a power loom heard late at night when everything else is hushed. It is a sickening, horrible sound! The Russians regard this machine as their best friend, and certainly it did very much as a means of defense. They were wonderfully clever in the use of this machine. They would wait till our men came very near them, four or five
ken
ⁱⁱ
only, and just at the moment when we proposed to shout a triumphant Banzai, this dreadful machine would begin to sweep over us with the besom of destruction, the results being hills and mounds of dead.
¹⁷

Japanese ground forces besieged Port Arthur late in summer 1904. They found that the Russians had prepared. The port was on a peninsula, and the soldiers had spent months fortifying the hills overlooking it. They had also dug extensive trenches and filled the lanes though which the Japanese soldiers might attack with barbed wire. Lights were rigged to cover the approaches in darkness. Maxim guns watched over it all; by one count, thirty-eight Maxims in all.
¹⁸
Circumstances were ripe for disaster. The Japanese infantry was fired with a culture in which to die in a battle was a supreme honor, and its officers faced a tactical problem for which their training offered no obvious or doctrinal solution. This was not entirely their fault. Until that time, there were no widely understood tactics for overcoming the types of modern defenses before them; the book on machine gunnery and tactics had not yet been written. The result was a horror. Eager for battle, the Japanese officers ordered human wave attacks across the open ground. One of the attacks, the Ninth Division’s assault on East Panlung, showed war’s new shape.

Sappers were sent first, at night, and managed to breach the Russian wire in several places, cutting open lanes through which the infantry of the Seventh Regiment might follow. The Japanese regimental commander ordered the First Battalion through the wire in the darkness before 5:00
A.M.
The soldiers went up the hill without cover and were stopped in place by sweeping machine-gun fire; not a man advanced through the breaches. The regimental commander led the remaining battalion in a second attack over the same ground. He was quickly killed. The Second Battalion suffered the same fate as the first. In the predawn gloom, the division commander tried to watch from afar. He knew nothing of what was happening, beyond that the volume of Russian fire was deafening and the absence of a Banzai call was discouraging. The scene which revealed itself at daybreak was worse than any sense of foreboding had anticipated: “The hillside was thickly strewn with dead and dying, and in front and around the gaps in the wire entanglements the dead bodies were piled three or four high. No progress had been made anywhere, and the small surviving force of the gallant 7th was cut off from retreat by the murderous fire.”
¹⁹
The division attacked again by daylight, sending another regiment of men over the same ground, bayonets high. These men, too, were cut down. A night attack ended in the same fashion.

This was but one episode among many. For weeks the Japanese
attacked. The Russian garrisons were too isolated to resist indefinitely. In the end, the Japanese soldiers captured the port. But by the time Port Arthur changed hands in early 1905, the Japanese commanders had lost more than forty thousand
²⁰
of their army’s soldiers in the war, and they had repeated their tactical mistakes throughout, sending exposed troops forward again and again. Lieutenant Sakurai, whose infantry company was annihilated, summed up the mentality of soldiers sent on a mission understood to be suicidal. “We were all ready for death when leaving Japan,” he wrote. “Men going to battle of course cannot expect to come back alive. But in this particular battle, to be ready for death was not enough; what was required of us was a determination not to fail to die.”
²¹

In the lieutenant’s last action, he almost got his wish. The soldiers set out on foot with twenty-inch bayonets affixed to their Type 30 carbines, picking their way through stacks of corpses from the waves before. The company commander, a captain, brandished a sword in the charge. He was killed. This was Lieutenant Sakurai’s moment. “From henceforth I command Twelfth Company!” he shouted. His command would be brief. He ordered a renewed charge, but soon the fire was thick and the men around him were few. What had been a company was a handful of survivors, including the lieutenant, who had been shot through the right hand. The Russians counterattacked. The remnants of Twelfth Company fell back, consolidated, and were trapped as the Russians brought up machine guns to finish the fight. The lieutenant was wounded and suffered the indignity of survival. It meant that he was able to tell what happened at the end. “Men on both sides fell like grass,” he said.
²²

This was not a distant colonial fight. It was a head-to-head conventional war between rival empires and soldiers bearing modern arms, fought in the presence of Western military attachés. The attachés observing the battles did a mixed job of assessing and reporting the discernable facts. Some noted that the Russian guns were effective. Lieutenant Colonel A. Haldane, a British attaché, wrote that Japanese attacks were “checked by machine gun and rifle fire, and there is no doubt that a strong feeling exists in the infantry that the presence of machine guns with the Russian army confers upon it a distinct advantage.”
²³
American reports were uneven. One officer reported that the Japanese had used their own machine guns quite effectively, and that Japanese officers had learned during the war that machine guns could be used offensively as
well as in defense of held ground—an echo of what Captain Parker had proposed for ten years, and had proved outside Santiago. But another American officer wrote that “the machine gun [had] played a useful but not great part in the war.”
²⁴
As a body, those who could carry the word out—military observers and war correspondents alike—were distracted from the obvious: that in the age of machine guns assault tactics urgently needed to be rethought. Colonel Louis A. La Garde, of the United States Army Medical Corps, later reviewed casualty data from the war and noticed something that should have been readily observable by any attaché on hand: the military futility of a bayonet charge. Of 170,600 Russian soldiers documented as wounded or killed, bayonet wounds accounted for 0.4 percent.
²⁵
More wounds, Colonel La Garde found, were caused by stones. And yet some Westerners present at the war still succumbed to a fascination for the spirit of the Japanese soldiers, missing the technical and tactical points while filing dispatches describing what they regarded as fanaticism, whether bizarre or sublime. What did Westerners have to learn from the Japanese experience, after all, when everyone knew that no Western army would resort to attacks by human wave? One correspondent’s dispatch was typical:

It is said that when men have made up their mind to die they act and speak like gods. That day, when the fight was at its fiercest and the bullets were falling like rain, Lieutenant Sakamoto, who had been sent out towards the right flank on scouting duty, found himself pressed by a greatly superior force of the enemy and unable either to advance or to retreat. He sent an orderly to ask the commanding officer for final instructions. The reply was, “Go back and say to the Lieutenant, ‘Die.’” The orderly, saluting, rode off. What a grand order—“die.” The one word, “die”!
²⁶

Germany drew a different lesson. Kaiser Wilhelm II had continued his support for machine guns, and by 1899 the German military had four-gun machine-gun batteries. In 1908, each regiment had batteries of six guns, and the German army underwrote extensive inquiry and experimentation into how best to use them. All the while, the gun works at Spandau were producing more of its Maxim clones. The other Western militaries breezed through the early twentieth century without clarity on
how they might use machine guns in the next war. Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, the American army’s chief of staff, noted that his service did not have a doctrine, or even a plan, for the guns on order.

The War Department is now confronted with this situation: We have adopted a type of gun, mount and pack outfit, and contracted for a considerable number [120 for field service and 75 for coastal fortifications], and actual deliveries [80 guns] are being made pursuant to this contract; but no plan for the distribution and use of these guns has been formulated.
²⁷

Everything was set for disaster when World War I broke out.

In summer 1914, as one nation after another declared war, Germany invaded Belgium and made a thrust into France. Under prewar agreements, Great Britain was committed to provide France with military aid. Much of the British army was spread about the globe on imperial duty, but the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF—a contingent of six regular British infantry divisions and another division of cavalry—quickly crossed the Channel and took its place between the beleaguered Belgian and French militaries. Though the expeditionary force was small (Kaiser Wilhelm II called it a “contemptible little army”), it was experienced, highly trained, and professional, and it made a determined fight. But it was outnumbered and outgunned. Within weeks its ranks were thinned. Soon the BEF was joined by the British version of reserves, known as the Territorials. These units, too, suffered heavy losses.

The near destruction of the core of the British regular army meant that Britain resorted to a massive recruiting drive to build what Lord Kitchener, now the minister of war, would call the New Army. “We have been asked who will volunteer for Foreign service and I have said I will,” wrote Alfred Chater, one of the men mobilizing for war, in a note to his girlfriend as he made his choice that summer. “It was put to us in such a way that unless one is married it is almost impossible to say anything else.” A letter soon after was rueful: “It would be a splendid experience for those who come back.”
²⁸
The early months in Europe saw a war of movement, with armies racing across the countryside trying to outflank each
other and check each other’s advance. But gradually the lines extended, and extended more, and settled by the fall into the Western Front. The opposing sides faced each other across a maze of trenches, pillboxes, and barbed wire. A modern form of siege warfare set in, as the Allies waited for replacement units to reinforce the lines and allow for an offensive to dislodge the entrenched German troops.

The imbalance of firepower was devastating. The German army went to war with more machine guns, and distributed them more widely, than any of their opponents. It began the war having issued sixteen machine guns to every infantry battalion, while the British army had issued two—thus part of the mismatch faced by the British Expeditionary Force in the war’s opening months.
²⁹
In 1892 the German gun works at Spandau had entered into an agreement with Ludwig Loewe and Co. (later the Deutsche Waffen and Munitions Fabrik) that gave the German firm the right to manufacture Maxim-pattern machine guns for sales to Germany and its united governments. Though many German officers initially resisted machine guns, the events at Omdurman and the Russo-Japanese War had made their impression, and by the early twentieth century, manufacturing had begun in earnest of the German modification Maschinengewehr 08, or MG08. The German military had at least forty-nine hundred of these Maxims by the start of the war. Manufacturing accelerated after hostilities began.
³⁰
Even Germany’s colonial troops were equipped with machine guns, which led to one of the failed British actions outside of Europe and demonstrated yet again that the British military mind did not yet grasp matters at hand.

In November 1914, a British naval and infantry force moved against East Africa, hoping to push aside the thin contingent of German soldiers along the coast and assert British control over the continent. The crown’s plan included an attack on Tanga, a seaport located in what is now Tanzania. An amphibious British force, accompanied by Indian units, landed outside the city and passed through most of the tropical forest around the port. The enemy’s pickets were waiting. As the invasion force drew within six hundred yards of Tanga’s outskirts, the Germans and their colonial units opened fire. “Bullets came thick, men falling in all directions,” wrote Captain Richard Meinertzhagen, a British intelligence officer who went ashore in the landing party’s little boats. “Half of the 13th Rajputs turned at once, broke into a rabble and bolted, carrying most of the 61st Pioneers
with them.” In the afternoon, the invasion force managed to round up enough of its scattered soldiers to push forward and into the city. “I had collected some 70 Rajputs and two private soldiers of the North Lancs and got them back to the firing line,” the captain wrote. As these small contingents pressed on, they were met by machine guns in the hands of native African soldiers under German command. This was both a reversal and precursor. For decades the British had used machine guns to bloody effect in Africa. Now Africans were pointing machine guns back.