The Gun (9 page)

The events in the field and on test ranges in 1873 secured the place of machine guns on the battlefield. The fall of that year marked a peculiar
moment in the history of the distribution of rapid-fire arms. Gatling guns had earned their supporters and found their way into armies. But the company that made them continued to struggle, and the records that remain of the company’s internal unease offer insights into unflattering facts behind the Gatling legend. Even as Gatling sought the trust of the Colt Patent Fire Arms Company, his company and its officers were laboring to keep knowledge of their poor finances from reaching their partners’ ears. The company had amassed thirty-one thousand dollars in debt in Indianapolis; Gatling and his colleagues wanted to suppress knowledge of it. They sent letters to one another discussing how to keep the debt in Indiana. It was essential, they agreed, to prevent details of the company’s position from being known in Connecticut, Gatling’s new home and the center of his business. “It would have a bad effect [in Hartford] on the credit and standing of the co.,” Gatling warned.
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The company secretary, Edgar Welles, agreed. These were men with high reputations in Indiana and Connecticut, who had connections in Washington. They were not above deceit. The company would suffer a “black eye,” Welles said, if it were known that it had “a debt of that size and no cash in the treasury.”
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By late 1873, the company had managed to pay down at least four thousand dollars of the debt. But it had done so by juggling its books, receiving financing from outside Indianapolis at a better rate, while trying to collect further on its accounts receivable to cover the balance. Gatling was nervous. But he saw reason for hope. If the collections could be made, he wrote, “and we can sell the guns (or only a part of them) on hand we will be all right financially. Money matters are still tight, and I hope ere long we may have money plenty.”
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There were other pressures as well. Selling machine guns had become a business with a bright future, but the company faced competition as orders arrived. Gatling had been an innovator, and he had devoted himself to the field. Now new rapid-fire guns—not only the mitrailleuse but the Hotchkiss and the Gardner—were in development or coming to market. Moreover, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor and arms manufacturer, had taken an interest in the Gatling guns in Russia and begun to work on them. He told L. W. Broadwell, Gatling’s main agent in Europe, who handled the Russian account, that he had improved the weapon so much that the Nobel version was a new weapon altogether. Pressured by worries over money and reputation, Gatling’s nerves overcame his customary
politeness. “I am often amused at men claiming my invention,” he complained to General Love, “as their own.”
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He added that he was willing to pay “liberally for any valuable change or modification which adds to the effectiveness of the invention; but, such men have no right to take my original invention—
the gun itself
[and] make some changes into it and call it
their gun
or
their system
.
ⁱ
”
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At last good news came with the difficulties. At the end of 1873, the navy, after the results of the hundred-thousand-cartridge endurance test, placed an order for fifty guns. The Gatling Gun Company, it seemed, might survive. More promise followed. William W. Belknap, President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, sought appropriations of $292,600 from the Forty-third Congress to purchase 209 Gatling guns, principally to be used for defense of forts.
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It stood to be the company’s largest order yet, and Gatling passed many months worrying over the fate of the appropriations. As the matter stalled on Capitol Hill, his correspondence grew in irritation. Gatling was not a military man, and his mechanical skills did not extend to tactical matters. He had never served in uniform, much less in war, and knew little of how war was actually fought. He was deeply impatient, and issued instructions to General Love to lobby with all his power not to let the appropriations fail.

It is now a well established fact that the Gatling is the best military arm for certain kinds of service (fort defense etc.) in the world and the nation should have them so the men can in time of peace learn all about how to work them to the best advantage. It is a shame that a nation like Russia should have four times as many Gatling guns as the Un. States—Even poor Turkey has more than this country. Forts are of little use without arms—our forts are weak [and] need being strengthened [and] no way can they be more cheaply [and] better strengthened than by being supplied with Gatlings. It is a criminal neglect of duty for members of Congress to refuse to vote money for the nations [sic] defense [and] when such appropriations are asked for by the Chief of Ordnance and the Secretary of War.
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A desire for profit eclipsed Gatling’s judgment and good form. He suggested pandering to the congressmen of North Carolina, where he had been born. “When they learn the gun is the invention of a native of their own state, they will not fail, I think, to vote for the appropriation.” He proposed planting stories in the press. “If you and Mr. Welles could get some articles published in the Washington or N. York papers, stating the necessity of strengthening the National defence (without making reference to the Gatling gun) it would do much good.”
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As the vote drew near, he grew even more anxious and prepared to have General Love hold a firing demonstration in Washington for members of Congress. The shooting, as he envisioned it, could be held on the public roads. “I got permission from the Mayor of Washington on former occasion to fire the gun against an embankment (formed by the grade of the street) near the Capitol,” he wrote, “so members of Congress would not have far to go to see the firing.”
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The appropriation was denied. Gatling’s bouts of nervousness, however, had not been necessary. Even without a large congressional appropriation, the company’s sales were strong, and its debt had been paid down. Between August 1, 1873, and October 8, 1874, the company recorded sales of 245 guns, and 174 of them were paid for, including 52 for the American army, 26 for the navy, 51 for China, 10 for Brazil, 4 for the Spanish Cuban government and an assortment for New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Iowa.
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Step by step, machine guns were creeping into use. The Gatling Gun Company was solvent. Other companies had formed in the United States and Europe and were readying their own guns—the Gardner, the Nordenfelt, and the Hotchkiss—for trials. The guns were in use in colonial and wilderness service and were being fitted to naval vessels. But there remained resistance to issuing them to continental armies. No powerful interest group backed them, and many opponents saw little use for them, in part because of the results seen in the Franco-Prussian War. Commentators were skeptical, or outright against. “The deluded French soldier has ere this found out that the new engine of warfare is not all that he had been taught to believe,” wrote the editorialists of the
Saturday Review.
The machine gun, they informed London, had seen its value inflated “by
diligent Imperial puffing” and could expect little productive martial use. “The instrument will not bring about a revolution in tactics. It will accomplish no real change in the art of war. It is not, in the broad sense of the word, a new arm or a new power.”
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The magazine
Nature
was more open-minded, but assumed a politely hedged stance. “It does not follow, because it is not good for all purposes, that it may not be useful in some. There are obviously many positions in which it might inflict great damage on an enemy.”
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By 1873, the Gatling Gun Company had sold fewer than one thousand guns, but it had sold enough of them, and there was enough curiosity arising from the accounts of the use of machine guns in battle, that a few officers were taking interest. Some of the officers who made a study of the French and Prussian battlefield reports concluded that the weapons had performed well enough when the French used them wisely, and that machines guns were a weapon with a certain future. A small contingent of officers advocated their use, sometimes to ridicule. One of these officers, Captain Ebenezer Rogers, of London, wrote a letter to Gatling late in the summer of 1873 to say that he had lobbied inside the British military to have the Gatling, which the British military had not yet adopted for widespread use, sent to Africa for the Ashanti War. He enclosed a picture of himself. Gatling liked what he read. Captain Rogers, he said, judging from the enclosed photograph, was “a very fine appearing gentleman.” There was a whiff of opportunity here. “The truth is,” Gatling continued, “Capt. E is doing us a good service in England [and] his efforts should be encouraged.”
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Captain Rogers sent another letter to Gatling, urging the company to push the British services to send six or eight of his guns to the Gold Coast. Gatling balked at this, thinking that a telegraph to the British secretary of war might offend the G. W. Armstrong Company, which had entered a licensing agreement with the Gatling Gun Company in 1869 that allowed the British firm to make Gatling guns for sales in Great Britain for five years. But Gatling was even more taken by the captain. “You will see from the letter,” he told General Love, “that he’s still quite warm to the cause.”
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Rogers was not alone. More proponents were awakening. Lieutenant William Folger, a former officer in the American navy who worked with Gatling, foresaw machine guns becoming so popular and widespread,
and a product that would create such an intensive competition between manufacturers, that he urged the Gatling Gun Company to set aside its disputes with Alfred Nobel and its resentment of the other guns and buy them out. He envisioned a super-company, which would manufacture entire systems of automatic arms and dominate global markets. “The world of inventions should be watched, [and] the Nobels’ and Hotchkiss’ should be taken in or bought. This fabrique would at the same time manufacture infantry arms—the best magazine for the next machine gun etc etc [
sic
] and in a short time become a sort of controlling feature among the arms companies. The Gatling cannot last forever, and the company should already look for something to replace it.”
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The vanguard had preceded Captain Rogers and Lieutenant Folger by only a few years. General Vandenburgh, of the New York militia, had traveled to London and made a presentation to the Royal United Services Institution in 1862, in which he reasoned that a machine that could mass rifle fire would be devastating once brought into use. Major Fosbery, who helped tweak the design of the Montigny mitrailleuse, had presented his own strong opinions in favor of rapid-fire arms to the same organization in 1870. Major Fosbery’s lecture remains important, even if his premature endorsement of French tactics eroded his credibility in officers’ circles. He was peering into the future, more perceptively than his critics. He had misread the French army and not foreseen the effects of Prussian artillery. But his solid mechanical understanding of machine guns—he had handled every gun of the time under consideration for service—was giving him glimpses of World War I.

The major had collected data on the effects that various weapons had on targets at various ranges, including data that showed how much shrapnel actually whistled through the air around a bursting artillery shell.
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He did the math and found that six twelve-pound artillery guns of the time could subject an exposed group of soldiers to about three hundred bits of shrapnel per minute. Six French mitrailleuses, which were proven to be less effective than Gatling guns, would be able to fire 2,664 well-aimed bullets into the same place during the same time. It was a chilling set of numbers. He let his listeners consider it. “What would be the result of the concentrated fire of several batteries of mitrailleurs on an exposed formation I leave it to your judgment to determine from the data I have placed before you,” he told the officers gathered in the room.

Major Fosbery’s logistical math similarly favored the mitrailleuse. It weighed less than half as much as a field artillery piece, needed one-third as many horses to tow along on campaign, and was fired with one-half the number of crew. Major Fosbery’s data had little influence in the British military. He understood why. “The invention in its present state is a comparatively new one,” he said, “and like all new things will find many opponents simply because it is so, whilst the status quo will never want an advocate.”
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With this groundwork laid, Captain Rogers continued the cause.

In his own presentation to the officers’ institution in 1875, after Gatlings had been deployed to Central Asia and to the Gold Coast, he declared that it was “no longer possible to ignore the existence of mitrailleurs with the armies of all countries, every state in Europe having adopted some type of machine gun.” He offered lists: Turkey, Egypt, China, Japan, and Tunis all had Gatlings, and Russia already owned “a formidable array,” with 400 Gatlings organized in units with eight guns apiece. British intelligence, he said, had determined that 328 of the guns were in European Russia, 48 were in the Caucasus, and 24 had been deployed to the empire’s distant reaches in eastern Siberia and Turkestan. The distribution had been swift.
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Captain Rogers predicted the bloody utility of machine guns on colonial duty, where small contingents of European soldiers, sometimes racked by fever, might encounter vast formations of African warriors, unschooled in the tools of modern warfare and not backed by the industrial economies that could produce them. He urged the British officer corps to see the obvious. Machine guns were more than an equalizer. They would allow Britain to strengthen her rule. “Gatlings are peculiarly adapted to colonial defensive operations, as well as for retaliating demonstrations against troublesome neighbours, in countries where our enemies are numerous but ill-armed, where the roads are few and unsuited to wheel traffic, and where the surprise caused by the overwhelming discharge of a battery could carry with it an irresistible moral effect.”
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With a few machine guns, he said, Europeans might use lopsided violence to put down rebellions around the world.