Dimensions
162 x 242 x 29mm
The Story of the Men and the Weapon that Changed the Face of War.
The machine gun was the decisive weapon of the First World War; it was the ultimate industrialisation of death, spewing out over six hundred rounds a minute, far beyond the capacity of a single rifleman.
Anthony Smith tells the stories of the remarkable inventors of this deadly new weapon: the buccaneering Sam Colt; Dr Richard Gatling, who claimed his motives for inventing the gun were purely philanthropic; and Hiram Maxim, the American-born inventor of the first truly automatic gun.
Maxim died peacefully in England in July 1916, during the battle of the Somme - where the machines he had profited from were mowing down tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides. Maxim's tireless salesmanship (aided by Edward, Prince of Wales) had ensured that Britain's enemies, the Germans, were well-supplied with machine guns.
The book also explores an extraordinary paradox. Why did the British have only 274 machine guns (the German army had 12,500) at the outset of the First World War? Why were the British generals so disdainful of them, despite having seen the way the Maxim gun decimated native armies in numerous colonial wars in Sudan, South Africa and India?
The British had to learn the devastating effectiveness of the machine gun the hard way - with 20,000 men cut down on the first day of the Somme alone.
Anthony Smith brings a great breadth of knowledge to his fascinating story of the machine gun. Filled with fresh insights and vivid eye-witness accounts, this is history at its most readable and provocative.
