LAYING A MACHINE GUN

Waikato Times, Volume 84, Issue 13208, 25 June 1915, Page 7

LAYING A MACHINE GUN

A POSI DEMANDING EXCEPTIONAL CAPABILITY. One of the most striking features of the war has been the part played by the machine gun. The British Eyewitness has already commented on the superiority in numbers of these deadly weapons with which the Germans started the war. In no branch of the service is greater expertnesi and long familiarity with the guns necessary than in the ma-chine-gun organisation, says a writer in the United Services Magazine. The crew must know the guns until they can pat cua together in the dark, until any man of the crew can diagnose a jam by the position of the rocker handle and reduce it in a few or point the gun with coolness and accuracy if the regular pointer is out of action. Signal Corps men, field gun layers; engineers, all of them specialists of long training if efficient, require no more concentrated experience than does the machine-gun man. To make the machine-gun service effective in the American Army there must be provision for separate ma-chine-gun companies, to which men interested in this work can be permanently assigned, and the companies brought up to their highest efficiency. A machine-gun in the hands of incompetent—which means ordinarymen is worse than useless because no dependence may be placed upon it, and it may fall down at the pinch. Only trained men can learn the gun so thoroughly that they can reduce any jam in a few seconds.

Only a trained man can diagnose a jam by the position of the moving parts, th?n proceed instantly to take the proper remedies. Only the man thoroughly familiar with every part of the mechankm can fit ne«v parts in case of breakage, and do this before the pleased enemy arrive and put the kibosh on him and his gun for good. Machine-guns are like gas engines —an hour to find the trouble, a second to correct it. The trained automobile expert can almost diagonose a refusal of an engine to run by the peculiar manner of said refusal. The tyro might strew the road with all the tools in his kit, he might tinge the air with his fervid comments on the situation; but lacking the experience, all his tools and all his text-books would not avail him in the least. Infantrymen detailed haphazard for duty are nearly"useless; they serve well enough until the pinch comes. Almost any mar with normal sense can "chauff" a motor car, so long as the brute does not break down or get out of order. Some men seem to lack ; the mechanical sense; parts of machinery are as easiy explained to them as was the mechanism of the steam locomotive to the pretty girl, seeing one for the first time. The victim with said pretty girl went into careful detail for 15 minutes, explaining about how the steam was generated in the boiler, how it was conducted into the cylinders, and there admittedly the elide valves, 10 drive in and out the pistons that were connected to the drive wheels. HH "Ves, I understand that perfectly, it's just dear of you," gushed the pretty girl. "Only 1 can't see what makes the thing run." Such men can be discovered only by experience, and their field of usefulness lies elsewhere. Dead-wood in the crew 3 cannot be permitted however, hut said deadwood can pass ammunition and refill belts and pack and unpack. There is no telling when a wellplaced shell may promote the lowest man on the gun to the job of gunpointer. Then, again, is the matter of the actual firing of the gun. Range finding, effect of fire, judgment of the proper target, and the most effective way to openon it—all may fall on the non-com; or even the private in de-i tached guns. The pointer must be an expert shot with that gun, he must know its individual peculiarities whether it throws higher when it gets hot, whether it develops jam as it heats and the sort of jams to watch for, and all the things that in the nature of modern rifles and machineguns enter in to make their fire uncertain. As I see it, the machine-gun in the hands of thoroughly competent men is a machine of fearful potentiality. What it may do in the hands of ordinary men is no more a line on its abilities than what the modern military rifle will do in the hands of the ordinary peasant conscript. [#%~~?i! No man who ever watched,' the handling of a machine-gun by a perfectly trained crew would ever deliberately allow such formidable weapons to be served by men who might not only fail to get all there was to get out of the gun, but might let it go out of action permanently the first time a jam took place. The strain on the machine-gun is a violent one. The repeated, rapid blows of recoil, the quick, hard slams of the working parts, and the thousands of times the parts are asked to do their work under conditions of the greatest strain, all combine to us wonder that any gun could work even through one day's hard fighting. The Germans introduced a com pletely novel phase of machine-gun fighting, and that is sniping. The possibilities of the gun for this kind of work do not seem to have been considered before, says a writer in The Cornhill Magazine, and yet the German machine-gun sniping'ha3 made the previous efforts in this direction of Indian frontier tribes seem like child's play in comparison.

They attain the result by selecting a position from which they can obtain a glimpse of a portion of our trenches in an oblique direction; the configuration of the ground often affords such an opportunity. Having laid the gun, the machine-gunner lies and watches with his glasses, and when he discerns any movement lie presses the button and fires a single shot. A house is by no means necessary for this procedure. The Germans make use of any little cover, and by operating the gun in its lowest position, with the gunner lying alongside, snipe our trenches with single shots continually. This single-shot practice is continued at night. By taking angles and elevation in the day time the gun can be laid for accurate shooting at night, and so we find the lines of approach to our trenches under a continuous sniping fire of machine guns.