Subtitled “Enthusiast’s Manual”. “Enthusiast” usually brings to mind someone who likes baseball, or sports cars, or quilting; in this case it’s Vickers-Maxim machine guns. Not the sort of thing you imagine any of your neighbors are into, even in NRA-friendly areas. Author Martin Pegler is a genuine enthusiast, though, and there’s a color picture of him with his own Vickers gun (although he notes it was taken “…in the days when owning such weapons was possible and the cost of shooting 3,000 rounds of Second World War surplus .303 ammunition in an afternoon was not prohibitive”).

Ammosexuality aside, this is a nicely done and illustrated guidebook, starting with machine gun history (I learned that the notorious “Puckle Gun” of 1718 was not just a patent drawing but actually built and two were issued to British forces in St. Lucia (where they were described as “Machine Guns of Puckles”, the first time “machine gun” had ever been used to describe a weapon). Pegler goes on to describe various other early attempts – Gatlings and Gardners and Nordenfelts, until finally getting to Hiram Maxim of Maine, USA. Maxim was the first to successfully use the gun’s own recoil to extract a fired cartridge, eject it, recock the firing mechanism, and compress a return spring, which would then push the action forward to strip another cartridge off the belt and chamber it. Pegler notes that feeding from a belt rather than a hopper or drum was another of Maxim’s innovations, and that a Maxim gun relied on the near simultaneous development of smokeless powder cartridges. During WWI, both the British and Germans (and the Russians and later the Americans) used Maxim guns; the Germans the MG08 and the British the Vickers-made version. There are numerous pictures of Vickers-Maxims being manufactured (entirely by women; all the men were off in the trenches) and in action. The weapon continued in use in WWII and Korea; the last recorded use by British forces was in 1968 in Aden (and it’s likely still soldering on elsewhere). I hadn’t realized there were so many variants – the license built US Colts (chambered for .30-06); the Russian guns on their little wheeled carriages and with a large diameter cap on the water jacket so it could be filled with snow if necessary, and the large bore 0.5” guns (not the same as the US M2 cartridge), the 12.7mm (given a metric designation to avoid confusion with the 0.5” and still not the same as the US M2) and a version based on a French 11mm cartridge.

The chapter on service use was enlightening. There a tendency to think of machine guns as brooms, sweeping back and forth across a line of charging enemy; Pegler notes that in WWI the Vickers wasn’t used that way. They were too heavy to be employed in the front lines (not only were the gun and tripod heavy, but they consumed ammunition belts that had to be hauled up by manpower as well). Instead they were kept to the rear and positioned where they could enfilade attacking infantry. They were also used for indirect fire, equipped with artillery style sights so they could be fired at a position identified by map coordinates. I had heard this was done but assumed it was relatively rare; it turns out it was very common. A frequent tactic later in the war was using them to supplement a “walking barrage”; conventional artillery would shell in front of advancing infantry, with the barrage “lifting” a hundred yards or so every few minutes, based on the assumed pace of the troops. The Germans responded by evacuating their front line trenches before the barrage reached them, then quickly returning to meet the assault; the indirect Vickers fire was placed to catch them as they retreated.
Lots and lots of illustrations (including one of the unlikely Vickers crew of Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau from the film Viva Maria!), “exploded” drawings, detailed instructions for field and armory stripping and repair, reassembly, and troubleshooting. Bibliography and index. Just the thing to have handy if you run across a Vickers-Maxim at a garage sale.

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