Vickers machine gun
The
Vickers machine gun or
Vickers gun is a name primarily used to refer to the
water-cooled .303 inch (7.7 mm) machine gun produced by the
Vickers company, originally for the
British Army. The
machine gun typically required a six to eight-man team to operate: one to fire, one to feed the ammunition, and the rest to help carry the weapon, its ammunition and spare parts.
The gun had a reputation for great solidity and reliability, and many of its gun crews became very devoted to the machine, spending off-hours lovingly maintaining each piece at highest efficiency.
According to Ian V. Hogg in
Weapons & War Machines, during an action in August, 1916 the 100th Company of the
Machine Gun Corps once fired their ten Vickers guns continuously for twelve hours, firing a million rounds between them and using one hundred new barrels, without a single breakdown. "It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one."
[ Weapons & War Machines, p62. Ian V. Hogg & John Batchelor. Pheobus, 1976. (ISBN 0-7026-0008-3)]
"The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on August 24, 1916. This company had ten Vickers guns, and it was ordered to give sustained covering fire for 12 hours onto a selected area 2,000 yards away in order to prevent German troops forming up there for a counter-attack while a British attack was in progress. Two whole companies of infantrymen were allocated as carriers of ammunition, rations and water for the machine-gunners. Two men worked a belt-filling machine non-stop for 12 hours keeping up a supply of 250-round belts. One hundred new barrels were used up, and every drop of water in the neighbourhood, including the men's drinking water and contents of the latrine buckets, went up in steam to keep the guns cool. And in that 12-hour period the ten guns fired a million rounds between them. One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968." Vickers produced the original
Maxim guns and therefore had an unrivalled knowledge of its operation and manufacture. After purchasing the Maxim company Vickers took the design of the Maxim gun and improved it, mainly in reducing weight. The British Army formally adopted it on
26 November 1912 and it remained in service until
30 March 1968.
The machine gun became standard weapons on all
British and
French military aircraft after 1916. The gun was fitted with
interrupter gear to allow it to fire through aircraft
propellers, and slots were cut in the water jacket so that it was cooled by air flow instead.
As the machine gun armament of fighters moved from the fuselage to the wings in the years before WW2, the Vickers with its cloth belts was replaced by the
Browning Model 1919 with metal clips in some aircraft, especially fighters. The
Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber was one British plane that used the Vickers in the Second World war.
Variants
The larger calibre (half-inch) version of the Vickers was used as an anti-aircraft gun on British ships as the
0.5"/62 Vickers Machine Gun Mark III. These were typically four guns on rotating (360°) elevating (+80° to -10°) mounting. The belts were rolled into a spiral and placed in hoppers beside each gun. The heavy plain bullet weighed 1.3 oz and was good for 1,500 yd range (1,300 m). They were fitted from the 1920s onwards but in practical terms proved of little use.
Foreign service
The Vickers was widely sold commercially and saw service with many nations and their own particular ammunition. for example
*6.5 mm Italian
*6.5 x 50 mm Japanese Type 38
*6.5 x 54R Dutch
*
7 x 57 mm Mauser*7.5 x 55 mm
Swiss *
7.62 x 51 mm NATO*
.30-06 United States M1906
*
7.62 x 54R Russian
*
7.65 x 53 mm Mauser
*
8 mm LebelThe weight of the gun itself varied based on the gear attached, but was generally between 25 and 30 pounds (11 and 13 kg), with a 40 to 50 pound (18 to 23 kg) tripod. The ammunition boxes for the 250 round ammunition belts weighed 22 pounds (10 kg) each. In addition, it required about 7.5 imperial
pints (4.3 litres) of water in its
evaporative cooling system to prevent overheating. The heat of the barrel boiled the water in the jacket surrounding it. The resulting steam was taken off by flexible tube to a condensor container - this had the dual benefits of avoiding giving away the gun's location, and also enabling re-use of the water which was very important in desert environments.
|
Rimmed, centrefire .303 inch (7.7 mm) cartridge from WWII |
In British service, the Vickers gun fired the standard
.303 inch (7.7 x 56 mm) cartridges used in the
Lee Enfield rifle, which generally had to be hand-loaded into the cloth ammunition belts. There was also a 0.5 inch (12.7 mm) calibre version used as an anti-aircraft weapon and various other calibres produced for foreign buyers. Some British tanks of the early Second World War were equipped with the 0.5 inch (12.7 mm) Vickers.
The gun was 3 feet 8 inches (1.1 m) long and its cyclic rate of fire was between 450 and 600 rounds of ammunition per minute, with a range of approximately 4,500 yards (4,100 m).
Science fiction/cyberpunk author Neil Stephenson described the operation of a Vickers gun, and the bystanders' awestruck reaction to it, during a World War II scene in his 1999 novel
Cryptonomicon.
[Stephenson, Neil, Cryptonomicon, Avon Books paperback ed (2002), pp333-336]*
Vickers K Machine gun
* Anon,
Vickers, Sons and Maxim Limited: Their Works and Manufactures. (Reprinted from 'Engineering') London (1898). :Plates showing the mechanism of the forerunner of the Vickers gun, the Vickers Maxim gun as well as numerous plates of the factories in which they and other arms were made.
*
Vickers Machine Gun*
Vickers MG Discussion Board*
Spartacus Educational - Vickers machine gun
