Tommy (54 page)

The Machine Gun Corps was brought into being by Royal Warrant on 14 October 1916, with its depot at Harrowby Camp, Grantham and (though not till March 1916) a training school at Etaples. George Coppard, wounded on the Somme, passed through Grantham on his way back to the front, and discovered that: ‘We ex-wounded types were quickly told to forget any experience acquired in France, as it counted for nothing at Harrowby.'
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Belt-fed machine guns were now concentrated into brigade machine-gun companies, numbered the same as their brigades, each commanded by a captain, the senior of the four section commanders making them up. The Machine Gun Corps had three proper branches, MGC (I) for the infantry, MGC (C) for the cavalry, and MGC (M) for light motor machine guns. The Heavy Branch of the MGC was the cover for what soon became the Tank Corps.

Coppard had been a machine gunner in 1/6th Queen's, part of 37th Brigade in 12th Division. In February 1916 he found himself in 37th Company of the Machine Gun Corps with a new regimental number, new identity discs and a new cap-badge. ‘I had some regrets about losing the Queens's badge with the lamb,' he wrote, ‘but welcomed the new one with the two crossed Vickers guns surmounted by the British crown.'
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In late 1915 Burgon Bickersteth, commissioned into the Royal Dragoons early in the war, was his regiment's machine-gun officer, his two guns and forty men forming part of the brigade machine-gun squadron. The following year he wrote that his men had had to display Machine Gun Corps badges. ‘I hate it, but I suppose it is inevitable,' he wrote. ‘Of course officers have not had to change.'
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Officers certainly should have changed, but such was the lure of the regimental system that many avoided doing so. The Guards Division preserved its own distinctive approach by not accepting members of the Machine Gun Corps, but by forming the Guards Machine-Gun Battalion, its cap badge showing a star of machine-gun bullets.

The next step was to bring brigade machine-gun companies together into divisional machine gun battalions, and this made it easier to produce even greater concentrations of fire, most notably with the machine-gun barrage, with guns firing at distant targets identified from the map. Although machine-gun battalions did not appear until the last year of the war, the trend towards centralisation and volume was clearly evident. On 24 July 1916 Graham Seton-Hutchison's guns of 1000th Company Machine Gun Corps fired just twenty-five rounds short of one million: one gun fired 120,000 rounds. Simply keeping the guns topped up with water became a major logistic feat, using all available petrol tins filled with water and the company's individual water bottles into the bargain.

Seton-Hutchison spent the last year of the war commanding a machine-gun battalion, which behaved much as an infantry battalion might, save that its companies were sometimes more widely spread. Many of the problems he encountered were old rather than new. One of his company commanders, ‘an officer of virile type, with the Military Cross … told me frankly that he did not feel confident of taking his Company into action again, a confession most difficult to make'. Seton-Hutchison sent him home to train drafts for three months, and when he returned he did very well indeed. And during an attack ‘a dishevelled Signaller from Headquarters' staggered up with a sealed message. He tore it open, expecting orders for the advance, but discovered instead ‘an order that I should report forthwith the number of tins of plum jam consumed by units under my command since the last report'.
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But if senior officers of the Machine Gun Corps were burdened by the sort of bureaucracy that other commanding officers knew all too well, the establishment of the corps made a real difference to the ordinary soldier. For a start, as a corps in its own right the Machine Gun Corps could enlist its own recruits, and was no longer dependent on drafts from other regiments which, as was the case with trench mortars, tended to produce men unwanted by anybody else. In fact, some of these rejected candidates did well. Seton-Hutchison recalled a private with a DCM who had been reduced from the rank of sergeant. He was given temporary command of a company which had lost all its officers, in a sudden crisis, and ‘NCOs and men alike rejoiced in his leadership'. He gained a bar to his DCM that day, and was soon commissioned.
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But the diversity and improved quality of recruits was also evident. In 1916 George Coppard was given two new gun-numbers. One had been born in Argentina: ‘He had a university education and spoke perfect English, and I never understood why he wasn't an officer … Any man who travels over 6,000 miles to fight for his father's homeland is no ordinary man.'
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There was also a growing pride in the corps' professionalism. In late 1917, when Coppard briefed Lieutenant Colonel Dawson of 6/Royal West Kent on the machine-gun plan he ‘felt a warm satisfaction that a battalion commander acknowledged the authority of the Machine Gun Corps and accepted this without question from one of its very junior personnel'.
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The centralisation of the big belt-fed Vickers guns which had previously constituted a battalion's automatic firepower was made possible because the smaller Lewis light machine gun entered service.
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It was a wholly new departure. Designed by the American Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis, its barrel was air cooled, so it did not need the water container which burdened Vickers crews, and its ammunition was contained in a flat 47-round magazine that fitted on top of the weapon. It was reasonably reliable, though like most weapons jammed if it got too muddy. Most infantry officers thought it a poor exchange for the Vickers because the magazine could be emptied all too quickly: a brave soldier in Rowland Feilding's Connaught Rangers battalion fired a full magazine in one long burst to destroy a German raiding party. Lieutenant Charles Carrington thought that it was hard to fill Lewis magazines (there had been a handy belt-filling tool for the Vickers) although their whole contents could be squeezed off in a few seconds. Captain Dunn regarded the removal of the Vickers from battalions as ‘an insane act'. And many soldiers felt that the Lewis gun simply did not provide that sustained firepower, so destructive to enemies and so heartening to friends, that was characteristic of the Vickers.

The Lewis might be carried over the shoulder on the march, passed from man to man – ‘Hand us that gas-pipe, young Saunders' – or put in an unpopular coffin-shaped wheeled trolley. Although normally fired on a bipod from the lying position because its barrel was heavy (the gun weighed 30lbs in all), a sturdy man could fire it standing up. Lance Corporal Irwin of the 72nd Canadian Battalion proved that he was one such at Passchendaele in 1917 when he attacked three German machine guns.

The example of the Welsh Guards shows how the Lewis gun spread through the infantry. The battalion received a single gun in November 1915, another in December, six more in March 1916 and another eight that August, eight more in January 1918 and a further eight in April. By then the battalion had thirty-two guns, so many that they could not all be manned, although by that time every man in the battalion knew about the Lewis gun.
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The February 1917 pamphlet ‘SS 143' prescribed one Lewis gun per thirty-six-man platoon, with a full section of nine men carrying its ammunition, and by mid-1918 there were often two or more guns per platoon – at least eight per company.

For all the mistrust occasioned by its initial appearance, the Lewis gun played an essential part in the structure of British infantry in the last two years of the war. Ivor Maxse, commander of the 18th Division on the Somme, became Inspector General of Training in the British Expeditionary Force in 1918, and had already had widespread influence in maintaining that the platoon should form the basis for all infantry training. Although there were some who maintained that platoons could never be kept at the thirty-six-man strength demanded by Maxse, and were too often disrupted by casualties to be trained to the level he required, it is clear that by the end of the war the infantry battalion had been wholly transformed.

The historian of the Welsh Guards summed up the combination of weapons available to the infantry in 1917–18. There was the traditional rifle and bayonet, ‘for assault, for repelling attack, or for obtaining superiority of fire'. Then there was the grenade, ‘the second weapon of every NCO and man … used either for dislodging the enemy from behind cover or killing him below ground'. The rifle-bomb is the ‘“howitzer” of the infantry, and used to dislodge the enemy from behind cover and to obtain superiority of fire by driving him underground'. Finally, the ‘Lewis gun is the weapon of opportunity'. ‘The platoon,' he concludes, ‘was the smallest unit capable of combining these weapons – a section of Lewis gunners, a section of bombers, a section of rifle-bombers and a section of riflemen.'
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The remarkable achievements of the last Hundred Days reflected the transformation of the infantry. In 1914 it was an arm which had prided itself on accurate rifle-fire which paved the way for assault in line. By the war's end, if it could not perhaps produce thousand-yard hits which would have delighted the old sweats of 1914, it could generate a blizzard of close-range fire from rifles and Lewis guns, launch grenades, from hand or rifle, at an enemy up to 200 yards away, and develop attacks with platoons and sections shoving their way forward with fire and manoeuvre. The average age of its leaders, commissioned or not, had dropped, often by as much as 50 percent. And at least half its officers had been commissioned from the ranks. Old Atkins could still occasionally be found, with his bushy moustache and Boer War ribbons, but it was young Tommy that made up the infantry of 1918.

A
rtillery had profited from the same sorts of technological innovation as the infantry weapon, with rifled barrels and breech loading becoming standard in the 1870s and 1880s. The replacement of black powder by the new high explosives such as melenite and Lyddite improved both the propulsion and the bursting power of shells, and the hydrostatic buffer and recuperator absorbed most of the gun's recoil and made it speedier to re-lay after each shot. By the turn of the century field guns fired faster, with greater range and accuracy, than ever before. But although there had been times (notably at the battle of Sha-ho, in September 1904 during the Russo-japanese War) when guns had been used to provide ‘indirect fire', engaging targets invisible to the gunners, their fire controlled by observers with telephones, in 1914 most artillery officers were still not persuaded that the future lay with indirect fire. Indeed, the standard British field-pieces of the war, the 18-pounder gun and the 4.5-inch howitzer, were both fitted with steel shields ‘tested with a service rifle bullet at a range of four hundred yards and should not be pierced, cracked or distorted'.
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Although British artillery officers who had observed the Russo-Japanese War championed indirect fire, there was a powerful lobby which disagreed, and the 1911 General Staff Conference heard Brigadier General Launcelot Kiggell advocate ‘lines of infantry pressing forward, bayonets fixed to close with the enemy. Lines of guns would support them at close range'.
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The mounted branch of the Royal Artillery – the Royal Field and Royal Horse Artillery – was renowned for its robust, somewhat unscientific approach to gunnery. It was even said that some horsey officers ‘never looked behind the swingletree' – the flexible coupling linking horses to gun and limber. The Royal Garrison Artillery (unkindly nicknamed the Gambardiers) favoured a more scientific approach to gunnery, but in 1914 it was the mounted branch that had the edge.

We have already seen how Royal Artillery commanders of 3rd and 5th Divisions decided to fight with their guns forward with the infantry at Le Cateau on 26 August 1914, and the consequence was a direct fire battle that would not have surprised gunners who had fought at Waterloo. Lieutenant Lionel Lutyens told his mother how things had been with 122nd Battery Royal Field Artillery, on the edge of a sunken lane towards the right flank of the British position.

When the moment came to withdraw, the horse teams were brought up from the rear.

The British lost thirty-eight guns at Le Cateau, a catastrophe unequalled since Yorktown in 1781. While the circumstances of the battle would undoubtedly have led to the loss of some guns, insistence on using indirect fire from artillery deployed so far forward made the losses needlessly high.

Le Cateau was the last time that guns were deployed forward on this scale, though there were times later in the war – and, indeed, in the Second World War – when artillery employed direct fire on a smaller scale. For instance, when 2/Devons held the Bois des Buttes on the Chemin des Dames in May 1918 their supporting 5th Field Battery RFA, with the utmost gallantry, stayed with them to the end, firing their 18-pounders as long as they could and then defending their gun-pits with rifles and Lewis guns. The battery had three unwounded men left at the day's end, and it and the Devons received the unusual distinction of the collective award of the French Croix de Guerre. However, it was clear, from the late summer of 1914, that the future lay with indirect fire. Indeed, although it was not to reach its full flowering until radio sets became more readily available enabling easier communication between observer and guns after the First World War, the technical means of producing effective indirect fire already existed.

Field guns had a dial sight, and this, used with an aiming post, a sort of military theodolite called a director, and basic trigonometry, enabled guns to be laid out so that their lines of fire were parallel. A telephone message from a forward observer, giving the location and type of the target, would be translated, by the command post on the gun-line, into a fire order giving the type of shell required, and the bearing and elevation on which the gun should be laid. The gun's commander – a sergeant, and ‘No. 1' in gunner terminology – would then salute to acknowledge the order, and repeated it so that the gun position officer would hear any error. A fire order shouted to an 18-pounder battery might sound thus:

There were numerous variations, of course. The rounds would fall on the ground in the same configuration, usually a gentle semicircle, as the guns were deployed on the gun-line. If they were shooting at a small target – a strongpoint or command post, for instance – it might be necessary to concentrate all guns onto the fall of shot of one particular gun, giving an ‘individual correction' to each gun to achieve this. One gun might be told to register a number of targets (now known as ‘adjustment') and the target information could then be passed on so that each gun could hit the target without the need for individual registration. As artillery survey techniques improved in 1917 even this could be avoided, and scrupulously-accurate surveying of gun positions, coupled with the detection of hostile gun positions by flash-spotting, sound-ranging and aerial photography, made it possible, as we saw at Cambrai, for accurate fire to be delivered without the need for preliminary registration, adding surprise to the gunner's repertoire.

British guns began the war with two types of shell: shrapnel and high explosive. Eighteen-pounder field guns and 13-pounder horse artillery guns fired only shrapnel. This, named after its inventor, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel RA, had first been used at the end of the eighteenth century, and its popularity with British gunners in 1914 stemmed from its success in the Boer War. A shrapnel shell consisted of a forged steel body. Its base held a bursting charge – usually black powder in the British service, which gave British shrapnel a distinctive greyish-white burst, unlike the dark German ‘Woolly Bear'. A thin brass tube, filled with powder pellets, ran up from the bursting charge to the fuse. Packed round the tube were round metal balls, 375 for the 18-pounder, at forty-one to the pound. There were various types of fuse, but the most common was the percussion-and-time fuse No. 80. This could be set to burst on impact, but when used with a shrapnel shell was generally set (by the gunner who removed it from the limber, using a fuse-fixing key) to burst about twenty feet above and in front of its target. The fuse would begin to burn as the shell accelerated on firing, and when it reached the setting prescribed by the gun position officer a flash passed into the brass tube and down into the bursting charge. This exploded, blowing the metal balls out like the blast from some gigantic shotgun. The forward observer would order ‘up' or ‘down' over the telephone to the gun-line until the point of burst was correct. To cut barbed wire, shrapnel had to burst three of four feet above it, something very difficult to get just right.

Throughout the war shrapnel remained a major killer for troops in the open. The British steel helmet was given its characteristic brim in an effort to keep shrapnel balls off vulnerable faces and necks. A low burst could shatter a man. In October 1914 Cyril Helm of 2/King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry was near Festubert when:

Higher-bursting shrapnel was more capricious. The Reverend Julian Bickersteth heard that his brother Ralph, a lieutenant in the Leeds Pals, had:

Very high-bursting shrapnel caused experienced soldiers little concern. In 1914 Arthur Osburn encountered some which was ‘prompt and accurate enough, but bursting much too high; the bullets rattling off our boots harmlessly'.
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Once the steel helmet was in service, the approved defence against high shrapnel was to tilt one's head in the direction of the burst. But here too caprice spun its dice. Lieutenant Julian Tyndale-Biscoe, regarding a 60-foot burst as little more than punctuation to his conversation, found that it mortally wounded an officer and the battery clerk: ‘They both died within a minute – very sad – they had only one bullet each.' Gerald Burgoyne recalled an incident where the medical officer of a Wiltshire battalion was bending down dressing a wound in a crowded aid post: ‘a piece [of shrapnel] entering the room, killed the doctor at once. The room was crowded at the time, but he was the only person hit.'
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High explosive, initially known as Lyddite after its filling, developed at the south-coast artillery ranges at Lydd in Kent, was available to British heavy guns and howitzer batteries in August 1914, but not to 13-pounders and 18-pounders. However, the abundant evidence that it was required for field guns too saw the first new high-explosive shells arrive during First Ypres. These consisted of a steel body filled with explosive, increasingly ammonal. Most were fitted with a fuse on the nosecap, which could be adjusted to give an instantaneous burst or a brief delay. However, in order to obtain the longer delay required to penetrate overhead cover, some heavy high-explosive shells were fused at their base and had hardened steel nosecaps, technology borrowed from naval warfare. They would go through the roofs of some dugouts to burst inside them, but very deep German dugouts were always too much for them.

A more serious problem was producing fuses that burst on the slightest touch, either against wire or the surface of the ground. This was not a simple matter, for such a fuse had to be stable enough to accelerate swiftly when the shell was fired, perhaps brush a camouflage net or branch near the gun muzzle, and then burst at the instant when it reached its target. The British ‘No. 100 Fuse' was safe enough but, because it had an infinitesimal delay, made only a slight crater, and in wet ground might lose much of its effect. The No. 106 fuse was introduced in 1916 and was available in large numbers in 1917. It made no crater, but expended all its explosive force by bursting flat: it was not only more effective for wire-cutting than even the best low shrapnel, it was also shockingly lethal against troops. The Germans developed a similar fuse at much the same time. ‘The Germans have a new extraordinarily sensitive contact fuse,' wrote James Dunn in June 1917. ‘A shell makes scarcely any shell hole, so the horizontal burst is not lost; a fair-sized splinter, which hit a man beside me below the knee, had carried the better part of 200 yards with a nearly flat trajectory.'
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