Tachanka, she is also a cart in Africa
Landscapes of Africa. Illustrative photo. The beauty!
For any of your questions - our clear answer:
We have "Maxim", but you do not have it.
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), poem "Modern Traveler" (1898)
We have "Maxim", but you do not have it.
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), poem "Modern Traveler" (1898)
In 1840, an event occurred in the North American United States, the consequences of which played a prominent role in stories our civilization. This year the famous gunsmith and inventor of the machine gun Hiram Maxim was born. Thirteen years later, on July 5, 1853, another protagonist of our drama appeared on English soil - Cecil Rhodes. And seventeen years before Rhodes, the eyes of another child, whose name was Lobengula, saw the sunlight. He was born in southern Africa, where many years later the fates of these people, so different from each other, converged.
The mighty polygamist Lobengula himself. historical photo
So. First there was a machine gun, and it was invented in 1883 after unsuccessful experiments with an automatic rifle by H. Maxim mentioned above. And then another figure emerges from the fog of history, and a very colorful figure, Cecile Rhodes.
Cecile Rhodes is resting at a halt. historical photo
nineties of the nineteenth century. South Africa, Transvaal, Bechuanaland, there is no Rhodesia yet, but its ghost looms on the horizon, and it is to its creation that the diamond king, one of the richest people of his time, Cecil Rhodes, begins. We will not describe the political situation of that time, we will not go into economic problems - this is not part of our task. Just in 1890, the British South African Privileged Company was formed in southern Africa, which had its own flag, its coat of arms and, possibly, its own anthem. And the managing director of this company was the famous millionaire and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes, who by that time had also become the prime minister of the Cape Colony.
He was an Englishman by birth, young in age, an adventurer in character, a businessman in mind. And all this coexisted in one person who conceived and brought to life the idea of creating a new state. Well, Rhodes chose the lands of a large and strong Ndebel tribe as the object of his claims, who lived in South Africa and from ancient times subjugated other, small and weak tribes, imposing tribute on them.
The Ndebel king Lobengula lived in his capital, Bulawayo. I must say that the Ndebels were a very warlike people who knew military affairs well (in their traditions, of course). And many battles with them ended very badly for the whites. Therefore, at first, Rhodes turned with a "request" to Lobengula, so that he would give a decision to let a dozen or two peaceful gold diggers into his territory. Lobengula was a smart man and understood that the war with the whites would end with the death of his people, and therefore he tried in every possible way to maneuver between assertive whites and his indignant warriors, who just wanted this war, not wanting to endure the presence of whites on their land. In short, Lobengula allowed. Imagine his surprise when he found out what kind of "pioneers-gold diggers" they were! It was a rabble, consisting of people of all professions and all walks of life, including aristocrats, mostly English and Dutch. With them came African laborers, two hundred Bamangwat warriors, and the company's armed mounted police, all under the command of British officers. There were about a thousand or more.
This is how many white settlers moved around Africa at that time. Bristling with guns!
But Lobengula was by no means a naive person. Despite the constant deceptions of white suppliers, he managed, according to contemporaries, to "accumulate" a whole warehouse of guns. Yes, and the Ndebels themselves are the same Zulus known to the whole world, everything is the same with them: both tactics and weapon, and unbending will in battle, and an army of many thousands, the strongest in southern Africa. Suffice it to recall that the war with them cost the death of the Crown Prince of France, the son of Napoleon III. And the death of one and a half thousand Europeans from Zulu spears in the battle of Isandlwana also speaks volumes, although the whites, in addition to rifles, also had cannons, and even a battery of missiles. According to the recollections of the surviving eyewitnesses, the Zulus were approaching like a cloud, and there was no escape from them ...
"The Battle of Isandlwana, 22 January 1879, the death of the British 24th Infantry". This is a painting by C. E. Fripp, 1885. In this battle with the Zulus, the Red Coats, despite being armed with breech-loading rifles, suffered a crushing defeat. African warriors simply crushed them in numbers!
So, on October 6, 1893, the war with the Ndebel began. Columns of white volunteers and detachments of their African allies moved towards their capital Bulawayo. In numerical terms, compared to the Ndebel, not so much. From Fort Victoria - 300 white and 300 African warriors. About the same from Fort Salisbury. At Fort Charter, 400 men were at the ready. 2000 Bamangwat warriors were coming from Bechuanaland. In Bechuanaland itself, 500 British soldiers with officers were sitting in the wings. What were these white guys thinking as they walked through a hostile country with a rifle in their hands? Did the ghost of past defeats and great losses loom in the damp haze of African soil? Who knows. They were walking and they had a goal. And the end, as you know, justifies the means, and the means ... was to become an easel machine gun of the Maxim system!
Hiram Maxim had patents not only for the invention of the mousetrap. In this photo, he is posing with his more deadly invention - with a machine gun named after himself ...
There were eight of them. Only eight machine guns of the Hiram Maxim system against many thousands of Lobengula warriors. Eight trunks that were supposed to give life to some and take it away from others.
It was then, we don’t know who, Rhodes or anyone else, had the idea to put a machine gun on a light steam-horse wagon. In order not to drag him on his hump across the savannah, and at the same time so that he was always ready for battle, a sort of mobile firing point - where necessary, they moved it there, where there were more "Kaffirs" - they used it there. This system justified itself one hundred percent. True, no one then called her a cart, what they called it is not known, but, most likely, they cursed with delight. And why? Listen further. It is only necessary to add that little was known about the machine gun then. It hasn't been used much anywhere. There were vague rumors about the use of these weapons during skirmishes in Uganda in 1891, but all this was unreliable and vaguely unsteady ...
On October 24, 1893 (exactly ten years after the invention of the machine gun), five thousand Ndebels attacked Rhodes' troops on the Shangani River. And if earlier they had, and even justified, the hope of running to the English positions through rifle fire and buckshot of guns, and there equalizing a spear with a bayonet, and a knife with a saber, now they have not left even that. Although we must not forget that they had rifles, and quite a lot. So, with the battle cry "Bayete!" an unstoppable black stream, like an avalanche, poured into the positions of the pioneers. And then something happened, something that the whites probably did not expect, but which, in the depths of their souls, they apparently counted on. One of the leaders of the Ndebel, who led his people on the attack, suddenly stopped and saw that around him all his warriors were falling like cut grass, just falling, falling in rows - it was a shock ... Shock and shock, even for a warrior who had seen blood. In twenty minutes of this battle, the Ndebels lost only 500 people killed. The machine guns kept the Africans away from the White positions, and there was nothing left for the artillery to do. The enemy fled. The second battle took place on November 1 on the Bembesi River. White losses were negligible. The third battle was on November 2 - and again machine guns, on the 4th Bulawayo was occupied, more precisely - the ashes left in its place - the Ndebels themselves burned it, and Lobengula with the remnants of the troops went north to the Zambezi River.
And so it turns out that we all know about the “maxim” and about the machine-gun cart drawn by three hot horses. Books were written about this cart, songs were composed, a monument was erected to it, the artist Grekov masterfully captured it on his canvas, and the movie "Chapaev" generally glorified it all over the world! In our country, almost everyone has heard about it, but few people know the name of the person who first used the cart on the battlefield. In our official history, it is generally accepted that this idea came to the head of the former sergeant-major of the tsarist army, Semyon Budyonny, when he was his red commander. By the way, the same Semyon Mikhailovich, already being a marshal of the Soviet Union, on the eve of World War II, when asked what type of weapon he considers decisive on the battlefield, answered: “Machine-gun cart". And this is in the presence of a huge number tanks on all sides of the future war. In perestroika times, “unexpectedly” it became known that it was not the dashing sergeant-major who came up with all this, but the tsarist general Alexei Brusilov, who also developed the tactics of using the cart. Only the war then was positional, and there was nowhere to use the cart. Most likely, this is exactly what happened, and Budyonny simply took advantage of someone else's idea, passing it off as his own. True, there is another version. That all this was figured out and put into action by the legendary old man Makhno. Without detracting from the contradictory "revolutionary merits" of Nestor Ivanovich, we still allow ourselves to doubt this.
Painting by Mitrofan Grekov "Tachanka", 1925. Dashing cart!
But I must say that at the beginning of the 1914th century, many had the idea of installing a machine gun on a light high-speed vehicle. The British installed machine guns on motorcycles back in XNUMX.
English machine gunners on motorcycles, 1914. Photo - Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Machine guns were mounted on motorcycles and light vehicles in many armies in the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, without denying the value of motors, let's remember the horse! Horse carts fought in the Red Army (and our cavalry performed very well during the Great Patriotic War!), in the Polish army; there were horse teams for machine guns and the Wehrmacht. And even now, the idea of a high-speed armed wagon is more alive than ever - pickup trucks with machine guns installed in the bodies, automatic grenade launchers or anti-tank systems are involved in all the conflicts of our time with might and main.
The commander of the calculation of the machine gun company (commander of the guard senior lieutenant I. G. Kulikov) of the 4th separate motorcycle regiment (from 10.10.1944/4/1915 - the 6th guards omtsp) senior sergeant Andrey Antonovich Pankov (born 2) and corporal Stepan Vasilyevich Ovcharenko behind the machine gun "Maxim". "Maxim" is installed in the back of the "Willis". Northern Transylvania. XNUMXth Guards Tank Army, XNUMXnd Belorussian Front. Photo - waralbum.ru
As you can see, there are different opinions, but Cecile Rhodes was the first to create a cart. So the tachanka is also a tachanka in Africa!
In the end, we note that Lobengula died in 1894 - according to rumors, he may have committed suicide.
Cecil Rhodes died on March 26, 1902, he was not even 49 years old. He left behind a huge fortune and Rhodesia, in fact becoming one of the "builders" of the British Empire, "over which the sun never set." Rhodes was buried near Bulawayo, the former capital of Lobengula.
This cartoon, "Colossus of Rodsky", with a reference to the ancient Wonder of the World, was published even before the war with Lobengula, in December 1892 in the Punch magazine. Here Rhodes tramples Africa with his foot and holds telegraph networks in his hands in order to link the continents. In general, if you omit moral standards, a fairly accurate definition!
Hiram Maxim died in 1916. And left behind mountains of corpses...
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