SIA Mod. 1918 – as if created specifically for the novel
Italian machine gun SIA Mod. 1918
“And it was Boris who insisted
and Savva Evgrafovich approved,
to part weapons hide it from his basement
in his barn, why did the guys dig there
quite a deep hole, lowered into it
an iron tank for rainwater standing in the yard,
and hid a Maxim machine gun in it
with several boxes of cartridges
and a whole box of German fragmentation grenades.
Each one was filled with paraffin on top for reliability.
the machine gun was carefully lubricated and tied with a tarpaulin
with some kind of water-repellent English impregnation.
The cache was covered from above with a piece of roofing iron.
and laid the floor from planks.”
“Three from Ensk” (book one).
Battle group "Iron Horse". Author's book
and Savva Evgrafovich approved,
to part weapons hide it from his basement
in his barn, why did the guys dig there
quite a deep hole, lowered into it
an iron tank for rainwater standing in the yard,
and hid a Maxim machine gun in it
with several boxes of cartridges
and a whole box of German fragmentation grenades.
Each one was filled with paraffin on top for reliability.
the machine gun was carefully lubricated and tied with a tarpaulin
with some kind of water-repellent English impregnation.
The cache was covered from above with a piece of roofing iron.
and laid the floor from planks.”
“Three from Ensk” (book one).
Battle group "Iron Horse". Author's book
Weapon stories. What kind of jokes does our life play on us? It’s just that sometimes you’re amazed. Here's this one story one of those that, as they say, you can’t imagine even when heavily drunk, and it lasted for a lifetime.
And it so happened that in my distant childhood I received a whole set of “Science and Technology” magazines from 1929. I really enjoyed looking at them, especially the articles in the “Military Equipment” section. And in one of them, dedicated to the history of the development of small arms, I came across an image of an Italian SIA light machine gun
Here is this page and on it is a drawing depicting an Italian soldier carrying this machine gun on his back
But in the text itself, absolutely nothing was said about this machine gun. And it was very sad. Because I really liked it and wanted to make it.
We, the boys from Proletarskaya Street, at that time had a lot of homemade weapons: rifles made of boards with a bolt made of a latch, homemade pistols, also sawn and planed, machine guns “with a stick” (magazine), and then suddenly I would have a “real " machine gun.
I figured out how to make it: the barrel is a handle from an old broom, the “rings” on the barrel are made from… curtain rings (!), everything else is from “planks”. I just didn’t know what kind of ammunition it had. And there was another problem - there wasn’t enough money to buy so many rings. But I would have bought it, no matter what, if I had known that this machine gun was powered not from a belt, but from an arc magazine! And then I look - the handles are like those of the Maxim, well that means - and it shoots, like the Maxim, also with a tape!
Alas, this is the lack of complete knowledge. And there was no one to ask then, and nowhere to read it either. I had to do “Maxim”, but that’s another story, but in this case our story is about the Italian SIA.
And then it happened that from all these magazines of 1929 I only had this page left. And, naturally, I never contacted her again.
But in 2005, I decided to write the historical novel “Three from Ensk”, the first book of which was almost entirely written based on the memories of my closest relatives, who told me in childhood about the events of the Civil War, and a lot was gleaned from the magazines “Niva” and the Penza regional archive. However, the novel planned not one, but three books, and the last one was supposed to take place in the present day. And one of his heroes had to dig up a machine gun buried in 1918 and... use it in 2005!
Well, out of the simplicity of my soul, in the first novel I took and “buried” a Maxim machine gun in the ground there. And everything was fine until I started writing the third part. And there it turned out that the person who tore off this machine gun simply could not cope with the Maxim! This was not the kind of “machine” that, after lying, even in oil, for so many years in the ground, it would easily “give itself up” to a person completely unfamiliar with such a weapon. He simply wouldn’t have taken it apart to clean it of grease, and having taken it apart, he wouldn’t have put it back together!
And that’s when I came across information about this Italian machine gun, and... a page from a magazine - everything is the same! True, when all this fell into my hands, a small edition of the novel had already been printed, and nothing could be corrected. So it turned out that in the first book the heroes hide exactly “Maxim”, and in the third - for some reason they find SIA.
If I ever have time for another reprint, I will definitely correct this. Because everything turned out very well: the machine gun is much simpler than the Maxim, and it has store-bought food, in a word - it turned out to be much easier for my hero to handle it.
Well, now about this little-known machine gun of the Italian army during the First World War.
SIA Mod. 1918
SIA Mod. The 1918 was the first Italian air-cooled light machine gun. Developed at the end of the First World War, it was used in limited numbers during the final months of hostilities and was intended to replace the primitive Villar Perosa machine gun in the event of a possible continuation of hostilities.
In April 1916, with the appearance on the Italian front of small units equipped with these strange machine guns, the foundations were laid for new combat tactics aimed at breaking the pattern of "trench warfare" that seemed to have no end. Now, Italian soldiers armed with these weapons were instructed to infiltrate in small groups, covered by their fire, across the line of combat contact and burst into the enemy trenches with pistols and grenades in their hands.
An Italian soldier with an SIA machine gun on his back. Wartime photography
However, the Villar Perosa was not very successful for fire support of such units due to the weakness of its Glizenti pistol cartridge. That is why, in January 1918, Colonel Abiel Bethel Revelli from Beaumont - who created this weapon - offered the military another machine gun, chambered for 6,5x52-mm Mannlicher-Carcano cartridges and with exactly the same air cooling as the his previous "Revelly".
But the military liked the second model and was put into production under the name SIA - an abbreviation consisting of the initials of the manufacturing company, that is, the Italian Aviation Society in Turin. Like the Villar Perosa, the SIA was primarily intended to arm small combat units, but it also found use as an aircraft machine gun, without a radiator.
The original plan called for each company to be equipped with 8 SIA machine guns (2 for each platoon), for a total of approximately 18. At the first stage, it was necessary to replace all the Villar Perosa machine guns, and at the second, increase their number to a certain number.
However, the war soon ended, so this plan could not be carried out. Nevertheless, this machine gun was also used during the Second World War, at least until the summer of 1943, when it was armed with the rear units of the territorial defense and the volunteer national security militia. Finally, it should be remembered that it was used as the main weapon on a light tank “Fiat 3000”, as well as in the role of the already mentioned aircraft machine gun.
Appearance of the SIA machine gun. The handles, magazine receiver and cooling radiator on the barrel are clearly visible
The SIA was a light machine gun, automatic, operated by the recoil of the barrel, 1 mm long (with a flash suppressor) and weighing 160 kg without the machine. The barrel, made of chromium-nickel steel, 10,7 mm long and weighing 660 kg, was cooled by a radiator composed of 4,75 round aluminum rosettes, compressed by a locking ring; the cooling system constructed in this way guaranteed a maximum burst length of 52 shots.
The box magazine was curved, double-row, made of sheet steel and held 50 rounds of 6,5 mm caliber. When loaded, it weighed about 2 kg and was inserted into a receiver on the top of the receiver. It is believed that this location of the magazine makes it easier for the enemy to identify the machine gunner's position.
In general, the reliability of the weapon turned out to be insufficient. The sighting system had a rotating rear sight, hinged on the left side of the receiver and having three radial sights corresponding to distances of 300, 700 and 1 meters.
The machine gun's rate of fire was 500–700 rds/min. Initial bullet speed: 700 m/s. Sighting range: 800–900 m. Maximum bullet range: 3 m.
The two handles and the trigger between them were similar to those used on the Villar-Peroz. The machine gun had a weight of about 5,6 kg reinforced with a wooden (!) tripod, which could be folded for carrying on the shoulder. Thus, the weight of the unloaded machine gun, including the tripod, was 16,3 kg.
In general, quite a bit compared to the same “Maxim”. Nevertheless, this machine gun did not make any difference, and in my novel it actually jammed after the first few shots!
Information