Machine gun in the trenches: how the Somme proved the engineers right
Russian soldiers in combat positions during World War I, presumably in 1915.
July 1, 1916, northern France, Somme Valley. After a seven-day artillery barrage (approximately one and a half million shells fired), fourteen British first-echelon divisions rise from their trenches and attack in tight formation, at full speed, with full gear. That day, the British army at the Somme lost 57,470 men, including 19,240 killed and died of wounds. These are the heaviest single-day losses in its history. stories. Most of it was from the fire of German MG08s, which artillery It should have destroyed it, but it didn't. A whole shelf of books has been written about what happened on those eight miles of front; technically, the story is shorter.
What the armies knew by August 1914 – and what they didn’t understand
By the start of the war, all major combatants had the Maxim machine gun in one of its national variants. However, the numbers and doctrine diverged more widely than is commonly believed.
A German crew with a Maxim machine gun model 1908 (MG 08) during World War I.
The Germans advanced machine gun doctrine further than anyone else. By August 1914, the active army had approximately 4,500 MG08 machine guns, six per infantry regiment, in standard machine gun companies; the total inventory, including reserves and training units, is estimated at approximately 12,000. It wasn't the sheer quantity that mattered, but the careful development of the manuals: firing sectors, multi-layered deployment, and crew coordination in defense—all of this was standardized by the Germans by 1914.
A French machine gun crew with a St. Étienne Mle 1907 machine gun
By the start of the war, the French also had machine gun companies in their infantry regiments, with about 2,500 Hotchkiss and Saint-Étienne guns in service. However, their tactical approach lagged behind the Germans: positions were chosen less systematically, flanking fire was not practiced as a mandatory mode, and the legacy of the "artillery" approach to mitrailleuses still affected the placement of crews in visible positions.
A British World War I Vickers Mark IV tripod-mounted heavy machine gun
The British treated the Vickers as a valuable and rare resource: two machine guns per battalion of approximately 800 men dictated careful, targeted use. Russia possessed approximately 4,100 Model 1910 machine guns; doctrine largely echoed the defensive logic of the Russo-Japanese War, focusing on the machine gun as the mainstay of company and battalion units.
The experience of the Russo-Japanese War was accessible to all. The Japanese assault on Port Arthur in 1904 demonstrated the cost of attacking a machine-gun trench: thousands of casualties in a single day on a single mountain. European military attachés wrote reports, and the general staffs read them. However, there was no widespread adoption of these conclusions into doctrine: in Berlin, Paris, and London, the Manchurian experience was viewed as an Asian phenomenon.
The maneuver phase ended within four months. By December 1914, the front from Switzerland to the North Sea was frozen in trenches. Historians disagree on whether the machine gun was the decisive factor in this freezing or one of several, along with mass artillery and barbed wire. Together, these three engineering systems completely obscured the battlefield for infantry; dissecting them by their respective scales is a task for a separate book.
The Maxim machine gun, model 1910, which was used by the Russian Imperial Army in World War I.
Geometry of fire: sector, cross, flanking
A machine gun on a tripod is not "weapon"...firing in all directions." This is a firing point with a specific geometry. Understanding this geometry helps explain what happened on the Somme and why it was inevitable.
The field of fire of a single machine gun on a standard mount is approximately 30–45 degrees horizontally without repositioning. This means that a single point controls a narrow strip of ground. To cover a battalion's defensive front, several machine guns are needed in widely spaced positions.
Crossfire: Two machine guns, positioned 100-200 meters apart along the front, create overlapping sectors. Attacking infantry passing through the overlapping zone finds itself under fire from two directions at once. The blind spots of one point overlap with the adjacent one.
Flanking, or enfilading, fire is the most effective mode (the terms mean the same thing: firing along the target line, not across it). The machine gun fires not at the front of the advancing line, but along it, at an angle of 20-30 degrees to its direction. Each bullet travels along a line containing several targets. A single MG08 in the correct flanking position functions as effectively as a rifle platoon. The gun crew itself remains outside the attackers' arc of return fire: they face forward and fire, not to the side.
Barrage fire is the fourth mode, established as the standard by the British and Germans by 1916. The machine gun is positioned at an elevated trajectory of 15–30 degrees and fires at pre-targeted areas without visual contact. This creates a "barrage" deep within the enemy's defenses or between their trench lines: infantry attempting to exploit the success of the first wave finds itself under fire from a source they cannot see.
A typical German position by 1916 looked like this: two or three MG08s, spaced 100-150 meters apart, covering a strip up to half a kilometer wide, with carefully planned sectors of flanking fire on adjacent sectors. One such node could halt a company attack. To suppress it, either precise artillery strikes on each point were required, or an enveloping maneuver was required, which was impossible under continuous front conditions.
Here, I'll make a note about the Russian army: the picture was uneven. The Maxim 1910 model itself was an excellent system, comparable in ballistics and reliability to the MG08. Multilayer machine-gun defense, based on the German model, was less well-practiced, and this had an impact on the Northern Front in 1915, in sectors with rapid officer turnover. But in offensive operations, particularly the Brusilov Offensive in the summer of 1916, the Russian army demonstrated its ability to use machine guns at a level comparable to its allies: both in suppressing Austrian positions during the artillery preparation phase and in consolidating captured lines. Much depended on the front, the division, and the specific officer corps.
German MG 08 (Maschinengewehr 08) machine gun in position
Somme, July 1, 1916
The British command's plan was simple and logical by the standards of 1916. A seven-day artillery barrage was intended to destroy the German trenches of the first and second lines, destroy the barbed wire in front of them, and suppress the machine-gun emplacements. After this, the infantry would have to occupy the destroyed positions: this was the plan at Haig's headquarters, which expected the crossing of no man's land to be virtually unhindered.
Almost nothing came of it. Of the one and a half million shells fired, a significant proportion were shrapnel—a choice explained by the primary objective: destroying barbed wire. But shrapnel performed poorly on the German barbed wire defenses of 1916: the wire was laid in several layers, partially buried, twisted into dense "Bruno spirals," and did not explode with shrapnel bullets as expected. The British also used high-explosive shells, but a significant number were defective (production in 1915–1916 had a high defect rate), and the fuses did not provide the necessary detonation to destroy the wire and suppress deep cover. German machine-gun crews waited out the shelling in concrete dugouts at a depth of up to ten meters: not a single British shell of that period could reach that depth. Once the fire was out, the crews pulled MG08 up in a matter of minutes.
The attack began at 7:30 a.m. Fourteen divisions emerged from their trenches simultaneously, on signal, and advanced in tight formations, marching, fully equipped with gear (about 30 kilograms per man). The distance to the German positions was 200–700 meters, depending on the location. 200–700 meters, marching, fully equipped—that's exactly the regime for which the German machine gun position was designed: flanking fire on the adjacent sector, cross-fire, and barrage fire from behind.
German machine guns were firing at adjacent sectors: not at the lines advancing directly toward them, but at those advancing on their neighbors. Each line found itself under enfilading fire from sectors its own command hadn't seen and made no attempt to suppress. In some areas, the first wave lost up to half its men in the first half hour. That day's casualties totaled 57,470, including 19,240 killed.
The Somme didn't prove that machine guns were more powerful than infantry—that had been known since Omdurman. The Somme proved something else: to penetrate a machine-gun front, artillery needed more than just destroying trenches; it needed to knock out each individual point. The British headquarters in July 1916 required a different kind of planning: locating each machine-gun position before the artillery barrage, distributing high-explosive shells among these positions, and verifying the results before the attack. This was only just beginning, and not only in London; the Germans and French were following the same path in those same months.
The first day of the Somme is the most famous episode, but not unique. Martin Middlebrook, in his classic 1971 study, showed, regiment by regiment and battalion, how the German machine-gun defense worked in the British sector. Similar accounts were found among the French at Verdun, where German infantry faced fire from the Hotchkiss, among the Russians in the Augustów Woods and near Baranovichi, and among the Italians in twelve successive battles on the Isonzo. This occurred wherever infantry advanced at full height onto a designated area.
This photograph, taken around 1916, shows American soldiers being trained to use a Vickers machine gun by a British instructor.
After the Somme: The Limits of the Heavy Machine Gun
By 1917, the armies of the Western Front had learned to suppress machine gun emplacements precisely, rather than with a blanket artillery barrage. Methods of sound and optical detection of batteries and firing points emerged, and aerial reconnaissance with photography mapped German defenses down to the individual positions. Artillery preparations, instead of "weeks of area fire," became short and precise.
Infantry tactics also changed. Gone were the tight lines. In their place were breakthrough groups: small units armed with grenades, light machine guns, and flamethrowers, advancing in short dashes from shellhole to shellhole. For the Germans, this evolved into the assault groups of the 1918 spring offensive; for the French and British, into non-linear infantry platoon tactics. At the same time, armor was entering the battlefield: танк as a response to the machine gun point is a separate story, to which this series will return.
By the end of the war, the heavy machine gun itself had reached its limits. The water-cooled Maxim machine gun remained an excellent defensive weapon: in a prepared position, with zeroed-in sectors, a well-coordinated crew, and a water supply. On the offensive, it was useless. The crew couldn't carry the sixty kilograms of the machine gun and its mount under fire; quickly deploying it to a new position occupied half an hour earlier was unrealistic; and the water in the casing required transportation. This was understood by 1915, but armies spent another quarter of a century figuring out what to do with this realization.
The heavy machine gun won its war—defensive, trench, and in pre-targeted sectors. But it couldn't lead a platoon into an attack: 60 kilograms of water and metal aren't something you carry on an offensive. By 1915, the French were already tinkering with prototypes of the handbrake, by 1916 the British had the Lewis, and the Germans had the MG08/15. These systems will be the subject of the next article.
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