The Social History of the Machine Gun

by John Ellis

Book Overview

In this stunning account of the human impact of a single machine, John Ellis argues that the history of technology and military history are part and parcel of social history in general. The Social History of the Machine Gun, now with a new foreword by Edward C. Ezell, provides an original and fascinating interpretation of weaponry, warfare, and society in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe and America.

From its beginning, the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801833582
• ISBN13: 9780801833588
• Release Date: August 1986
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

GATLING TO KALASHNIKOV

This is a review of THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE MACHINE GUN by John Ellis. This book first came out in 1976. My edition is the paperback which was published in 1991 and includes a foreword by Edward Clinton Ezell, Director of the Armed Forces History Division of the Smithsonian Institution, and a well-known author in his own right. Ellis is a great writer and is well known for his study of trench warfare in World War I, EYE-DEEP IN HELL. Indeed, one of the things that put all those soldiers "eye-deep in Hell" and helped label "the Lost Generation" was the machine gun. It mechanized slaughter and changed tactics and strategy forever. It also influenced how we see war. It's no longer perceived as a glorious adventure, but a grim necessity. Social perceptions like that are, in large part, due to the innovation of the machine gun which Ellis does a wonderful job in describing in this short, readable book. Ellis isn't perfect. For example, he criticizes General Custer for "monumental folly" (on p. 74) for failing to take the four Gatling guns available to him along on his advance to the Little Bighorn. Custer's excuse was that the guns would have been too difficult to transport over the rough terrain he had to cross to reach his objective. Ellis challenges that explanation noting that the four Gatling guns in question were designed to be transported on mules. Of course, Custer didn't have any mules and his "packers" weren't especially good. His pack train lagged behind as a result of that and the fact that only condemned cavalry horses were available for pack animals. In this sense, General Crook, whom he was supposed to link up with before engaging Sitting Bull's people and their Cheyenne allies, had a big advantage. Crook had both experienced packers and real mules, much more sure-footed than Custer's condemned horses. There is also the fact that despite the impression created by Hollywood, the Gatling guns were not well loved by the soldiers assigned to them. They had to be fired standing up in full view of the enemy. After the first couple of rounds fired, the dense, acrid cloud of smoke would block their view of their target. Enemy riflemen learned to pour their fire into that cloud. Compounding the Gatling's deficiencies was the fact that the gun was also prone to frequent jamming. The invention of "smokeless powder" would have mitigated some of the Gatling gun's deficiencies, but by the time that was available Hiram Maxim's gun had superceded Gatling's. It was the Maxim design which drove a generation of soldiers into trenches from Switzerland to Nieuport as the Great War raged in Europe. Ellis, in other words, isn't perfect, but his book is good enough to merit five stars and a place on your bookshelf if you're interested in firearms, military history, social history, or the dialogue between technology and social change.

Ellis had another tour de force

"The only thing harder than putting a new idea into a military mind is taking an old idea out." Liddell Hart I consider myself exceptionally well read in military history and found most books deal with pre- conflict diplomacy, diplomatic failure, initiation of conflict, strategy, tactical considerations, campaigns, occupation, end of conflict results and the resultant impact on societies and nations. Once in a while I read a book that is so profound that I experience what I call an intellectual epiphany. The last time I had that was in 1990 when I read John Ellis's Brute Force. It studied WW II in a way I had never thought of and never seen in all the WW II books I have read. I looked forward to reading The History of the Machine Gun and was not disappointed, although I think it is not as much an intellectual tour de force as Brute Force. Ellis does not study the history of the machine gun in a Unitarian way, but weaves a story incorporating social, military and technological history into a smooth formula. He shows there is an absolute interplay between the zeitgeist of social [especially class], military and technological forces. He also shows that unless there are the proper changes and alignment of forces progress is retarded. Multiple factors created by the Civil War aided in the development of the machine gun. The author states that the American Civil War "was the first war in which both sides were able to effectively mobilize the potential, in terms of materiel and manpower" [pg 24] a point I am not sure I agree with [i.e. the Napoleonic and Crimean wars or were they an adumbration of the Civil War]. He also states that "A new emphasis was placed upon the material ability to kill as many men as possible" [pg 24] and three factors were responsible for the first machine gun to be invented in the United State. They were as follows; first, because of early 19th Century labor shortages America had to rely on streamlined mechanized processes, secondly, the arms industry readily adopted the mechanized process and third, "the dependence upon machinery created a new faith in the unlimited potential of machines"[pg 23]. As with most breakthrough inventions, there is a leit motif of multiple people who claim be the first to originate the idea. Of this group, only Richard Gatling's machine gun was reasonably reliable. He then had the task of trying to convince the U.S. Army of the practicality and advantages of this weapon as a force multiplier. The recurring theme of the machine gun was the reluctance of high military officers and procurement bureaucracies to see the tactical and strategic advantage that the machine gun imparts to the army that uses it in an attack or defense mode. Interestingly, it wasn't until 1866 that the U.S. Army adopted the Gatling gun and only in limited numbers. Unfortunately for Gatling, the sales nationally and internationally never reached numbers that would be considered

Understand how technology changes the battlefield

John Ellis has written a masterful work on how technology changes the battlefield; in this case, it is the machine gun. The machine gun had been in existence since the Civil War in the form of the Gatling gun, mounted on a carriage similar to a small field artillery piece. Around the 1890's it had gone through several improvements until it looked similar to the ones we use today which are bipod mounted, belt fed and easy to maneuver with on the battlefield. The machine guns first use in this form all be it on a smaller scale was in the Russo Japanese War of 1905. Every major country in the world had military observers attached to both sides of the conflict and they all wrote in their official reports about its effective use by the Japanese on the battlefield. When WWI starts in August 1914, only the Germans have produced a prodigious amount of machine guns during the nine years since the Russo Japanese War. They had men trained as machine gunners as a specialty in infantry tactics and had assigned billets in each company for machine gunners. It seems as thought the Allied Powers had either ignored, or did not read the reports from the Russo Japanese War and where behind technologically, logistically and operationally in machine guns. To give one example of the muddleheaded thinking of the stodgy French generals; in the French military academy and in their training manuals they still advocated the "spirit of the bayonet", touting it to be the weapon that would inflict the maximum amount of casualties in the next war. Needless to say at the beginning of the war all those poor French soldiers ordered over the top of the trenches by their incompetent generals to march with their rifles mounted with fixed bayonets through no mans land to storm the German trenches were mowed down by the voluminous and accurate German machine gun fire. There are diaries of German machine gunners stating how after a while they could not continue to fire into the advancing French line because the carnage was too much for them to take! After a few attacks the Allies learned their lesson and feverishly scrambled to incorporate the machine gun in their battle plans. The Germans managed to hold onto the technological edge throughout the war in machine gun technology until we showed up with the Browning .30 caliber machine gun near the end of the war. By the way, we did not have much in the way of machine guns when we showed up late in 1917 and were using inferior French machine guns that we bought at a premium price. They being cheaply made they had a nasty tendency to jam easily when they came in contact with the least little bit of mud or dirt, just the thing for trench warfare. I am fond of telling school kids that come to the Virginia War Museum where I am a docent that the Viet Nam War Memorial wall contains the names of 55,000 American soldiers who died in that conflict in a nine-year period. The Allied forces in 1916 in the battle of the Somme lost ove

The obsolescence of the soldier

This is a unique book. John Ellis has written more than a technical history of the machine guns, a weapon which has really revolutionized the battlefields and the military world. Mr. Ellis tells us a story about the resilience of customs, practices and traditions, in spite of the fact that the material reality that once enabled these customs and practices to thrive have already gone away. The 19th Century's officers and commanders were accustomed to thinking in terms of human intrepidity and courage as the most important attributes to carry the day in the battlefields. Machine guns were the first specific application of the technique and logic of the industrial revolution in military combat. Firing an inordinate stream of bullets, machine guns came to be the definitive symbols of the machine age in military history, regardless of marksmanship or easy targets. Nevertheless, ingrained beliefs die hard. The militaries in all major powers continued to cling to the idea of the irreplaceability of the infantry and cavalry charges, with bayonets, swords and lances, as the final judge of victory or defeat in military matters. In this sad tale about the final triumph of the material conditions against an ideal and constructed world, there would not be any place for happy endings. Archaic tactics and a longing for offensives, on the one hand, plus the continued production of more powerful and improved machine guns, on the other, set the backdrop for the appalling bloodbaths of the First World War, like Gallipoli, Verdun and the Somme. This is a book that will please not only social scientists or scholars, but also anyone with an interest in this topic (First World War, military matters and gun history) with a sophisticated taste for reading and studying. It is important to mention also the dozens of wonderful pictures and drawings that illustrates all the book, which give the reader enhanced pleasure.

An unusual perspective

Mr. Ellis has written a most unusual book. His thesis contends that the invention of the machine gun and the failure of the military to recognize it significance in the decades leading up to WWI, considering it useful only against tribesmen and other "primitives", led directly to the horrific slaughter of WWI and the static warefare of the trenches. He looks in depth at the military subculture of Victorian England and how it was incapable of recognizing the significance of the machine gun-and those who attempted to place the weapon into the British Army's scheme of things were sanctioned and gagged. When we finally get to the chapter on WWI it is akin to reading one of Shakespear's tragedies. The inevitability of the butchery is made all that more terrible by the knowledge that the deliberite myopia of the British and French higher command ensured that their troops used outmoded tactics against emplaced German forces and their Maxim guns. The author gives one case where two German machine guns annihilated a six-hundred man British infantry battalion in the space of a couple of hours with no casulties sustained by the Germans. In other words six German soldiers killed and wounded hundreds. The final chapter covers the years following WWI as well as the role of the weapon in movies of all things. Some might disagree with Mr. Ellis, that the invention of one device could be responsible for such sweeping changes in both social and military circles is unrealistic, but Mr. Ellis presents a very skillfull work that states just that. If you are looking for a technical history of the machine gun then this book isn't for you, but if you are curious about the impact that the industrial revolution has made on humanity then this book will be a fascinating read.