As long as you keep water in the water jacket and keep the loaded belts coming, it will keep on working as steadily as a sewing machine, only requiring a new barrel every 15,000 rounds; a change that can easily be done in 15 seconds. If a part does break, the Maxim is a modular design that allows the swapping out of the bolt or feed block with a spare to keep on firing. When faced with swarming infantry, this is a life-or-death matter. When the Russians attacked the Ukrainian Bakhmut meat grinder in waves, reminiscent of a WWI-style assault, the Maxim really came into its own, cutting down lines of attackers like wheat before a McCormac reaper.

There have been other ingenious applications of the Maxim, such as mounting telescopic sights and grouping four or six guns together in one mount. This enables 2000 to 3000 rounds per minute to be fired at attacking aircraft. When a modern jet comes in low with all the electronic warfare devices to hide it from sophisticated ground-to-air missiles, it’s still quite vulnerable to a low-tech anti-aircraft position that can raise a curtain of lead with a row of linked Maxims.

As the war drags on, the costs keep mounting and the Ukrainians are hard pressed to get enough ammunition, as they have drained the NATO stockpiles. Only Russia has kept all its WWII production lines intact and modernized and, while they are well-supplied, the cost of artillery shells necessary to deny continuous passage through an area is astronomical. A steady rain of indirect machine gun fire does the same job for a fraction of the cost. This requires a water-cooled gun that does not wear out quickly.

This is a job for a Maxim. Its toggle action spreads out the shock of operation so there is less wear and breakage of parts. When it does wear out, the bearing surfaces on the receiver are riveted on and can simply be changed for new ones while the modular parts are sent back to the ordnance depot for rebuilding. Being recoil operated, it does not have a gas system to foul and jam as the number of rounds fired adds up. The Germans were well aware of this issue with gas operated guns and stated that the gas operated systems had inherent problems. They kept designing recoil operated guns as a result.

TACTICAL USE OF THE MAXIM IN 2024

To get the best use of the Maxim today, you would want the WWI German 08-15 version with the optional Lafitte 34 mount. No one today seems to remember that the 08-15 with its shoulder stock and bipod was just intended as a more mobile heavy machine gun that storm troopers could emplace as they infiltrated the enemy lines and then dominate that sector with sustained machine gun fire. The mobility of the 08-15 eliminated the weakness of the emplaced heavy machine gun under artillery fire as the 08-15 machine gunner could move about like a rifleman, changing firing positions. Even though the weight was 50 pounds with a full water jacket and a 100-round belt in a drum magazine, the weight was so well distributed that many men could fire it from the shoulder like a rifle. This was something almost no one could do with the barrel-heavy Lewis gun, which was a true light machine gun and weighed considerably less. The ability to use a heavy, sustained-fire, water-cooled machine gun in the light machine gun role was a testament to the Maxim’s versatility.

For accurate fire in the heavy machine gun role, many of the remaining 08-15 Maxims were mounted in the Lafette 34 mount in the 1930’s. This ultimate machine gun mount features recoil absorption, telescopic sight, automatic traverse (if desired), and enabled accurate fire out to 3500 meters converting any machine gun mounted in it to a miniature artillery piece. We see these today with MG34’s and MG42’s primarily mounted on them, but they cannot deliver the sustained fire of a water-cooled gun in the Lafette 34.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENCE

The abandonment of the sustained fire machine gun and its replacement with air cooled guns had disastrous consequences. The air-cooled machine gun is a wonderful weapon in its place, but it can never do the job of a sustained fire machine gun. In WWII, the Germans found that the Russian human wave assaults kept coming until the air-cooled guns overheated allowing the Russians to overrun them. The Normandy invasion was admittedly a close-run affair and water-cooled Maxims fully deployed for both direct and indirect fire would have been more than enough to dip the balance in the German defender’s favor.

During WWII, in Burma, the British managed to sucker the Japanese into Banzai charges against WWI-style barbed wire backed by their Vickers machine guns (a Maxim variation) resulting in the annihilation of the attacking Japanese troops.

No machine gun is as reliable or able to fire as long as a Maxim. When John Basilone got his medal of honor defending Henderson Airfield at Guadalcanal with the two machine gun sections he commanded, his commendation stated, “he went from machine gun to machine gun repairing them and keeping them firing.” They weren’t supposed to need repairing! If they had Maxim guns, there would not have been any stopping for repairs. And if there was a problem, the gunner could have swapped out the modular part in a few seconds and kept firing without needing his commander’s help. It seems clear that water-cooled guns would have been a powerful help against Japanese Banzai attacks throughout the war as they could keep on coming long after an air-cooled gun overheated.

In the Korean War, the Chicom human wave assaults pushed back the American troops just as the Russian human wave assaults had done against the Germans in the preceding war. Water-cooled guns properly employed for direct and indirect fire would have foiled these assaults, but they were scarce, and the U.S. military has never wanted to invest the training time and equipment needed for effective indirect machine gun fire.

During the Vietnam War, American fire bases were overrun largely because of inadequate machine guns of modern design and the improper use of them. No one wants to learn the lessons of history if it involves using old ways. Newer is always supposed to be better and anything from the past tends to be dismissed out of hand if not ridiculed as anachronistic and obsolete. What could be more obsolete than the world’s first machine gun? A weapon designed back in 1884! The problem with that line of reasoning is that the inventor got it right and the design was perfected. Once you get to the top of the mountain of machine gun design, all roads go downhill… and the Maxim is the pinnacle. No gun made since has come near its longevity and reliability.

MORE THAN GUNS

Maxim was one of the great geniuses of all time. He patented the electric light bulb and Edison was only able to steal the design when Maxim went out of town and told his plant director to renew the patents… which he failed to do. The patents lapsed and Edison was able to grab the invention and run with it.

Maxim also flew the first airplane in front of England’s elite and the English press. When investors were not forthcoming, he wisely dropped the project. The airplane industry didn’t take off until many years later in WWI. When the Wright brothers wanted to build an airplane, they went to Maxim, and he gave them his notes, enabling them to build an airplane, as well.

When you look up and see an automatic fire sprinkler system in a building you are looking at another of Maxim’s inventions that has remained unchanged, defying improvement.

When you look more closely at the man behind the Maxim machine gun you realize why it has also defied improvement and still reigns supreme as the all-time greatest in its field.

The increasing air superiority of the Allies and their area bombing had severely damaged the German armaments industry and transport routes during the WWII. In the last months of the war, the precarious supply of weapons and ammunition therefore necessitated a great deal of improvisation.

And in these difficult times everything available was used, as, for example, unexploded incendiary bombs that had been dropped by the Allies. The Forensic Institute of the Security Police (Kriminaltechnisches Institut der Sicherheitspolizei or KTI), a department of the Reich Security Main Office (“Reichssicherheitshauptamt” or RSHA), had experimented in early 1945 with converting Allied incendiary bombs into incendiary devices for ground combat. After all, the Allies dropped more than 80 million of them on German cities – with a correspondingly large number of duds. SS-Hauptsturmführer Professor Dr. Specht, an expert in arson investigation, and SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Albert Widmann, who headed the D2 “Chemistry and Biology” department, were involved in the experiments.

The experiments were satisfactory and immediately aroused the interest of SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny was generally very open to new weapons and maintained close contacts with the KTI. In February 1945, Dr. Widmann reported to the head of the Criminal Investigation Police Department (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt), SS-Oberführer Friedrich Panzinger, about the Elektrothermit incendiary devices. At the time, he said “3,000 incendiary bombs were being converted for Skorzeny, because they were much sought after by the SS-Jagdverbände. 500 of them could already be finished and shipped to Theresienstadt. With these incendiary devices, files can be destroyed in an emergency or tar-oil barrels, vehicles, buildings, or prepared fire barriers against tanks can be set on fire.”

According to Widmann, the Wehrwolf organization had also reported such a need. The conversion work was carried out by a KTI workshop.

To cover the demand, not only allied duds were collected. The declining German Luftwaffe hardly carried out any major bombing raids and large quantities of bombs therefore lay unused in German depots. As a U.S. report on captured ammunition shows, German 1 kg stick-type incendiary bombs had also been converted from larger ordnance.

From the incendiary bombs, the tail unit, the head fuse and the thermite filling were removed. The body was then filled with a pyrotechnic powder (magnesium and aluminum) and a detonator with a pull cord was installed. The detonator ignited a delay charge with about 100 seconds burning time. The filling then burned for about 3 to 4 minutes.

The Americans puzzled over the sense and purpose of the conversion. The heat development was too low to ignite fires. The original filling would have been better suited for this purpose. Therefore, a use for lighting or ground signaling seemed most likely. The report ends by stating that it was a forced measure with components that were just available, that it worked poorly, and that it was not well suited for fire or lighting purposes.

War usually means wounding and death of many people. How wonderful it would be if battles could be fought without much bloodshed.

Again and again, scientists conducted research on non-lethal weapons and warfare agents, but none of them could be accepted for use under war conditions. What might have seemed useful in the hands of the police in the fight against individual perpetrators was hardly usable in the fighting at the front. However, the idea of not having to kill the enemy at once is still alive and well and stimulates research and the military to conduct new experiments.

This was the case in 1994, when scientists at Wright Laboratory presented various concepts for non-lethal chemical weapons at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Wright Laboratory was founded in 1990 as the research and development department of the U.S. Air Force Materiel Command. It was reorganized in 1997 and became part of the existing U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. By the way, the base is named after the Wright brothers, who had made many of their flight attempts in this area.

In the report “Harassing, Annoying and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals” there are many curious ideas among the suggestions of the laboratory. You might think they were a joke, but it was indeed (non-)deadly serious at the time. So was the “Gay Bomb”, a bomb that was supposed to make the enemy so lustful that they would become homosexual. Even if only for a short time. The scientists relied on the artificial production of body-own substances, which were to be spread by means of airdrops or spray planes and absorbed through the respiratory tract or the skin. The report says: “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.” The enemy soldiers would thereby be brought into sexual ecstasy with great lust and be incited to sexual acts with each other. The soldiers, who were thus no longer able to fight, would then be easily overpowered without having to kill them. The laboratory had applied for a budget of 7.5 million U.S. dollars for the complete development.

But the hoped-for money blessing did not come to anything. At first the concept did not arouse much enthusiasm and was not pursued further. In 1997, the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits the development, production, possession, transfer, and use of chemical weapons. Thus ended the short history of the Gay Bomb. Today, the documents are no longer classified as secret. After they became known, they certainly caused amusement and in 2007 the concept even received the Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award to honor scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, then make them think”.

The documents also contain other very special ideas. For example, certain groups of people should be marked with chemicals by spreading them out on marching routes and letting the enemy walk over them unnoticed or by spraying an enemy camp from the air. People marked in this way could then be easily identified during checks. Other chemicals should serve as an attractant for insects. Ideally, naturally stinging and biting flies and beetles, rodents, and even larger animals should be made aggressive and drawn to the enemy positions. The “Halitosis Bomb” was intended to make the bad breath of soldiers unbearable. Or the body odor by the “Heavy Sweating Bomb”. The “Flatulence Bomb” on the other hand was supposed to cause severe discomfort by stench in the air. In one of the released documents there is a rather interesting counter argument. The chemical weapons would certainly not work everywhere, since, ”people in many areas of the world do not find faecal odour offensive since they smell it on a regular basis.”