Vienna’s Museum of Military History is one of the most important military museums in the world. Located near Vienna’s city centre, it’s near to the famous Belvedere Palace and very well connected by public transport.

The location is part of the Arsenal, Vienna’s former garrison. Its building was purposefully built as a museum between 1850 and 1856 by order of Emperor Franz Joseph I; thus being the oldest museum in Vienna and also claiming to be the oldest purposefully built museum in the world. The architecture of this building and the remainder of the original complex are very interesting, ascribing to Byzantine, Hispano-Moorish and Neo-Gothic styles. Most of the original complex is now a public park and also hosts the museum’s outdoor exhibits.

The museum covers the historic period from 1618 to 1945 (although the outdoor exhibits includes many more modern pieces) and is a very lively organization, hosting several activities ranging from period swordsmanship to cannon firing, culminated by the Montur und Pulverdampf, a huge historical re-enactment event. For more information and videos, please, check on Google and YouTube.

Getting back to the museum proper and having admired the façade, one can dedicate time to visit the outside exhibits. Composed mainly from one of the best ancient artillery collections, this exhibit is partially covered under two roofed pavilions. There are also aircraft and military vehicles. Admittance to the external exhibits is free unless there’s any activity in progress.

Inside the main building you will be greeted by the Commander’s Hall – a pillared hall decorated with the statues of the main military commanders in Austria’s history.

A chronologically organized visit starts in the first floor. Its left wing has two halls dedicated respectively to the 17th and 18th centuries. Opposite is the zone covering the historical period from 1789 to 1866. Back at the ground level, the left wing covers the period from 1867 to 1918, with a hall dedicated to Emperor Franz Joseph and the Sarajevo assassination and another to World War I. Opposite the Commander’s Hall are the Republic and Dictatorship (1918-1945) and Austrian Naval Power Halls.

The 17th century was a troubled period for Europe, starting with the 30 Years’ War, which convulsed the continent from 1618 to 1648. That’s the historical period that saw the restoration of permanent armies in Europe. The museum hosts an impressive collection of body armour from this period as well as pole arms and a very informative audio visual display showing the actual operation of a musket. There’s also a very well preserved carriage mounted volley gun.

The next section covers one of the most important episodes in Europe’s and world history: the 1683 Ottoman’s second, and last, siege of Vienna which was the last attempt of the Ottoman Empire to conquer Europe. The victory of the combined Imperial and Polish armies signalled the start of the Turkish retreat from the continent. The displays of Turkish weaponry are very interesting due to their exoticism, including the famous compound bows, which at that time still rivalled, and even surpassed, firearms in terms of range and rate of fire.

In the 18th century hall is a very well preserved small mortar, known as the Belgrade Mortar, credited with having fired the shot that blew the main magazine of the Belgrade fortress on August 14, 1717 causing more than 3,000 casualties and precipitating the fall of the city. Another very interesting display contains several hand grenades dated circa 1765.

Crossing the building to the opposite wing is an exhibit dedicated to the French Wars. The main piece from a technical point of view may very well be the oldest military aircraft still preserved, which is a French observation balloon. Another very interesting display is the presence of a couple over/under flintlock muskets, presented as soldier’s weapons. There’s also a single tube rocket launcher together with a selection of rockets and artillery shells from the first half of the 19th Century.

At ground level is the wing dedicated to the second half of the 19th century until 1918. There’s a very interesting display showing the development of the breech loading rifle in Austria and also a representation of that country’s sidearms.

There’s an entire room dedicated to the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, which was the spark that ignited the First World War. Preserved there is the car in which the crime took place, the pistol used by Gavrilo Princip to commit the crime and even the uniform worn by Archduke Ferdinand on that fateful day.

Following that room there’s an extensive collection of objects covering World War I comprising even a specimen of the infamous French Chauchat light machine gun. The array of weapons from both sides is extensive that includes flamethrowers, machine guns, personal armor, chemical warfare equipment and even some medieval looking maces for hand to hand fighting. Artillery from the period ranges from a small hand portable cannon to a very imposing 38cm howitzer. There’s even an original Albatross B1 airplane prototype, as well as several armoured domes taken from fortifications, some of them wearing impressive battle scars.

The presence of several specimens of the Vilar-Perosa machine gun was most interesting. It was the first pistol caliber machine gun, chambered for the 9mm Glisenti round, and fed from a top mounted, detachable magazine. It was twin conception (a double gun) intended to be used as a light machine gun/automatic rifle, complete with bipod and spade grips. On display is a specimen mounted on a special wooden structure designed to be suspended in front of a man’s chest so he could fire the weapon while advancing. The basic gun was 21 inches (533 mm) long and weighed 14.34 lbs (6.52 kg) – quite a handful for such a feeble cartridge. After the war, almost all the surviving pieces where stripped from their twin mounts and given conventional stocks giving birth to the OPV and Beretta 1918 submachine guns.

The “Sea Power Austria” room is dedicated to Imperial times when Austria (now a landlocked country) operated a sizable naval force, a period spanning 200 years ending in 1918. On display is an impressive model of a battleship, several antique torpedoes, and even a conning tower salvaged from a sunken WWI submarine. The collection of small arms includes some Colt revolvers.

The exhibit dedicated to the World War II has an interesting array of small arms including a FG42 rifle. There is also a machine gun turret from an American bomber, accompanied by an electrically heated airman’s suit, and several other aircraft.

There’s also an instrument panel from a Me 109 fighter as well as a WWII jet engine and a Fiesler Storch short take off and landing light airplane. Artillery is represented by an 88 mm Flak 36 together with a searchlight and a German 75 mm antitank gun. Other anti-tank weapons are a Panzerfaust, a Panzerschreck rocket launcher and a British PIAT grenade launcher. Inside this same hall there are several German vehicles, both wheeled and tracked, and a most impressive Kettenkrafttrad half track motorcycle complete with cargo area tarpaulins and towed chariot.

There’s also a specimen of the SdKfz 302 Goliath – the German unmanned ground vehicle. This was a miniature wire guided tank, complete with armour and tracks, used to place demolition charges.

If you are accompanied by persons who are not that interested in military history, they can visit the nearby Belvedere Palace, originally home of one of the foremost imperial generals and now an art museum, housing some of the most famous paintings by Gustav Klimt. If you need to recover energies after the visit, one of the most popular restaurants in Vienna, Salm Bräu, is next door to Belvedere Palace.

Museum of Military History, Militärhistorisches Institut, A-1030 Vienna, Arsenal, Objekt 1.
Phone number: +43-(0)1- 79561-0.
Website: www.hgm.or.at.

Public transport: underground line U1, Südbahnhof station and U3 Schlachthausgasse stations.
Bus lines 13A, 69A, streetcar lines 18, D.

Open daily (please, check before visit, as at least several museums in Vienna close one day per week) from 9am to 5pm. Closing days: 1 January, Easter Sunday, 1 May, 1 November, 24, 25 and 31 December.

Entry fee is 5.1 € (includes audio guide in several languages, including English), additional small fee for picture taking, no flash or tripod allowed. Informative sheets in several languages are available. English speaking staff. There are facilities for physically impaired persons. There’s a small café in the premises and nearby hotels and restaurants.

By Anthony G. Williams

The Great War of 1914-1918 saw the first substantial use of aircraft in a major conflict. At the beginning the aircraft were almost all frail, underpowered devices that could barely lift themselves and their one or two crew into the air, and carried no armament except for the crew’s personal weapons. By the end of the conflict, heavy bombers carrying multiple defensive machine guns contested the air with fast and agile fighters, typically armed with two fixed machine guns synchronised to fire through the propeller blades. As well as ball rounds these guns fired a variety of specially developed ammunition, loaded with armour-piercing, incendiary and even explosive bullets.

Although machine guns specially designed for the needs of air fighting were being developed at the end of the war, none of these had time to get into service. So with the exception of a few large-calibre cannon, the air war was fought with more or less modified versions of the guns used on the ground by the army.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its capital in Vienna, was one of the major combatants in the Great War, fighting alongside Germany and the Ottoman Empire against France, the United Kingdom, Russia (until 1917), Italy (from 1915, initially only against the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and the USA (from 1917). Defeat in the war led to the break-up of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

The standard machine gun of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces was the Schwarzlose. This was designed by a German, Andreas Wilhelm Schwarzlose, who took out the first patent in 1902. It was adopted by the Empire in 1905 as the M05 (Model 1905) and manufactured at the Osterreichische Waffenfabrik Gessellschaft in Steyr, Austria. An improved model, the M07, replaced the M05 two years later, to be replaced in production by the further-modified M07/12 five years after that. However, the older versions remained in service.

The Schwarzlose was unusual by comparison with the common locked breech short-recoil (e.g. Maxim) and gas-operated (e.g. Hotchkiss and Lewis) guns in that its mechanism used a form of blowback, in which the gas pressure in the barrel forces the cartridge case backwards, pushing the unlocked bolt to the rear of the gun. In its simplest form, the blowback mechanism is restricted to very low-powered cartridges because it is necessary for the inertia of the bolt to hold the case in the chamber until the projectile has left the barrel, otherwise high-velocity burning gas will burst from the breech to the discomfiture of the firer. With high-pressure military rifle cartridges, the weight of bolt required would be so heavy that the rate of fire would be very low.

Various solutions to this difficulty have been tried, because blowback weapons are attractively simple and cheap to manufacture. One is the retarded blowback, in which an additional mechanism resists the initial rearward movement of the bolt, and this was the approach adopted by Schwarzlose. His design utilises an elbow joint attached to the bolt by one arm with the other arm pivoted to a fixed axis on the receiver. The effect of this mechanism is to force the initial rearward movement to operate under severe mechanical disadvantage, delaying the opening of the breech until the bullet has left the barrel. Even so, the cartridges it used were so powerful that the breech still opened too quickly. The solution was to shorten the barrel to 20 inches (compared with 28 inches for the Maxim) so that the bullet left the muzzle sooner before the breech could open. It was belt-fed, using a fabric belt. The simplicity of the mechanism kept the cost down to about half that of a Maxim, and the gun was subsequently adopted by several other European countries in a variety of different calibres. The ruggedness and reliability of the Schwarzlose made it a popular gun and it had a long life, though the main problem being the sensitivity of the mechanism to ammunition quality. The Dutch were still making it in 1940, and it was being used at least until 1945 as a second-line weapon in Italy and Hungary.

In army and naval use, the gun is recognisable by the short and wide water-filled barrel jacket, the large conical flash-hider attached to the muzzle (the short barrel presumably resulting in a much bigger muzzle flash than usual) and the curved shape of the back of the receiver. As with all blowback guns there is no primary extraction, so the gun was fitted with an oil tank and the chamber was sprayed with oil before each round was chambered in order to facilitate case extraction. This mechanism was the source of some discomfort in aircraft use when Schwarzloses were mounted in front of the pilot, as he received a constant spray of oil in his face whenever the guns were fired. In at least one installation – in the Albatross fighter – a metal shield and drainage tube were fitted to catch and dispose the oil.

The cartridge in use in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the 8x50R Mannlicher, developed in 1886 by the Georg Roth ammunition factory of Vienna together with the Vienna Armory, and one of the first of the small-calibre military rounds designed to use the new smokeless powder. The US equivalent was the .30-40 Krag of 1892. The initial loading featured a heavy (244-grain) round-nosed bullet fired at 2,030 fps, although some later specialised loadings, such as the M.08 armour-piercing and the M.17 and M.18 incendiary types, used pointed bullets. There was also an explosive bullet with a blunt nose and a waisted body. These explosive and incendiary types were intended for use against hydrogen-filled observation balloons, initially from ground-fired guns and later from aircraft.

The Schwarzlose as an Aircraft Gun

The Schwarzlose was not an obvious choice for an aircraft gun, being bulky, heavy (at around 43 pounds) and initially slow-firing at around 400 rpm (500 rpm for the M07/12). However, except for a few imported Madsens, Bergmanns and LMG 08/15s, it was all the Austro-Hungarians had available so it was adapted for the task. At the start of the conflict the Empire also pressed into aerial service some Schwarzlose M12s intended for export to Greece, chambered for their 6.5×54 Mannlicher-Schönauer cartridge. This fired a 160-grain round-nosed bullet at 2,230 fps. The M12 guns were lighter, being air-cooled, and were used as flexibly-mounted defensive weapons, but the small bullet was less effective so these were eventually replaced by 8mm guns.

The first change to the gun for aircraft use was the removal of the flash hider. The next concerned the water jacket. Cooling water was not necessary for an aircraft gun: the combination of short bursts of fire and a strong wind keeping the barrel cool enough. So the jacket was frequently emptied of water and fitted with large slots to allow air to circulate. Unlike the Vickers/Maxim short-recoil guns in which the front of the barrel jacket was needed to support the moving barrel, the only other function of the jacket in the fixed-barrel Schwarzlose was to hold the foresight. Once separate sights were used, the jacket could be dispensed with entirely, leaving the plain, skinny barrel protruding rather oddly from the bulky receiver. Despite these modifications, some Schwarzloses fitted to aircraft retained their cooling water jackets to the end of the war.

The M07/12 was found to be sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure, firing more slowly and finally stopping when the aircraft climbed above an altitude of 10,000 feet. A set of modifications designed by Ludwing Kral raised the rate of fire to nearly 600 rpm and the critical altitude to almost 18,000 feet. Mid-way through the war, a version specifically for aircraft use was developed, the M16, in which the weight was reduced to 29 pounds. Continued development eventually saw the free rate of fire of the M16A increased to 880 rpm, and raised its operating altitude to 23,000 feet. But even in March 1918 fewer than 300 M16s were in service, and the M07/12 remained numerically the most important gun in the inventory.

By the middle of the war, it had become established that the most satisfactory layout for a fighter plane was the tractor type, with the engine in front of the pilot. This meant that if the guns were to be kept within reach of the pilot (important at that time, as guns often jammed and needed clearing), their firing needed to be synchronised with the engine revolutions so that the bullets passed between the propeller blades.

Most synchronisation systems needed to be tailored to the gun they were used with, and the Schwarzlose’s unique mechanism required a purpose-designed system. The most common seems to have been the Zaparka gear, which fired the gun on every fourth propeller revolution. The mechanism could be relied on only within a band of engine revolutions between 1,000 and 1,600 rpm with the M07/12, and 600 to 1,600 rpm with the M16. This explains the very prominent place given in the cockpit of fighters to a large engine tachometer. The 1,600 revolutions per minute limit restricted the maximum rate of fire to 400 rpm regardless of the free rate, and it would obviously have been less at lower engine revolutions. The Bernatzik and Daimler gear reduced the rate of fire even more, by 55% in the case of the M16. However, the Daimler gear did have the advantage that the M16 could be safely fired from engine idle to 1,600 revolutions per minute, although the M07/12 was still restricted to the 1,100 to 1,600 rpm band. None of these systems proved to be entirely reliable, leading to a loss of confidence in the pilots who risked shooting off their own propellers. At the end of the war the Austro-Hungarian forces decided to standardize on the Priesel system.

Aircraft installations

Aircraft used by the Austro-Hungarian Empire were a mixture of indigenous and German types. Some of the latter were specifically made for the Empire, and these were usually armed with Schwarzlose guns.

Synchronisation systems for the Schwarzlose were not available until 1916, so earlier fighters needed to find other ways to mount their guns. Among the first of the Empire’s fighters was the German-built Hansa-Brandenburg D.I, armed with an unsynchronised Schwarzlose in a fairing on top of the upper wing so it could fire over the propeller. This fairing was known as the VK canister. The standard version was the Type II VK, which held a gun and 250 rounds of ammunition, plus a gravity fuel tank, but sometimes two guns were installed in the canister. The Hansa-Brandenburg D.I was also built under licence by the Austro-Hungarian Phönix company, but this version did not prove very successful. The Phönix D.I combined its fuselage with new wings, a more powerful engine, and two synchronised Schwarzlose guns. It was a much better fighter, but deliveries started only in the spring of 1918. Very small numbers were delivered of the improved D.II and D.III. After the war, the D.III went on to serve with the Swedish Air Force. The other successful family of Austro-Hungarian fighters was entirely indigenous. The Österreich-Ungarische Aviatik Flugzeugfabrik (not to be confused with the German Automobil und Aviatik A.G., which also built a number of fighters) produced the Aviatik D.I, which in prototype form had a single synchronised Schwarzlose but entered service in the summer of 1917 with two.

In addition to these, the German Albatros D.II and D.III fighters were built in the Empire and armed with two synchronised Schwarzloses. Some Fokker D and E series were also used.

Despite its bulk, the Schwarzlose was also used as a defensive gun in flexible mountings. Single-engined two-seaters (known as the C class in both Germany and the Empire) which carried such armament included the German-built Hansa-Brandenburg C.1 (which also had a fixed gun in a VK top-wing canister for the pilot) and several indigenous designs from Lloyd, Lohner, Oeffag and Phönix. Thirty twin-engined German Gotha bombers were supplied to Austria, who fitted them with Schwarzlose MGs. Hansa-Brandenburg also supplied the W.18 floatplane, and the indigenous Lohner L of 1915 was a three-seat single-engined flying boat. Both carried one Schwarzlose gun.

While the Schwarzlose was not best suited to aircraft use, the Austro-Hungarian Empire engineers were able to make some remarkable improvements, which turned it into an acceptable aircraft gun.

Schwarzlose Technical Data

Length: ….. 42 inches Barrel length: ….. 20.9 inches Weight: ….. 43 lbs (M05, M07, M07/12), 29 lbs (M12, M16) Method of operation: ….. Retarded blowback Calibre: ….. 8x50R Mannlicher (except M12: 6.5×54 Mannlicher-Schönauer) Ammunition feed: ….. Cloth belt Cyclic rate of fire: ….. c.400 rpm (M05, M07, M12), c.500-580 rpm (M07/12), c.600 rpm (M16), c.880 rpm (M16A)

(Anthony G Williams is co-author (with Emmanuel Gustin) of “Flying Guns – World War 1: Development of Aircraft Guns, Ammunition and Installations 1914-32”, published by The Crowood Press in 2003. You can visit him at www.quarry.nildram.co.uk)