MachineGun Tactics on the Western Front 1914–18

This fully illustrated study explores and depicts the machine-gun tactics employed by both sides on the Western Front in 1914–18. During World War I, machine guns made an enormous combat contribution in the hands of both Entente and Central Powers forces, not only during the trench warfare of 1914–17 but also in the more mobile climactic battles of 1918. While light machine guns and ‘automatic rifles’ were widely issued to infantry at platoon level, this book focuses on the rapidly evolving tactics employed by the specialist units equipped with weapons such as the British and Commonwealth Vickers, the German MG 08 and the French Hotchkiss Mle 1914. In this volume, Greg O’Reilly presents a novel analysis of the machine gun as a decisive battlefield weapon in World War I. While all of the belligerents grasped the value of the machine gun as a short-range defensive weapon, this study reveals how innovators on both sides came to understand how to use massed machine-gun fire as a formidable long-range area weapon, making expert use of the terrain. This hard-won expertise was far from being evenly shared across the various armies and was often underappreciated at the time despite its battle-winning potential. Specially commissioned artwork and carefully chosen archive and present-day photographs depicts the weapons involved and the innovative machine-gun tactics used on the Western Front battlefields.