Reply To: Machine Guns in Defence

[John D Salt]

A couple of final snippets, and then some maundering about the organisational peculiarities of the British Army…

Rapid and sustained (UK “deliberate”) rates for the M60 and M240 according to ArmyGuide are 100 and 200 rounds per minute, same as the British rates for the GPMG. While the USMC often does things its own way, I doubt they do things differently from the USA on this.

The Vickers MMG seems also to have used a normal (old name for “deliberate”) rate of half a belt per minute and a whole belt for rapid, but as the belts were 250 rounds instead of 200 that’s 25% more bullets per minute than the GPMG(SF).

Just Jack mentioned firing at the cyclic rate, something not advised in British doctrine. I did discover, though, from a translation of piece by Comrade Tokarev, that the Russians have a term for extremely intense close-range MG fire. The Russian term for this is “kinzhalniy”, кинжалный, which comes from the Russian word for a dagger, and so I suppose might be translated as the “knife-fight” rate of fire.

Aiming posts (stakes) I always associate with mortars more than anything else, but the GPMG pamphlet and Vickers manual both list them as required stores — they don’t seem to get much use in the exercises suggested other than for setting up DFs at night or when the target is obscured. I have never heard of rifle sections using aiming posts. When I used to play at soldiers in my spare time, we were supposed to make out range cards, same as everyone else, and indeed the carboard compo ration packs had range card blanks printed on them.

The British Army has always organised its machine guns (the tripod-mounted kind, at any rate) in a rather bizarre way. During WW2, almost every army in the world organised their ordinary infantry battalions as three rifle companies and an MG (or heavy weapons) company, and I believe some Indian Army battalions were still organised like this at the start of the war. The British, having abolished the specialist Machine Gun Corps in 1922, instead had whole infantry battalions roled as MG battalions, equipped with Vickers MMGs (and, later in the war, 4.2-in mortars). Typically one MG battalion would be provided for each infantry division, or an independent MG company for a lorried infantry brigade in an armoured division. This means the British had a lower proportion of tripod MGs in their infantry armament than almost any other army in WW2. 48 guns (36 once the 4.2-in mortars came in) for the division means only five-and-a-bit (later four) guns per infantry battalion, which looks a bit slim compared to the American, German or Russian scales of tripod MG provision.

When the GPMG came in, specialist MG organisations vanished almost completely; the usual thing was to issue 3 SF kits to each rifle company, and leave them to it. This is obviously not a great way of maintaining SF-role machine-gunning skills, but in those days everyone was interested in armoured warfare where this wasn’t seen as vastly important. If my memory fails me correctly, of the four types of infantry battlion organizations when I was in (Infantry, Internal Security, Parachute and Nuclear Escort), only the Para battalion had an MG platoon.

Nowadays, interest in massed armoured combat has faded, dismounted combat is much more the thing, and MG platoons are to be found in light and mech infantry battalions. They are big platoons, too, and have 0.5″ HMGs (whose previously neglected virtues were rediscovered when the Argentines used them against us in 1982) and GMGs (Grenade Machine Guns, or automatc grenade launchers) as well as the good old GPMG(SF).

All the best,

John.