The machine gun known as the queen of the battlefield during World War 1 was originally invented by Hiram Maxim in 1884. Though there was other types of automatic guns this was the first weapon able to sustain firing without external support. The British army bought the machine gun in 1890. By the time of the First World War the machine gun was used by all major powers however Germans had 20 times the amount of machine guns compared to the allied forces. British officers were unsure of the effectiveness of the weapon and only issues two pe

r battalion. The 1914 machine gun weighed 30-60kg, took a crew of 4-6 men to operate it, and was normally positioned on a flat tripod. These guns would rapidly overheat and become unusable with in minutes if fired continuously. There were two was that the gun was cooled, water cooled and air cooled. Water cooled machine guns have a water filled jacket which required the crew to carry large amounts of water with them. It was not unheard of crew urinating in the jacket to cool the weapon. Air cooled machine guns had air vents built into the weapon. Because of the weight and the water needed to cool the weapon the machine gun became a defensive weapon. It was not until 1915 when allied forces adopted the Lewis gun. The Lewis gun was a machine gun that weighed a mere 12kg was air cooled and had a circular cartridge magazine. This weapon soon became and offensive weapon. As the war developed the weapon was added to things such as the tank and the airplane though they were relatively larger caliper weapons.

Battlefields were dominated by the killing power of the weapon. The battle of Somme utterly demonstrates the effectiveness of this weapon. On 1 Jul 1916 an attack was launched on a 30 kilometer front north on the Somme river. It was a joint attack from the French and the British. The French Commander in Chief Joffre planed the attack as an attack of attrition with a secondary goal of gaining land. The plan was agreed upon by the British Commander in Chief Haig. Originally the attack was planed for 1 Aug was move up to advert German resources in Verdun. The joint attack was preceded by an 8 day bombardment. Haig and Joffre hoped to destroy all forward defensive positions of the Germans with this bombardment. Haig had hoped to have generally little resistant from the remaining Germans. There were around 3000 guns both French and British used in the bombardment. The Royal artillery had prepared an underground telephone network for forward observation officers to command the barrage as the battle raged. General Haig ordered his advancing party from the center of the line to consolidate after a limited advance. For this reason they went with many supplies. Meanwhile on the north end of the line Haig ordered General Allenby to break trough the enemy line and divide the German line in half. The French in the south also planed to attack at the same time as General Allenby’s forces did. The allied forces did follow one of the

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