German Machine Guns Development, Tactics and Use from 1892 to 1918 - Hardcover

Dr. Frank Buchholz; Thomas Brüggen

 
9783902526960: German Machine Guns Development, Tactics and Use from 1892 to 1918

Synopsis

This illustrated book with 520 pages and ca. 1000 photos and illustrations traces the development of German machine guns and graphically depicts why they became the most feared infantry weapons of the First World War. If a unit under attack was able to survive the attacker’s preparatory artillery fire with its machine guns intact and place them in position as the infantry attack began, it could be assumed with certainty that this infantry assault would be a bloody failure. Consequently, all available means were employed in an attempt to knock out the enemy’s machine guns. The proper use of machine guns could decide battles and give a numerically inferior defender the fire superiority necessary to successfully repulse attacks. Especially for the German Army on the western front, the firepower of the machine gun came to replace the steadily diminishing personnel strengths of the infantry regiments. As opposed to the rifle bearers, machine gunners became the true pillars of infantry combat. It was for this reason that the machine gun crisis of 1915 was all the more strongly felt, German weapons makers having failed to produce sufficient quantities of machine guns to meet the requirements of the fighting forces. It was only the advent of the new production methods devised by Prof. Romberg and the introduction of standardization that led to a tenfold rise in monthly output with production of the MG 08/15. In addition to the standard MG 08 and MG 08/15 machine guns, the book also describes the Luft-MG 08 and 08/15 variants, the MG 08/18 which ended the Maxim development series, and the very

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