Machine Guns & Rifles WW1 Uncut

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE

This is a very unusual day. I've come to a...

..secret location in the east of England.

It's one of the few places in the country that you're allowed

to

fire heavy weaponry.

I've come here because we're looking at one of the most revolutionary

and important weapons of World War I.

The machine gun.

Machine

guns have been tested at this

weapons facility for generations,

and it bears the scars.

Machine guns rose to a position of such prominence in World War I

that they came to symbolise the entire conflict.

This

was a futuristic weapon,

unimaginable just a couple of generations before.

OK.

So we close the top cover.

Sight's already

up.

Pull that one through.

How many crew would these have had?

Anything between four and eight.

So it could have had an eight-man crew.

There's people loading these belts,

there's people carrying the equipment.

A guy that pulled the sled on harnesses attached to his webbing.

You had the guy that carried the gun.

The guy that brought all the ammunition up.

So we have here the trigger.

Then we just depress the triggers and away it should go.

OK, Dan.

And

now just depress

this over to one side

and you're now basically ready to fire.

That

is a feeling

of extraordinary power.

Given that it's the same as rifle ammunition,

but it feels like it's a piece of artillery.

Amazing.

Really amazing.

You certainly get the feeling of being on the end

of an extraordinary explosive power here.

You felt like you were projecting these bullets down the range.

Unlike anything I've

ever

experienced before.

One of the

ways to really get

an appreciation

for just how many bullets a machine gun is capable of firing

is to load it, and that means putting all these individual bullets

into an ammunition belt like this.

Right, let's fire the Vickers,

the British version.

I

mean, was this...

Do you think it's better than the German version? What's your opinion?

Yes, it was better, it was a lighter gun,

it was a very reliable gun.

Because there's that story about

the ten Vickers machine guns,

the summer of 1916 at the Battle of the Somme?

And they all fired continuously for

12 hours.

And in that case they managed to fire

one million rounds in 12 hours, didn't they?

DAVID: Yeah, and without any reported failures,

which is even more phenomenal.

Our

safety catch is these paddles,

which we pull towards us.

And this is now our trigger.

Right.

- Safety?

- Safety. Bends over the top.

- That's it. - Firing.

You

can really feel the shock waves

coming off that one, can't you?

You can. Basically, this is virtually identical to the German,

but being more lightweight,

you feel you're more exposed to it.

The German one was much heavier, much larger.

This one feels more like a sort of wild horse that's a bit skittish.

It's

a strange thing to come here

today and fire these machine guns

because you're actually replicating some of the actions of that caused

the deaths of hundreds

of thousands

of people during World War I.

But unless you come here and understand these

and work out what they can do,

it's really impossible to understand that slaughter in its entirety.

Right,

in a way, it's the odd one

out - the

Lewis gun.

DAVID: It is the odd one out.

But it actually outnumbered the Vickers three to one

by the end of the war.

And

this was brought into service

during the war.

This is state of the art in World War I.

It was. And it was the most mobile machine gun of World War I.

Because obviously these ones are quite immobile, aren't they?

You know, you think about these ones

being used in the classic

defensive

battles

and mowing down the oncoming infantry.

This is actually designed to be taken forward. It's an offensive weapon.

It is an assault weapon. Yeah, it certainly is.

It is the very first machine gun

that was designed really to be lightweight -

carry it and take the fight to the enemy across no-man's-land.

And the Germans hated it. They

despised it.

But they also admired it when they captured it,

and they used them in great numbers.

They used a lot of them, didn't they?

- Yeah. - Right, let's give it a go.

The

guys are just de-rigging

the guns now,

and it's been a shocking, but fascinating, demonstration

of the sheer power of these machine guns.

It's probably as close as I'm ever going to get to the sound

and some of the smells of a First World War battlefield,

thank goodness.

And just looking at these weapons, experiencing the kick

and seeing

the power that they throw

out, it really is a scary thing

to think about just how many deaths these guns have been responsible for.

EXPLOSION

SHOT

SHOT

The

design of a weapons system

tells you a huge

amount

about the culture of the society that produces them.

SHOT

In the case of the German Mauser rifle,

this was a superbly engineered bit of kit,

reflecting German engineering prowess.

About a metre-and-a-half long with a bayonet on the end, a reminder

that these rifles were also

to be used in close combat.

It

was descended

from a hunting rifle.

It was extremely accurate at very long ranges.

It's got a longer barrel than some of the other rifles at the time,

which is what gave it that accuracy and

that range.

It's made of walnut, which is a good, solid hardwood.

Weighs just over four kilos.

Right, I'm going to try and fire a few rounds off

on the famous Gewehr achtundneunzig.

Well,

it's certainly got

a lot of kick.

More than I was expecting.

And it feels like an extremely chunky, solid, reliable weapon.

SHOT

SHOTS

The

British were armed with this...

..Short Magazine Lee-Enfield.

The No 1 Mk III was issued to

British infantrymen in 1907,

and variants of this rifle continued to be used

way up into the late 20th century.

In fact, there are still police

forces around the world

that use this to the present day.

It's

about the same weight

as the German rifle,

but it's differently distributed.

It's a shorter weapon and already it feels far more wieldy.

Really, the key difference

is in this compartment here.

First of all, you can fit ten rounds in this magazine.

Not five, like the German gun.

So

you can shoot double the number

of bullets before you have to reload.

And secondly, this bolt action here is very different.

SHOT

It's

much smoother, much easier

to operate.

Right, let's give it a go.

It's

so noticeable. This... The bolt

action is so much smoother.

And the effort you've got to put into it is so much less.

It's just a far shorter range that you've got to move the bolt through

compared to the German Mauser.

And when you are here ready to fire it,

your finger's right here on the trigger.

It's a small difference but I think it's a really important one.

Also, it feels like

a far lighter

weapon almost.

It's shorter, it's easier to use.

It's much quicker to fire.

In fact, the British Army in 1914 went to war

knowing

that all

of the infantrymen could fire 15 aimed shots

every minute.

In

fact, one rifle instructor

was able to fire off 38 aimed

rounds in one minute.

That's

a phenomenal rate of fire.

The German army,

when they met the British Army in the second half of 1914

in the fields of France and Belgium,

were often convinced

they were attacking troops

armed with machine guns,

when, in fact, what they were doing was marching into

the concentrated rifle fire

of

British infantry

armed with the Lee-Enfield.

Let's

go up here and have look

at the target, see how I did.

Well, not brilliant - not an expert marksman.

But not bad for an inexperienced

rifleman.

Few shots on the target there.

Not great spacing, but it's only 500 metres.

It just goes to show how good those rifles are, that you can give them

to somebody pretty inexperienced like me.

These rifles are capable of delivering the bullets onto

the target as required.

But ultimately the big difference between the two guns in World War I

wasn't

accuracy,

it was rapidity.

Which rifle could fire the most rounds?

And if you want to put it to the test, you don't want me,

you need a professional marksmen, like Andy.

Firing

as many bullets as possible

under the same conditions,

the Lee-Enfield nearly always comes out on top.

With its smoother loading system and ten-round magazine,

this

was the world's

most effective rifle.

SHOTS

The

main point is that

both of those rifles were

brutally efficient

at the job they were designed to do.

The technological revolution, the firepower revolution

that

had taken place before

the First World War

meant that individuals could shoot far more accurately

far farther away.

And that's why the area between the two armies, this no-man's-land,

became a

total killing zone.

This was like nothing else in the history of warfare.

GUNFIRE

SHELL WHISTLES

EXPLOSION

PLANE PASSES OVERHEAD

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

MILITARY DRUMS