Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/557

 Popular Science Mout/ih/

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���machine gun. It has a wooden stock like an ordinary rifle, and it can be fired from the shoulder, although hardly with automatic fire, because of the unbalancing effect of the series of hard drives of recoil. With the regulating latch set for one-shot fire, the gun fires once for each pull on the trigger, precisely like the well-known so- called auto- matic sporting rifles and shot- guns and pistols which reload themselves by the recoil and fire each time the trigger is pulled.

When the same latch is thrown down to automatic fire, however, the gun fires at a rate of speed higher than that of any known machine gun, and the twenty shots are fired in approximately two seconds! The Benet- Mercier would take this time or longer; the Colt and Vick-

ers three seconds. The magazine is readily replaced by a filled one.

Longer box-magazines — the form in which the cartridges are carried in this arm — can be used, but the twenty-shot is intended for use in the front line, where the firer may have to hug the ground and where a too-long magazine would make the automatic rifle hard to handle.

Consider the automatic rifle section of a platoon, then, each man carrying easily over his shoulder the lo-pound rifle, and loaded with ammunition packed in spare magazines, and with still more in the hands of ammunition carriers. Using one-shot fire, the firing party can easily empty a rifle with aim for each shot in ten seconds. Then, when the rush comes or when it is necessary hurriedly to sweep a

��The Benet-Mercier Machine Gun

The Benet-Mercier gun has been used by our army since 1908. It came originally from the French Hotch- kiss factory. It weighed about twenty-eight pounds, which means that it can be picked up and carried by one man in changing position. Benet-Mercier machine guns, however, come as light as fifteen pounds. This gun is operated by the powder gas passing through a tiny port in the bottom of the barrel about half way up. The gas strikes the head of a piston within a regular cylinder like that of a one-cylinder gas engine. The backward drive of this piston performs the various operations of compressing the retractor and main- springs, extracting and ejecting the empty shell, cocking the hammer, etc. Then the compressed springs drive home the bolt, with a fresh cartridge in the chamber

��trench traverse filled with the enemy, a shifting of the latch and a burst of fire of twenty shots in two .seconds! A single bur.st, and a twitch or two of the muzzle, and a traverse would be cleaned out. Such fire would have to be from the prone position or from the hip. No man can stand up under the repeated recoil of a

light machine gun fired from the shoulder.

The only competitor the new Brown- ing gun has is the little French Chau- chat "the hell- cat," used now in our army, and weighing nineteen pounds. Our experienced officers say even the twenty- six pound Lewis is too heavy for the automatic rifle work in the front line — and now every pla- toon of an in- fantry regiment has a machine gun or auto- matic rifle sec- tion — the terms being much the same in these days — the men of which carry light machine guns and ammunition, therefore, just as still another section carries only hand gren- ades. Some of the little fifteen pound terrors are now coming through the Winchester works.

So came about the crowning triumph of the Yankee, John Browning, designer of the Government's automatic pistol, and now the designer of the three most suc- cessful machine guns the world has seen, victors in fair trial over all other machine guns — the Browning water-cooled ma- chine gun, twenty-five pounds in weight, the Browning air-cooled machine gun for planes, still lighter weight, and the mar- vellous Browning automatic rifle or light machine gun, fifteen pounds.

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