The Madsen Machine Gun

5 The Madsen [6 June 1918] Gun. 6 kiss for the Cavalry; and the Vickers for points of defence. The Danish gun weighs only 15 lbs. if it is fitted with a heavy barrel)—that is, 5 lbs. more than an ordi- nary rifle; but if fitted with a long, light barrel, the same as the Lewis, it would weigh only 14 lbs. The heavy barrel, howe- | ver, is a distinct advantage. The Lewis gun i weighs 28% lbs.; the Hotchkiss 28 lbs.; and the Vickers 68 lbs. The Vickers is an excellent gun, and I belive it has been improved; but it is a gun entirely for defence and not for offence—I am talking of the Infantry—as yo,u cannot carry it easily. The spare parts of the Madsen gun are one-third lighter than the Lewis; and the magazine filled up with 3,600 cartrid- ges—that is, in magazines, not one maga- I zine—is 67 lbs. lighter than the Lewis. I This is an enormous advantage if you want to move a gun quickly. I do not think we can overrate the value of the Vickers gun ; for defence; but for trench attack, for air | attack, and for tanks, it is not as good as ; the Danish gun would be. The total weight 1 of the Madsen gun and spare barrel, with 3,600 rounds, is 83 lbs. lighter than the Lewis gun. The Danish gun is superior to the Lewis—which is the trench gun at present—in every singular particular. If your Lordships will allow me I will enume- rate in what particulars it is superior. The first advantage is that it can keep up a sustained fire of 18,000 rounds. That has been done. This means, of course, changing the magazines which hold forty- four rounds each. The Madsen gun cannot jam. It operates by recoil, and not by gas —as do the Hotchkiss and the Lewis guns —which fouls the mechanism; the gas makes the mechanism and cover hot as well as the barrel. The mechanism of the Da- nish gun is extraordinarily simple, far more so than either the Hotchkiss or the Lewis. The gun can be fired from the shoulder like an ordinary rifle, with the bayonet fixed; you can fire standing or kneeling or in any position without any support whatever. As I have said, the magazine holds forty-four rounds, and the gun can fire 400 rounds in a minute. Another advantage of the gun is this. As your Lordships may know, if the enemy see a machine-gun about, whether it is being carried or in action, they concen- trate the whole of their rifle fire upon it; but this gun could not be told from an ordinary rifte at a distance of 100 yards. A further advantage is that the men can be trained to handle it very quickly; it can be handled at easily as a rifle, and you can. fire a single shot from it simply by touching a lever at the side—as long as you keep your finger on the trigger the gun fires the same as a Maxim does. The Madsen gun is mechanically sound in every respect. Another great point is that the men can be taught to take this gun to pieces and to assemble it again, to drill at it and to work at it, in about twelve hours; whereas it takes about three weeks to teach the same men to do the same thing with the Lewis. If taken to pieces, the parts of the Madsen gun are only seven. The parts of the Lewis gun are eighty-six, and among those eighty-six parts is an enormus lot of springs, which, as your Lordships know, are a weak point in any rifle on active service. In my opinion the Danish gun is superior for either attack or defence—■ certainly for attack. With a gun of this kind there may be raised, of course, the old argument—as to its capability for firing 18,000 rounds an hour—that you would soon get through your ammunition. Bat I want to point out that you do not want to fire 18,000' rounds in an hour; what you want to do is to fire at that rate for two or three minutes, and. you will have plenty of ammunition. I have known this old matter of ammunition for many years. When I went to sea in 1859 we had the same guns as Lord Nelson: our main armament was 32-pou.nders and 18-poun.der carronades, muzzle-loading, cast- iron guns. When I was a midshipman we used to fire at the rocks and other tar- gets of a like nature on the shore, and I have frequently been sent to pick up the shots we had fired and to bi’ing them back to the shot-locker so as not to waste ammunition. Then we came to the breech-loading gun, and the same argument was advanced again. Then we came to the quick-firing breech-loading gun. The improvement in gunnery of the quick-firing breech-loading gun over the breech-loading gun was enormously more than the improvement of the breech-loading gun over the old muz- zle-loading gun, but we had the same