What was the first war machine guns were used?

Answer 1

All the sides involved used machine guns, although the Germans used it to its best advantage. The Germans considered the standard infantry tactics in setting up their machine gun nests (one gun would be placed in the firing arc of another, so it was harder to capture without being fired on from many places at once).

All sides did use machine-guns in World War One. It is contentious to say that the Germans made best use of them.

Answer 2

They were used as fixed position weapons for the most part. They could be used for indirect (high angle) fire to shoot over a ridge line, or place plunging fire into a valley. However, for the most part they were used for low angle grazing fire. This made the traditional infantry assault almost impossible, and forced the use of trench warfare.

Answer 3

think the first machine gun used was between Russia and Germany and i think it was called the gatlin gun. it killed hundreds of people in seconds

Note: the gatlin gun was the main machine gun used prior to the 20th century. Some people consider Hiram Maxim the inventor of the "self-powered" machine gun. By the time WW1 occurred there was a lot of competition. The Gatlin was not used during the war by either side. See the link regarding what machine guns were used.

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The German Army were enthusiastic adopters of the machine gun. When the war broke out they already had machine gun companies in place all over the various war fronts. They had over 12,000 Maschinengewehr 08 (German version of the British machine gun, the Maxim, developed by Hiram Maxim) in place by August 1914.

The first use may have been between the Serbian and Austro-Hungarian forces who began fighting 1 of Aug. Not sure if machine guns were used because machine guns were in short supply among the Austro-Hungarian forces. It also could have been between Belgium and Germany with the German invasion of Belguim or Russia and Germany with the Russian invasion of East Prussia since these actions took place on Aug 4 1914.

See the link below for a good writeup on the development of the use of machine guns during WW1.

Answer 4

Technically, the first machine gun, the Gatling crank automatic weapon, was introduced during the American Civil War.

The Spanish American War saw the first use an fully automatic machine gun, the Browning M1895, which was used by American ships to lay suppressive fire on the Spanish vessels.

The first war to see the use of more modern belt fed machine guns was World War I, with the introduction of the Maxim machine gun, which was designed by an American, licenced by the British, and manufactured under licence by the Polish, Germans, and Soviets.

Answer 5

Several types of machine guns were used in small numbers during the American Civil War. The most sucessful were the Agar which disappeared after the war, and the Gatling which was later adopted by the US Army. None of these early machine guns saw enough use in the war to adequately rate their effectiveness. The first machine gun to be part of an army's tactical doctrine in a large scale war was the Mitraileusse, used by the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War. Like the Gatling, it was mounted on an artillery carriage, and because it looked like a cannon the French tried to use them like cannon. Prussian artillery destroyed them easily, and the machine gun would have to wait for the next war. The first machine guns, Gatlings, Nordenfelts, and others were extremely heavy, but they were mounted on warships as a weapon against boarding attack. In those days, war at sea was still conducted at fairly close ranges. The Maxim machine gun revolutionized the art of machine gunnery. It was still heavy, but lighter than its predecessors, and much improved mechanically. More importantly, armies had finally learned the proper tactical employment of the machine gun. If used offensively, the gun was brought forward in sections and quickly assembled using whatever cover might be available. If used defensively, the gun was already assembled in a "machine gun nest" protected by sandbags. The guns were spread apart so that an entire gun company would not be wiped out by a single hit from the enemy's artillery, but with overlapping fields of fire so that the guns could protect each other from infantry and cavalry attack.

Answer 6

Britain.

Hiram Maxim, who designed the machine gun which bore his name in 1884, first offered use of the machine to Britain.