So all day today I've had a bunch of ideas banging around in my head. Scenes for S5DS04, scenes for the second episode of TLOK6, the last piece of Desolation Angel: The Blue Flame Chronicle, the main action set-piece of Technical Difficulties, even a couple bits of the Day of Infamy retool.

If you're curious about why I didn't write any of those things today, it's because school is in session and I was busy working on this crap instead.

Yay.

--G.

---

Benjamin D. Hutchins
HTY 492 – Spring 2014
March 23, 2014

Thoughts on Ellis's The Social History of the Machine Gun

Although it is a significant work on an important topic, not only in the context of twentieth-century warfare but also of the way in which armed conflict is managed today, John Ellis's The Social History of the Machine Gun is flawed in ways that may tend to damage one's confidence in its authority. Some of its flaws could be indicative of simple editorial carelessness, but a few stand out as so peculiar and evidently deliberate as to call the whole matter into question.

The first and most prominent of these is the bewildering misidentification of one of the most prominent firearms designers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Moses Browning. At his first mention on page 16, Browning is identified as William Browning. Further, on page 41, in the caption of a photograph plainly depicting John M. Browning with his M1917 heavy machine gun, he is identified as William J. Browning – an arrestingly specific misnomer.

This is not simply a case of attaching the wrong name to a person shown in an old photograph. John Browning was the designer of virtually every American firearm of consequence between 1885 and 1935 (despite the fact that he died in 1926). It may be argued that Browning is a minor figure in Ellis’s narrative, which focuses mainly on the Gatling and Maxim guns at that stage in machine gun history, and therefore this is not a significant error. I contend, however, that he was such a seminal figure in early-twentieth-century firearms history that blatantly misidentifying him thus, even in a context where he is being given only peripheral importance, is an egregious – even jarring – failure of scholarship.¹ It is akin to reading a history of the General Motors Corporation and discovering a reference to GM’s competitors, Ernest Ford and Gerald E. Chrysler.

Beyond this simple but startling error, Ellis indulges in other, more elaborate, curious lapses. On page 28 he trots out the tired allegation that Richard J. Gatling was a Confederate sympathizer who sited his factory in Cincinnati, Ohio, near the Kentucky border, in the hopes that it would be captured by the rebels. He has the grace to couch this accusation in weasel words like it seems and it is even alleged, but offers no evidence; in fact he has none to offer, as these allegations, made against Gatling during his lifetime, do not hold up to historical scrutiny.² Furthermore, they are irrelevant to the topic being discussed, which is Gatling's struggle to get his invention noticed by the United States Army – a problem that was hardly unique to Richard J. Gatling or his eponymous gun. The problem of gaining military acceptance for machine guns in various guises will continue to preoccupy Ellis's narrative right through World War I, long after he has finished offhandedly impugning Gatling's character.³

Strange lapses and questionable digressions aside, there is historical value in this book. The central theme of the gulf between the machine gun's capabilities and military thought, and its horrific cost in the First World War, occupies the bulk of the work, and it’s a theme that deserves investigating. The narrative becomes a trifle repetitive here, true, but that is because the historical events themselves were repetitive, as the supposed best military minds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in Europe, resolutely failed to learn the obvious lessons of the American Civil War. Or the Boer War. Or the Russo-Japanese War. Or, indeed, any armed conflict in which rapid-fire weapons were employed, up to and including most of the Great War itself. Ellis pulls no punches here, using example after example to illustrate not just the incompetence, but in many places the willful incompetence, of those responsible for the frightful slaughter the Western Front became in 1914 and remained for four long, soggy, bloody, miserable, utterly futile years – from generals refusing to adopt the machine gun in the first place to commanders at all levels failing to implement it properly or take it seriously once it reached the field.

Powerful though this section is, it strikes me that Ellis missed an opportunity to contextualize the folly of the war more broadly. By focusing exclusively on the adoption (or, in most cases, non-adoption) of the machine gun itself, he shortchanges the myriad other ways in which Western military thinking had failed to advance in the century since Napoleon's defeat. This gives the illusory impression that the terror of World War I was more-or-less solely about the terrible killing power of the machine gun and the Allied generals' failure to grasp its significance, which is perhaps understandable in a book with such a specific focus, but overlooks much potentially useful context. To take just two examples:

- The machine gun was far from the only technology whose potential to shape the battlefield was underestimated or outright dismissed by the uniformed thinkers of the day. For instance, as late as the 1930s, influential military authorities were still voicing open skepticism about the strategic usefulness of the aircraft, a tool which one would think had proven its value many times over in the same war which finally drove home the importance of automatic fire. Ellis makes vague reference to other slowly-adopted military technologies in his conclusion, as part of a general view of twentieth-century war as an industrial undertaking, but he fails to draw the various threads of the topic together to give a really coherent broad context;

- Similarly, no attention is given to the remarkable state of European political and social disarray that led to the Great War in the first place. While not directly relevant to the question of the machine gun, this fact – that Europe found itself involved in such a vast and destructive conflict in the first place because of applications of human folly, pigheadedness, and vanity so liberal as to make the British and French generals' heel-dragging about machine guns seem like a minor personality quirk – would have gone far toward informing the overall narrative. That such a disastrous moment in human history can be examined for one specific facet - a single aspect of military technology – without accounting for the overall insanity of the age is an interestingly compartmentalized view, but not, I think, one with much weight behind it.

In the light of the above, Chapter VI might at first seem like another peculiar digression, veering as it does away from military matters entirely to discuss the civilian use of the Thompson submachine gun in the inter-war period (and a brief interlude in film studies), but in a way, this section actually strikes closer to Ellis's central theme than much of the material about World War I. This is, after all, a social history of the machine gun, and the non-military uses of such a weapon are surely relevant to that theme, as is its impact on the popular culture of its time. In particular, the Auto-Ordnance advertisement reproduced on page 151 is telling. "The ideal weapon for the protection of large estates," indeed.

Ellis's concluding chapter, in which he examines the postwar impact of automatic weapons on military strategy, then endeavors to summarize his conclusion, is curiously abrupt considering the exhaustive nature of the middle part of his narrative. In the course of it, he brushes against matters that seem like they would have borne much closer scrutiny, such as the relevance of modern industrial production technologies to the genesis of modern weapons in the first place, in a manner too cursory, and too late in the work, to be really satisfactory. It is not until the final page that he comes to what, in hindsight, appears to have been his real point all along: the comparison of the machine gun, and both the military and civil society's struggle to understand its significance, with the atomic bomb.

In the concluding paragraph, the entire work is revealed as a sort of historical shaggy dog story, 180 pages of scaffolding meant to support the grimly pessimistic conclusion that those who view technology in a positive light are naïve. It is a somewhat annoying bait-and-switch to be hurried past the omissions and context faults enumerated above only to be chided sarcastically that "those optimists who foresee [humanity] being conveyed triumphantly into a neon sunset would do well to ponder the history of the machine gun."

As noted before, there is value here; the struggle to modernize the prevailing modes of thought about warfare is one which resonates today, in the era of armed drones and multi-million-dollar "smart weapons" on whose precise advantages few military theorists can seem to agree. In The Social History of the Machine Gun, however, this value is overshadowed – sometimes to a maddening degree – by quirky scholarship, sloppy editing, odd digressions, and a manipulative authorial bias which only reveals its true character at the very end. It is a deeply flawed and irritating work which finds its own academic usefulness compromised by its author’s overarching need to make his pessimistic concluding point.

¹ It is doubly puzzling that such an error got past not one, but two editors, given that the edition we are reading is the book's second. That such a basic mistake could be committed and then go unnoticed during the book’s publication and its preparation for paperback release is slightly shocking – particularly in light of the fact that Browning is correctly named in another photograph caption on page 176, and in both the work’s bibliography and bibliographical essay.

² Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 124-5.

³ Again, one wonders where his editor was.

Bibliography
Ellis, John. The Social History of the Machine Gun. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Keller, Julia. Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun that Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genuis Who Invented It. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.