Another Sunday has been and gone on ABC free to air TV and another 15 minutes of historically slanted light entertainment has been viewed by the post Doctor Who masses.
The Boffin The Builder The Bombardier, or TBCubed for want of letter count, added to their World War One collection by 'investigating' The Mad Minute. That makes three out of four viewed programmes dedicated to WW1 and more interestingly, three out of four dedicated directly to some aspect of the .303 SMLE rifle. It this telling us something about the main period of interest for the head writer (who from speed reading the credits, AWB believes to be the 'Boffin' character. Seriously, the ABCs own website has been completely non helpful which does make one wonder where that extra $10million in funding is being wasted), or are we in reality seeing a reflection on the programmes props budget.
"Hey Davo, I've got these couple of 303s and some shoot range access. Wanna make a telly doco??"
Quite.
Anyway, back the programme. The myth of the week was the high rate of fire obtained by the highly trained career soldiers that made up the BEF during the first months of WW1 in France and how they cut down in waves the attacking Germans. The counter argument was that the musketry skills had little to do with it and the unimaginative German tactics had a lot to do with their own failure.
So, our TV heroes, to prove the claim of 15 or more aimed shots per minute set up a wall down range to represent a block of unimaginative Germans, and, stopwatch running, let fly for 60 seconds.
One minute later they had a large target filled with bullet holes and the conclusions were quickly made that the high level of training probably did have a lot to do with it, but only because of the poor German tactics.
Okay... what have we just actually proved? That three semi trained men can operate SMLE at a respectable speed? If you are ever a large plywood wall, then don't even think about going to war?
The problem here was that it is automatically assumed that the poor German tactics is an unquestionable fixed condition. True, actually proving the German tactics were poor is mildly tricky. To AWB's knowledge there are next to no photos of the Mons battles and even then, without context, they probably wouldn't be conclusive. To calculate it would probably require obtaining the (unreliable and incomplete) casualty returns, determine the axis of advance of the units involved, factor in the BEF casualties from German artillery, model using carefully calculated hit percentiles and... well.. take a wild arse guess. Point being is that you still have a whopping great variable and to draw a solid conclusion after shooting up a plywood wall is not history, it is shooting up a plywood wall.
Having solved the problems of the world in the first 5 minutes of their show, they then needed to fill in the rest of the ep and then attempted to match the record which was claimed at 32 some shots a minute. Now here our team not only didn't come close, but also didn't seem to investigate the historical situation. As AWB had it explained to them by an Australian Light Horse reinactor (so your mileage may vary, but remember we are comparing this to three guys who shoot walls), the pre-war 303 round was the round nosed MkVI. About 1916 this started to be replaced by the more powerful and pointed nose MkVII round. Now while AWB may have screwed up the mark numbers, the important thing was that the newer round had different powder and hence a far greater kick. The practical result of this was that the firer now had to hold the weapon a lot more firmly and could not get away with the previous trick of opening and closing the bolt with one's palm so that their finger tip could touch the trigger the moment the action was closed.
(try this at home with your Air 303. Imagine the bolt handle is in the centre of the palm and as you rock your hand forward your fingers are already reaching down towards the trigger in one smooth action. Bang. Repeat. Feel free to make the noises if it assists with the process.)
So, two conclusions. Either AWB was misinformed with an old wives shooting tale or TBCubed are really just three blocks shooting up plywood walls.
So, the conclusion that TBCubed is harmless non historical fun still stands.
Having successfully alienated the TBCubed crew with character assassinations, where does this leave us wargamers and what, if anything, can we learn from this?
AWB believes the prime thing to take away is that not many of us actually have a realistic grounding of what infantry firepower during the period could actually do. Your homework for this post (after you have finished playing with your air 303, air cleaned it and safely air locked it into the air weapons locker to prevent air accidents), is to dig out your current WW1 or 2 rules and find out how a machine gun is defined compared with a rifle. Most rules seem to give the tripod MG more/better firepower factors and range and leave it at that. After all, the ROF is higher, therefore more firepower. Right?
Well... maybe... and that brings us back to the idea that we do not really fully understand just how the weapons worked.
A typical Maxim style MG of the WW1 period comes in with a ROF of 600rpm cyclic. Now if you joined all the belts together and watched the cooling water you could probably keep that up for a long time. In reality most sources seem to list the practical and/or service rate of fire as more like 100-200 rpm. So if we take the middle of 150rpm and compare it to say 10 riflemen firing off 15 aimed shots per minute... Maybe apples to oranges but remember that a machine gun is a crew served weapon and depending on the army and the situation could easily have 10 men keeping it in operation so the comparison is not completely unfair.
We also need to look beyond the pure numbers of total bullets fired. Let us pretend that our team of 10 and our MG both encounter 20 enemy in the open. In this situation the 10 riflemen may prove to be more effective. They have the ability to volley fire and assuming a reasonable level of skill may only need to personally target 2 or 3 men each - easily a couple of seconds work even with bolt action rifles. Our MG in comparison, despite firing 10 rounds per second, would still to pan across the target area and, depending on the situation, may not successfully hit all the enemy before they disperse or take cover. In practical terms, the MG may actually be less 'deadly'.
However, having forced the enemy to cover, it is also probably a safe assumption that the MG would be a lot better at forcing them to stay there. If you can then act on the fact these enemy are pinned, either by moving infantry to flank or blowing them up with artillery, or both, then that is still a result and your work here is done, medals all round.
The commonly held assumption with WW1 is that the MG was the big killer, with scores of men being mown down by them. AWB feels this is at best a gross simplification and at worse just plain wrong. Accurate rifle fire could be very deadly and in fact many WW1 senior officers and trainers stressed the need for high levels of musketry training for effective assault troops, yet rifle units within WW1 gaming systems are often largely ignored. The machine gun by comparison is often a very deadly tabletop stand, where in real life it was probably not so much the killing weapon, as the denying weapon. MG fire could and did deny units the freedom to move. A more honest look at the cause of causalities in the battle will probably show that MGs killed relatively little, but instead pinned units in positions where they were unable to avoid the artillery fire that caused all the damage.
Which means what our TV heroes in TBCubed really need to do is throw away the SMLE rifles and drag out a Vickers and an 18 pounder.
No comments:
Post a Comment