Machine guns are only effective against a massed enemy. Attempting to use machine guns against individual birds will always result in a lot of misses. This is why machine guns are placed on the flanks of a position with overlapping fields of fire – you do a lot more damage firing down a line of men than at the center of the line, especially given that the Lewis guns could only fire short bursts lest they overheat. What is shocking is not that the Australian Army used machine guns against emus, but that anyone who has ever used a machine gun would have imagined that they would be effective.
The gunners missed because the birds engaged in emugency maneuvers.
This is probably the best thread title I’ve ever seen.
I couldn’t imagine someone using a machine gun against single birds, so I assumed that there were masses of them that they were trying to gun down. If there was only one bird in an area at a time, why didn’t they get out their rifles and carefully aim?
Will machine guns work against emos?
The practical range of a machinegun is greater than that of a semi automatic in the same caliber. E.g.: M-14 is good to about half a mile, the M-240 up to a mile (on a tripod). M-16: 0.5km (this seems optimistic) whereas the M-249 is good out to about 1km.
More bullets= more chances of hitting, greater likelihood of multiple hits, takes less time. It may also not require as much skill as using a marksman’s rifle.
“Machine guns are only effective against a massed enemy”
I’m not sure of what you mean by “massed enemy”. Do you mean 19th century-style tight ranks? Your reference to “a line of men” makes me think you do. If so, your basic premise is false.
MGs are often preferred even in cases where individuals are much more sparsely distributed than that. All NATO militaries I’m familiar with include MGs (or beefed up assault rifles meant to be MGs) in each infantry squad and those squads never encounter lines of men. Perhaps all those militaries are wrong and should only deploy MGs when fighting 19th century militaries.
Johnny LA: Some questions can only be answered empirically.
Australian wildlife is truly a formidable enemy. Kangaroos are known for launching anti-air rockets against helicopters.
Anyway, the machine guns they have deployed are made before World War II (since it was 1932), so although machine guns are more viable against these emu threat due to the volume of fire necessary against a large number of fast-moving, highly elusive threats, these old-style machine guns are susceptible to malfunction and/or jam. They probably had to deploy machine guns anyway, since bird hunters with marksman rifles aren’t enough to kill a lot of these emus.
At the beginning of WW1 it was still thought a viable tactic to charge enemy positions en masse to try to simply overrun the defenders. So not a classic rank and file but still a mass of infantry spread out across a front of the enemy line they were trying to take. If you use enfilade fire across the front of the advancing attackers you are almost guaranteed to hit someone with nearly every bullet. It was this experience that taught military tacticians that frontal assaults against machine gun emplacements were not a good idea.
A post on the use of full-auto fire today: When is firing full-auto a good tactic?
Melchett: Field Marshal Haig has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.
Blackadder: Ah. Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy?
Captain Darling: How could you possibly know that, Blackadder? It’s classified information!
Blackadder: It’s the same plan that we used last time and the seventeen times before that.
Melchett: Exactly! And that is what is so brilliant about it! It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard! Doing precisely what we’ve done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time!
Eagle’s basic premise is that MGs are only effective against massed enemy. My point is that today (where massed enemy is almost never encountered) it’s still effective. The fact that MGs were effective against what you describe doesn’t mean they’re not effective against sparser distributions. MGs seem plenty effective even today, when massed formations are very rare, which falsifies eagle’ contention that it’s only effective against a massed enemy.
As for full-auto: It’s true that full auto may only be effective against a massed (or very close) enemy but it doesn’t mean MGs are. When I was taught to use them, we were told to shoot them in 5 to 10 round bursts. The highest practical rate of fire for them was 100 rounds/min, which is about one 6th to one 10th of an MG’s cyclical rate (what it’s mechanically capable of).
The Emu war would seem to be a missed opportunity to train up some truly formidable snipers.
“The Emu War” sounds like something fought by the British in the latter 19th century. And as the saying went:
“Whatever happens,
we have got
the Maxim gun
and they have not”.
Why didn’t they just herd them into a pit and line up cowboys on either side with repeating rifles. . .oops, wrong movie.
A question eminently worthy of research.
Cite? They could only fire short bursts because that’s all they had; 550rpm from magazines of 47 or 97 rounds means maximum bursts of 5 or 10 seconds respectively anyway.
I just love that the Australian Army had a war with emus. I can picture an old grizzled sargeant sitting around a fire. “War is hell; it’s the waiting, knowing that somewhere, out there, is an emu with your name on it…”
“Beak awful out there!”
On MGs, a 5 second burst is rather long. It’s short by Hollywood standards but then, non-Hollywood soldiers are affected by ammo weight, ammo scarcity, recoil and muzzle climb. Notice how those guys do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=697CfQX2xBk&feature=related
Right. The little saying the teach you to say while firing is “Die mother effer, die.” That should take about 2-3 seconds.
Reading the article 100:1 round per kill ratio doesn’t actually seem too bad given the circumstances. MGs are really only used to engage a point target if you have a really stable mount, like a tripod or a vehicle.