Why were Gatling guns declared obsolete in 1911?

Factual Questions
1

According to this site
“Obsolescence. With a advent of the automatic machine gun, the U.S. Army declared their Gatling gun obsolete in 1911, after 45 years of service to the U.S. Army.”

No further elaboration given.

If I understand properly, the Gatling gun can produce a higher sustained rate of fire and is less prone to jams (or clears quicker?) than the typical automatic machine gun.

Wouldn’t mounting a single .50 Gatling be lighter and provide better firepower than, for example, the 4 M-2 .50’s and 20mm Hispano the P-38 mounted. (Or consider the B-25H with 8 .50’s and a 75mm up front.)

This can’t be as simple as – “An automatic machine gun is automatic, with a Gatling someone has to turn the crank” and nobody thought to hook a fan motor to the Gatling. Is it?

What was the real complication?

2

Even if a Gatling gun can produce a higher sustained rate of fire than a later-model machine gun, I’ll bet that it can’t produce a greater rate of fire than six machine guns. The multiple barrels, and the mechanism to rotate between them, has to add a lot of cost and complexity.

3

Two reasons:

  1. Weight: the GG was like a small artillery piece-it weighed about 650 pounds, and needed to be hauled by a horse. Machine guns are light and can be moved easily
  2. Innacurate: the GG keyholed like crazy-at beyond 100’, the bullets wanderd around-machine guns were far more precise. The GG was OK when used against indian warriors, but useless against european (traned) soldiers, who hugged the ground and used cover.
    The virtue of the GG is its extremely high rate of fire-which is why it was revived for use on fighter planes.
4

And they made it bigger and better, noteworthy examples include the Vulcan Cannon, which fires 20mm explosive shells at 6,000 rounds a minute, and the Avenger Cannon, which fires 30mm depleted uranium shells at a somewhat more sedate rate of only 4,200 rounds per minute.

So yeah, the Gatling Gun was retired, probably due to things like the weight issue - lugging around six gun barrels and maintaining all the moving parts couldn’t have been fun. It’s worth noting that they came back only after we developed big enough vehicles to mount them effectively (the 20mm cannons in fighter jets, the 30mm cannon in the A-10, and 7.62mm miniguns in vehicles like helicopters and some ground vehicles.

In most other applications, Machine guns are still evidently considered to be a better fit, probably because some poor bastard has to carry the thing.

5

I believe they tested electric motors on Gatling guns in the 1890s, achieving rates of fire in the 3,000 round-per-minute range, but considered that ROF excessive – it was hard enough to lug the gun around on its carriage, and eating up ammo that quickly just added to the logistical burden. As a shipborne weapon it might have had benefits, but it was considered preferable to simply use a larger caliber round at a lower rate of fire (ships of the era mounted rotary cannon of up to 37mm or more in size).

6

I’d buy the “weight” reason, but there’s too much talk about Indian warriors fighting from cover for me to buy this particular assertion.

7

The Gatling was also very tall, making it a rather large target for trained rifle fire. The Maxim gun can be fired from a prone position if necessary, and even the standard position offers a much smaller target than the Gatling.

8

This Gatling doesn’t look obsolete to me.

9

But these are.

10

For one thing, machine guns aren’t typically fired non-stop like you’re implying. Generally speaking, they’re fired in 4-10 round bursts, and used much like a long-range shotgun, so having a big-assed Gatling on a wheeled carriage or even on a tripod wouldn’t necessarily have been any more useful than a water-cooled Browning in that era, and due to the higher rate of fire and spin-up time, was probably less useful.

Now if you have an electric motor to spin it up real quick, and you have an application where you have to put a lot of lead downrange in a hurry, then rotary guns of some kind are where it’s at. If you need short bursts, then revolver cannons (revolving cylinder, one barrel) are the way to go; longer bursts and sustained fire are where gatlings shine- with multiple barrels, the barrels don’t heat up so fast, and cool off better.

One reason that the P-38 had what it had, is because the M2 used was basically the same one used on other fighters, bombers, tanks, jeeps, ships, PT boats, etc… so there was a lot of value to be had in commonality of parts, ammunition, training, etc…

11

The U.S. Navy still likes 'em: Phalanx CIWS - Wikipedia

12

Thanks for all the replies, I thought about several of those but none really seemed reasons to declare the weapon obsolete and drop it from the inventory for 30 years.

But y’all lead me back to what I think is the trick I missed. I was looking at the Gatling from the 1940’s where even aircraft could have carried a Gatling type system and jeeps and armored vehicles were becoming commonplace vs 1911 where WW1 was three years away, armies still used human and animal power to carry everything, and airplanes barely existed.

So it’s a bit easier to see why having a light-weight machine gun vs a Gatling must have been seen as rendering the Gatling completely outmoded.

Still doesn’t seem to satisfy and support a “obsolete” declaration, so figured somewhere there had to be a study or documentation supporting that finding.

If curious, you can read below as to why I figured even a WW2 aircraft (especially the P38, Martin B26, Douglas A/B-26, B-25 which all featured substantial nose armament) could have handled a Gatling style weapons system in the nose…

I’ll continue with the P-38 which mounted 4 .50’s and a 20mm cannon in the nose. With the 20mm Hispano weighing in at 94lbs and the Browning .50s at 84lbs each, that’s about 340lbs right there not counting ammo and feeders.

According to the Wiki articles, a modern GAU-19 (the .50 version) weighs in, with feeder and transfer units, at 139lbs and even the Vulcan M61, without the feed system, comes in at only 250lbs; however, the feeder adds a lot of weight (200-300lbs) that puts the 20mm system closer to 500lbs.

Allowing for improvements in metallurgy and the like, I still can’t see a 1940’s system significantly outweighing these weapons since the M61 development started in 1946. So weight wouldn’t seem to be an obstacle that difficult to overcome as development proceeded.

Not sure about accuracy, the stuff I’ve read (never fired one) comment that Gatlings are very accurate, but couldn’t find anything that seemed to quantify that or why.

Again, to the plus side, the Gatling is much more reliable. Modern systems are reported to be capable of firing as many as 30,000 rounds without a jam. (PDF) I can’t think of anything I shot in my brief stint with the military that could get off more than a couple hundred rounds without an issue.

I recall, vaguely, something like part of the reason WW2 fighters carried 5-6 machine guns was so that 2 would still be unjammed and working by the end of the mission. Wish I could remember where that came from.

What it boiled down to for me was that even the drawbacks of the Gatling didn’t present insurmountable obstacles and there seemed some fairly useful advantages.

And that posed the question as to why a pretty firm declaration from the Army that they wanted nothing more to do with the Gatling because it was obsolete?

And that loops us back to me thinking of 1940 tech vs what was foreseen in 1911 and takes us back to the top of this post.

13

They’ve proven surprisingly ineffective against predators.

14

Obviously there, the problem wasn’t that the Gatling was ineffective, simply that they should have used MORE Gatlings. Like all of them carrying Gatling guns, with Ahnold unloading two of them - Gatlings Akimbo!

15

Viet Nam had the AC47’s Spooky (also nicknamed “Puff the Magic Dragon”) with GE Miniguns. The minigun had multiple barrels just like a Gatling gun.

Each minigun produced 4000 rounds per minute and there were 3 in the plane. :eek:

16

Or perhaps they needed to use slightly higher caliber Gatlings.

17

Fighters carried multiple guns to get the maximum amount of bullets into the air in a single burst. The Hurricane and Spitfire were given eight guns because it was calculated that targets would only be in sight for max 2 seconds. Given the small calibre of the guns to be used it was determined that eight would be required to get the weight of fire required to bring down a modern aircraft.

And as for developing and using Gatling style weapons, the US had enough difficulty just getting cannon to work. Tens of thousands of 20mm cannon were produced but never used because of reliability and other issues. So if it was difficult to introduce a new weapon that was based on an existing design and successfully in use with the British. Imagine how much more difficult it would have been to introduce an even more radical design.

18

To reiterate what bump said, commonality is important. By WWII the ‘Ma-Deuce’ had been around for about 20 years, and the supply chain for parts, ammunition, personnel, etc. was established. Certainly aircraft had special weapons and needs compared to ground forces, and these were accommodated. Certainly some squadrons mounted 75mm cannons in the noses of their B-25s and they were so successful North American offered ‘kits’ for field installation. But the M2s and the M4s were variants of existing pieces. For aircraft to be armed with Gatling guns, the guns would have had to have been developed for the purpose and tested. With a war on, this would have been impractical. For example, YP-80 Shooting Stars entered service in 1944. But the P-51 Mustang was already being produced in quantity, and there was no reason to get the P-80 into full service. A hypothetical Gatling gun would have needed an electric motor to operate, whereas the M2 only needed a solenoid to be fired remotely. There was less to go wrong (e.g., electrical failure, or fires from overheated motors) with the M2. Assuming a greater rate of fire, more ammunition would have had to have been carried. As it was, fighters often ran out of ammo. The added weight would have degraded performance. Weight could have been reduced by having fewer guns. You’d have the same amount of lead flying out, because you’d have a higher rate of fire. But I’d rather have six effective, battle-proven guns than two or four newly-developed ones.

So using the M2 instead of a newly-developed Gatling gun retains the existing supply chain. The M2 can be used without electrical power (except in aircraft where they are remotely mounted). You don’t want dead batteries when you’re in a firefight! Everyone was familiar with the operation of the M2, which is really like any other gun, as opposed to a type that your typical farmer would be unlikely to have grown up with. Gatling guns have proven useful for special applications since Vietnam, but in WWI and WWII the M1919 and the M2 were better designs.

19

Interestingly enough, from what I’ve read in various places, the 75mm was more “fun” than “useful”. The muzzle velocity was too slow to be used effectively from an airplane, and the recoil could damage the airframe over time. They preferred to just fill the nose with M2 machine guns, with the max loudout for a B-25 being eight machine guns in the nose, plus four more in dual cheek-mounts.

20

I hadn’t heard that. Since the muzzle velocity is certainly greater than the aircraft’s airspeed, did it really matter? I’d always wondered how they aimed the bloody thing, since IIRC it was hand-loaded and thus didn’t have much of a cyclic rate. I heard they aimed it by firing the .50 caliber machine guns, which had tracers in the chain, and fired when the bullets were hitting the ship.

Recoil would have been a problem over time, but aircraft weren’t expected to last all that long back then. ‘War weary’ planes were often put to other uses; for example, I remember a B-24 painted in polka-dots that was used for a mustering plane, and others were used as ‘squadron hacks’.