Comments by "Big Blue" (@bigblue6917) on "Vickers Heavy Machine Gun" video.

  1. During a battle in WW1 the British wanted to benign an area 2000 yards from their positions in order to stop the Germans counter attacking. They set up ten Vickers machine guns from the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps and fired continually for 12 hours. They had a team there doing the loading of the rounds into the belts and they went through so much water that they even used the contents of the latrine buckets. I love the smell of hot urine in the morning, to paraphrase Col Kilgore. And in that 12 hour period the ten guns used one hundred new barrels and one million rounds were fired. I believe they had one stoppage but all guns were still firing after 12 hours. It may well be that when they later did the five million round test they may have known about the event I mentioned above and wanted to see the effects on the gun. The belts used on the Vickers were nine yards long and when a machine gunner asked how many rounds to fire was often told give them the whole nine yards. Now you know where that came from.
    1