Vickers machine gun

We've had people ask already, when's it going to come out? And there's a few other projects to be done first.

And ironically, we're starting this Small Arms Small Talk podcast of the Vickers MG Collection.

By talking about a brain gun.

And the book that, although we've got Vicar's 44 to 45 Northwest Europe Infantry out there already, the Vicar's First World War book needs to be one that is on our shelf.

All these areas are Bren gun, I'm not a specialist in.

I used to use the hashtag expert by accident because of the amount of material that we have accumulated in the archive on the Bren, the Lewis, the Hotchkiss, likely more than anybody else at least has digitized.

They might have more material, but digitized and accessible in the way that we do through Patreon for the Vickers MG Supporter Core.

It is one of those that it's all scanned, digitized and accessible.

The favorite gun in my collection is actually sitting in my Washington, D.C. office.

It is a 1915 water-cooled Vickers belt-fed machine gun.

And it's operational?

Fully operational, absolutely.

All right, it's two serial numbers different from mine.

And all of the guns have the exact same data plate on the back of them from Colt because they were converted.

You know, the Vickers is a British gun.

And it was originally in 303 British.

Did you spot the Thompson on a tripod at the end?

I did, but did you also spot the Vickers K aerial machine gun in the cave?

Yes, yes.

And the Lewis guns, the aerial Lewis guns.

Well, there is footage of Japanese troops using Lewis guns

in the attack.

There is, and there's footage of Japanese troops using Vickers guns because they licensed

the

Other weapons are in critically short supply.

We are apt to forget how short of machine guns the British Army is in 1915, and these are almost universally heavy machine guns, Vickers, Maxims.

There's problems procuring them.

The cost of these machine guns is very high.

In fact, the British government intervenes and threatens Vickers that unless they reduce the cost of these machine guns, there's going to be an investigation into war profiteering.

This does lead to changes.

But machine guns in Army hands are always quite precious.

The second HMAS Sydney, designated as D48, was one hundred and seventy-one meters long with a beam of seventeen meters.

Her impressive armament included eight six-inch guns mounted on twin turrets, four four-inch quick-firing high-angle naval guns, twelve Vickers thirteen-millimeter machine guns quad-mounted on three turrets, twelve Vickers half-inch machine guns and three quad mounts, twelve Lewis machine guns, and eight twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes.

As built, four three-pound Hotchkiss guns were included, but they were later removed in 1940.

A Supermarine Walrus amphibious patrol aircraft was also included on board and could be launched via catapult for reconnaissance.