Dec 13: Forgotten machine-guns II: Louis Schmeisser and the Dreyse-MG
Probably even before 1907, thus before the takeover by Rheinmetall, Louis Schmeisser moved as chief designer to the Dreyse-Werke in Sömmerda, which after the takeover by Rheinmetall operated as “Rheinische Metallwaaren- und Maschinenfabrik (Rheinmetall), Abt. Sömmerda”. This Dreyse company had little to do with the factory of inventor and designer Nikolaus (or Nicolaus, that is not entirely clear) von Dreyse, who had supplied the German Army with innovative needle guns in the middle of the 19th Century. After the death of his father on December 9, 1867, his son Franz von Dreyse had tried to continue this success, however his efforts to sell a needle revolver to the Prussian Army failed. Dreyse participated with commercial success in the license production of Reich revolvers for the German armies, but he failed to produce a groundbreaking design of his own.
Dreyse turned to the production of hunting and sport weapons, until following the death of Franz von Dreyse in 1894 there was a clear downturn in the production of weapons. The hiring of Louis Schmeisser was therefore probably supposed to bring new and innovative impetus to Dreyse’s weapons development program. As chief designer, at Dreyse, Louis Schmeisser met Louis Stange, a young next-generation designer, with whom he began working on a machine gun. Louis Schmeisser probably used ideas which he had previously brought to his designs at Bergmann. In any case, several components of the Bergmann and Dreyse machine guns are so similar that it is difficult to believe they were the result of chance. The bolts of both MGs were designed as straight pull-through systems. Louis Schmeisser continued development of the heart of the weapon, the lock, and in 1909 he received an American patent for it.
Schmeisser had designed a rotating block lock, in which the breechblock was locked by a falling locking block mechanism, which with the breechblock locked, placed itself behind it and braced it. The movement of this block was controlled by the hammer. This design was also a recoil loader. That development took place during Dreyse’s Rheinmetall era and it represented a clear technical difference from the breechblock of the Bergmann machine gun. Rheinmetall seems to have offered this gun as the “Dreyse MG” in 1912. The Dreyse Machine Gun was liquid cooled with an approximately four-litter water jacket and was fed by fabric ammunition belt like the one used by the MG 08. Firing was combined with spade grips and functioned in a similar fashion as on the MG 08 – however a shoulder stock could be mounted on the rear end of the receiver. The weapon could be fired over open sights with folding pillar-type rear sight and a range setting up to 2,000 meters or using an optical sight with threefold magnification. The weapon was mounted on a relatively light tripod with wheels, to which a small armour shield could be attached.
Rheinmetall succeeded in selling several examples of this version, called the Model 1911, to China. Dolf Goldsmith includes a photograph of six liquid-cooled machine guns on tripod mounts in “The Devil’s Paintbrush” with the period caption: “Bergmann Model 1911 machine guns destined for China.” During the war the pick-up for this tripod was modified so that the bipod from the 08/15 could also be used, enabling the Dreyse MG to also be used as a light machine gun. The Dreyse Machine Gun thus followed a concept similar to that of the Maxim gun. It clearly came onto the market too late, for by 1912 most armies had made their decisions as to which machine gun should enter service.
Dreyse Machine Gun Specifications
Manufacturer: Rheinische Metallwaaren- und Maschinenfabrik (Rheinmetall)
Operating principle: Recoil loader with swing bolt support
Calibre: 8 mm x 57 IS
Rate of fire: 600 rounds per minute
Ammunition feed: Fabric belt with 250 rounds, like that of the MG 08
Overall length: 1,170 mm (without shoulder stock)
Barrel length: 720 mm, right hand twist with 4 grooves
Weight: 13.5 kg (without coolant)
Production: approx. 3,000 examples
The weapon’s feed and follower mechanisms pulled cartridges from the belt by means of springs and claws and fed them into the chamber, where they were ignited by the open bolt. This design, which was very similar to that of the Bergmann machine gun, was simple and had the advantage of being less vulnerable to dust and gummed oils than the cartridge feed in the “elevator” of the MG 08. A disadvantage was its relatively light design, whose spring forces could be overloaded by the centrifugal forces of a turning aircraft, leading to feed interruptions which had to be cleared by the gunner in flight. Both the Bergmann and Dreyse machine guns were therefore probably unsuited for use as aircraft armament. Fired from the more stable firing platform of a tripod or bipod and shoulder stock, this factor was irrelevant. On the other hand, the Dreyse MG was less vulnerable to dirt. Another shortcoming of the Dreyse machine gun was the weakness of its belt feed mechanism, which received its working energy indirectly from the recoiling breechblock, not directly from the recoil energy of the barrel as on the Maxim and Bergmann machine guns. The pulling force for the machine gun belt was thus relatively weak, which together with the complicated spring mechanism described above was a source of feed interruptions. Like all other German machine guns of the First World War the charging handle moved forward and backward as the weapon was fired. On the Dreyse MG the crank handle was directly combined with the breechblock, so that the gunner could tell from the position of the crank handle in which position the breechblock had stopped: “If the gun jams and the crank handle is found to have stopped in the middle, the first step in clearing it is always to open the cover.”
In 1925, Generalleutnant Wurtzbacher, chief of the Army Ordnance Office in the Reichswehr Ministry, gave Director Gustav Wesemann the task of looking into the frictions, from industry’s point of view, that had developed from working with the procurement authorities. Wesemann had been a reserve officer with the field artillery and by 1909 rose to become government building planner with the Magdeburg railway district. In 1910 he moved to private industry and initially became assistant to Heinrich Ehrhardt in Düsseldorf. In 1911 he was named director of the Rheinische Metallwaaren- und Maschinenfabrik AG, Abteilung Sömmerda, the former Dreyse-Werke. In the First World War he initially served as an officer in the 3rd Guards Reserve Field Artillery Regiment and subsequently transferred as Hauptmann der Reserve to war material production at Rheinmetall. On November 14, 1925 Wesemann gave his manuscript to General Wurtzbacher, who kept it under lock and key, however. As to the question of why the Dreyse—or for that matter the Bergmann—machine gun did not go into mass production despite their technical advantages, Wesemann wrote: “On the Maxim gun, the cartridge was forcibly held from extraction from the belt until insertion into the chamber, without being able to move freely. The new machine guns [Bergmann and Dreyse, the author], which were accepted for testing because of their simplicity, did not meet this fundamental requirement to the same degree, as the cartridge was not forcibly held in place, instead being held in place under spring pressure. This rigid adherence to purely theoretical views of the forcible retention of the cartridge, about which technical opinions varied greatly, led before the war and also in 1914-1915 to the rejection of the Dreyse gun, which today is recognized everywhere as considerably superior to the Maxim gun.
It has been established that the cartridge is well-secured by resilient bodies in the new Dreyse gun [MG 13, the author], and because of this design arrangement the functioning of the weapon is very much better, especially under difficult conditions caused by soiling by leaking oil, sand and poor belting. If this great advantage of the Dreyse machine gun must be placed directly on the non-forced guidance of the cartridge, it cannot be understood why before the war the technically obsolete principle of forced guidance, which had been discredited by experiments, was insisted upon, as it is now generally acknowledged to have caused the Maxim gun’s disadvantages.”
Then, in assessing the decision-makers in the military procurement authorities, Wesemann was extremely clear: “Similar differences of opinion of a fundamental nature were observed in the entire army equipment field. The only explanation for the difficulties was that the personnel handling the technical questions often lacked the necessary knowledge and engineering ability to adapt to new ideas.”
Wesemann also rejected the argument that the production of machine guns other than the Maxim system had been rejected ensure the standardization of armaments: “The point of view of standardized armament often given as a reason has to be acknowledged, but it can only be valid under the condition that sufficient reserves are available. The legitimacy of this view ceased when captured enemy equipment was repaired and used in large quantities.” Wesemann also refused to accept the argument of a uniform orientation of production to the mass production of the Maxim gun: “When the production of Maxim guns caused great difficulties for fabrication reasons, the temporary delivery of simple Dreyse guns was a welcome way out. But instead of allowing the factory [Rheinmetall Sömmerda, the author] to continue this production following familiarization, after the implementation of Maxim parts production it was again forced to abandon production of the Dreyse gun and instead produce the Maxim.”
Wesemann’s conviction of the quality of the Dreyse machine guns produced by Rheinmetall and his regarding of the focusing on what he saw as the obsolescent Maxim system as a mistake, is certainly understandable from his perspective as a director of the Rheinmetall company. Nevertheless, General Wurtzbacher had had good reason to order this draft: the Reichswehr was also aware of the clumsiness and problems associated with the 08 and 08/15 systems. Germany had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles from developing new machine guns, but it circumvented the ban with the help of industry. This further development was based on the liquid-cooled Dreyse machine gun, from which the air-cooled MG 13, a really light machine gun weighing 11.4 kg was developed, which was used by the Reichswehr until 1936, when it was replaced by the modern MG 34.
Improvements were also made to the Dreyse during the war, which sometimes meant that the affected parts from older weapons could no longer be used in newer weapons. Like Bergmann, however, Dreyse had the basic problem that its production process was not optimized during the war in the same way as those used by the companies making the MG 08 and 08/15. The result of this was that parts for the Bergmann and Dreyse machine guns were made using the true to gauge method and thus had limited interchangeability. True to gauge production meant that the parts of each individual weapon had to fit together—the actual reason for the matching numbers of German firearms—and as a result could not simply be exchanged between weapons of the same model. Even though these two machine gun types shared design features, which were technically more advanced than the Maxim, the production process was at least an impediment to production of these two machine gun types in larger numbers.
Rheinmetall obviously also worked on a larger version of the Dreyse machine gun in the 13 mm calibre of the Tankgewehr, which was to be used as an anti-tank weapon. But here too the War Ministry stepped in, seeking to standardize armaments production with concentration on just a few models: “The then War Ministry even went so far as to forbid tests with the Dreyse weapons, especially those with the Dreyse-Tank-Maschinengewehr, and threaten the technicians working on this weapon with being drafted. The offer to provide the army with 50 Dreyse anti-tank machine guns at no cost was turned down. An enlarged Maxim gun was accepted as an anti-tank weapon with no lengthy trials. The Dreyse-Tankgewehr, which was demonstrated at Ruhleben [meaning the Rifle Test Commission at Spandau-Ruhleben, the author] and worked surprisingly well during initial trials, was not considered at all. Not a single additional cartridge was made available to the engineering works to continue testing. The responsible war department office was given the task of determining if experimental work on the Dreyse gun had been halted.”
Like the Bergmann MG, the Dreyse machine gun was seen by the War Ministry as an interim weapon, which was used as long as model 08 and 08/15 machine guns could not yet be procured in sufficient numbers. About 3,000 examples of the Dreyse machine gun were produced and as of 1917 they were used exclusively by Army Group Mackensen in Romania and later by German troops of the Asia Corps. Dolf Goldsmith must be corrected here, as he describes this Dreyse model as the “Model 1918” and states that it came “too late for combat”.