Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was born in America...
the military to reassess their approach to the weapon.It is unclear when the Maxim gun was used first. Some scholars say that it was in Africa in 1893, during the British conflict with the Zulu. Others say it happened several years later, during the Boxer Rebellion in China.
The deadly power of the Maxim gun was first officially recorded during the Battle of Omdurman (1898), when an army of 8,000 British and 17,000 Egyptian troops commanded by General Sir Herbert Kitchener repelled an attack by 50,000 Sudanese rebels. Kitchener lost only 100 men, while the rebels lost about 20,000, 15,000 of whom were felled by machinegun fire.
This made it clear that the new weapon allowed a relatively small group of soldiers to repel attacks from a more numerous enemy effectively.
Machine guns won their rightful place on the battlefield during World War I, when commanders agreed that the weapons should be moved from the artillery to the infantry units and ordered
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