Key Point: During just one day in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme the British lost 21,000 men – many of them killed by Spandau machine guns, the German version of the ...

The Maxim gun was the world’s first true machine gun - a weapon that fundamentally changed the nature of warfare. Invented in the 1880s by Hiram Maxim, it used recoil energy to fire automatically, ...