Hopefully this will interest some of you. You'll have to forgive the rambling as I talk about why the .5-inch gun is important in the Vickers collection here but work through it and I talk and the .5-inch and how it was used, as well as a closer look at the gun itself and the accessories we have for it. It was the main armament on the Vickers light tanks as well as used by the LRDG on the rear of the trucks.
Interesting. The Vickers 0.5 was used for balloon busting in WW1 in aircraft like the FE2 but these were too vulnerable to the AA that protected observation balloons. There is also a photo on one mounted on an AA pillar mount in a railway truck in Palestine. I assume that these were Mk Is?
That looked like a good video but the volume was too low on my end for me to hear much of what he was saying. Did he talk about the Vickers .5 HV cartridge as well? I think it significantly outperformed the .50 Browning but I'm not positive about that.
The Mark I was introduced in the later 1920s and only experimental. The early AA guns were either 11mm (built by the US) or the Maxim-designed 'pom pom' in 1/2 pdr or 1 pdr ammunition. I'm sorry about the volume. It's not something anyone else has mentioned so hopefully only a one-off issue. I do mention the HV round but only briefly as my main focus was on the British service guns. The muzzle energy was higher than the Browning on the HV guns but they were only built for export. They were a bigger round than the .5-inch round for the Mark V.
The gun I'm referring to was called the Vickers Aircraft Gun nick named The Balloon Buster and I've seen references to it firing a round of somewhere about 11mm. It certainly looked like the Vickers 0.5 and it wasn't a US product BTY the sound was a problem for me too
Sorry about the sound for a start. I’ll have to remedy that in future. The Great War gun used as a balloon buster was in 11mm Gras and was an American-made Vickers machine gun, made by Colt under license to originally arm the US Army but sold to the French and the Russians. It wasn’t used by the British so anything larger than .303-inch at that point was the Maxim Pom Pom light anti-aircraft guns. Vickers didn’t develop the .5-inch until after the war.
Maybe if you could provide a copy of the image or a link to it Rich (or others) would be able to make comment on what it is
Is it possibly this photo? 1916 in Mesopotamia. If so, it was published in 'Pictorial History of the Machine Gun' (Hobart, 1971) and does cite it as a Class D Vickers; however, this is incorrect. The Class D was not developed until the late 1920s or even 1930s. This is correctly described in 'The Devil's Paintbrush' (Goldsmith, 2002) as a 37mm one-and-a-half pounder Maxim 'pom pom' gun. Made by Vickers but not the Vickers design from later on. This is the only photo I'm aware of that you could be referring to so if it's not that, please let me know where I can find it and I'll see what I can determine. I'll never say never when it comes to weapons development as trials and experimental items do appear all the time but I'm pretty sure on this one.
