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Editor’s Note: Stuart Stevens was recently in Ukraine on an aid project. This is the first of a series of pieces he’s writing on what he encountered.
I’d seen one before in a World War I museum in Leeds, England. The Maxim gun was the first mass-produced machine gun that harvested bodies on an industrial scale. It fired 600 rounds a minute. How was it possible that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Germans inflicted over 57,000 casualties on British troops? The Maxim gun, fired behind fortified positions into the “over the top” human waves.
That was over a century ago. And it was with astonishment that I found myself looking at a Maxim gun in action a couple of weeks ago in Ukraine. It was actually four Maxim guns mounted together side by side on a swivel with a metal bar welded to the trigger mechanisms. If you’re counting, that’s 2,400 rounds a minute from the four linked machine guns.
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I was visiting an anti-drone air defense site that was organized shortly after the full-scale invasion by a Ukrainian Supreme Court judge. He and other judges and lawyers had come together to establish this air defense site on the banks of the Dnipro River that divides Kyiv. Along with the Maxim guns, there were a modern 50-caliber Browning machine gun and its Soviet-era equivalent. The guns were equipped with updated optical sites that track drones as they come down the river, a frequent approach path for the Russian Shahed “suicide” drones. They were mounted on the roof of an old houseboat moored to the bank. Inside, there was an office with multiple video screens from cameras trained down the river, stacks of ammunition crates, and a couple of birthday cakes. I visited on the birthday of one of the lawyers who crews the position.
I grew up in a family of lawyers and judges and spent a fair amount of time in law firm offices and courtrooms, trailing my dad as a kid. I tried to imagine what it would have been like for my dad or grandfather to spend the day in court, then leave to man a machine gun position to defend their families. ...
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