How did this weapon system designed during the American Civil War make its comeback in warfare in a way its designer could have never even imagined? You have surely seen it in some form or another. But now you are going to understand just why everyone hates the American Gatling gun. Okay, so let’s start from the very birth of the Gatling gun and move through its turbulent history to the present day.

 It was 1862 and Richard Jordan Gatling was the inventor who created, you guessed it right, the Gatling gun. It is said that he supposedly created it from a humanitarian standpoint after witnessing the suffering of soldiers on both sides during the American Civil War. That was the first time in history musketss and early rifles caused such wounds for which medicine at the time was not prepared.

 So it is said that because of this he wanted to create a machine that would do the job of tens of soldiers instead and this way reduce the number of people needing to die in war. This led to his creation of the rotary gun. Depending on the version, it had a cluster of 10, six, or four barrels positioned around a central shaft, and they would all rotate when the hand crank was turned.

 During this rotation, the mechanism performed the tasks of feeding, firing, and ejecting in sequence for each barrel through a clever mechanical design never seen before. At a certain point in the rotation, each barrel fired around, then made a new circle, and repeated the process as long as the gun was fed with ammunition.

 This was now much more effective than early volley guns, which were basically several muzzle- loaded barrels bunched up together for an increased volume of fire, as each one had to be loaded the same way as the standard musketss used by infantry. But the Gatling gun had a real high and sustained rate of fire, especially when better standardized cartridges like 4570 arrived.

 Feeding the gun was the biggest problem at first, as there were no belts or sophisticated magazines. The first solution was a top-mounted gravity-fed hopper magazine where loose rounds simply fell into the mechanism one by one. However, in early versions, Gatlings could achieve a practical and sustained rate of about 200 rounds per minute and later even more.

 And remember that this was at a time when three rounds per minute was the best a musket could give you. New rifles later improved this, but it was still a far cry from what the Gatling could put out. Soon, better feeding systems were adopted, like the Bruce feed, where two staggered rows of 4570 rounds allowed essentially uninterrupted fire as long as it was fed.

 Now, the Gatlings could put out some 400 rounds per minute, which was just incredible for the time. However, when Gatling offered his invention to the Union Army, he was met with quite a bit of skepticism. Commanders during the American Civil War were fairly stubborn and conservative. And it took a significant number of lives lost for them to finally admit that the battlefield had changed with the introduction of new weapons and that the old Napoleon era tactics of tight formations of soldiers advancing across open fields should also be changed. The

same attitude showed up when it came to adopting such a revolutionary weapon. They were also concerned about the logistics and how they would supply such a hungry machine with precious ammunition. Plus, early mechanical unreliability did not make them look like something that could really work reliably in real battle.

 On top of that, it is said that Gatling had tried to sell his guns to both the Union and Confederate forces. So, the Union high command was not quite impressed. Instead, a few enthusiastic officers bought a couple of Gatling guns out of their own pockets or by raising funds privately. At the time, they cost about $1,000 per gun, which was about $35,000 in today’s equivalent.

 So Gatling saw only a minor direct role in the Civil War, but they did appear in quite a few engagements where they showed their devastating potential. They badly beat several infantry or cavalry charges or suppressed defensive positions with sustained fire to cover advancing infantry because the enemy could not raise their heads to fire.

 However, it arrived too late to significantly affect the outcome of the war and Gatling guns were later mounted on fixed defensive positions or gunboats because they were not mobile enough to be used together with infantry and cavalry. They already earned quite a fearsome reputation and their presence alone deterred most of the attacks where they were positioned.

It was not hard to learn what would happen if you charged a machine gun position. Yet, this would be repeated through history over and over again for some reason. Foreign armies also took note of Gatling’s invention. So the gun became one of the first American weapons to be sold around the world. Imperial Russia and the British Empire were some of the biggest buyers.

 The British used them in their colonial wars against warriors still fighting with swords and spears where Gatlings leveled their smaller numbers of men against much more numerous warriors of the colonies. By the 1880s, the Gatling gun had achieved a strong reputation for its firepower. But then something would happen that would make it disappear for almost a century.

 It was in 1884 when Hyram Maxim showed the world his creation, the Maxim gun, which is the world’s first true automatic machine gun. Maxim harnessed the recoil force of the fired cartridge to cycle the action, extract the spent casing, and load another round from the belt feeding system, which made the handc cranked multiple barrel gatling system obsolete.

 Maxim had a single barrel and a water jacket around it that allowed sustained fire without overheating. and it did everything and more than the Gatling, but in a much more compact and reliable package, allowing sustained fire just by pressing the trigger. By the 1900s, all major powers had their own versions of Maxim guns, and the Gatling was pushed into storage to collect dust for decades to come, until something completely unexpected brought it back to life in a form no one could even imagine would exist when this gun was developed during

the American Civil War. World War I saw the use of machine guns on a scale never seen before, where they completely changed the way wars were being fought and significantly contributed to the stalemate of trench warfare. No side could simply find an effective way to capture positions protected by machine gun nests, as everyone trying to do so, no matter how powerful the attack, would inevitably get mowed down by heavy automatic fire.

 So years passed after World War I and in the Second World War, machine guns evolved from water cooled maxims into air cooled machine guns, either magazine or beltfed that were now much lighter but provided the same or a better rate of fire. In this war, technology also evolved rapidly with new forms of combat like tanks and aircraft now deciding the outcome of battles.

Now, you probably did not expect that it would be fighter aircraft that would bring the Gatling gun back to life. And even more surprising, that it would be jet aircraft, which were the pinnacle of fighter aircraft technology after World War II. How did this cuttingedge technology end up needing something designed so far back in the history of musketss and swords? Well, let’s explain.

 During World War II, fighter aircraft were evolving into faster and more heavily armed models. But these were piston engine propeller-driven planes armed with heavy singlebarrel machine guns or smaller caliber autoc cannons like 20 or 30 mm. The problem with fighters was that whether they were attacking ground targets or more importantly engaging in dog fights with other fighters because of their speed they had only a short window of a second or two to fire when their targets were in their sights.

 During this time, they had to put out as many rounds as possible to increase the chances of hitting and damaging an enemy fighter enough to bring it down. With piston engine fighters, by raising the number of machine guns to six or eight, like the Americans did with their M250 calibers tuned for a higher rate of fire, they reached some 4,500 rounds per minute of fire at most.

 But this added weight and took precious space on the plane. And because of the extra machine guns, they could carry less total ammunition, giving them only about 10 or 15 seconds of total firing time before running empty. However, this problem became even bigger when jet engine fighters were introduced. These were now much faster than any propeller-driven aircraft, and soon after their debut in combat, they made the era of older fighters completely obsolete.

 But the problem of armorament now remained. And because all fighters, including enemy ones, were now much faster. The time window to shoot them down also shrank even more. No more machine guns could be added to increase it. And this became a problem. You see now where I am getting to.

 In a completely unimaginable turn of events for the designer of the Gatling gun, someone actually got the idea to use this multiarrel rotary concept and make it work in fighter jets where instead of being handc cranked by the pilot, they would be electrically operated. By the way, even Gatling himself experimented with operating his gun with an early electrical motor, but the technology of the time was still far from making it work reliably.

 The idea was that although American 50 caliber machine guns on jet fighters fired more rounds per minute, they were becoming too underpowered to effectively shoot down enemy jets. So, the need for heavier autoc cannons was realized. But they fired from magazines that were not so reliable and of course had a much lower rate of fire than machine guns.

 In searching for this new cannon that needed to have an incredibly high rate of fire, someone got the idea to revive a 19th century Gatling creation. In 1946, the US Air Force started a project cenamed Vulcan. They began developing a six-barreled 20 mm rotary cannon capable of firing between 6 and 7,000 rounds per minute.

 Essentially, a modernized Gatling gun on steroids adapted for aircraft use. With multiple barrels, they achieved this crazy rate of fire, but without melting down a single barrel that could not sustain so many rounds in such a short time. This way, each barrel would fire, then spin for a brief time to prevent it from overheating.

 The feeding system was also ingeniously created to work inside the aircraft. And with the Gatling’s simple but smart design, it became one of the most reliable weapons with over 10,000 rounds fired between failures on average. To avoid misfeeds and the danger of discarded metal links and spent casing shooting out of the aircraft and possibly damaging it, a linkless feed system was developed.

 It was basically a revolving drum that fed loose cartridges and collected back the spent casings, keeping them inside the fighter. The development of this project led to the creation of the M61 Vulcan cannon that was first deployed with US fighter jets in the late 1950s. It now fired about 100 rounds per second, but initially carried only between 500 and 1,000 rounds, depending on the aircraft, so the pilot had to really make those bursts count.

 The first jet to carry the M61 Vulcan in its nose was the F104 Star Fighter, and it quickly became standard arament for American fighters. The Vulcan saw combat for the first time during the Vietnam War and quickly scored its first kill, shooting down Soviet supplied MiG fighters. It could literally cut apart an enemy fighter with tight, precise grouping and a ridiculous rate of fire.

 So, the Vulcan became one of the most favored weapons among fighter pilots. It was also terrifyingly effective in strafing runs against vehicles or tanks on the ground. Seeing the effectiveness of this concept, it was more than clear that it would stay in military use. So engineers began thinking about what else could be done with this and adapting the concept to other calibers and roles which led to a whole freely said crazy family of Gatling guns.

 As the war in Vietnam intensified, the M134 so-called minigun because it was mini in comparison to the Vulcan was developed on the same Gatling principle just in 7.62 NATO caliber. It was first intended for protection of Huey helicopters but then also integrated into the Cobra gunship. They were used here for direct fire support of ground units or to protect helicopters during insertions or extractions of troops in hot landing zones.

 Miniguns fired some 6,000 rounds per minute, which was more than the M60 machine guns mostly used by door gunners could ever achieve. And the North Vietnamese quickly learned that hiding in the jungle was not effective when the jungle was quite literally sprayed with bullets. It had that distinctive brr sound where the rounds were fired so close together that it turned into one continuous sound and the firing sensation was described as spraying a hose of lead at the enemy.

 They spat out streams of traces looking like a laser beam. But remember that a tracer was usually every fifth round. So for each one you see flying, there are four more in between each one. Now imagine being on the receiving end of that. But the US Air Force did not stop there. Quite the opposite.

 This was only the beginning of what the Gatling would evolve into. There was also the legendary AC47 Spooky, a modified C-47 cargo plane with three M134 miniguns mounted to fire out of the left side of the fuselage. The plane would circle around the target and just hose it down with fire. For example, during one night in 1969, an AC-47 fired a total of 63,000 rounds to save a South Vietnamese outpost from being overrun.

 We also have an instance of Spooky with three miniguns orbiting a Vietkong force on a hillside for hours and firing over 20,000 rounds, killing approximately 300 enemy fighters. It was reported that quote, “Nothing of flesh survived the impact zone. They circled over bases at risk of being overrun and provided the extreme amount of fire that kept them safe.

” This concept proved so successful that it led to the creation of larger and even more heavily armed gunships like the AC119 and AC130. These carried a combination of, for example, four M134 miniguns and four Vulcan 20 mm. And you can only imagine the effect these eight Gatlings firing together could produce. Hitting the enemy with such an insanely high rate of fire from such powerful cartridges would ensure that enemies were usually hit more than once, and the wounds these created are probably better not to describe. Then they thought about where

else they could mount them. So these Gatlings found their way onto vehicles and boats as well. Riverine patrol boats operating in the Meong Delta had some experimentally mounted M134s, and there were even some mounted on gun trucks protecting cargo convoys from ambushes. And take a look at this. the M113 armored personnel carrier with the 20mm Vulcan.

 It was intended as an anti-aircraft weapon for low-flying aircraft, but you could also, like American soldiers in Vietnam, point it at anything on the ground you would wish to erase from this planet. The United States produced some 10,000 miniguns during the Vietnam War and experimented in various forms with them. However, it was after Vietnam when this concept was brought to another level.

 That is when they took this the G A8/ Avenger which is a monster 30 mm 7 barreled Gatling gun developed in the 1970s and then decided to create a fighter jet around it literally. This was a US Air Force program to build a dedicated ground attack aircraft which led to the creation of the legendary A10 Thunderbolt 2 or better known as the Warthog.

 Now, the GAU8 is much larger than the Vulcan, weighing about 1,800 kg with its massive feed system and drum that holds 1,150 rounds of 30x 173 mm ammunition. The gun fires at 3,900 rounds per minute, which is about 65 rounds per second. And it has special high explosive or armor-piercing ammunition that can basically destroy anything you may encounter on the battlefield.

 It was actually designed to counter the emerging threat of masses of Soviet tanks during the Cold War with the development of special depleted uranium armor piercing rounds. You may think that modern tanks could easily withstand a hit from a 30 mm and you are right if it shoots at them frontally where the armor is thickest.

 The Warthog attacks from the air and shoots down onto the roof armor of the tank which is the thinnest. And by spraying the tank with tens of rounds that will hit it, some of them will surely cause enough damage to put it out of action. The Wthog with its monster Gatling saw action in the Gulf War where it destroyed hundreds of ground targets, including tanks.

 However, this still was not the end of Gatling’s development. Naval forces also adopted Gatling versions for closein weapon systems that protect ships. For example, the US Navy introduced the Failank system in 1980, which consists of a self-contained turret with a radar guided Vulcan cannon that can automatically detect and shoot down incoming anti-hship missiles as the last line of defense.

 Beyond these, there is also the so-called micro gun, which is the minigun just chambered in 556 in a lighter form, but still capable of firing 10,000 rounds per minute, although it was never adopted widely. There is also one chambered in the famous 50BMG, but mostly the M134 versions are used and mounted on various vehicles like Humvees and similar platforms.

 So, what is completely ironic compared to Gatling’s original idea to lower the number of casualties in war is that he actually created a weapon that not only killed so many people throughout history and still more than effectively does, but also went so far in its evolution and is used on platforms that no one at the time Gatling invented it could even imagine, like fighter jets.