A Ukrainian drone has claimed a very old prize: a Russian M1910 machine gun—a type that first appeared in, you guessed it, 1910.
But it wasn’t just any M1910. The machine gun the first-person-view drone blew up seemed to be a Finnish modification of the basic M1910 that made it more reliable in brutal battlefield conditions.
A video that circulated online on Saturday depicts an explosives-laden FPV drone barreling toward a Russian bunker somewhere along the 600-mile front of Russia’s 22-month wider war on Ukraine.
A still-frame from the drone’s video feed clearly shows an M1910 machine gun poking from the bunker.
The water-cooled M1910—a derivative of famed armorer Hiram Maxim’s Maxim gun—fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at a rate of 600 per minute. The gun is prized for its accuracy and reliability, which is why Ukrainian and Russian forces still use it after more than a century.
But Finnish troops discovered a problem with the basic M1910 way back in the 1920s or ‘30s. The M1910 is cooled by the water in the sleeve surrounding the barrel. Hard use will evaporate the water. Crews could top off the water via a narrow valve.
“The Finns were rightly concerned that there must be a more expedient way to fill the water jacket surrounding the Maxim’s barrel, particularly when being used in an environment that precluded the use of water in its liquid form,” Robert Segel wrote in Small Arms Defense Journal.
“After a period of trial and error, a simple and innovative design change was ordered that took advantage of Finland’s long, cold winters. The Finns replaced the small filler port in the water jacket of the older Maxims with a larger port on top of the water jacket and added a snap-cap that secured the larger filling port.”
The advantages were twofold, Segel explained. “First, the cap could be quickly opened to allow a larger volume of water to be rapidly introduced into the water jacket and, secondly, the new system allowed both snow and ice to be introduced into the water jacket during the winter when water in its liquid form was non-existent.”
The “snow-cap” modification was so effective that Soviet industry adopted it for M1910s produced after 1943 or so. Look closely at the screengrab from the Ukrainian drone-strike. The snow cap is visible on the top of the machine gun’s barrel.
So the M1910 the Ukrainians recently blew up wasn’t an original, 1910-vintage gun. It was a “new” M1910 built in or after 1943.
