Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction Company
taking a look at one of the machine guns that's going to be in their upcoming
Extraordinary Firearm sale. This is a water-cooled, belt-fed, tripod-mounted
Vickers machine gun. And it's a Turkish conversion of the Vickers, which is pretty cool.
The Turks did more to the Vickers than just about anybody else,
they kind of did the Swiss Army knife sort of thing to them.
So the backstory to this is, of course, in World War One Turkey ended up as an enemy of Great Britain.
Now there were strategic reasons for this, but kind of a big part at the start was right at the beginning of World War One
two Turkish battleships had been built under contract by British firms and just before they could ship them off
to Turkey, having been completed in 1914, both of the ... ships were confiscated by the British government.
War had broken out and they needed ships and they figured we need them more than Turkey does,
and if they don't like it, well, they don't have any battleships so what are they going to do about it?
This didn't help things with British-Turkish relations and ultimately Turkey would enter the war on the German side.
As a result (in fact Turkey had been playing with perhaps buying Vickers guns),
they ended up instead adopting the 1909 commercial Maxim as produced by DWM.
They bought those for a couple years until commercial production shut down by 1916,
and then they ended up using German MG 08s and MG 08/15s that were supplied as military aid.
Now, that has nothing to do with the Vickers. As we fast forward, when we get to 1940
the whole thing's starting to happen again, and Winston Churchill sees what's coming
and the ... Turks ... are clearly in need of armaments again.
And they request some support and Churchill, having having been intimately involved with Gallipoli
and knowing exactly what can happen if you have Turkey as an enemy,
decided he wanted to make sure that this time the Turks were on the same side as the British.
So in 1940 he sold Turkey 1,176 Vickers guns. These were guns that had all been refurbished
for the British military in the 1930s.
And this really says a lot about how important Churchill thought Turkey would be as an ally,
because 1,200 Vickers guns right on the eve of war - that's a big risk.
Those are guns that the British certainly could have made good use of themselves. So
they ship these guns off to Turkey, they actually go by way of Belgium
because of course the Turkish military doesn't use .303, they're using 8mm Mauser as their standard cartridge.
So in Belgium, in Liege, the guns are refitted. There are three new parts that you need for 8mm in these guns.
That conversion is done, off they go to Turkey. Turkey of course still has a lot of German Maxims,
and what they end up doing is they take all the old Maxim guns and they give them to the Turkish Navy,
because those are the heavy guns. The Vickers is substantially lighter, so the Vickers guns go to the army.
Well, the Maxim guns, they'd put some work into coming up with a bunch of extra components to them.
And what they did is they went ahead and added a bunch of that stuff to the Vickers guns as well.
So we have a whole mess of cool extra widgets. We have anti-aircraft sights,
we have a belt box off of an MG 08/15 from World War One here,
we have, like almost every part of the tripod has been reassembled in some way, or redesigned in some way.
and we have of course the 8mm conversion.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at what those modifications actually look like.
Alright, let's start with the belt box. This is a standard MG 08/15 belt holding drum.
They'll hold a 100 round belt in there and what the Turks did was they mounted this block,
(I do not know why someone has purple painted a number on it), but
they went and mounted this block onto the receiver.
It's just kind of bolted on there, and it's got a pair of grooves right there
that you can slide an 08/15 drum right onto so that you have some ammunition easily held right on the gun.
Next up we have anti-aircraft sights.
So there is a rear anti-aircraft sight that has been again modified, bolted onto the ... sight rail here.
You can see the pin going through there, and then they added a spring to it so you can pivot this up.
This little tab locks it in place in either position.
And it gives you an open box as well as a v-notch to use.
And that is used in conjunction with a spider style of front sight. The way this sort of thing works is you have
your actual centre aiming point. And then the rings indicate aircraft speed
and I don't know exactly what speeds are represented by this particular style,
but normally you'd have something like 100 km/h or 200 km/h.
And so you estimate what speed the aircraft is moving at, and then you use these to estimate your lead.
So you would use say this as an aiming point, or this one, or wherever, depending on which direction the aircraft is going.
Now this sight, it has a little spring-loaded mount.
The Turkish army soldered on this little mounting bracket onto the rear of the water jacket of the gun,
and so we can put that in there, push the button in, and then rotate it to lock into place.
That gives you your front sight, and when you put that all together you've got that for a sight picture.
Now Turkey had a lot of Z.F. 12 optical sights for their MG 08 Maxim guns,
and ... there is actually a mount that the British made that bolts on here using a couple of these pins,
or cross screws, and that mount was made for a British dial sight ... for indirect fire.
And it's got a little dovetail bracket on it.
The Turks made an adapter block so that they could mount their Z.F. 12 optics onto those.
Unfortunately, this particular gun doesn't have that bracket mounted on it. Sorry, it goes from there, to there, to there.
So I can't show you that one, unfortunately, but they did also use that.
As for the tripod there are a number of changes that they made.
First off, all three legs were replaced with longer legs. This rear leg has a much bigger rear foot on it,
and the rear leg tube is hollow to accommodate this guy, which is the anti-aircraft extension.
They also replaced the standard brass ... azimuth indicator
with a much bigger one graduated in mils. Made the gun a little bit easier to work with.
And they added this tab to the outside as a measure, so you can keep track of exactly where you're positioned here.
So when the gun wasn't being used in an anti-aircraft mode, this whole
extension leg comes off and gets stowed in the rear leg of the tripod.
And lastly the guns were converted to 8mm.
I say lastly, that was actually the first thing that was done because
that was done when they were first initially shipped out to Turkey by way of Belgium.
You can see a "CAL 7.9" marking right there on the feed block.
To do this conversion you replace the feed block, the extractor and the barrel.
I won't pull the barrel out, but those barrels are marked on the underside
7.9 and "B" for Blindée which stands for "Balles Blindée", which means jacketed bullet.
Now the one other element of the conversion was modifying or replacing the extractor.
So this one has a very nice new production
purpose-built 8mm extractor. And you can just kind of see that because,
(there we go),
the grooves here are not wide enough for the rim of a .303 cartridge.
Now some of these ... were converted by taking existing ... British ones and kind of just
hammering the two extractor ribs in until they fit 8mm about right. Those are a little cruder, but you do also see those.
In addition, the Turks even went so far as to develop their own new metallic belts for the Vickers and the Maxim.
What they did was make this really pretty cool, very lightweight, aluminium two-part belt.
So each one of these links is actually a top and a bottom section,
they're separate and they're held together by the little wire spirals at each end.
So these belts are really handy when they're in good condition,
a lot of them are a hundred years old now. This one looks gorgeous and apparently runs great.
A lot of these have gotten brittle and oxidized and fragile over the years,
but when they work right, they're easy to load and they're very lightweight.
And, unlike cloth belts, they're not susceptible to soaking up water and getting too tight.
And that's it, one of the cool things about the Vickers and Maxim in general is that calibre conversions were very simple.
These were guns that were sold in a variety of calibres from the original factory,
and the easier they could make it to ... offer the guns in different calibres, the better, the easier, sales would be.
Alright guys, well there you have the fully accessorised, kitted out and cool improved
Turkish 8mm conversion of the Vickers gun.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, definitely make sure to hop over to the Morphy's auction catalogue.
You can take a look at all of their pictures and their description and such, as well as a whole slew of other cool guns
and machine guns that they have in said catalogue. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching