The Background
People generally associate the advent of the machine gun in its modern form, a single-barreled, crew-served automatic weapon firing a rifle-caliber or larger cartridge, with the Great War. In that conflict, the U.S. forces used mostly the John Browning-designed M1917 machine gun, a big, heavy water-cooled affair. Some were also issued the British-made Lewis gun, which was air-cooled and used a rotary magazine, which made it somewhat more portable.
These were not, however, the first modern machine guns. Working in the United Kingdom, Hiram Maxim established the basic patterns with his Maxim gun in 1884, that being the very first single-barrel, belt-fed, crew-served machine gun in production. The Maxim set the mold, and Browning improved it. But there was a less-well-known intermediate step between the Maxim and the M1917 Browning, and that was another product of the brilliant mind of the Da Vinci of guns: The Colt-Browning M1895 “potato digger,” which was in service with the American Navy, the Army having decided against it, from 1895 to 1921.
The Design and the Designer
This was John Browning’s first machine gun, and surprisingly, it had several design oddities that we don’t expect from the Maestro. So many of his designs were near-perfect when finally introduced that it’s a little odd to see something that is, frankly, a little kludge. But a visit to the Browning Museum in Ogden, Utah, something I highly recommend if you’re ever in the area, will show you how John Browning ran what was basically a gun design skunkworks. The museum has a lot of Browning’s hand-made prototypes, and when you’re accustomed to finished products like the Auto-5 shotgun and the famous M1911 pistol, some of the intermediate steps leading up to those guns are a little, shall we say, cobbled together. Old John was a great experimenter and didn’t worry about looks too much until he was producing the final product.
That may be why the old M1895 machine gun has a rather rough look to it. And one of those oddities lay in its mechanism. This gun, which fired from a closed bolt, had a tilting bolt that locked in place for firing. The bolt lay in a slot in the receiver and was held in the locked position by a recoil spring.
What’s even odder is that this gun resembles nothing quite so much as a modified lever gun, which Browning designed in considerable variety, from the 1892 to the 1895 Winchesters. When a round was fired, the bolt disengaged from the locked position, and the gun's operating lever, located just aft of the muzzle, swung downward. A spring then returned the operating lever to the closed and locked position.
In this video, you can see the swinging lever that resulted in the name “potato digger.”
The problem here seems an obvious one: If the gun was not held a foot or so off the ground, the operating lever would jam against the ground, sometimes kicking up dirt and rocks, thus the nickname, “potato digger.” Keeping a low profile is an obvious advantage in a firefight, especially where machine guns are involved; so that was one obvious problem that likely led the Army to eschew the Colt-Browning gun. Also, it was generally expected that the operating lever would be a magnet for dirt, which would eventually lead to jamming.This, then, is something unusual indeed: A Browning design that left some things to be desired. But, if one allowed for that odd operating lever, the gun was fairly reliable, turning out a steady 400-450 rounds per minute.
The Gun
In United States service, the M1895 was produced in three calibers: The .236 Navy, the .30 US Army (.30-40), and the .30-06 Springfield. Foreign buyers received the gun in calibers including the 6.5mm Carcano, the 7mm Mauser, the Russian 7.62x54R, and the .303 British. The gun saw some service in the Spanish-American War; they were used by the United States Marines in the invasion of Guantanamo Bay, with four guns in the 6mm Lee Navy round being issued for that attack. Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders also used two M1895 guns in 7mm Mauser, but those guns were privately purchased.
The Navy and Marines used M1895 guns in the Philippine-American War, in the Boxer Rebellion, and in the invasion and occupation of Veracruz in 1914.
The M1895, interestingly, saw combat in the Great War, not by American forces but by Canadian troops. In 1915, the 21st Battalion and the 10th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Forces, used the .303-caliber Colt-Browning machine guns in combat. By 1917, the Canadian forces had been issued Lewis guns, replacing the M1895s.
The United States Army never formally adopted the M1895. Some were used for training, but the Army, as far as I’ve been able to determine, never used one in combat in the Great War; the American Expeditionary Force instead used the M1917 Browning.
One variant of the M1895, a slightly improved version called the Marlin-Rockwell Model 1917, was among the last of these guns manufactured. Some later variants of the Marlin-Rockwell guns replaced the downward-kicking operating lever with what is now the more expected gas piston operation.
The potato digger’s history wasn’t quite over. M1895 guns were used in the Spanish Civil War, most notably in the Battle of Jarama, where it gained a renewed reputation for jamming. The Belgian Army had a number of these guns in 7x57mm in storage at the outbreak of World War II, and some of those guns saw action against the German Wehrmacht when they invaded Belgium. That is, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the last use of the M1895 Colt-Browning machine gun in actual combat.What About Now?
Very few of these old guns remain outside of museums. Production wasn’t extensive; for all customers and in all variants, probably only 2-3,000 were made; good records for this gun simply aren’t available. Browning, of course, swiftly improved on his design with his M1917 and later the M1919 air-cooled .30 caliber guns, and finally with the immortal M2 Browning .50-caliber. The window for the potato digger was short, its reputation questionable, and its usefulness was limited. By 1940, it was generally obsolete. And, unusually for a Browning design, it didn’t work nearly as well as later efforts.
But it was the first, and that’s not nothing.
The machine gun, especially in the Great War, changed the way wars were fought. It had been expected to be the weapon that made war so horrible that nobody would want to fight in it anymore. Well, that obviously didn’t happen, but they did change things. Hiram Maxim may have been the first overall, but John Browning was the first in the United States, and his later designs went on to pretty much define what great machine guns were – and, remember, his final masterpiece in machine guns, the M2, is still in service today and has been since 1933.
So, in the end, the potato-digger had a pretty good legacy after all.
