Musketen Battalions (Part III)
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Musketen Battalions (Part III)
The German Army of World War I
This post is the third part of a series of articles on the subject of units armed with Madsen guns. The other posts in this series can be found below, in the section marked “for further reading.”
The German scheme for employing the Madsen gun borrowed much from the way that contemporary Danish bicycle troops used the weapon. In both the original Danish design and the German copy, four men and a single Madsen gun formed the basic fire unit. Both the Danes and the Germans, moreover, formed three of these fire units into a squad. (Apart from the men who fired the Madsen guns, all members of these squads carried rifles.)
Above the level of the squad, the Danes had adopted a binary structure. That is, two squads made a six-gun section and two sections made a twelve-gun platoon.1 The Germans, however, preferred a purely triangular organization, with three three-gun squads combined into a nine-gun platoon and three platoons assembled into a twenty-seven-gun company.2
Source: Particulars of the organizational history of German Madsen gun units come from this summary of a series of articles published in the Zeitschrift für Heereskunde in 1932.
For Further Reading:
Didier and Bertrand, “Le fantassin en campagne dans les principales armées: Danemark” Revue d’Infanterie, January 1914, page 249
On page 59 of its Handbook of the German Army in War, April 1918, the Intelligence Division of the British War Office allots thirty Madsen guns to each Musketen company (and thus ten to each platoon.) It is likely, however, that these figures include spare weapons kept in the company trains.