By Will Dabbs, MD

Any gun nerd worthy of his GLOCK has at least a passing knowledge of the history of automatic firearms. Seminal names like Maxim, Browning, Lewis and Thompson shaped the landscape. We all know that true machine guns were introduced in the late 19th century only to find their legs later during the hemoclysm that was World War I. 

The English Vickers and American BAR were legendary, while the French Chauchaut was an abomination. However, what is not so well known is that there was a relatively obscure Danish design debuted in 1902 that was actually the world’s first true light machine gun. Offered in a dozen calibers and formally adopted by 34 nations, the Madsen LMG (light machine gun) was decades ahead of its time. Incredibly, it soldiers on to this very day.

In the Beginning 

Designed by Theodor Schouboe and Julius Rasmussen, the Madsen LMG was first proposed by Colonel Vilhelm Herman Olaf Madsen, the Danish Minister of War. As Colonel Madsen was the driving force behind this radically advanced gun, he got to hang his name onto it. At a time when most machine guns were water-cooled, belt-fed and as big as a chest freezer, the Madsen fed from a top-mounted magazine and was light enough to be utilized by a single operator. It would take the rest of the world years to catch up.

Colonel Madsen started a company, Compagnie Madsen A/S, to produce this extraordinary automatic rifle. That company remains in operation today as DISA. Through the decades they produced a wide variety of military guns to include the 9mm M50 SMG. Nowadays, DISA is an industry leader in industrial casting and molding equipment.

Mechanical Details

The Madsen LMG began as the M1888 Self-Loading Rifle first imagined by then-Captain of Artillery VHO Madsen in 1883. The formal name for the M.1888 was the Madsen M1888 Forsøgsrekylgevær. You have no idea how tough it was convincing Microsoft Word to produce that term.

The M1888 was a novel recoil-operated shoulder arm chambered in the 8x58mm Rimmed cartridge. Curiously, the M1888 was gravity-fed via an integral folding stripper clip. The clip remained with the rifle and would pivot to seal the action when not in use. While inspired, the M1888’s gravity-fed action was mechanically doomed. Despite being as complicated as a sewing machine, the basic action nonetheless held great promise.

These rifles were designed just as cartridge-firing guns were transitioning from black powder to smokeless nitrocellulose-based propellants. The first prototype Madsen machine guns were finicky and prone to fouling with the early black powder rounds. However, once the gun was chambered for the then-state-of-the-art 6.5mm smokeless cartridge, it ran quite well.

The Madsen operated via a hybrid recoil-driven action inspired by the lever-action Martini-Henry rifle. It fired from the open bolt to aid in cooling. Where the Martini-Henry was manually operated, the Madsen used the recoil impulse from a fired round to move the bolt, barrel and barrel extension to the rear. When the moment was right, the bolt cammed upward, while the barrel and barrel extension cycled separately. A combination extractor/ejector lever discarded the empty case through the bottom of the receiver. As the action returned forward, it stripped a new round and shoved it into the chamber. 

The movement of all this mass helped mitigate recoil forces. It also resulted in a positively impressive rate of fire of around 450 rpm. This is about the same as that of the American M3 Grease Gun.

Major Players of the Madsen LMG

The Madsen LMG was expensive and laborious to produce, but all machine guns made during this time were expensive and laborious to produce. Regardless, when stoked with smokeless rounds, the Madsen was lightweight and portable in an era when automatic guns typically were not. These attributes made it quite popular. The Madsen became a common fixture on battlefields.

Both sides used the Madsen during the Mexican Revolution. In fact, in 1905 the British Rexer Arms Company began producing an unauthorized copy that they sold to anyone with cash. The Russians bought a pile of the guns for use with both horse cavalry and aboard the crude warplanes of the day. 

The open-bolt nature of the design confounded efforts to create a synchronization gear to allow the gun to fire through the propellor arc safely on early Morane-Saulnier aircraft. Some versions of the plane even employed an armored propellor to deflect the rounds as needed. This probably didn’t inspire confidence among its pilots. 

The German infantry used Madsen LMGs chambered in 7.92x57mm during WWI. The relatively-lightweight Madsens were popular among the soldiers who needed a mobile base of automatic fire for trench-clearing operations. Considering the alternative was the MG08/15 Maxim that weighed a whopping 40 pounds empty, the Madsen offered markedly improved mobility.

The Chinese were cursed with internecine warfare among sundry warlords throughout the first half of the 20th century. They bought a small number of Madsens and then began local production at the Guandong Arsenal in 1909. As a result of such widespread distribution, the Madsen eventually found its way around the globe.

You Can’t Keep a Good Gun Down

In the years following World War I, it really did seem that everybody was using the Madsen, albeit in small numbers. The Czechs employed the gun to fight the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. China bought another 300 in the 1930s and put them to use. Paraguay and Bolivia both bought Madsens to use against each other. Brazil and Argentina stocked their arms rooms with Madsens as well.

After World War II broke out, the world just could not get enough guns. Thousands went to the Chinese, while Norway used the Madsen LMG as a Squad Automatic Weapon chambered in 6.5×55 Krag. However, of all the calibers the Madsen ran, this was one of the least reliable.

The Madsen was originally a Dutch design, and the Dutch used the gun in a hopeless effort at maintaining their Pacific colonies prior to their capitulation to the Japanese. As the Imperial Japanese Army was forever short of firearms, they press-ganged these liberated Madsens into use against the Allies. A few were captured by U.S. forces at Guadalcanal.

Onward To the Present

While the Great War might have ended, other wars and battles picked up around the world. The Madsen saw significant post-war service in Brazil. Chambered in 7.62x51mm NATO, these guns were still in use by Brazilian police as recently as 2018. The Portuguese used Madsens through the 1970s and 80s as they tried to gracefully extricate themselves from their chaotic African holdings. 

In July of 1969, Honduras and El Salvador actually went to war over a soccer game. Four days later, some 3,600 people were dead…because of a soccer game. There were other issues of mass migration and cultural incompatibility as well, but it was the soccer game that conflagrated everything in the first place. Naturally, the Madsen LMG figured prominently.

If properly maintained, firearms will last pretty much forever. In fact, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Ukrainians threw absolutely everything they had into defense of their country. News footage showed members of the Ukrainian youth group Prava Molod going into action against Russian forces packing WWI-vintage Madsens. 

Despite being more complicated than the U.S. tax code and looking like the illegitimate love child between a boat paddle and a fishing rod, the Madsen LMG has had an outsized impact on the course of modern war. 

Tags: Full auto, light machine gun, Machine Gun, military firearms, WWI, WWII