There is an old soldiers myth that the Geneva Convention prohibits firing at infantry with large caliber anti-aircraft guns. Allegedly, this is inhumane. In reality, no such prohibition exists, but the legend did not arise out of thin air. It was born out of the animal horror of those who have seen what a 12.

7 mm bullet does to the human body. Now imagine that it is not just one such bullet flying but 50/. The engineers who created this machine solved a complex mathematical problem. How to shoot down an aircraft that flies overhead faster than a shooter can blink. They created a tool for hunting duralamin birds, complex, expensive, and powerful.

But war, as always, had its own plans for this masterpiece. This weapon became legendary not because it brilliantly fulfilled its task, but because it failed miserably. It was too late for the war in the sky to become the absolute reaper of death on the ground. This is the story of the M16 meat grinder, an anti-aircraft gun that won three wars without even looking up.

Stories about how an engineering dead end turned into the infantry’s worst nightmare. And to understand how an air defense weapon became the best anti-infantry weapon of the century, we need to go back to 1943 when American columns in Italy realized that they were completely defenseless. In the summer of 1943, Allied columns stretched for miles along the roads of southern Italy, moving from their staging areas deep into the peninsula.

And every driver in every truck knew that the main threat would come not from the roadside, but from above. German fighters would emerge from behind the hills in a low-level flight, rush along the convoy a few meters above the ground, spraying equipment and people with fire from their side cannons, and disappear before anyone had time to aim their weapons.

The entire raid lasted seconds. It left behind burning vehicles, wounded soldiers, and a feeling of utter helplessness. Light infantry weapons were practically useless against a fast, low-flying target. Neither rifles nor submachine guns could provide the rate of fire and speed of aim required to hit an aircraft flashing overhead at 500 kmh.

The army needed something fundamentally different. Something mobile, rapid fire, capable of instantly turning and filling the sky with lead in those few seconds while the target remained within range. And the answer to this need would turn out to be crude rather than elegant. So crude that its effectiveness would become frightening over time.

The problem was arithmetic. The large caliber Browning machine gun, the legendary Madus, fired at a rate of about 500 rounds per minute. Against ground targets, it was a monstrous force. The 12.7 mm bullet designed in 1917 at the request of General Persing to combat armored vehicles, easily pierced light armor, and destroyed shelters.

But for anti-aircraft fire, 500 rounds per minute from a single barrel meant an unacceptably sparse stream of fire. A low-flying aircraft spent three maybe 4 seconds in the firing zone. During this time, a single barrel could fire two dozen bullets, most of which would miss their target. The Americans began to experiment.

Turret mounts from various manufacturers, including Bendix and Martin, were tested on the chassis of halftrack armored personnel carriers. None of them produced the desired result. The New York-based Maxon Corporation came closest, offering the M33 twin mount with two electrically powered Browning machine guns. It entered service and even saw action in North Africa, but the two barrels still left too much empty sky between the bullets.

The solution reached by the company’s founder, former naval officer William Maxon, was disconcerting in its simplicity. If two barrels weren’t enough, then four would have to be used. No new caliber, no new guidance principle, no radar. Just double the number of barrels and fill the space in front of the target with so much lead that it would be statistically impossible to miss.

This logic was completely devoid of engineering elegance. But it was ruthlessly honest. And when the quadruple M45 mount, nicknamed quad mount, passed tests at the Aberdine proving ground, it became clear that Maxon had found the formula, a frighteningly simple formula. In May 1943, the White Factory in Cleveland began mass- prodducing a vehicle designated the M16.

Structurally, it was a halftrack armored personnel carrier with an open fighting compartment in which Maxon’s quadruple mount was placed on a rotating platform. Four heavyduty Browning machine guns arranged in pairs on either side of the gunner were capable of firing simultaneously or alternately. the upper pair and the lower pair, which allowed for prolonged firing without overheating the barrels.

An electric drive powered by two sixvolt batteries and recharged by a gasoline generator rotated the entire structure through a full turn and raised the barrels almost vertically. The gunner sat between the machine guns on a canvas seat, controlling the aiming with a pair of handles and aiming through a reflex sight, which the soldiers nicknamed the spiderweb.

But what made this system truly exceptional was not its rate of fire, per se, but the ability to adjust the barrels to converge at a single point at a given distance. Four streams of bullets, each of which posed a serious threat on its own, converged into a single cone of fire. And this convergence distance could be changed right in the heat of battle.

In practice, this meant the point of aim had a hit density that no other weapon of comparable caliber could match. The barrels were fed from box magazines of a distinctive shape, which the soldiers nicknamed gravestones. Each held 200 rounds and weighed 40 kg, and two loaders had to change them manually, while hot casings fell onto the metal floor of the turret at their feet.

By March 1944, the Cleveland plant had produced nearly 2,900 machines. At the same time, hundreds of obsolete M13 double-barreled guns were converted into M16s and International Harvester assembled a thousand similar machines for delivery to the Soviet Union under lend lease. The meat grinder went into production, but its very design had a feature whose significance neither Maxon or any of the military customers could have foreseen.

The quadruple mount was designed to fire upwards and everything about it was subordinated to this task. The open turret provided a 360° view of the sky. The elevation angle of up to 90° allowed the barrels to follow an aircraft passing directly overhead. The 12 mm armor plating protected the crew from shrapnel and stray bullets, but nothing more.

Heavy armor was unnecessary for an anti-aircraft machine operating behind the front lines. The 12.7 mm caliber was deadly effective against piston engine fighters with their duralaman skin, but it was no longer suitable against the new generation of aircraft that was rapidly approaching. All this meant that the M16 was a weapon of its time and that time was inexraably coming to an end.

Messesmidt ME262 jet fighters were already appearing in the skies over Europe for which a large caliber machine gun posed a minimal threat. The M16 was already being replaced by the M19, equipped with twin 40mm bow force automatic cannons capable of engaging high-speed targets at much greater distances.

But it was precisely the characteristics that made the M16 obsolete as an anti-aircraft weapon that turned it into something completely different when the barrels were turned toward the horizon. A declination angle of 10° below the horizontal allowed it to fire at ground targets. 12 mm of armor, useless against a tank gun, was quite sufficient to withstand infantry small arms.

And 2,200 rounds per minute, excessive for a single aircraft, proved absolutely devastating against manpower in open terrain. The meat grinder was designed to look at the sky, but the war had already prepared it for a completely different job. The M16 arrived at the front in early 1944 and almost immediately faced a paradox that would determine its future.

By the time of the Normandy landings, the Allies had already gained air superiority, and the skies over France were virtually empty. The meat grinder had no one to shoot at. By July 1944, M16 crews were increasingly lowering their barrels to the horizon, using quadruple machine guns to comb through hedge rows and trees where German snipers were hiding.

Four 12.7 mm barrels simply cut through the vegetation along with everyone hiding in it. The M16 still fulfilled its anti-aircraft role and did so brilliantly. On January 1st, 1945, the Luftvafa threw its last reserves into operation Bowden Plata, a massive attack on Allied airfields.

It was a disaster for the Germans. They lost hundreds of irreplaceable pilots without any strategic result. And in March of that year, when units of the 9inth Panzer Division unexpectedly captured the Ludenorf Bridge over the Rine at Remagan, the only surviving bridge across the river, the Luftwaffa threw everything that could still fly at its destruction.

Dive bombers, fighters, heavy destroyers, and then the Arad 234 jet bombers, the world’s first jet bombers. Herman Goring even sought volunteers for suicide ramming attacks on the bridge, but his own officers rejected the idea. Five anti-aircraft artillery battalions, including the M16 of the 492nd anti-aircraft division, built a wall of fire over the Rine, and not a single German aircraft managed to hit the bridge.

But by that point, anti-aircraft warfare was already the exception rather than the rule in the M16’s biography. Its main job had become something else. In December 1944, during the Ardan counteroffensive, the quadruple installations mowed down German infantry with such efficiency that the soldiers gave the M45 another nickname, Kraut Maua, the Fritz Mower.

The war ended, the M16 was decommissioned, and it seemed that its story had come to an end. But the darkest chapter in the meat grinders biography had yet to be written. On June 25th, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and within a few months, the peninsula was plunged into a war for which the United States Army was not fully prepared.

Thousands of pieces of equipment from the previous war were stored in the warehouses, including the M16, which was by then formally recognized as obsolete. Its large caliber, manually guided machine guns, were useless against the MiG 15 jet fighters capable of speeds of up to 1,000 km per hour. The new M19 self-propelled anti-aircraft guns with twin 40mm cannons were more powerful and had a longer range, but there were not enough of them.

And so the old halftracks with four Browning barrels went back to war. Only now they were no longer used to shoot at planes. In the fall of 1950, when China entered the conflict, the nature of the fighting changed radically. Chinese volunteer units employed tactics that American soldiers perceived as human waves, although in reality they were much more complex and dangerous.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army used a system of short attacks, night infiltrations by small groups of three fighters, trio after trio on a narrow section of the front. The groups crawled forward to grenade throwing distance and launched a surprise attack simultaneously from several directions to the sound of horns and whistles, creating the impression among the defenders that they were being attacked by an innumerable mass.

If the first echelon did not achieve a breakthrough, it was followed by a second, then a third, until the defenses began to crack. The M16 proved to be formidable against this tactic. The barrels, useless against jet aircraft, were lowered to the horizon and found targets for which their power was not just sufficient, but monstrously excessive. A 12.

7 mm bullet designed to penetrate aircraft armor could hit a person without any armor protection. 2,200 such bullets per minute brought together in a single cone of fire turned the quadruple mount into a weapon that had no infantry equivalent. No other type of weapon in the American arsenal could create such a density of fire at such a distance with such destructive power for each individual hit.

The demand for the meat grinder in Korea was so great that the army urgently converted another 1,200 conventional M3 halftrack armored personnel carriers into M16 A1 anti-aircraft vehicles hastily installing Maxon turrets. South Korea received 50 vehicles under a military aid program and used them for the next four decades. By the end of 1951, the M16 was officially reclassified as limited standard equipment.

And in 1958, it was finally removed from service with the United States Army. But the four Maxon barrels refused to retire. The Halftrack died, but the turret survived. The M45, removed from obsolete armored personnel carriers, began to be mounted on a towed trailer designated the M55. The generator was replaced with a more powerful one.

The tombstone magazines were replaced with larger boxes and flame arresters were installed on the barrels. And in this form, four Browning machine guns went to their third war. In Vietnam, the quadruple installations were mounted on army trucks that protected convoys on roads that transport soldiers referred to as ambush alleys. Route 19, a 240 km winding road through the central highlands, was particularly deadly.

Supply convoys were attacked so regularly that drivers began to convert their trucks into improvised combat vehicles themselves. They covered the bodies with steel plates and sandbags, installed machine guns, and if they could get a Maxon turret, placed it in the center of the bodies. These homemade vehicles were given their own names.

Brutus, Eve of Destruction, and Little Shershot. One of the veteran transporters, Steven Peters, later recalled, “No gang truck in Vietnam was officially approved by the army, but all the commanders knew we had them.” Outside America, the Maxin turret continued to mutate. Israel converted it into a 20 mm cannon mount that remained in service until the 1980s.

Colombia mounted quadruple machine guns on armored vehicles to fight guerillas in the mountains. South Korea, which received its M16S in the midst of the war, continued to use them until 1990. A weapon designed in 1942 to combat the Luftvafa’s piston engine fighters was still finding use half a century later. The meat grinder was not a marvel of engineering.

There was nothing revolutionary about it, nothing elegant, nothing that would make the designer proud of the beauty of the solution. Four old machine guns on a rotating platform powered by a lawnmower generator mounted on a tracked truck chassis. It was a weapon of crude pragmatism created according to a logic accessible to any sergeant.

If there is not enough firepower, add more barrels. And it was this simplicity that made the meat grinder immortal. War found use for it again and again against aircraft in France, against infantry in the Arden, against night attacks in Korea, against ambushes in Vietnam. Each time the task changed, but the weapon remained the same.

Complex systems become obsolete when one of their many components fails. Simple systems live on because there is nothing in them to break. William Maxon, who created this device, also invented frozen meals for Navy pilots. He died in 1947 at the age of 49 without ever knowing about Korea or Vietnam or that his four barrels would be killing people decades after his death.

But that’s the nature of weapons. They always outlive their creators and find uses their creators never imagined.