QF 1-pounder Pom-Pom

Origins

Hiram Maxim built his first automatic gun in 1884, and within a few years his company was scaling the design up. The result was a gun of 37 mm caliber, the smallest bore allowed to fire an explosive shell under the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868, which threw a one-pound projectile from a belt at the rate of a machine gun. Maxim-Nordenfelt showed it to the British Army in the 1890s and was turned down: the War Office could see no use for a weapon too heavy for infantry and too light for artillery. The company sold it abroad instead, and among the buyers was the Transvaal, which took delivery of a number of guns, with German-made ammunition, before 1899. The Orange Free State bought some too.

Design & Construction

The pom-pom was a Maxim Gun in every essential. Barrel and breech recoiled together after each shot, a toggle joint broke to unlock the breech, the empty case was extracted and the next round drawn from a fabric belt of twenty-five, and a spring returned the action to fire again, at a cyclic rate of about 300 rounds a minute, though in practice the gun was fired in short bursts of a few rounds. A water jacket cooled the barrel. The shell was a small steel cylinder filled with black powder and fitted with a percussion fuze that burst it on impact, scattering a handful of fragments. The gun sat on a wheeled field carriage, usually with a shield, and with its limber was drawn by horses or mules like a light field gun. Its range was about 3,000 yards against targets the gunner could see.

Combat Use

The Boers used their pom-poms with the commandos in every major action of 1899 and 1900, from the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking to the Battle of Magersfontein, the Battle of Colenso and the Battle of Spion Kop, where one swept the crowded British summit. The small shells did little real damage, and a man had to be close to a burst to be hurt, but a string of five or ten of them walking across a battery or a firing line, each with its flash and crack, was unnerving to men who had never met anything like it, and the sound of the gun, pom-pom-pom, was heard and named by the British in the first weeks of the war. British gunners found pom-poms especially trying because they were hard to locate and could shell a battery from beyond rifle range. The War Office reversed itself within months and ordered dozens of guns from Vickers, Sons and Maxim, which reached South Africa in 1900 and were used by the British for the rest of the war, including in the drives against the guerrilla commandos.

Legacy

The pom-pom was the ancestor of every automatic cannon, from the anti-aircraft guns of the two World Wars to the cannon of modern fighting vehicles. In the First World War the British fitted 1-pounder Maxims to high-angle mounts as some of their first anti-aircraft guns, and the 2-pounder "pom-pom" of the Royal Navy, a Vickers enlargement of the same design, defended British warships into the 1940s. Boer-captured and British-issue 1-pounders are preserved in museums in South Africa, Britain and Canada, and their belts of fat brass cartridges are among the odder relics of the war.