Ciężki karabin maszynowy wz. 30
heavy machine gun
The ckm wz. 30 (short for ciężki karabin maszynowy wzór 30; "heavy machine gun pattern 1930") is a Polish derivative of the American Browning M1917 heavy machine gun. Produced with various modifications such as greater caliber, longer barrel and adjustable sighting device, it was an improved although unlicensed copy of its predecessor, and was the standard machine gun of the Polish Army from 1931.
Design and development
After Poland regained her independence in 1918, her armed forces were armed with a variety of different weapons, mostly a legacy of the armies of her former occupying powers. As with its rifles and carbines, the machine guns used by the Polish Army in the Polish–Soviet War included the Russian 7.62 mm M1910 Maxim, the Austrian 1907 8 mm Schwarzlose MG M.07/12, the German 7.92 mm Maschinengewehr 08, and the French 8 mm Hotchkiss Mle 1914. Such diversity was a logistical nightmare, and in the early 1920s the General Staff of the Polish Army decided to replace all older machine guns with a new design, specifically built to Polish designations.
Initially the Hotchkiss machine gun, proven during the Polish–Soviet War and adapted to the standard Polish 7.92 mm round (as the ckm wz. 25), had the most supporters. In late 1924 and early 1925, 1,250 were ordered from France and the Polish Ministry of War started talks on buying the license for manufacturing copies in Poland. However, the first tests of the post-war Hotchkiss machine guns proved that the new production were well below both Polish needs and maker's specifications, and the talks came to a halt.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ciężki karabin maszynowy wz. 30” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.