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Lewis Gun
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The Lewis Gun (or Lewis Automatic Machine Gun) is a pre-World War I era light machine gun of American design that was perfected and most widely used by the forces of the British Empire. It was first used in combat in World War I, and continued in service with a number of armed forces all the way through to the end of the Korean War. It is visually distinctive because of a wide tubular cooling shroud around the barrel and top mounted drum-pan magazine, and was commonly used as an aircraft machine-gun during both World Wars.
Lewis Gun was invented by U.S. Army Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis in 1911, based on initial work by Samuel Maclean.
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The Lewis Gun (or Lewis Automatic Machine Gun) is a pre-World War I era light machine gun of American design that was perfected and most widely used by the forces of the British Empire. It was first used in combat in World War I, and continued in service with a number of armed forces all the way through to the end of the Korean War. It is visually distinctive because of a wide tubular cooling shroud around the barrel and top mounted drum-pan magazine, and was commonly used as an aircraft machine-gun during both World Wars.
History & Design
The Lewis Gun was invented by U.S. Army Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis in 1911, based on initial work by Samuel Maclean. Despite its origins, the Lewis Gun was not initially adopted by the American military—most likely because of political differences between Lewis and the head of the US Army Board of Ordnance—and so in 1913 Col. Lewis retired, moved to Belgium, and established the Armes Automatique Lewis company in the town of Liege to facilitate commercial production of the gun. In the meantime, Lewis had been working closely with British arms manufacturer BSA in an effort to overcome some of the production difficulties of the gun. The onset of WWI increased demand for the Lewis Gun, and BSA began production of the Lewis Gun (under the designation Model 1914), with the design officially being approved for service on October 15th, 1915 under the designation "Gun, Lewis, .303-inch". No Lewis Guns were ever produced in Belgium during World War I; all manufacture was carried out by BSA in the UK and Savage Arms Co. in the US.
The Lewis Gun was gas operated. A portion of the expanding gases was tapped off from the barrel. This drove a piston to the rear against a spring. The piston was fitted with a vertical post at its rear which rode in a helical cam track in the bolt, rotating it at the end of its travel nearest the breech. This allowed the three locking lugs at the rear of the bolt to engage into recesses in the gun's body to lock it into place. The post also carried a fixed firing pin, which protruded through an aperture in the front of the bolt to fire the next round at the foremost part of the piston's travel.
It was designed with an aluminium barrel-casing to use the muzzle blast to draw air into the gun and cool down the internal mechanism. There is some discussion over whether the cooling tube was effective or even necessary- In the Second World War many old aircraft guns which did not have the tubing were issued to anti-aircraft units of the British Home Guard and to British airfields, and were found to function properly without it, leading to the suggestion that Lewis had insisted on the cooling arrangement largely to show that his design was different from Maclean's earlier prototypes.
Later, more aircraft guns were used on vehicle mounts in the heat of the Western Desert and again did not suffer without the tube. However, the Royal Navy retained the tubing on their deck-mounted AA-configuration Lewis Guns..
The Lewis Gun utilised two different drum magazines, one holding 47 and the other 97 rounds. Unlike other drum magazine designs, the Lewis's drum was not wound against a spring but was mechanically driven by a cam on top of the bolt which operated a pawl mechanism via a lever.
An interesting point of the design was that it did not use a traditional helical coiled spring, but used a spiral spring, much like a big clock spring, in a semi-circular housing just in front of the trigger. The operating rod had a toothed underside, which engaged with a cog which wound the spring. When the gun fired a round, the bolt recoiled and the cog was turned, tightening the spring until the resistance of the spring had reached the recoil force of the bolt assembly. At that moment, as the gas pressure in the breech fell, the spring unwound, turning the cog, which, in turn, wound the operating rod forward for the next round. As with a clock spring, the Lewis Gun's recoil spring had an adjustment device to adjust the recoil resistance for variations in temperature and wear. Unusual as it seems, the Lewis design proved enduringly reliable, and was even copied identically by the Japanese and used extensively by them during WWII.
It had a cyclic rate of approximately 500-600 rounds per minute. The gun weighed 28 lb (12.7 kg), only about half as much as a typical medium machine gun of the era, such as the Vickers machine gun, and was chosen in part because, being more portable than a Heavy machine gun (such as the Vickers), it could be carried and used by a single soldier. BSA even produced at least one model (the "B.S.A. Light Infantry Pattern Lewis Gun", which lacked the aluminium barrel shroud and had a wooden foregrip) designed as a form of assault weapon.
Differences between British and American-made Lewis Guns
The Lewis Gun was only produced by BSA and Savage Arms during WWI, and although the two guns were largely similar there were enough differences to stop them being completely interchangeable (in fact, even BSA-produced Lewis guns were not completely interchangeable with other BSA-produced Lewis guns, although this was rectified during WWII).
The major difference between the two designs is that the BSA guns were chambered for .303 British cartridges and the Savage guns were chambered for .30-06 cartridges, which necessitated some difference in the magazine along with the feeding mechanism, bolt, barrel, extractors, and gas operation system.
Savage did make Lewis Guns in .303 British calibre; the Model 1916 and Model 1917 were exported to Canada and Great Britain in this calibre and a few were also supplied to the US Military, particularly the US Navy.
The Savage Model 1917 was generally produced in .30-06 calibre, however, and a number of these guns were supplied to the UK under lend-lease during WWII.
Service
Colonel Lewis became frustrated with trying to persuade the U.S. Army to adopt his design- political differences between himself and General William Crozier (Head of the US Board of Ordnance) led to the Lewis design being un-necessarily rejected out of hand in 1911, and so Lewis—"slapped by rejections from ignorant hacks", as he said—left the US and headed to Belgium (and, shortly afterwards, the UK) with his design. The Belgians quickly adopted the design in 1913, using the .303 British round, and not long after that, in 1914, the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA) in the UK purchased a license to manufacture the Lewis Automatic Machine Gun, which resulted in Col. Lewis receiving significant Royalty payments and becoming very wealthy.
World War I
The Belgian Army was the first military force to adopt the Lewis Gun; and when Germans first encountered it in 1914 (whilst in combat against the Belgians), they nicknamed it "The Belgian Rattlesnake".
The British officially adopted the Lewis Gun in .303 calibre for Land and Aircraft use in October 1915, with US Marine Corps and US Navy following in early 1917, adopting the M1917 Lewis Gun (produced by the Savage Arms Co.) in .30-06 calibre.
The US Army never officially adopted the Lewis Gun for infantry use and even went so far as to take Lewis Guns off US Marines arriving in France and replacing them with the cheap, shoddy, and extremely unsatisfactory Chauchat LMG—a practice believed to be related to General Crozier's dislike of Col. Lewis and his gun.
The US Army eventually adopted the Browning Automatic Rifle in 1917 (although it was February of 1918 before any of the new guns reached the front lines), but the US Navy and the US Marine Corps continued to use the .30-06 calibre Lewis Gun until the early stages of WWII.
The Russian Empire purchased 10,000 Lewis Guns in 1917 from the British Government, and ordered another 10,000 Lewis Guns from Savage Arms in the US. The US Government was unwilling to supply the Tsarist Russian Government with the guns and there is some doubt as to whether they were actually delivered, although records indicate that 5,982 Savage Lewis Guns were delivered to Russia by March 31st, 1917. The Lewis Guns supplied by Britain were despatched to Russia in May 1917, but there is some confusion as to whether these were the Savage-made Lewis Guns being trans-shipped through the UK, or a separate batch of UK produced Lewis Guns.
The British Mark IV tanks used the Lewis Gun, replacing the Vickers and Hotchkiss guns used in earlier tanks. The Lewis was chosen for its relatively compact magazines, but as soon as an improved magazine belt for the Hotchkiss gun was developed, the Lewis gun was replaced by them in later Marks of tank.,
The Germans also used captured Lewis guns in both World Wars, and included instruction in its operation and care as part of their machine-gun crew training.
Despite costing more than a Vickers gun to manufacture (The cost of a Lewis Gun in 1915 was £165, and the Vickers cost about £100,) machine-guns were in high demand with the British military during World War I, and the Lewis also had the advantage of being about 80% faster (in both time and component parts) to build than the Vickers gun (and was a lot more portable), and thus orders were placed by the British Government between August 1914 and June 1915 for 3,052 Lewis guns. By the end of World War I over 50,000 Lewis Guns had been produced in the US and UK and they were nearly ubiquitous on the Western Front, outnumbering the Vickers gun by a ratio of about 3:1..
Aircraft Use
after the first successful firing of a machine-gun from an aeroplane in June 1912.]]
The Lewis Gun has the distinction of being the first machine-gun fired from an aeroplane; on June 7th, 1912 Captain Charles Chandler of the US Army fired a prototype Lewis Gun from the foot-bar of a Wright Model B Flyer.
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The Lewis Gun was extensively used on British and French aircraft during WWI, either as an observer's or gunner's weapon or as an additional primary weapon to the more common Vickers machine gun. The Lewis' popularity as an aircraft machine-gun was partly due to its low weight, the fact it was air-cooled, and that it used self-contained 97-round magazines. Because of this, the Lewis was first fitted on two early production examples of the Bristol Scout C aircraft by Lanoe Hawker in the summer of 1915, mounted on the port side and firing forwards and outwards at a 30º angle to avoid the propeller arc, and later on French Nieuport 11 and British S.E.5a aircraft, above the top wing in a Foster mount, which was outside of the propeller's arc, and allowed the gun to be swung down on a rail to allow the magazine to be changed in flight. For the use of observers or rear aircraft gunners, the Lewis was mounted in a Scarff ring, which allowed the gun to be rotated and elevated whilst supporting the gun's weight.
Lewis Guns were often employed in an balloon-busting role, loaded with incendiary ammunition designed to ignite the hydrogen inside the gasbags of German Zeppelins and dirigibles.
World War II
By World War II, the British Army had replaced the Lewis Gun with the Bren gun gun for most infantry uses. As an airborne weapon it was being largely supplemented by the Vickers K gun, which could achieve over twice the rate of fire, and was also popular with the Long Range Desert Group.
In the crisis following the Fall of France, where a large part of the British Army's supplies had been lost, stocks of Lewis guns in both .303 and .30-06 were hurriedly pressed into service, primarily for arming the Home Guard and purposes such as defending airfields and anti-aircraft use. 58,983 Lewis Guns were taken from stores, repaired and refitted, and pressed into service by the British during the course of World War II. In addition to their reserve weapon role in the UK, they also saw front-line use with British, Australian, and New Zealand forces in the early years of the Pacific Theatre operations against the Japanese. The Lewis gun also saw continued service as an anti-aircraft weapon during WWII, and in this role it was credited by the British as bringing down more low-flying enemy aircraft than any other AA weapon they had in service.
-crewed Long Range Desert Group truck (equipped with Lewis Gun) being un-ditched from sand, c.1942]]
American forces used the Lewis gun (in .30-06 calibre) throughout World War II; The United States Navy used Lewis guns on armed merchant ships, small auxiliary ships, landing craft, submarines, and for ships' landing forces, and the United States Coastguard also used the Lewis on their vessels.. Despite being a US design, however, the US Army never officially adopted the design for anything other than aircraft use.
The Germans used captured British Lewis Guns during World War II under the designation MG 137(e), whilst the the Japanese copied the Lewis design and employed it extensively during WWII; it was designated the Type 92 and chambered for a 7.7mm rimmed cartridge that was interchangeable with the .303 British cartridge..
The Lewis was officially discontinued from British Service in 1946, but continued to be used by forces operating against the United Nations in the Korean War, and against the French and the USA in the First Indochina War and the subsequent Vietnam War
Total production of the Lewis Gun by BSA was over 145,000 units, and a total of 3,550 guns were produced by Savage Arms Co. for US Service– 2,500 in .30-06 and 1,050 in .303 British calibre.
Influence on later designs
The German FG42 rifle used the Lewis Gun's clock-mainspring design, and the M60 machine gun has some design similarities with the Lewis Gun in relation to the bolt and groups of the gas piston and firing pin.
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