Lewis Gun

Origins

The gun was designed around 1910 by Samuel McLean and developed by Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis of the United States Army. In 1912 a Lewis gun was fired from a Wright biplane at College Park, Maryland, the first machine gun fired from an aircraft in the United States, but the Army's chief of ordnance, General William Crozier, had no interest, and Lewis retired and took the design to Europe. He set up production in Liège, Belgium, and licensed the Birmingham Small Arms Company in England. When war came in 1914 the Belgian factory was lost, but BSA was ready, and the Belgian army's early use of the gun gave it the German nickname 'Belgian rattlesnake.' The British adopted it in 1915.

Design & Construction

The Lewis is gas-operated with a rotating bolt, firing from an open bolt at around 500-600 rounds per minute. Its most distinctive feature is the large cylindrical shroud over the barrel, enclosing aluminum cooling fins; the muzzle blast draws air through the shroud and over the fins. Ammunition fed from a flat, round pan on top of the receiver, holding 47 rounds for infantry and 97 in the larger aircraft pan, which the gun itself rotated as it fired. A coiled clock-type spring under the receiver drove the operating rod. At about 28 pounds it was much lighter than the water-cooled Vickers, and it could be made far faster and more cheaply — about six Lewis guns for the time and cost of one Vickers. American-made Savage-Lewis guns in .30-06 served with the US Navy and Marine Corps. Aircraft versions dropped the shroud to save weight.

Combat Use

By 1918 the Lewis gun had changed the structure of the British infantry platoon, with a Lewis section at its core and riflemen and bombers working around it, much as later armies built squads around the M1918 BAR and the Bren. On the Western Front the gun could advance with the infantry and fight from shell holes, where the heavy Vickers could not keep up. In the air it was the observer's gun in two-seaters and, on the Foster mounting above the top wing of the S.E.5 and other fighters, a pilot's gun too. American Marines arriving in France in 1917 with Lewis guns had them taken away and replaced with French Chauchats so that American production could go to aircraft — a decision much resented. In the World War II the Lewis was brought out of storage for the Home Guard, merchant ships, airfield defense, and anti-aircraft duty, and Japan's Type 92 was a copy.

Legacy

The Lewis gun proved that a light, air-cooled machine gun could give ordinary infantry their own firepower, and it laid the basis for the squad automatic weapon concept. Its shroud and pan made it one of the most recognizable weapons of the World War I. Registered, transferable Lewis guns are prized by collectors, and deactivated examples are common in Britain and the Commonwealth. It sits in the same generation as the belt-fed M1919 Browning Machine Gun and served beside it in the early years of the Second World War. See Machine Guns.