Military Weapons From the Past: The Lewis Gun

It must be an automatic rifle, Robert Jordan thought. “How much does it weigh?” he asked.

“One man can carry it, but it is heavy. It has three legs that fold. We got it in the last serious raid. The one before the wine.”

“How many rounds have you for it?”

“An infinity,” the gypsy said. “One whole case of an unbelievable heaviness.”

Sounds like about five hundred rounds, Robert Jordan thought. “Does it feed from a pan or a belt?”

“From round iron cans on the top of the gun.”

Hell, it’s a Lewis gun, Robert Jordan thought.

[Excerpt from ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemingway]

World War I is supposed to be about men stuck in the mud of trench warfare, a static stalemate with little movement.

Yet there were numerous patrols and attacks along the Western Front, the kind of action where portable automatic firepower could give soldiers a tremendous advantage.

The Maxim and Vickers machine guns of the time were effective but heavy.  Those weapons were for infantry support from fixed positions.

But there was a light machine gun that saw plenty of action on the groundand in the air. It was the Lewis Gun, an all-but-forgotten weapon today that was ubiquitous on the battlefields of The Great War because it could be carried, mounted on vehicles and even placed on airplanes.

 

The Lewis Gun had a respectable post-World War I career, as well. Hemingway wrote about the weapon in his classic novel about guerilla operations during the Spanish Civil War, a war he saw first-hand as a reporter. Republican forces in Spain had many Lewis guns. They either got them as gifts from Soviet Union or captured them from the Nationalists.

Hemingway’s guerillas might complain about how heavy a Lewis Gun was when attached to a Vickers-designed tripod. But on its own, the Lewis Gun had a simple bipod and weighed 28 pounds — less than half of the weight of a Vickers machine gun, which was also water-cooled and was more complicated to set up.

Desperate for weapons after their defeat at Dunkirk in 1940, the British pressed mothballed Lewis guns into service with the Home Guard. There were even some Lewis guns in the hands of North Koreans and the Viet Cong during the 1950s and 1960s.

It’s a weapon that lives up to a nickname earned during The Great War — “The Belgian Rattlesnake.”

No doubt about it, the Lewis Gun had a distinctive look. A large aluminum cooling shroud enclosed the barrel and a top-mounted pan magazine fed ammunition into the weapon. The pan magazines held either 47 or 97 rounds.

Originally chambered for the British .303-caliber cartridge, there was also an American version that fired the .30-06 round. Both are hefty cartridges that bring mayhem to the battlefield — and the Lewis Gun could fire up to 600 of the rounds per minute.

There was even a version chambered in 7.92-by-57-millimeter Mauser that was produced in limited numbers.

The Lewis Gun boasted raised blade- and tangent-leaf sights, as well as a removable wooden rear stock that could be replaced with a handle so an operator could more easily traverse the gun on a tripod.

Col. Isaac Newton Lewis of the United States Army designed and perfected his eponymous weapon in 1911 based on ideas from fellow gunmaker Samuel Maclean. The result was an innovative weapon for the time that put enormous firepower in the hands of one man, rather than the crew of up to six men needed to operate weapons such as the Maxim Gun.

The U.S. Army should have adopted the Lewis Gun, but didn’t because of animosity between Lewis and Gen. William Crozier, the chief of the Ordnance Department — probably resulting from differing politics.

Crozier blocked the Army’s adoption of the Lewis Gun — a foolish move that kept a perfectly capable light machine gun out of the hands of U.S. troops. It also infuriated Lewis, who reportedly sputtered that he had enough of being “slapped by rejections from ignorant hacks.”

Read the Remainder at War is Boring