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Lewis
.303in Light Machine Gun |
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As
usual, in the beginning, nobody wanted the Lewis. Virtually every
country with a worthwhile standing Army turned it down, but Colonel
Isaac Lewis of the US Army persisted. He wasn't the inventor of the
gun - this was the brain-child of one Sam McClean. But again, as in
the relationship between Maxim and Vickers, it was Lewis the soldier,
who re-worked the gun designed by the Engineer McClean, producing
the Lewis gun in a form which could be used tactically in the field,
in the hands of soldiers who sought rugged reliability. In fact, it
brought a new dimension into the meaning of Fire and Movement -
although it could be argued that there was a lot of fire, and
precious little movement in the early years of its life with the
British Army on the Western Front. The
US Army however, didn't want it. Lewis brought his gun, samples and
designs and drawings to Europe just before the start of the First
World War. Again, no one really wanted to know much about it, but
the Belgians, knowing a fair offer when they saw it, provided some
manufacturing facilities at Liege, that home of so many excellent
weapons and engineering expertise. The Belgian Army even had a few
in use by the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. After their country
was almost totally overrun by the Schlieffen planned German Army,
the drawings were whipped away smartly, and found a new home with
the Birmingham Small Arms Co - BSA of immortal memory. The
British Army entered the War with a scale of two Vickers or Maxims
per Battalion. By 1915, even the War Office had begun to realise
that machine guns needed to be used en masse for proper fire effect,
and the Vickers were concentrated into new Units - the foundation of
the Machine Gun Corps. And thus it came about, that when the War
Office looked for an alternative, the Lewis was waiting in the
wings to make its debut. The RFC had already sized it up as suitable
for aviation use. The Army version, of course, was fitted with a
wooden butt, and was suitable for firing from its own tripod, or any
other suitable rest, from the prone position, or standing from
trench or other cover. The
works were unusual for the time. The gun was cocked by hand, and the
first round produced gases which pushed a piston to the rear, thus
re-cocking the gun. The re-cock action turned a pawl, which in turn
wound-up a clock-like spring, providing the energy for the next
forward movement. The rearward movement ejected the spent round, and
the forward movement stripped the next live round from the circular
top-mounted magazine, and pushed it into the chamber. The firing pin
continued its forward movement - and the cycle repeated itself. The
rate of fire depended on the mood of the gunner, the usual method
being to fire in bursts of three to five rounds, at whatever
fleeting target was on offer. The
greatest advantage of the guns, after its
portability, was the fact that it was air-cooled, and the team did
not need to carry cooling water, cans or tubes. The barrel was
encased in aluminium fins, which in turn were covered with a cast
iron or machined steel jacket. As hot air rises, and as nature
abhors a vacuum, fresh air moved in to replace the hot air which
escaped from the end of the jacket. Leaving
aside its weight, the gun was a very fine tactical weapon. At the
front was fitted a folding bipod, from which the gun could be set up
to fire. I found the bipod was a bit of a nuisance, it being fitted
too far forward to be in easy reach of the firer. On the whole, it
fired comfortably from a handy sand-bag or grassy bank, but it was
not too good firing from stone or brickwork. With hindsight, after
some experience with the Bren, one must wonder whether it might have
been possible to fire it from the hip with the aid of a sling, but I
must admit that the possibility was never mentioned in my hearing.
The Lewis weighed some 27lbs complete, and would have been a bit of
a bruiser to handle compared with the handy and compact Bren,
weighing a mere 22lbs.
The
allocation of Lewis guns to the Battalion grew slowly, until by 1918
each of the 16 Platoons in the then standard Infantry Battalion had
two guns, with a further four being held as supporting weapons at
Battalion HQ. Here one might note that, according to an Uncle who
was a Regular Soldier with 2nd Bn The Essex Regiment, any infantry
battalion which could raise more than 10 to 12 platoons in the early
part of 1918 was fortunate indeed. The four guns at HQ were usually
used in the Anti Aircraft role, but could be used to stiffen up fire
to help the soldiers on to their objectives. In
field conditions, the gun was prone to the usual problems of mud in
Europe, or sand in the deserts of Mesopotamia and Palestine. There
were six “immediate action” stoppages, and seven possible
others, and the litany describing remedial attention ran into pages
and pages of small print. Nevertheless, by careful and thorough (and
boring) training, the soldier of the day mastered them all; an
important matter for which I am sure he would have been grateful
when he found himself in a life or death situation. As usual, in 1919 the run-down of the Army began - after all, what Treasury wants to keep on its payroll lots of idle soldiers who have to be fed and housed - and worse of all, paid. So the soldiers were demobbed, and the Lewis guns, by the thousand, went into store. And there they stayed, leaving aside those on issue to Units, or those sold off as surplus to emerging Nations. Its replacement, the peerless Bren came along in the late thirties, but there were still thousands of Lewises in the Ordnance Depots. Which was just as well, as the British Army lost far too many of its Brens in France in 1940 - so the Lewis was taken out of store to resume its place in the Field of Battle, until the sweating workshops of the UK could replace the lost Brens. Cleaned of their preserving grease by cursing squaddies, they became the front line weapon against aircraft, protecting merchant vessels in the Channel and the East Coast runs. They were again the platoon weapon for many of the Units providing the Defence of the United Kingdom and all we young soldiers sought the aid of the veterans of the First World War, to point out the best way of coming to terms with the Lewis. - Text originally published in Airfix Magazine, April 1982 Photos
by Knut Erik Hagen and Mike Casale |
