If you like drama, guns, and history, well, this is just the right video for you because the Louiswis gun story is full of these three for some weird reasons that you’re going to hear.

So, let’s get started.

The story of the Lewis Gun begins with a doctor who abandoned medicine to chase machines and who would eventually lose everything to the very invention that made someone else famous.

Samuel Neil Mlan gave up a medical practice and went on to invention and engineering.

Now, to make a long story short, his passion was automatic weaponry.

And among many quite interesting designs he had like the gas operated 37mm automatic cannon that didn’t really go anywhere, he came up with a gas operated water cooled machine gun.

It was heavy and complicated and failed in tests and the whole company eventually went bankrupt.

But when they were taken over by the new company, they got interested in a rotating bolt gas piston system from that failed machine gun.

They wanted to make this system work with a new design.

And this is where Isaac Newton Lewis comes into the story.

He was an artillery officer and had quite a few inventions himself, mostly tied to artillery things.

But now he was brought in to work on this new machine gun that had promising core principles, but no one really knew how to make it work.

So again, in short, Lewis took that promising operating system, threw out virtually everything else, and started from scratch.

Instead of a water cooling system, he put in something called a forced air arrangement.

He designed the new flat top mounted pan magazine, simplified the internal mechanism, and made a bunch of other smaller changes.

So the new gun could be carried and fired by a single infantryman.

Now this was revolutionary at the time of crew served heavy water cooled Maxim type machine guns that needed a crew of 4 to8 men and were because of that almost exclusively a defensive weapon.

It was now the year 1911 and Lewis had a working prototype chambered in the standard US30 6 cartridge.

So let’s first take a look at it and then why it didn’t go anywhere at first.

So the Lewis gun was an open bolt and more importantly an air cooled machine gun.

The idea for cooling looked like this.

Lewis encased the steel barrel in a cylindrical jacket of cast aluminum with deeply cut grooves running from the brereech to the muzzle.

Over them was a thin steel tube slightly longer than the barrel with the front narrowing and creating the bottleneck while the rear was left open.

These aluminum grooves would let the air go through, absorb the heat from the hot barrel, because when the gun fired, the muzzle blast exiting through that narrowed front end created something called the Venturi effect.

This means a drop in pressure at the muzzle end that sucked cool air in from the open rear and pulled it through those grooves and basically taking out the heat.

In simple words, when the gun fired, it sucked the cool air from the back of this steel tube and pulled it through those grooves to cool off the barrel heated by the prolonged firing.

and all that without any pump, moving parts, and so on.

Now, remember this system for later when I tell you what happened with it in the next global war.

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Okay.

Now, the next feature that stood out the most was the pan magazine, and it stood out for quite a few reasons.

So, it held 47 rounds.

And what’s interesting is that it didn’t have an internal spring like a conventional box or drum magazine.

Instead, the magazine was driven by the gun’s own action.

Each time the gun fired and the bolt cycled, the mechanism rotated the pan one position to push the next round to the feeding lips, and rounds sat in concentric rings with bullet tips pointing toward the center while the bottom of the magazine was open so the rounds could drop into the feed path.

Now, this might sound extremely complicated and not suitable for the kind of fighting it was about to get in the First World War, but it actually had a few advantages over the belt feeding system.

It was lighter and avoided belt related jams of the time when canvas belts were used that got wet or dirty and also the machine gun could be used by a single soldier without an assistant for the belt.

When soldiers got familiar with the weapon, they could swap pans quite quickly and continue firing.

However, loading those pans was the real pain in the ass process that tests your nerves and wastes your time.

Also, the open bottom wasn’t really the best solution for mud, but it is what it is.

It also wasn’t the highest ammo capacity in the world for a machine gun firing about 750 rounds per minute, which was quite a bit for the time.

And because Lewis used a clock spring instead of a conventional helical coil spring, the gunner could adjust the tension of it and use it as a crude regulator of rate of fire, applying more or less tension to control how fast the gun would be firing.

Lewis later went on to design an adjustable gas regulator, allowing the gunner to precisely control the weapon’s rate of fire.

This came in handy for adjusting the gun to various environmental conditions like different temperatures and so on.

However, what Lewis did was that he showed the world for the first time how a practical portable machine gun for a single soldier was possible.

Keep in mind that this was still before the BAR even existed.

So, it was virtually the first machine gun of that type.

It weighed some 28 lb or about 12 kilos.

This was in a time when standard machine guns in combat configuration weighed easily over 80 lb.

It was now time for the testing of four prototypes and for one of the weirdest cases of institutional sabotage in American military history.

And you guys had quite a few of them.

Don’t get offended, our dear American viewers.

It was Brigadier General William Crosier who had near absolute control over what weapons the army adopted and what it rejected.

And the thing is that he and Lewis didn’t quite have the best relationship due to some things in the past.

And now Crosia had a chance for payback for Lewis’s commenting and criticizing his work in ordinance a while back.

So when the Lewis gun was demonstrated in 1911, the senior army officers were impressed.

But then nothing happened.

One Lewis gun actually got destroyed during testing, which was a single failure that was used to reject the whole design permanently.

Then Lewis decided to organize a demonstration where his gun would be fired from an airplane, which had never been done before.

The right B, a pusher biplane with the pilot seated in front of the propeller, had the Lewis gun on the foot bar at the front.

They made three passes over the targets from some 250 ft and fired at them, achieving a 32% hit rate from this open cockpit biplane with no gun mount or sighting system.

All this was happening at the time when airplanes were seen as useful only for reconnaissance and firing machine guns from them was seen as a ridiculous wild dream.

However, instead of being a revelation moment that shocked the world and proved how ingenious the design was, it did quite the opposite.

The whole demonstration was on Lewis’s own initiative and without official authorization.

So the ordinance department could and did classify it as unauthorized.

Then the formal ground trials went the same way with Lewis obviously being sabotaged by his dear friend General Crosia.

And the gun chosen over Lewis was the Bennett Merci M1909 that was just notoriously flawed and ridiculously designed.

It was more than obvious that the Lewis gun was just systematically blocked by Crosia at every step he could think of.

Lewis was understandably devastated and enraged.

He pretty much flipped off the members of the test board, packed his things and his machine gun, and left his own country.

Lewis arrived in Belgium in January 1913 and went straight to one of Europe’s greatest centers of arms manufacturing where he set up a company and showed his gun to the Belgian army.

Now, the reception this time was everything opposite to what it was back home.

Belgians loved it and adopted it the same year, but in 303 British and not in 7.

65x 53 mm Mouser caliber, which was their standard cartridge.

This was because Birmingham Small Arms Company in England had already solved some mass production challenges and they did it in their British caliber.

Even though Britain didn’t want Lewis guns for themselves as they didn’t believe in sustained fire from an air cooled gun for now.

But anyway, the Belgians adopted it while Lewis himself moved to England with his patents because it was obvious that the Germans were cooking something and he wanted to protect himself and his work.

Then the war began in August 1914.

The Belgian army had only about 20 Lewis guns as they were still in the experimental phase when the Germans invaded them.

But given the situation and urgency, Belgians took those Lewis guns and strapped them onto a few armored cars they had and began hit and run raids against the flanks of the advancing German columns.

These were the tactics that Lewis himself envisioned for his weapon.

And they proved quite effective.

Shoot, duck, run, and fire from another position rather than dig in with the watercooled Maxim and camp there for four years.

Anyway, the German soldiers gave a nickname to this new gun, the Belgian rattlesnake.

coming from its distinctive rapid fire sound and the fact that it appeared from nowhere and sprayed the German column with bullets.

However, 20 Lewis guns and a handful of armored cars didn’t save Belgium from falling.

But it finally showed the rest of the world that Lewis had a point and that his weapon could actually be useful.

And the British who rejected it at first found themselves pretty soon in a machine gun crisis.

In 1914, they had a few hundred Vicar’s machine guns.

To see the difference, the Germans had over 12,000 MG08s at the beginning of the war and would soon get over 100,000.

Trench warfare then set in and the machine gun became the dominant weapon.

So, this gap was even more important now.

So, the British needed machine guns and they needed them like yesterday.

They placed the order for some 3,000 Lewis guns as they were already in their standard caliber.

And Brits then reorganized their machine gun structure within their army.

While the Lewis gun was officially approved for British service, they split the heavy vicar’s guns into the newly formed machine gun core where they’d be used for defensive lines because they were so bulky but capable of that sustained fire.

And the Lewis gun was pushed to the infantry section where it would go forward in attacks and provide close-range covering fire.

More importantly, it would be used in a tactic to destroy enemy machine gun positions.

The British formed specialized infantry machine gun killer teams, which were small, aggressive units whose specific job was to locate and destroy German machine gun imp placements that were holding up an advance.

They’d push forward, find the enemy gun positions, then use the Lewis gun’s mobility to get into a flanking position and take them out.

How well it performed tells you the fact that by the end of the war, over 50,000 Lewis guns were issued to British forces, which outnumbered the Vicers somewhere about 3 to one.

So now the Louiswis gun was operated by a dedicated team, usually about seven men.

You’d have a gunner as the center of the team, then a loader/ass assistant with the spare parts, keeping close to the gunner at all times.

And then the rest of the team, about five soldiers, were ammunition carriers with each one of them loaded with canvas bags with pan magazines on top of their full personal kit and rifles.

They protected the machine gun, handed over the ammo, and helped with the tedious business of reloading empty pans when there was a quiet moment during the battle.

The important thing is that each one of those guys in the team was trained to operate the gun if needed.

You know, in case, god forbid, something happened to the designated gunner cuz he was pretty much the highest priority target, especially for German snipers.

So, you’re not shocked when I tell you that the gunner’s life expectancy was not very long.

The machine gun corps as a whole, counting both vicers and Lewis gunners, suffered a casualty rate of about 36% over the course of the war.

More than 62,000 soldiers out of 170,000 were killed, wounded, or went missing, which is more than one in three.

And guess the nickname they got? The suicide club.

The Lewis gun was extremely effective in the trenches because it could appear anywhere at any time.

And unlike machine gun nests whose positions are mapped and wellknown, Lewis could pop out from the flank and mow down the advancing German infantry before diving down and reappearing somewhere else.

In the right conditions and right hands, it could deliver quite a blow and cause hundreds of casualties in just a few minutes.

And the Germans took notice of that.

Not only did they notice it, but they wanted it badly cuz they didn’t have anything like that of their own.

They did eventually come up with their version of, say, an attack machine gun, which was the MG815 in 1917, but it still weighed 18 kilos and was still water cooled, so not really a neat solution like the Lewis was.

The Germans captured about 10,000 Lewis guns during the war and rechambered them in their 7.

92 x 57 mm and gave them to their stormtroopers.

But where were the Americans while all this was happening? Well, here is the fun part.

And when I say fun, I mean the tragic, horrible, and selfish part that got soldiers killed because of some stubborn egoomaniacs.

So when the United States entered the war in April 1917, the American military was in a genuinely pathetic state when it came to automatic weapons.

The Ben Merci that Crosia had chosen over the Lewis was already recognized as useless.

They had almost nothing that could be carried forward in an attack.

Now the US Navy and Marine Corps had not been part of Crosia’s vendetta against Lewis and the Navy ordered 6,000 Lewis guns chambered in 30 ought six.

The Marines trained extensively with the weapon and they loved it.

They were deployed to France with them and were about to go into combat when the army took their Lewis guns away and gave them the French Shosha garbage, which was then rechambered for 306 and turned out even worse than the original notoriously unreliable French version.

If you heard something about the Shosha, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t anything good.

The Marines were understandably furious.

The justification was uniformity of arms so they wouldn’t be mixing up spare parts and all that.

And this might be somewhat true, but it’s most likely that the real reason was Crosia still trying to trip up Lewis at every step he could.

And to make everything even worse, the Americans were developing the so-called walking fire doctrine, where the idea was for the soldiers crossing no man’s land to have some suppressive firepower they could carry with them.

This was because when the artillery barrage lifted, advancing infantry armed with boltaction rifles time and time again found themselves just in front of the enemy trenches on the open ground.

They couldn’t suppress their fire so they could reach the trench and take it.

And they were over and over again getting mowed down by the defending side after they emerged from cover as soon as the artillery lifted.

It would be great if they had something light enough they could carry with them and then fire at the trench line to keep the defenders heads down.

Like, I don’t know, something with a 47 round magazine and full auto capability.

Nah.

While the show shot turned out to be a piece of crap, it was envisioned to be a stop gap until John Browning finished his BAR or Browning automatic rifle that was created for that walking fire thing.

But it was also still kept from full deployment for the next year of the war that never came because the war ended.

Meaning the American Expeditionary Force never got the solution for their problem, which was, by the way, all the time right beside them.

And they weren’t allowed to use it.

Isn’t that just great? Even when Lewis returned over $1 million in royalties on Lewis guns made for the American government as a patriotic move towards his country, Crosia wrote to the Secretary of War a suggestion that Lewis had quote an ulterior motive and that his money shouldn’t be accepted.

To which Lewis replied with the great mic drop saying quote I am directly instrumental in supplying, delivering and putting on the actual firing lines against the fighting enemies of my country.

more machine guns each week than the present chief of ordinance has supplied for the use of our own army of defense during the whole of the 14 years that he has been in office.

So yeah, the drama continued all along.

Crosia was sidelined at the end of 1917 and replaced as acting chief of ordinance which finally put him out of the way and he retired in 1919.

He also wrote a book pretty much defending his decisions and explaining that he didn’t have anything against Lewis personally, just that his design was crap, so that’s why it was never accepted.

Now, while all this was happening on the ground, the Lewis gun was also becoming the most important aerial weapon of the war.

Do you remember that demonstration in 1912 when the Americans dismissed firing a machine gun from an airplane as a foolish stunt? Well, by 1915, every major air force in the war was desperate to put Lewis guns on their aircraft.

For this role, the gun was stripped of the cooling shroud as the airflow would cool the barrel while flying.

Anyway, the wooden stock was replaced with a spade grip and a 97 round double tier pan magazine was made for aircraft use, so the pilot wouldn’t need to change magazines as often in an open cockpit while flying.

The problem though was that the Lewis gun fired from an open bolt, which meant it couldn’t be synchronized to fire through a spinning propeller like the Germans were first doing based on that Dutch interrupter device.

So they had to find ways to mount it where it could fire around or over the propeller arc.

The earliest solution was pusher aircraft where the propeller was behind the pilot.

So at the front was an unobstructed field for firing.

But these were much inferior to the planes with the propeller at the front and were soon pretty much obsolete as the war intensified.

The answer was a curved metal rail that was mounted above the upper wing of a biplane.

The Lewis gun slid along this rail called the Foster mount after the pilot who came up with it.

So the pilot could pull the gun back down to reload and then push it back into firing position aiming above the propeller arc.

Some versions of planes had vicers synchronized to fire through the propeller and a foster mounted Lewis to fire over it so they’d cover two angles and two-seater aircraft got the Lewis gun on a circular mount for the observer’s rear position to watch their back.

The Lewis gun found its way inside MarkV tanks as well.

Although this turned out to be quite a bad idea, the problem was that the cooling system designed to draw air forward worked in reverse inside an enclosed steel hull.

The shroud sucked engine fumes and cordite gases into the gunner’s face.

And when you combine that with 50° C inside the tank, yeah, it wasn’t really the most pleasant experience.

When World War I ended, the Lewis gun stayed in service as the standard infantry light machine gun until 1937 when the British Army adopted the Bren gun as its replacement.

Now, the Bren was much better than the Lewis, lighter and more reliable with the quick barrel change system.

But then something happened that kept the Lewis still in service when the next World War came.

The Germans ran over France and pushed the British forces all the way back to the English Channel.

Then the Dunkerk catastrophe followed when the British pretty much left all their weapons and equipment on the beaches to save their asses from annihilation by the Germans and with them were some 30,000 Brens that they left.

So with the danger of German invasion and with their army basically unarmed, they brought their good old Lewis guns from storage.

They blew the dust off some 60,000 World War I Lewis guns, oiled them up, and put them in action.

And here’s something that would probably piss off the World War I Lewis gunner.

It turns out that when they took aircraft versions without those weird cooling shrouds, they worked just fine for ground use, even without them.

That complicated aluminum radiator and steel tube that Lewis had designed, patented, insisted upon, and that had added about 8 lb to the weapon’s weight and defined its entire look for three decades turned out to be unnecessary for the kind of burst fire the guns were being used for.

They took some 46,000 American 306 aircraft versions and marked them with a red 2-in band painted on the body to avoid mixing the 303 ammo being loaded in it, which could turn out really bad.

The Lewis gun served throughout the Second World War in multiple roles.

The Royal Navy used it as its standard close-range anti-aircraft weapon on warships, and the British actually credited the Lewis gun with bringing down more low-flying enemy aircraft than any other weapon in their inventory.

As for the operating system that goes all the way back, even before Lewis came into the story, it found itself in new weapons like the German FG42 paratrooper rifle, which is considered one of the most advanced weapons of the Second World War.

And even after the war, when the United States developed the M60 generalpurpose machine gun, they took the operating system from the FG42, which took it from the Lewis gun.

And there’s also Japan’s type 92 aircraft machine gun, which was pretty much an undisguised copy of the Lewis chambered in a 7.

7 mm round.

So similar to 303 that both were interchangeable.

If you’ve made it this far and like how we cover military history, you can check out our channel for more such videos.

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