During World War One, the US Army basically got in a personality spat with Isaac Newton Lewis, and refused to adopt the Lewis gun. The British and Belgians happily made use of it though, and contracted manufacture to the Savage company in New York. As US involvement in the war got closer, the US Navy decided to investigate adopting the Lewis gun. It ended up doing just that, and ultimately bought about 6,000 MkVI Lewis guns in .30-06 caliber. The Marines trained with the guns and tool them to Europe as part of the 1st Infantry Division. On arrival, the Army (which commanded the division) promptly took them away and replaced them with Chauchats. Under Army administration, American Lewis gun usage was almost entirely focused on aircraft guns.
Many thanks to the US National WW1 Museum & Memorial for pulling this example out of their exhibit for me to film! If you are in Kansas City, make sure to stop by and see the museum:
https://www.theworldwar.org
BG Crozier and COL Lewis hated each other with a passion. Lewis resented that Crozier was selected Chief of Ordnance over him. While recorder for the Board of Ordnance Lewis was openly insubordinate in his testimony to Congress. Crozier, infuriated, exiled him to the West Coast. Neither Lewis leaving the Army, nor the outbreak of war d anything to diminish the animosity between them.
One of the naval history channels mentions Lewis guns mounted on the early WWII PT boats. I suppose, being built to last, they stayed in USN inventory.
I’ve read references that say some Navy Lewis guns were commercially purchased after WWI for use in China and in other applications.
Precisely how this squares with WWI production? No idea.
It’s interesting that the one .30-06 Lewis that I’ve handled and torn down to look at had very different parts, especially the operating rod tower/bolt interface cut. On the one I handled, there was a distinct and quite large relief cut at the forward end of the track, that is not present here.
Per the guy who owned that copy, his came out of WWII-service Navy stocks, and had probably been procured sometime during the 1920s.
I’ve never seen a book anywhere that really laid out all the production variations and changes made in the Lewis. I do know that early models were significantly different from later ones, in detail, and that’s about it.
A lot of USN Lewis guns were pulled from inventory in 1940 and sent to England under Lend-Lease. For a long time they were the only AAA the coasters in the Channel had when they were being hit by masthead-height attacks by the Luftwaffe.
There were never enough to go around, so when a coaster made port, they’d hand-off their usual pair of Lewis guns (one fore, one aft) to one preparing to sail.
The ex-American Lewis guns all had a 2″ wide band of red painted around the front of the receiver to remind everyone that they were .30-06, not 0.303in.
They were necessary because the Admiralty and Ministry of Supply stubbornly insisted on continuing Channel traffic, even of cargo like coal, to show everyone that the “Boche” did not control the waters around Britain.
It would have been simpler and safer to transport everything north and south by the railway system, because the main north-south trunk lines were far enough inland to be beyond the combat radius of anything the Luftwaffe had, even the He111.
But that wouldn’t have made the correct “impression”.
Common sense rarely does with politicians.
clear ether
eon
Y’know… Something that has just struck me is that we don’t look at weapons and weapons engineering in quite the right way.
Rightfully, instead of tracking just the individual weapon and saying “Yes, this borrowed ideas from X…”, we really ought to trace those ideas between weapons.
The Lewis-to-FG42-to-M60 path of design ought to be traced as a distinct thing, with the common features/operating principles laid out, along with lessons learned or unlearned along the way. Doing this would likely help engineers and others evolve designs and understand how to effectively integrate features.
The Lewis-to-FG42 was an example of evolving a derivative system from an earlier one done the right way, more-or-less. The FG-42-to-M60 was a clear case of the same process being done just plain “wrong”.
I think there is a place for someone to do a progressive step-by-step documentation of mechanism development, going weapon by weapon through the whole series of derived weapons. An example would be the tilting-block recoil lock system beginning with the Walther P.38 following through all the various Beretta versions and other derivatives.
Othais over at C&Rsenal could likely do something with all of his research into the various revolver mechanisms he’s dug up from the patents. Progress through from earliest example up to the latest, showing where and why all the changes/innovations were made, what motivated them, and why the derivatives did or did not work.
I think we’re missing an angle on all of this, the more I think about it. Weapons design is, no matter what the patent offices want to tell you, a collaborative effort. John Browning was a co-designer with Gaston Glock, even if they’d never met…
People trace the Parabellum pistol “toggle action” back to the Maxim machine gun, but it goes back even further than that, to the Merrill breechloading cavalry carbine of the American Civil War.
Most historians miss the connection because the Merrill was manually-operated, not recoil. But pull up and back on that operating lever and there’s the toggle-lock, staring you in the face.
The Nordenfelt rotating breech on the French Model 1897 75mm field gun was probably scaled up more or less directly from the Werndl-Holub breechloading rifle of 1867. The major difference between the two is simply the dimensions.
And every revolver with a swing-out cylinder and simultaneous ejection to the present day had its beginnings with William Mason’s patent of 1865. Which he assigned to his then-employers, Remington, who did little or nothing with it until it expired in 1882, seventeen years later.
A double-action, metallic-cartridge revolver with swing-out simultaneous ejection might have put a different flavor on numerous frontier “close encounters” between pistoleers.
To say nothing of the Greasy Grass on 25-26 June 1876.
clear ether
eon
I suspect that the metallurgy and machining of the day would have prevented any sort of successful implementation of a swing-out revolver cylinder system being able to reach effective enough mass-production to equip frontier cavalry with…
I’m also dubious of your Merrill design description; I don’t see any sort of toggle-locking going on in that rifle. Were you thinking of the Henry, instead? I always thought that was the first actual production implementation of a toggle-lock…
https://www.alloutdoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/harpers-ferry-merrill-conversion.jpg
Look closely at the upper left panel. Three hinge joints, a breechblock up front.
All that’s really missing is a pair of “toggles” and a pair of ramps to “break” the middle joint upward.
There might be even older examples of such a setup, but the Merrill aka Jenks-Merrill is the oldest I have been able to verify.
cheers
eon
Given that a number of Sioux and Cheyenne had repeating rifles at the Little Big Horn, it is easy to imagine a situation where they had the DA revolvers as well. Like I think you have said elsewhere, availability does not necessarily translate into militaty procurement
“(…)double-action, metallic-cartridge revolver with swing-out simultaneous ejection might have put a different flavor on numerous frontier(…)”
Webley Mark I https://modernfirearms.net/en/handguns/double-action-revolvers/great-britain-double-action-revolvers/webley-eng/ was adopted by British military in 1887. It was double-action and metallic cartridge and simultaneous ejection, but not swing-out. So if we disregard geographic consideration, then 1887 seems to be early enough to be used by some “pistoleers” at [I presume U.S.] frontier, which ceased to exists in 1912.
By some accounts, Custer had at least one perhaps two Webley Royal Irish Constabulary revolvers with him on his final expedition. Of course two revolvers do not win battles of any size. Still the technology was there, if not the numbers.
One correction. The RIC revolver was DA, but extraction of spent casings was a chore. A document detailing the weapon’s use suggested using ‘a pencil, a stick, or suchlike thing.’ Sticks can be in short supply on the Montana plains.
“People trace the Parabellum pistol “toggle action” back to the Maxim machine gun, but it goes back even further than that, to the Merrill breechloading cavalry carbine of the American Civil War.(…)”
I am not sure if Maxim was studying said fire-arm before making his own, but he certainly must be aware of prior use of toggle-link, as one of first prototypes https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/139447857570/maxims-prototype-recoil-operated-rifle-in-1883 was actually recoil-powered gizmo mated with Winchester 1866 lever-action (see drawing).
This video has a few seconds of Lewis Guns aboard the USS Panay firing at attacking Japanese bombers in China in 1937.
https://youtu.be/4tzlrIiZzLg?is=KucuT0fzn9eilF5Y
A war story. My uncle was an Army Air Force mechanic in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. As things went south, he was converted to infantry. He claimed that he fired a Lewis gun at Japanese troops coming ashore on the beach he was assigned to defend.