If you were a part of a British Lewis gun crew, you had maybe 10 hours to live during actual combat. See, the Germans noticed that the easiest way to destroy a British section in World War I was to take out this portable automatic machine gun first. But, despite it being such a death sentence for its crew, the Lewis gun was everywhere.
During the Battle of the Somme, the gun literally managed to fire millions of rounds. So, have you ever asked yourself what life was actually like for the men who were behind the gun? If so, we’re going to explain it from start to finish. The Lewis gun exists due to a problem the British had in 1914, and it was killing thousands of men every single week.
At the start of World War I, the only real automatic firepower the British infantry had came from the old and reliable Vickers machine gun. The Vickers was brilliant at what it did, but it weighed about 90 lb with a tripod and the water jacket, and it needed a crew of six men just to drag it into position, which made it practically impossible to run across no man’s land with.
So, whenever British soldiers went over the top, they left nearly all their automatic firepower behind in the trench they just came from, and had the MG crew lag behind, sometimes for multiple hours. The Germans absolutely knew this because every time they were forced to defend, they only saw rifles and grenades on the British sections in the early hours.
So, this is where an American colonel would accidentally save the British Army, and he did it because his own country, America, basically told him to get lost. Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis had designed a light machine gun back in 1911 that weighed about 28 lb and fired .303 caliber rounds from a 47-round pan magazine on top.
It could pump out 500 to 600 rounds per minute, and one single man could carry and fire it, which was completely unheard of at the time. Lewis tried to sell it to the United States Army, but General William Crozier at the Ordnance Department had a personal grudge against Lewis that went back years.
Crozier blocked the adoption and basically swept every positive test result under the rug. Lewis got so fed up that he resigned his commission, packed up four prototype guns, and sailed for Europe in 1913. He told friends he’d spent nearly 37 years in the Army, and all he got was slapped by rejections from ignorant hacks. The Belgians bought it almost immediately, and the Birmingham Small Arms Company in England picked up a manufacturing license by 1914.
So, when the war kicked off in the summer of 1914, the Belgian army used their small batch of Lewis guns to defend Namur against the German advance. And the Germans hated it so much they gave it a nickname on the spot, the Belgian rattlesnake, because of the distinctive rattle it made when firing. However, it wasn’t until 1915 that the Lewis gun would truly change the entire war.
The British army officially adopted the Lewis gun in October 1915, and by early 1916 it was being shipped to battalions on the Western Front. At first, each battalion only received four Lewis guns, which sounds like nothing when you realize a full battalion had around a thousand men. But production at BSA was ramping up fast, and by 1917 every single infantry section had its own Lewis gun with a dedicated crew.
Battalions went from four guns to 46 in under two years, and BSA alone cranked out over 145,000 Lewis guns before the war ended. Now, the Lewis gun crew was typically six men, sometimes more in combat. First was the actual gunner who carried the gun and a revolver. Number two was the loader who also carried a bag of spare parts and a toolkit, because his whole job was keeping that gun firing no matter what.
The remaining four men were ammunition carriers, and each one was loaded to the gills with their full infantry kit, a rifle, and eight loaded pan magazines for the Lewis gun. Every single member of that team was trained to fire the gun and make repairs in seconds, because the army knew multiple men would be taken out and somebody else had to take over immediately.
But here’s the problem that nobody talks about, being the Lewis gunner was the most dangerous job in the section, arguably even more so than operating the Vickers. See, the Germans figured out very quickly that one Lewis gun could do as much damage as 50 riflemen, similarly to the Vickers, but it could also pop out from new positions constantly, creating a real-life whack-a-mole.
So, every German soldier on the other side of the line had one standing order whenever a fight started, and that was to find the Lewis gun and kill the man behind it before he could take out too many of their comrades. The gun had a distinctive silhouette with that big cooling shroud and the pan magazine on top, so you could spot it from a distance, even in the chaos of an assault.
And when the Lewis gun went silent, the the entire section lost most of its firepower in one go. Now, the first truly massive test for the Lewis gun came on July 1st, 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. By this point, every active battalion had at least four Lewis guns, and British ordnance experts later estimated that Lewis guns collectively fired over 15 million rounds every 24 hours during the battle that raged for 140 days.
On that first day alone, the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, and the Lewis gun crews were among to get killed. One single Lewis gun in a good position could hold an entire stretch of trench by itself, pouring short, controlled bursts into any Germans trying to cross the open ground. But the Somme also proved something far darker about what happened to the men behind these guns.
There’s a Lewis gun sitting in the Australian War Memorial today that tells the whole story just by looking at the writing scratched into its barrel jacket. It was issued to the 27th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force in March 1916 and stayed in action until a shell knocked it out at Grandcourt on the 3rd of October, 1918.
That single gun fired over 150,000 rounds across 2 and 1/2 years of fighting, and 60 men passed through its crew during that time. Of those 60 men, 21 were killed, and 32 were wounded, meaning almost every single person who ever handled the gun ended up as a casualty. And that was just one gun out of tens of thousands. At Verdun, the French used their own Lewis guns alongside British-supplied weapons during the brutal fighting around Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux in 1916.
The gun’s portability made it one of the only automatic weapons you could drag through the shattered trenches and shell craters around those forts, because anything heavier would just get bogged down in the rubble. Besides the ground war, the Lewis gun absolutely dominated early air combat. It was the first machine gun ever fired from an airplane back in 1912 during a demonstration by Captain Charles Chandler from a Wright Model B Flyer.
For aircraft use, they stripped off the heavy cooling shroud since the wind at altitude kept the barrel cool enough on its own, which brought the weight down to about 20 lb. Observers in the rear cockpit used Lewis guns on wing mounts to destroy enemy fighters, and Captain Billy Bishop of Canada earned his Victoria Cross in 1917 using a Lewis gun mounted on his aircraft when he single-handedly raided a German aerodrome.
Loaded with incendiary rounds, Lewis guns on fast fighters turned out to be absolutely devastating against German zeppelins filled with hydrogen gas. But, none of that mattered until the gun actually proved itself in the fighting, and it did that almost immediately. By 1917, the Lewis gun had completely changed how the British fought on the Western Front.
Sections built their entire tactics around getting the Lewis gun into a solid position because once it was firing, the rifleman had much more maneuverability. The gun was used for everything from defending trenches against raids to covering assaults across no-man’s-land to ambushing German patrols at night. And, six Lewis guns could be built in the time it took to manufacture just one Vickers, which meant the British could absolutely flood the front line with automatic firepower in a way the Germans simply could not match. By 1918, the
Germans had no comparable light machine gun of their own, and that gave the British infantry a genuine edge in the mobile warfare of the war’s final months. During the last 100 days campaign from August to November 1918, battalions now carried 36 Lewis guns each, and they used them aggressively during the advance.
Private Arthur Bullock of the 2/4 Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry left notes from his training that described the gun’s main advantage as its invulnerability, meaning it was tough as nails and it kept working. On the 13th of April, 1918, Bullock and his crew intercepted a German advance along the Callon to Robecq road and fired the gun in turns until it was too hot to hold, recording afterwards that they caused around 400 German casualties mostly from that one Lewis gun.
So, the Lewis gun was performed extremely well. But, after the war ended, the Brits started looking at alternatives like the Beardmore-Farquhar and later the Bren. But, somehow the Lewis gun would make a completely unexpected return 20 years later when the Bren gun officially replaced the Lewis as the standard British light machine gun in 1938, the army chucked tens of thousands of Lewis guns into storage, figuring they’d never be needed again.
And then Dunkirk happened in the summer of 1940, and the British Army left most of its equipment on the beaches of France. So, suddenly the country was staring down a possible German invasion with barely enough weapons to go around to every soldier. So, the government pulled nearly 59,000 Lewis guns out of storage, patched them up as best they could, and handed them out to the Home Guard, the Royal Navy, airfield defense units, and anti-aircraft crews all across Britain.
Old aircraft versions that never had the cooling jacket were given crude wooden stocks and sent straight to the front. And it turned out the gun worked perfectly fine without the heavy jacket, which drove some World War I veterans absolutely mental because they’d been carrying that extra weight through the trenches for years.
In the anti-aircraft role during World War II, the Lewis gun was credited by the British with shooting down more low-flying enemy aircraft than any other weapon in the entire British arsenal. Australian and New Zealand forces also used Lewis guns on the front lines in the Pacific against the Japanese, particularly in the early fighting on the Kokoda Track in 1942 before enough Bren guns arrived to replace them.
The Japanese had actually nicked the Lewis gun’s entire design for their Type 92 heavy machine gun, which was the standard flexible weapon for Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft gunners throughout the war. Peter White of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers recorded that his battalion was still using Lewis guns mounted on Universal Carriers as late as 1945, which is staggering for a weapon designed over 30 years earlier.
So, let’s quickly cover some of the darker stories of Lewis gunners in both World Wars because some of them are extremely hard to stomach. Private Thomas Cook was a 35-year-old New Zealand-born carpenter who moved to Australia with his wife and three children before the war. He enlisted in the AIF in February 1915 and ended up with the 8th Battalion on the Western Front at Pozières on the Somme in July 1916.
During some of the worst fighting Australians ever saw, Cook was ordered to take his Lewis gun team to a dangerous section of the newly captured line. He started firing the gun and did what the citation called fine work, but the position was completely exposed and heavy fire started picking his team apart one by one.
Eventually, every other man in his crew was either killed or wounded, and Cook was the only one left. He stayed at his post and kept firing alone until reinforcements were finally sent forward, and when they arrived, Thomas Cook was found dead beside his gun. Later, he was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, and his wife and children never saw him again after he shipped out.
And Cook was far from the only Lewis gunner who died at his weapon rather than abandon his post. Lance Sergeant John Moyney of the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards was 22 years old when he found himself commanding 15 men at two advanced posts north of Broenbeek in Belgium during September 1917. The Germans completely surrounded his position, and Moyney somehow held it for 96 hours straight with no water and barely any food.
On the fifth day, the Germans moved in to finish them off. So, Moyney attacked them with grenades and fired his Lewis gun until he’d forced them all the way back. Then, realizing he was completely cut off, he led his surviving men in a bayonet charge straight through the German line. He and Private Thomas Woodcock covered the rest of the group while they crossed, and both men received the Victoria Cross for it.
Around Pozières, the Australians saw Lewis gunner Lewis gunner get killed in the same kind of fighting. Private Charles Tongney of the 48th Battalion had both legs and an arm brutally wounded during German counterattacks, but he kept firing, beating back assault after assault before he physically could not hold the weapon anymore. He got the Distinguished Conduct Medal, but the fighting from Pozières to the Hindenburg Line cost the Australian Imperial Force over 20,000 casualties in total.
One Lewis gunner whose account survived the war described a night when a shell hit his team while they were moving through open ground. The blast killed his numbers three, four, and five, or the men carrying the ammunition instantly. He wrote afterwards that losing those three men upset him more than anything else in the entire war because they had only been together four months, but with all that chaos around them, it felt like a lifetime, and they had become brothers.
So, we’ve covered how dark the experience of operating the Lewis gun was and how it had become obsolete in the 1920s, but somehow after the end of World War I and even World War II, it still stayed in use. After the armistice in 1918, over 50,000 Lewis guns sat in armories and depots across the world. So, dozens of countries just kept using them cuz the gun was cheap and proven and ammunition was absolutely everywhere.
Russia had already bought 10,000 of them from Britain back in 1917 and the Red Army kept those guns firing right through the 1920s until the Degtyaryov machine gun finally arrived in 1928. Around the same time, the Irish Republican Army got their hands on Lewis guns and used them during the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s.
And as we already covered, when World War out, the British pulled nearly 59,000 of them right back out of storage and put them straight to work again. The Lewis gun’s influence would go on to inspire some of the biggest masterpieces of the 20th century. The German FG 42 paratrooper rifle pinched the Lewis gun’s gas assembly and bolt design and those same elements were later shoved into the American M60 machine gun that served from Vietnam all the way through to the 2000s.
The Russian PKP Pecheneg machine gun still uses a streamlined version of the Lewis gun’s forced air cooling system to this day, which lets it fire over 600 rounds through the barrel without warping. The Lewis was officially withdrawn from British service in 1946, but it somehow kept turning up in conflicts for decades after that, from the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 to the Troubles in Northern Ireland and even the Croatian War of Independence in the early 1990s.
Over 152,000 were built in total. If you enjoyed the video, please consider liking and subscribing.
