The Owen Gun is without a doubt one of the most beloved foreign weapons in American military history. It was designed more than 80 years ago by a teenager who had no formal training. And yet, after years of combat across the Pacific, American soldiers still swear it was the finest submachine gun of the entire war.
General MacArthur was so impressed, he tried to order 45,000 of them to replace the Thompson for American troops. So, how did a kid from a country of 7 million people build the gun that America’s greatest generals wanted for every single one of his soldiers? So, let’s start with the man who invented the gun because his story is far more fascinating than the gun itself.
In the late 1930s, working out of his family home with whatever spare parts he could muster up, Evelyn Owen put together this crude little .22 caliber submachine gun. This was the early Owen gun. It barely worked at the time, but for something built out of scrap metal in a family home, it actually looked like a solid weapon. But, in early 1940, Owen was enlisted into the Australian Imperial Force for military service and had to leave the whole project behind.
So, he stuffed the gun into an old sugar bag and left it against the wall at his house. And this would soon turn out to be an insane case of fortune. See, while Owen was away, entrepreneur Vincent Wardell found this weird-looking gun just sitting in the bag. And instead of ignoring it like everyone else had, he actually saw potential in it.
So, he started pushing the Australian military to pull Owen out of regular duties and let him develop the gun properly as a potential standard issue weapon. But, the military wanted nothing to do with neither of them because they were looking at the British Sten gun as their solution. The Sten was the standard submachine gun the whole Commonwealth was supposed to be using.
So, every time Wardell tried to get Owen’s design looked at, the answer was the same, no time and time again. But, this is where the military made a serious mistake. See, the Sten wasn’t arriving quickly enough, and at the same time, Japan was knocking on the front door. So, Australia was now facing the very real possibility of being invaded with not enough weapons to go around.
So, Wardell kept pushing, and eventually, the military ran out of excuses to say no. They agreed to put the Owen gun into a formal trial against the Sten and the Thompson in September 1941 to see if it was actually that good. And suddenly, they put all three guns through the worst they could think of.
The Thompson did okay when clean, but the second any dirt got into it, it jammed on the first magazine. And the Sten couldn’t even get through clean conditions properly. So, when they poured dust over it, the mechanism just kind of gave up. The Owen gun, however, never jammed once in every test. The whole trial was actually filmed by Movietone News, and you can see the officers just standing there watching this makeshift gun from Wollongong outperform everything the best British and Americans engineers had built.
But how it performed on the firing range was only one thing. What it did endure in the field would turn out to be far darker. Now, to understand why the Owen gun mattered so much, you need to understand what Australian soldiers were dealing with in New Guinea in 1942. The jungle there was some of the thickest on the planet, and the humidity was so bad that weapons which worked okay in training back home would seize up and jam within days of being in the field.
But Owen had added one design feature that turned out to be almost perfect for this kind of fighting. And believe it or not, he hadn’t even planned it on purpose. The magazine sat on top of the gun and fed rounds straight down into the chamber. So, firstly, gravity was doing half the work, but the mag position also made it 10 times easier for a soldier to go prone.
And because the ejection port was on the bottom of the receiver, any residue or water that got inside just drained straight out. Compare that to the Thompson, where the magazine fed up from underneath. So, any dust that got into the action would cause it to jam. And the Sten was even worse because its side-mounted magazine jammed even in clean conditions.
So, almost by accident, Owen had built a gun that was perfectly suited for the exact war Australia and their American and British comrades were now fighting. But this gun had one thing about it that confused almost everyone who saw it for the first time. The sight was slightly slanted diagonally right, which made it particularly powerful in the possession of a left-handed shooter.
And that was combined with the Owen’s weight of about 4.2 kg loaded, firing 9 mm at around 700 rounds per minute with an effective range of roughly 100 m. It looked like something a plumber welded together in a shed, but even the soldiers who trained with it back home had no idea it would end up saving more lives than most other small arms in the Pacific.
See, the Kokoda Track was a narrow mountain trail cutting through some of the most brutal jungle on earth. And in 1942, Australian forces were retreating along it against Japanese troops pushing south toward Port Moresby. The jungle was so thick that soldiers could walk within 5 m of a Japanese position and not know it was there until someone started shooting.
And soldiers described wading through chest-deep swamps for days without ever being dry. But even after all of that, their Owen still worked perfectly fine. That is why the troops gave it a nickname that stuck for the rest of the war. They called it the Digger’s Darling, meaning the soldier’s darling, describing the Anzac’s deep affection for the gun.
However, the top-mounted magazine sometimes made the Owen gun more awkward to carry on long marches because branches kept catching on it. So, some troops literally started carrying the Owen gun upside down with the magazine hanging below and just flipping the gun over when they met Japanese contact. Not the most important detail, but interesting as a side note about how troops adapted in the field.
However, at the time, the Owen gun was yet to meet the worst fighting. Far from it, actually. At Buna, Gona, and Sanananda from late 1942 into 1943, Australian troops faced some of the most brutal close-quarters combat of the entire Pacific War. You see, the Japanese had built hundreds of bunkers from coconut logs and compacted earth and covered them in vegetation so thick you could walk within a few meters of one and not know it was there.
The only way to take those positions was to crawl through the swamp on your stomach and get close enough to throw grenades into the gun slits or fire straight through them. At 700 rounds per minute from a 32-round magazine, it could simply shred a Japanese crew before they had time to react.
The third Australian Infantry Division and the 7th Division and militia units like the 39th Battalion all carried Owen guns during these battles, but the gun also proved itself against something far more terrifying. The Japanese launched fanatic banzai charges straight into Australian lines, and the bolt action rifle only gave you one desperate shot before you had to cycle.
However, the Owen gun gave you 32 bullets and multiple mags, so a squad of maybe 12 Australian soldiers could easily cut down a handful of Japanese troops in an instant. Now, around this same time, American Marines fought right beside the Australians in New Guinea and saw those top-loaded guns firing all day with barely any stoppages.
So, if an Australian was wounded and his Owen gun was lying next to him, some American troop was sure to pick it up. General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters would soon put in a formal request for 45,000 Owen guns to equip American forces across the Pacific. That is the highest-ranking American general in the Pacific theater formally asking to replace his own country’s weapons with something built in a small factory in Newcastle, Australia.
But, Australia could not fill the order. Lysaght’s factory, where it was built, was already at full capacity just keeping up with Australian demand, and total production over the whole war only came to about 45,000 units. So, most Americans never got to use one, but the few who did absolutely loved it. And believe it or not, many of them came back after the war to personally thank the workers at the Lysaght factory because they believed the Owen had saved their lives.
So, we’ve gone over how the Owen gun beat the Thompson, but it’s also worth understanding why the Thompson failed so badly in the Pacific because it shows just how well the Owen gun was actually designed for this war, even if most of it was by accident. The Thompson was built in the 1920s for dry American conditions with clean armories and proper cleaning supplies.
The M1928 version had very tight tolerances, which made it accurate, but also made it completely useless the moment any grit got inside. You see, the tighter a weapon’s parts fit together, the less room there is for debris, and the faster everything seizes up. But, the Owen gun had much looser tolerances.
Its rougher finish meant residue just passed straight through the action without catching onto anything. So, an Australian could swim chest deep through a muddy creek and start firing the moment he came up from the other side without even wiping the gun down first. Whereas, the Thompson would have probably jammed before the first magazine was empty.
And then, there was the massive weight difference. The Thompson came in about a kilogram heavier than the Owen when loaded. And in jungle fighting, where you’re hauling everything on your back through swamp and up mountain trails, that kilogram wears you down much faster. But, the Americans did eventually bring in the M3 Grease Gun later in the war.
It was cheaper and simpler to produce, and ironically, looked somewhat similar to the Owen gun. However, infantry troops who had already held and shot an Owen gun knew the Grease Gun wasn’t as good. But, the Owen gun story somehow didn’t end with the Second World War. In 1950, the Korean War broke out, and as the Australians landed near Busan, they pulled the Owen straight back out of the armories.
Korea was a completely different war, though. The terrain was open hills and wide valleys, where engagements happened at ranges the Owen was never designed for, and the winters were brutally cold compared to the almost utopic jungles of New Guinea, which meant 9-mm pistol rounds could not punch through the heavy padded clothing that Chinese and North Korean soldiers wore from a distance.
So, for most of the conventional fighting, the Owen sat in the back while rifles and machine guns did the heavy lifting. By 1951, the war had turned into a complete stalemate, and that changed everything. Both sides dug into fixed positions along the front, and the fighting shifted to night raids and close range ambushes in the dark.
Australian infantry carried two Owen guns per 10-man squad, and on those night patrols, the Owen was the most important weapon going out, since it still was reliable inside buildings and the like, but it was one battle in particular that proved just how much soldiers still trusted this gun. At Kapyong in April 1951, the third battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment was holding a hill when waves of Chinese infantry came pouring through the night.
Before the first shots were fired, every Australian who could get his hands on an Owen gun grabbed one because they knew exactly what kind of fight was coming. Australian Major Ben O’Dowd, who was on the defensive side, later said the Owen gun was the most effective weapon in the entire fight while the old bolt-action Lee-Enfield was the worst.
At times, the Chinese got extremely close, but the Australians held that position through the night. Helicopter search and rescue crews also started carrying Owen guns in Korea to protect downed airmen from enemy troops racing to reach the crash site. A short-range automatic you could fire one-handed from a chopper door was exactly what those crews needed, and the Owen would keep firing after being rattled around in the airframe all day.
But after the cease-fire in 1953, the Owen went straight back to for the Malayan Emergency. Australian troops were hunting communist guerrillas through tropical bush so dense that engagements happened at the same close ranges the Owen had been dominating since 1942. And soldiers who grew up hearing their fathers talk about this gun now got to find out for themselves why it had the reputation it did.
But then, Australia made an interesting decision. They joined the Vietnam War. Australian troops deployed in the early 1960s, and the Owen gun was used once again, even though by this point the gun was over 20 years old and looked like it. But the infantry scouts who walked point were always the first to make contact and yet still carried Owen guns on every patrol.
Some units fitted short bayonets alongside the barrel because so much of the work happened at arm’s length where stealth was everything. Soldiers in the fifth and sixth battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment carried Owen guns into the Vietnamese jungle in 1966, more than two decades after it first saw combat in New Guinea.
But by the The the Owen was finally showing its age. The military brought in a replacement called the F1 submachine gun, which was lighter and purpose-built for the same role. But, the man who built the Owen gun never managed to see any of this. After World War II, Evelyn Owen had no money and almost no recognition for the masterpiece that bore his name.
He got about 10,000 pounds in royalties and from selling his patent rights to the Commonwealth. That sounds like a lot, but for a weapon that 45,000 soldiers carried into combat across the Pacific, it was not even close to what it was worth. And the company that built it barely got paid because Lithgow did not receive full payment from the government until 1947, which was 3 years after production had ended.
So, Owen used what he had to set up a small sawmill at Tongarra near Wollongong and lived there mostly alone. He never married and he kept working on sporting rifles as he had always done, but his drinking problems never stopped either and his health got worse and worse. On the 1st of April, 1949, Evelyn Owen was admitted to Wollongong District Hospital with a ruptured gastric ulcer.
He died that same day at just 33 years old. He had no idea that the weapon he built in his family home would go on to fight in three more wars and be carried by soldiers who were not even born when he died. If you enjoyed the video, please consider subscribing and liking the video.
