The Lewis gun merits debate, part 2

[Romani]

This spring I started a thread

The Lewis gun drum rotates!


to debate the merits of the Lewis, wich I thought overrated. I wrote a post that I never got around to post, and after buying and reading since then, "Flying guns: World War I" I now realize I had lost many excellent occasions of shutting up

Really, after reading Williams book, the only thing I can do is fall on my knees and worship him, chanting "We are not worthy! We are not worthy! "

Regardless, I still think I had a couple points to make, so please don't see this as an attempt to get the last word, just reopening the debate to disseminate knowledge.

So, as we were saying yesterday...

Well, it's presumptuous of me to be arguing with such as illustrious expert as you, sir, but I just want to get across a point. Ok, the Lewis was better, but why?

Originally Posted by TonyWilliams

A couple of comments: It wasn't a Vickers, it was a Hotchkiss - the M1909 portative, to be precise. The British knew it as the Hotchkiss Mk 1 - it was only the Americans (who also adopted it) who called it the Benet Mercie, I believe.

Yes, you are right, it was a mistake on my part, in such a long post is easy to confuse names, to my mind and many people, there's only one Hotchkiss, that's why I used the Benet Mercie name, to tell them apart.

Reliability is a relative issue. By the standards of WW1 LMGs, the Lewis was considered to be a very good weapon.

I am not contesting that. In fact, I agree that it was the best of the lot, even if the feeding system was a dead end, in my opnion.

The Germans certainly used any they could get hold of (on the ground and in the air) and even converted them to their own 7.9mm ammo, so they must have been highly impressed.

They were, because though the basic mechanical design of the Maxim gun is a good one, the light versions of it were no more than crude improvisations of mediocre performance. But the superiority is not technical. In fact, it can be argued that the LMG08/15 ground and air versions have a firepower advantage over the Lewis in sustained fire. Perhaps not that relevant for an observer gun, I suspect that if the observer had to resort to use his weapon, most of the time he didn't fired more than 100 rounds before either driving off the attacker (if lucky) or getting shot down. So the 100 round Lewis drum would suffice. On the infantry role is another story, much higher ammo consumption and the ground drum was only 50 rounds. The explanation of why the Germans preferred the Lewis (or anything else they could lay their grimy hands on) to their own guns is simple: weight. For an infantryman this is a critical consideration. For an observer less so but maneuvering a 15-20 kilo gun at high altitude, against the slipstream and with less oxygen probably is as strenuous as hauling it across the mud and cratered surface of the battlefield.

Regarding its use in the German giant bombers, Uhlan covered it. Besides ease of handling, I would point that by replacing 3 Parabellums with the 250 round drums with Lewis with probably 1 single 100 drum each would save about 50 kilos of weight and is a significant saving, not from the point of performance in speed and ceiling, but from the fuel consumption standpoint. Flying long range bombing missions over the English Channel I would want as much as a safety margin as possible in the fuel tanks.

I point out that the bombers were intended for night missions, and most of the time they never fired their guns at a attacking night fighter. 100 rounds would suffice to drive away the attacker (tracer at night is scary!) and break contact, With no radar onboard, if an attacking night fighter evaded to avoid the defensive fire it would be hard to find the bomber again for another pass.

Another alternate explanation might be that the giants flew at high altitude and installing Lewis might have been an effort to ease the fatigue on the gunners... but if I recall correctly, the crews were provided with oxygen to make such high altitudes possible.


Final argument that captured Lewis were selected because of a shortage of Parabellum guns doesn't seem likely... there were about 20 Zeppelin Staaken RVI bombers built, at 3 guns per airplane that makes a grand total of 60 machineguns wich is not a significant amount in view of German aircraft production. Perversely, I think if there were indeed LMGs shortages for use in aircraft, then the Parabellums would be better used in frontline 2-seaters while the bombers, whose armament was more of a token for crew comfort and just in case, could make do with captured guns.

The Lewis was also adopted as a flexible aircraft gun by the French during the war, and many other nations after it,(the Japanese were still using them in WW2).

During the war, it's just a case of what is available, the other Allied nations also used the Vickers as fixed armament since their own MGs were not suitable, and still there weren't enough Lewis to go around for everybody and the Italians had to use the Revelli as a flexible mount.

No doubt those nations would have preferred to have their own MGs of their own rifle caliber to ease training, maintenance and supply. Probably these considerations made Austria - Hungary to adapt their own Schwarzlose for aircraft use rather than producing Maxims for their airplanes. As a result, A-H flyers were shortchanged but the decision probably made sense from the logistics viewpoint.


After the war usage of the Lewis was due simply to the fact that the Allies won the war and there were a lot of surplus allied aircraft armed with Vickers and Lewis so those guns became a sort of standard of air forces around the world in the postwar into the 1930s.

The Japanese small arms industry produced unimpressive results at best, they went with copies of the Lewis because that's the best they could come up with. So in conclusion the widespread adoption of the Lewis was more a case of availability and not having something better than the quality of the gun itself.

Finally, somebody mentioned the use of the Lewis in WWII. Again, making virtue out of necessity. With the retreat from Dunkirk the British Army was desperately short of weapons and the Lewis was pulled out of storage, Bren production could not yet cope up with the losses. Same reason the Long Range Desert Group / SAS used Vickers-K guns taken out of bombers when these were replaced by the Browning.

The rotating pan magazine may have been odd, but the Lewis wasn't the only gun to use it: after WW1, some countries with Vickers aircraft guns converted them to use Lewis magazines when
they installed the guns in flexible mountings.

First I ever heard about this. Are you referring to the Vickers-K? I thought it was a new design, what, with it being named Vickers Gas Operated. Also, the pan doesn't look at all like the Lewis one. I am holding my head in my hands now trying to figure out how you could convert a side belt fed recoil operated gun to fire a top fed pan designed for a gas operated gun and not succeeding.

After reading your book "Flying Guns World War I" and not finding any reference to the Vickers K, I did a websearch. The Vickers K is definitely NOT a Vickers Maxim converted to use Lewis magazines, but an altogether different gun, please see the link below on it

LRDG Weapons- Machine Guns

(continues below)

[Romani]

In the end we are back to the confrontation of the Maxim derivatives vs the Lewis, I will try to sum up the points


]1) Mechanical design: Parabellum, improvisation borne out of necessity. Lewis, best of all of the era, all things considered, even if it had its faults

2) Reliability: I have often read the claim that the Lewis was more reliable, without any proof. If anything, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence, regarding jams in overwing fixed Lewis, and the defects of British ammunition.

I have come to the following conclusions regarding reliability of mechanisms:

Vickers slightly more reliable than the parent design the Maxim, the Maxim sometimes suffered from broken firing pins. If ammunition quality is not an issue, then both guns are quite reliable, though the Vickers robustness and ability to fire during hours without breaking down is exagerated, if the gun were that good... it wouldn't have a manual with 15 pages devoted to clearing stoppages!

On the ground, both MGs should be more reliable than the Lewis, if for no other reason that the simpler the mechanism, fewer things can go wrong. I don't know if it's the case with the Lewis, but gas operated guns tend to foul up with gunpowder residue overtime. The issues with the feeding method have been exposed so I don't repeat them.

Put them onboard airplanes, and then the picture changes. All guns, regardless of type, suffer from extreme cold at high altitudes. All of them suffer from congealing of the oil, and it can also cause steel to become brittle wich causes breakage of parts. I conjecture that the stress put on the gun mechanism by subjecting cold metal to the sudden stress and temperatures of firing might explain the instances of a MG firing for the first time at high altitude resulting in a few rounds being fired and then a jam, due to breaking of a spring or firing pin. I am no gusmith, so I am basing this on anecdotal evidence of gun malfunction in WWII in the winters of the East Front, and basic physics.


3) Weight and ease of handling: Lewis wins hands down. Lighter, better balanced (no drum hanging from the side), slightly more controllable in recoil due to gas operation

The Madsen also had its own problems, including a very low rate of fire and a small magazine capacity. The Bren belonged to a later generation of LMGs, and was the most outstanding weapon in the world in that category. Everything else was inferior to it. It remained in frontline British service (converted to 7.62mm NATO) well into the 1980s, and I read only yesterday that some British soldiers were asking if there were any in store which they could be issued with in Afghanistan, because they wanted its long-range accuracy and hitting power.

Well, this is wandering off topic, but probably the main reason is because the L85 Rifle was a stinking pile of junk, and problably its light machinegun version as well.

The Lewis gun never had a Hazleton adapter - it was a muzzle booster which could only be utilised by recoil-operated guns like the Vickers. 700 rpm was the maximum the Lewis reached (quite respectable for WW1), the Vickers was accelerated to 850 rpm, but that was a bit academic in synchronised applications.

I beg to differ. In the Lewis gun datafile, Harry Woodman only mentions at the end of the book that

experiments were carried out to increase the rpm of the Lewis led to the guns being tortured to fire at rates of 850 plus, the guns almost ripped themselves apart.

The point of such experiments is lost on the author as the gun was still stuck with the 97 round magazine

Digressing again, the answer is that a high ROF increases the chances of a kill during the split seconds the target is in the sights,Hence the quest for even higher rates of fire including the Hazelton booster and the German Siemens "electrical guns". The problem with this experiments is that they only addressed one of the problems, the punch, remaining unsolved the other problem, actually hitting the target. So if you can't bring the guns to bear on the target, a higher ROF is just wasting ammo, and if the pilot was skilled enough to get close enough to don't miss a target (within 50 meters), a higher ROF is relatively unimportant since even a single MG will do. Higher ROF or heavier punch in the form of heavier caliber bullets or shells have to go hand in hand with improvements in sights to be fully effective.



Dave Watts, (FlyxWire) in similar threads found that Hazelton booster was indeed used for the Lewis, but I think it had another name. He quoted the following passage from another Woodman's book.


Harry Woodman, Aircraft Armament: The Aeroplane and the Gun up to 1918 page 45:
The Hazelton Adapter:
______________________________________________
The rate of fire of the original Mk.1 ground gun was between 450 and 550 rounds a minute and adjustments could be made by tightening or slackening the fusee spring. The early synchronizing gears (in particular the Ross gear) tended to slow up the rate and it was not until the arrival of the CC (Constaninesco) gear that any major improvement could be made.
However, Lt. Cdr. George Hazelton RN invented two speeding-up devices for machine guns, one for the Lewis and another for the Vickers. In the latter the device was accommodated within the muzzle casing and consisted of a special sleeve and shallow conical spring which increased the force of the gases which pushed back the muzzle cap. The gases were held in the muzzle cylindre and could not escape until the muzzle cap, moving back, uncovered the holes in the muzzle cylinder. One Vickers fitted with this attachment was made to fire at 1,000 rounds per minute but this was far too high for normal operational use: the wear and tear on the parts was considerable and they were also liable to fracture. The 'muzzle booster', as it came to be called, was thus adjusted and modified until the rate was brought down to 850-900, which remained the standard for this gun.

To sum up, the Lewis was the most highly regarded LMG of WW1, and was particularly favoured for flexible mounting in aircraft because of its light weight and compact ammunition magazine.

Highly regarded because there was no contender. Compact? Yes, but the spool on the Parabellum is compact enough also, your statement about the belt inconvenience surely referred to the empty belt flapping around in the slipstream.

You discount the jamming of the drum with G-forces simply repeating that it served for a long time.

I hadn't thought of that, but thinking that a loaded 97 round is close to 3 kilos in weight, wich can easily be trebled in violent combat maneuvers and that the magazine is meant to move around instead of being a fixed magazine, I find it plausible it happened sometimes with wing mounted Lewis, since the gun is fixed to the airplane frame, and the stress is borne by the attachment of the magazine to the gun. On the other hand a gun in a flexible mount would tend to swivel and pivot as a whole on its mounting, so it wouldn't be an issue for in that case.


And finally, in your book, page 15, you note that

ROF in belt fed guns is affected by the drag of the belt installation, (wich may reduce as ammunition is used up)

This stands to reason, I have always been skeptical of the theoretical ROF of machineguns in ground use seeing footage of how the belt is jerked as the machinegun eats it, and why there's always a gunner assistant holding the belt to make it flow easier. In airplane installation this problem is solved, but I have to ask you, aren't spring driven magazines slower in feeding? I think a belt feed is a smoother operation than a magazine, but I don't know.

Anyway, wouldn't the big drum of the Lewis also cause feeding drag?

[Ransom E. Olds]

Romani: It needs to be borne in mind that the Parabellum and the 08/15 are significantly different from each other. The 08/15 is a lightened 08, hence an original-type Maxim, whereas the Parabellum, like the Vickers, has a redesigned and significantly more compact lock and receiver. Ransom

[tbstreet]

I'd like to make a single observation. The Imperial Japanese Navy purchased a license to manufacture the Lewis beginning in 1932 because they found it the best aircraft flex gun at that time. The notion that "Japanese small arms industry produced unimpressive results at best" is wartime racist propaganda unsupported by fact. It is true that the Japanese were consummate comparison shoppers and would buy what they felt was the best rather than reinvent the wheel. They also produced many original and effective designs. The IJN assessment that the Lewis was still the best in 1932 must be seen to carry considerable weight. The Lewis was not without competition either 1914-1918 or later.

[Romani]

This is wandering off topic.

Originally Posted by tbstreet

I'd like to make a single observation. The Imperial Japanese Navy purchased a license to manufacture the Lewis beginning in 1932 because they found it the best aircraft flex gun at that time.

Nobody contests that. I am just pointing out that there were hardly other contenders.

The notion that "Japanese small arms industry produced unimpressive results at best" is wartime racist propaganda unsupported by fact.

I try not to make statements that are not supported by fact, and the facts is that notwithstanding the Japanese excellence in ships and airplane, their small arms from the Nambu pistol to the Hotchkiss copies of their machineguns the automatic antiaircraft guns of the Yamato were a load of junk, the best ones being copies of Western weapons such as the Mauser(Arisaka) and the ZB 26 (Type 99 7.7mm LMG) . They couldn't even make a submachine gun, for crying out loud!

That is not "wartime racist propaganda" but a fact, and the comparison is telling! Compare each and every gun in the Japanese arsenal with their contemporaries, and they will be average at best.

Really, I can't tell wich army (no navy or air force) that had worse weapons in WWII, the Italian or the Japanese one.

[Sreiko]

Romani- just wany to thank you for sharing of all of this info

[tbstreet]

Romani, with respect,

You reinforce my point for me! The Arisaka was not a Mauser copy and the Type 99 LMG is totally unrelated to the ZB 26. This is easily confirmed by actually comparing the guns. You have simply repeated wartime propaganda.

[tbstreet]

My apologies for getting sucked off topic. I did not mean to get into a "discussion" of Japanese WW II weapons. My original point has become lost.

That point was simply that, if the IJN considered the Lewis the best flexible aircraft gun in the world as late as 1932, it surely must have been outstanding in WW I. To say that it had no competition does not mean that there were no other guns available or used - the Russians even developed and used a very tidy installation for the Colt 1895 "potato digger" - just that no other guns were as good.

Again, sorry for the effect of my remarks.

T. E. Bradstreet

[TonyWilliams]

A few responses:

No, I was not referring to the Vickers K or VGO when I mentioned that some Vickers guns were adapted to take a Lewis-type drum. The VGO's drum was entirely different, being powered by a spring (as most others were) rather than by the gun mechanism (as the Lewis drum was). What I was talking about is covered in the second volume of Flying Guns: Development of Aircraft Guns, Ammunition and Installations, which covers the period from 1933-1945. Vickers produced new versions of the Vickers-Maxim type action in the Class E (belt-fed, for fixed mounting) and Class F (with the 97-round Lewis drum, for flexible mounting). It was sold only for export to various countries (including Japan, Greece and Poland) and did not see RAF service.

The Hazleton Adapter, as fitted to the Vickers, was a gas-trap device fitted to the muzzle which kicked the barrel back more quickly to increase the rate of fire. It is generally known as a "muzzle booster" or "recoil intensifier" and was later commonly built in to recoil-operated MGs from the start. This device could never have been fitted to the Lewis, which used gas operation with a fixed barrel - there is simply no way that it could possibly have worked. Something different must have been done to speed up the Lewis, although I'm not sure what. The standard method of speeding up gas-operated guns is to enlarge the gas port, allowing more gas to hit the piston which operates the mechanism which kicks it back with more force. Another possible way (which could be in combination with the first one) is to lighten the bolt and weaken the mainspring, but put a strong buffer spring at the rear to kick the bolt back more violently. All of these approaches will indeed put severe stress on the gun and will cause increased wear and probably breakages, if the vulnerable parts are not strengthened. The VGO was an aircraft version of the Vickers-Berthier LMG, speeded up from c.550 to 950 rpm, and that had to be significantly strengthened.

Guns designed to use either belt or magazine feed generally fire faster with the magazines: belt drag is a distinct handicap.

[Uhlan]

Originally Posted by Romani

Regarding its use in the German giant bombers, Uhlan covered it. Besides ease of handling, I would point that by replacing 3 Parabellums with the 250 round drums with Lewis with probably 1 single 100 drum each would save about 50 kilos of weight and is a significant saving, not from the point of performance in speed and ceiling, but from the fuel consumption standpoint. Flying long range bombing missions over the English Channel I would want as much as a safety margin as possible in the fuel tanks.

Just for the record I would like to point out that during WWI a lot of captured Lewis guns ended up with the German ground units. Users of captured Lewis guns that competed with aircrew for access to the Lewis supply were the 'Stosstruppen' who as a kind of élite unit usually had the pick of the best German or captured enemy equipment. The Stosstruppen were apparently issued some captured Lewis ground guns. Another major German user of Lewis guns were tank crews. To what extent Lewis air guns were re-converted back to ground guns is something I am not sure of. You have to keep in mind that while British or French aircrew shot down behind German Lines had nowhere to run, were usually quickly captured, and carried no tools capable of irreparably damaging a Lewis their guns were often captured either completely in tact or little damaged. On the other hand the crew of a knocked out British tank would often escape and take their Lewis guns with them or disable them with heavy duty tools that no combat aircraft could carry. I suspect quite a few captured Lewis Aircraft guns were cannibalized to get ground guns working again because the Lewis ground guns were more badly needed than aircraft guns.

At the end of the war the Germans operated somewhere in the vicinity of 60-70 or more Mk.IV tanks, a handful of Whippets captured form the British and a few Renaults captured from the French. In addition the Germans also apparently had a respectable fleet of captured Russian armored cars. The German army had captured a total of close to 200 or more Mk.IV tanks that the German army's motor vehicle command 'Chefkraft' had managed to successfully restore to working order (I'd have to check my references to get accurate figures). Chefkraft had also cannibalized many more for parts. The Mk.IV rebuild program eventually became so big it exceeded the Capacity of Chefkraft heavy motor vehicle repair facilities and Mk.IV tanks were (if I recall correctly) shipped to civillian contractors in Germany for rebuilding. The Mk.IV for one could not easily be modified to use the Maxim MG 08 mountings form the A7V nor could the lMG 08/15 be adapted to the existing Lewis mountings. German Mk.IV tanks would probably have had high priority on captured Lewis machine guns.