Lewis Gun

[niall78]

Just digging about the internet on this topic and came across this piece of trivia :

 

Standard piece of equipment for a Lewis gun team I wonder?

 

You'd have to think that the completely exposed underside of the magazine when attached to the weapon or carried as spares would have been a nightmare in any type of muddy, dusty or sandy conditions.

 

Edited July 11, 2016 by niall78

[Michael Emrys]

2 minutes ago, niall78 said:

Standard piece of equipment for a Lewis gun team I wonder?

Somehow it doesn't look like the kind of thing a soldier would be carrying around in his pack in the field, but I don't know. If the company had its own armourer who rode around in his truck borne workshop, he would likely have one. But I never heard of it and doubt that it was even issued due to the lack of Lewis Guns in the standard company.

Michael

[JasonC]

Re reloading pans, see -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l73mR4D9pYw

Jump to 8:19, and watch for 40 seconds.  No, he doesn't load 47 rounds in 40 seconds.  Try 5.

Reloading 1 47 round pan mag from loose rounds is a 5 minute operation at the shortest, and some modern people report 10 minutes is more realistic.  The 47 rounds load in two layers and the winding spring gets progressively harder to turn as load.  This is incredibly clumsy compared to putting rounds into a box magazine, like we all do today..

"But, but, you'd never reload a magazine in combat!"  

Even if you just fired your last rounds from your last loaded magazine?  Do you throw rocks at them instead?

In WW 1, a Lewis crew was 8 men - yes, 8 men.  They carried 26 47 round pans between them, in addition to the gun.  A battalion typically have 200 pans, and didn't have a large reserve - the pans were mostly out with the guns.  Notice, they never even tried to treat the Lewis as a squad level magazine gun.  It was a heavy weapons platoon kind of item, with "squads" of a sort for each one just to haul its ammo around.

Bren gun mags were packed 12 to a box, often loaded only 28 to a mag for spring tension reasons, which means 336 rounds to a box.  Such a box weighed 30 lbs.  Each Bren in the field was usually assigned at least 25 magazines, including typical 2-4 per rifleman in the squad, outside of the Bren team proper.  Each rifleman was also carrying 90 rounds for his rifle, which could be fed into the Bren mags if desired.  That really wasn't practical with the Lewis, for the reason shown in the video above.

The Lewis required a large team and had a fixed ammo load and very long times and a separate ammo operation to keep the gun fed, beyond its first surge use of its panned-up ammo.  The Bren was readily handled by squads, used by just a few men, resupplied from boxes carrying 12 mags, mags were readily reloaded by any rifleman in the squad, rapidly, from loose rifle ammo or ammo lose out of boxes.

Pretending it is more important to have 47 rounds between pan changes instead of 28 rounds between mag changes, than all those advantages, is myopic. It is overly fixated on one mechanical point in the whole chain of keeping the gun supplied.

 

 

[Michael Emrys]

I reckon the LRDG came into their Lewis guns because nobody else wanted them. Like I said, scrounged.

Michael

[cool breeze]

One thing that can't be argued with is that it is freaken cool looking gun.  It looks maybe even better/cooler on the jeep than on the Stormtrooper.  On jeeps sure does seem like a good place for em though.  Not that they would be as powerful as a bigger better belt fed, but having the jeep cancels out most of the problems, so why not, since they were lying around.  Id rather have a Lewis on my jeep than nothing, or an extra Lewis with something.

Edited July 12, 2016 by cool breeze

[JasonC]

breeze - If I have a motor vehicle to carry gun and ammo, I'd take a belt fed M1919 over a Lewis or a Bren, any day.

[Erwin]

What was the ROF?  Have only seen the Lewis in movies and it seemed fairly slow.  I though that new tactics required a faster ROF so that one burst could ambush and hit a bunch of troops b4 they had time to dive for cover.  That was the theory behind the MG42.

[Michael Emrys]

 

2 hours ago, Erwin said:

What was the ROF?  Have only seen the Lewis in movies and it seemed fairly slow.

It was about average for ground use. But the Vickers K (also called the VGO) had a rate of fire about twice as fast, 950-1,200rpm. A pair of those could really throw out the lead.

Michael

[Sublime]

Unless i had the mg34 or 42 option Id take 1919A6 all day.. IMO best squad level mg on the Allied side.  Mind im talkin the bipod one that started life with airborne units

[JasonC]

Erwin - about 550 rounds per minute, cyclic.  Half second 5 round bursts, practically speaking.

MG rate of fire is extremely overrated, incidentally.  A very high ROF is only helpful vs briefly exposed targets or e.g. anti aircraft use where brief exposure and a need for many hits to do material damage is important.  Vs infantry in their skivies, 2 hits aren't any better than 1, the beaten zone is set by gun manipulation mechanics not ROF, and running out of ammo twice as rapidly isn't nearly as good an idea as wargamers seem to think.  The allies had MGs with twice the ROF of their typical ground mounts for aircraft use, but deliberately didn't use them in infantry roles.  It wasn't some technology ability, it is a design choice.

The impression the ROF equates to firepower largely stems from a mental idea that each bullet has the same chance of inflicting harm, and this isn't even remotely true.  It's a bit like expecting a shotgun shell with 16 pellets to be twice as destructive as one with 8.  Nope, same pattern size per blast, only a marginally higher hit chance on the worst shots, you are in the pattern and get hit or you aren't and you don't, etc.

Edited July 13, 2016 by JasonC

[Michael Emrys]

GIs who were up against the MG42 with its insane ROF were certainly intimidated by it, but since they generally didn't have much exposure to other MGs, we don't know to what degree they would have been intimidated by those too. A healthy respect for all automatic weapons strikes me as a healthy attitude.

Michael

[Erwin]

I understand what the point you are trying to make, Jason.  But am not convinced that the probability of getting more hits with 16 shots is no better than with 8.  An MG sprays bullets like a shot gun, but is used at much greater ranges.  Surely, the "spray" requires more kinetic material to cover the area - in the same way that multiple warhead munitions devastate an area.  The Germans presumably researched this as much as the allies.

[cool breeze]

22 hours ago, JasonC said:

breeze - If I have a motor vehicle to carry gun and ammo, I'd take a belt fed M1919 over a Lewis or a Bren, any day.

 

On 7/12/2016 at 2:10 PM, cool breeze said:

 Not that they would be as powerful as a bigger better belt fed, but having the jeep cancels out most of the problems, so why not, since they were lying around.  Id rather have a Lewis on my jeep than nothing, or an extra Lewis with something.

As you see I am in full agreement.  My point was just that the better guns go more critical places first, and after you've used up all the good/best guns and still have some jeeps that could use more, stick the Lewis guns on em cause why not.  Better to have the 3rd man in the jeep with his own Lewis vs anything else you could do with em like giving em to a 5 to 8 man mg team.

[cool breeze]

And also, not to really argue, since I totally see what your saying about the MG rate of fire, especially with regards to ww2.  But on the other hand... lol.  Since ww2 we have switched to a more MG42 style MG with higher (but not as high) rate of fire.   Maybe this shows that the better more modern approach is to just bring more ammo?  Part of my thinking is based on your point about the beaten zone of the MG being set by gun manipulation mechanics.  Doesn't this mean that if you wanted, you could have the gun shoot twice as fast, over twice as big an area, giving you no overkill but more firepower (Edit to add: per unit time) ?  I mean that doesnt work if the target area isn't big enough, but it does seem like a worth while capability.  On the one hand you are of course right, and ammo is always in fact a limited quantity.  But on the other hand you can always have just taken more in the first place.  And MG ammo fired at the enemy seems like usually a good thing to have space and weight wise. 

Edited July 14, 2016 by cool breeze

[JasonC]

cool - no, you can't fire over twice the beaten area to make full use of a higher rate of fire.  The shots are coming very fast.  It is the inherent dispersion the shots cause by moving the gun barrel around with their own recoil impulse that determines the angle the burst covers.  That and the range determine the width of the spray pattern at the other end, not the operator.  The effect of a denser pattern is just to make the spray a fuller probability of a hit on anything inside that dispersion cone, through a narrow range window, and at quite a distance.  Even that density only matters for a briefly exposed target, because the same density is available for the lower ROF gun by just extending the length of the burst in time, if the target is still visible.

Higher ROF does not fire any more bullets overall, because the total rounds fired is set by gun resupply, not ROF.  Also, none of them can fire at cyclic for very long, and for all the air cooled guns, sustained rate of rounds fired is set by heat issues, not cyclic rate.  Only water cooled and lower ROF MGs can actually sustain cyclic ROF over extended periods, and that's only useful if the target is exposed that long, is that large and numerous, etc.  For all the air cooled guns, and all the high cyclic rate guns, they only concentrate the bursts *within* the overall firing time.  If they try to fire twice as many rounds as another air cooled, they just overheat and force a barrel change sooner.

So what you get from high ROF is a better hit chance on very briefly exposed targets, in specific range windows where a slower ROF would leave a pattern with larger than man sized gaps in it.  Vs vehicles e.g. AA use, you also get more repeated hits on the same target, which may matter for material damage against something one hit won't put down.  In return, you are very clearly lowering, not raising, average accuracy in all other engagement situations, by sending 10 rounds to the same area an ordinary ROF gun would send 5 or 6.  In other words, by increasing the number of rounds wasted in near misses (or overkill repeat hits) in all cases in which a lower ROF gun would have hit the target anyway, with the same burst length and point of aim.

If you look at post WW2 experience, people have not all gone to 1200 rpm let alone tried to increase ROFs further.  The only application in which an even higher ROF has been sought and used is for guns designed to be fired air to ground, from fast moving planes and at extended ranges, where a much higher ROF is useful to create a dense enough pattern.  And there it just replaces the WW2 aircraft armament approach of mounting several guns in parallel and firing them together.  It does save weight in that role, but that's the engineering gain.  

Modern ground mount MGs use ROFs higher than the WW2 standard only with lighter rounds that may want multiple hits, or for an anti material purpose.  The notion that 1200-1500 rpm is more effective than 500-800 is rejected by modern armies.  The best ROF for air cooled ground mount MGs meant to hit infantry is in the 600-800 range, not higher.

As for the 8 vs 16 shotgun analogy, the purpose people use 16 smaller pellets for, from a shotgun, is much smaller targets than people or deer.  If you want no rabbit sized holes in your pattern, sure you want more smaller shot.  

Edited July 14, 2016 by JasonC

[Sgt Joch]

One thing to remember is that LMG/HMG were generally not fired at their maximum ROF.

Yes, a LMG 42 could fire at 1200 rpm, but at that rate, chances of a jam increase exponentially. In practice, they generally used a ROF of 300-400 RPM and fired in 2-3 second bursts.

Same with the Vickers HMG, it could fire at up to 1,000 RPM and certain WW1 Allied pilots did go into missions with the ROF cranked that high. The U.S. air service even specified a permissible 800 rpm ROF on its Vickers in 1918. Again the issue was high ROF=increased jam rate.

In actual practice, there was not a huge difference between the ROF of the various LMG/HMGs.

Edited July 14, 2016 by Sgt Joch

[cool breeze]

Well sure you can't make Full use of the higher rate of fire.  But some of the dispersion is set by the auto rocking mechanics that some MGs mike the MG42 use.  In that situation, it seems you could double the left right sweep with double the rate of fire and get the same density spread at a given range.  Sure, its usually better to fire at a point target that is too small for that to work, but often MGs do area fire and covering twice as big an area seems sometimes helpful.  Although I hadn't been really thinking about air cooled and the barrel changes in particular.  But not counting running out of ammo, doesnt more barrel changes mean more shooting?  And my "point" is also not about ww2 where supply was obviously limited, but modern where we can just have more trucks with ammo.  Also my point was that 800 like we do use was seemingly better than 500 ish like the Lewis, not 1200, although I guess that sort of follows the same line.  And I wasnt thinking high rate as default, but as an option.   Sometimes accuracy and sustained fire seems better, but some of the time maximum lead dumpage seems good. 

[Sailor Malan2]

Ah, the ROF debate again. This has been discussed very extensively. The higher ROF does not lead to more casualties, but does lead to a lot of weight needed (ammo, barrels etc.)  The thing to think is we have been capable of very high ROF for many years and yet... most weapons are lower. SO, either most gun designers are idiots and armies more so, or...?

[JasonC]

cool wrote in part - " often MGs do area fire and covering twice as big an area seems sometimes helpful".  

But you aren't covering twice as big an area.  You don't get one more bullet by having a higher rate of fire.  You don't get one more ounce of barrel metal or one more inch of barrel surface area to cool things off.  You don't get to fire any more, therefore, not over any length of time.  You don't even get to fire the same ammo faster in any sustained fire sense.  You just get to fire the ammo you can and do fire, in narrower windows of time within the overall firing time you have.  

As I said, that only helps you if you can get those narrower windows to coincide exactly with periods of higher enemy exposure, and only if the other intervals of time when you aren't firing with the high ROF gun, but would have been firing with a low ROF gun, have significantly lower target exposure.

Ammo being limited is not a function of era and whether you have enough trucks.  The ammo limitation that matters is right up at the firing position, and the last half mile to that firing position is man packed.  Nothing else lives in infantry forward areas where MGs are firing at each other, certainly not unarmored trucks packed full of ammo.  They can't go there; they don't go there.  The ammo an MG in action has is set by the ammo men can carry to the firing position in their hands and on their backs.  Including ongoing trips by ammo carrying parties to be sure, but always strictly limited.  

Every MG ever made can fire off the ammo that can be hauled to it in those tactically relevant circumstances much faster than it can be hauled up to the gun.  You can cite games with indirect fire from covered positions out of action, but they don't have exposed targets and will never even "rate" in the accuracy per round sweepstakes.

Take actual practical values from WW2 - which aren't appreciably different these days, incidentally.  A squad level MG is lucky to have 1500 rounds, counting the stuff carried by the riflemen of the whole squad.  An HMG team with a dedicated ammo operation and a fixed position into which ammo has been "dumped" ahead of time without regard for the ability of the team to ever move it out again in "tactical time", might have 5000 rounds.  Even at low sustained rates of fire, those amounts last less than half an hour, perhaps less than 10 minutes for the LMG role.  At cyclic rates they are gone in 1-3 minutes for the LMG, and 3-10 minutes for the HMG amounts.  Infantry battles lasted *hours*, often half a day.  Nobody is firing continually, even with occasional resupply (in amounts around that LMG scale, not that HMG scale).

Say they want to cover a wider beaten zone with area fire.  The low ROF MG will have its trigger depressed for 2-3 times as long in those long periods of combat, as the high ROF gun.  But both have the same ammo, both have the same heat deposited by their ammo fired that they need to dissipate.  When is the high ROF gun better?  Only if the times its trigger is depressed the enemy is exposed, and the times its trigger isn't depressed but the low ROF MG would be firing, the enemy isn't exposed.  That's it.

On the other side, the extra bullets that miss the point target or overkill by hitting it twice, are "lost" by the high ROF MG, and "saved" by the low ROF MG. 

That's the trade off.  The only way the high ROF is better is if the former brief exposure factor outweighs the extra overkill factor.  There is no assurance it does.  It certainly isn't going to convey anything like 50-100% higher overall effectiveness, just from having a higher ROF.  More like "break even overall if you are lucky, occasionally better and occasionally worse, depending".  

[Erwin]

These all sound like good arguments.  So am curious... why did the Germans, who seemed so advanced in these issues, decide to go from the MG34 to the higher ROF MG42?

[Sgt Joch]

The reason behind the switch from MG34 to MG42 was pure economics. The MG 42 was a cheaper, easier to produce copy. It was not an improvement and apparently was less accurate and less durable than the MG34.

[cool breeze]

2 hours ago, JasonC said:

Ammo being limited is not a function of era and whether you have enough trucks.  The ammo limitation that matters is right up at the firing position, and the last half mile to that firing position is man packed.  Nothing else lives in infantry forward areas where MGs are firing at each other, certainly not unarmored trucks packed full of ammo.  They can't go there; they don't go there.  The ammo an MG in action has is set by the ammo men can carry to the firing position in their hands and on their backs.  Including ongoing trips by ammo carrying parties to be sure, but always strictly limited.  

Every MG ever made can fire off the ammo that can be hauled to it in those tactically relevant circumstances much faster than it can be hauled up to the gun.  You can cite games with indirect fire from covered positions out of action, but they don't have exposed targets and will never even "rate" in the accuracy per round sweepstakes.

Firstly, very much appreciate the insightful reply.  With regards to my point about maybe the more modern approach being to just have more bullets, I should have said I was thinking about not modern but near future warfare.  The more trucks with the ammo are to bring it to the IFV/APCs and also robots like the robot dog and similar tracked things and flying things can carry and resupply troops in action.  If you can somehow get 150% the firepower, by shooting 200% to 300% more but carry 400% the ammo, you get more firepower per gun.  Which either increases firepower or frees up manpower for the all important supply operations. 

Also I don't think burning up MG barrels sounds bad in modern day, just bring more

And I'm also thinking about not the briefly exposed targets that obviously provide benefit to the higher rate of fire, but the ones that are " not exposed" .  Like just firing into the woods or bushes where you think or know the enemy might be.  If the double rate of fire can sweep double the amount of woods, you can have half the number of guns for the same sweepage, which if you wanted could let you trade one mg for one ammo bearer. 

Oh and I'm saying have both not one or the other.  besides sweeping woods and crests and bushes, one of the other main things I have my mg's do in CM is shoot windows.  When they occupants are laying low, the high rate of fire MG's are probably not ideal, shooting the windows at a lower rate would be sufficient.  But when they are fighting out the windows you want the extra RPM.  If the gun had both it would have the best of both worlds. 

Edited July 14, 2016 by cool breeze

[c3k]

Backpack mini-guns... I saw one in a movie once.   https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=predator+minigun+scene&&view=detail&mid=A462BA2AA7304B1F4080A462BA2AA7304B1F4080&FORM=VRDGAR

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

For dismounted infantry, a very high ROF weapon does not offer significant advantages.  Even on tanks or vehicles with literally thousands of rounds of ready ammunition, something that kicks out 800 RPM  is considered entirely adequate to the task.  

In regards to "sweeping" anything, not so much.  If you're bumping out 500-600 rounds you're likely getting as adequate of a suppressive effect as 1200+ RPM, in terms of lethal fires, rapid just ensures instead of a 3-5 round burst, you're dealing with a 6-12 round burst and it won't kill the enemy any harder you know?

In ground employment there's something to be said for more rapid fire at very long ranges, as the divergence of the rounds will create a sort of lethal area, but that's usually well beyond the ability of a dismounted machine gun to realistically accomplish anyway.  

[Erwin]

7 hours ago, Sgt Joch said:

The reason behind the switch from MG34 to MG42 was pure economics. The MG 42 was a cheaper, easier to produce copy. It was not an improvement and apparently was less accurate and less durable than the MG34.

Understood.  But that doesn't address the question re what was the military's reasoning for wanting a faster ROF weapon?  Presumably the MG 42 could have been manufactured to have a lower ROF.