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Lewis gun
Acabashi · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Lewis gun

Machine guns

Country of origin United States
ManufacturerBirmingham Small Arms Company, Savage Arms
The Lewis gun (or Lewis automatic machine gun or Lewis automatic rifle) is a First World War–era light machine gun. Designed privately in the United States though not heavily adopted there, the design was finalised and mass-produced in the United Kingdom, and widely used by troops of the British Empire during the war. It had a distinctive barrel cooling shroud (containing a finned breech-to-muzzle aluminium heat sink to cool the gun barrel), and top-mounted pan magazine. The Lewis served until the end of the Korean War, and was widely used as an aircraft machine gun during both World Wars, almost always with the cooling shroud removed, as air flow during flight provided sufficient cooling.

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Specifications

Introduced
1911
Entered service
1914
Retired
1953

Countries that use it (1)

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Model data: Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Figures can differ between versions of the same weapon. · Q373396