Portal:World War I/Selected equipment/9
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The Lewis Gun is a pre-World War I era squad automatic weapon/machine gun of American design that was most widely used by the forces of the British Empire. It first saw combat with the Belgian Army in World War I, and continued in service all the way through to World War II. It is visually distinctive because of a wide tubular cooling shroud around the barrel and top mounted pan magazines. The British quickly claimed it as their own, adopting it in late 1915 (much like their invention of the Peabody-Martini-Henry rifle). Each Lewis Gun required a team of two gunners, one to fire and one to carry ammunition and reload, and the whole rifle squad was trained to fire it in case the gunners were incapacitated.
