Owen Gun Trial
Minister for the Army, 1941 Frank Forde
Delay Will Be Paid For In Australian Lives!
The Australian Army’s attempts to obstruct the introduction of the Owen Gun was identified and noted when Minister Frank Forde (Minister for the Army) called a conference of all parties on 24 November 1941.
Bluntly he told them that the Government would tolerate no more delays and no more obstructions. Production of an efficient gun had to begin:
… quickly and in sufficient numbers. Delay will be paid for in Australian lives.
Forde was satisfied that Australian set backs in Crete demonstrated the Army’s
urgent need for a Sub Machine Gun. He felt that the British Sten Gun was much inferior to the Owen Gun.
3D Drawing of the Owen Gun, proven to be the best produced during WW Two.
The Sten Gun, handy when it works and was designed for the cheapest bang for the buck when there was nothing else to shoot. NCOs used to tell us, our equipment was supplied by the cheapest tender. One Factory in the UK made 20,000 per week. They might not have been the worst but close to it.
The Loss of Crete.
The information that Minister Forde had received referred to the loss of Crete. That was due to the German tactics of deep infiltration and in the case of the Battle of Crete the Germans used the pinnacle of infiltration storm troops by the use of parachute regiments from the Air. The Allied force on Crete with no Anti Aircraft guns, no air cover, and not enough section firepower suffered badly as 274 Australians were killed, 507 were wounded and 3100 were captured, including most of the 2/1st, 2/7th and 2/11th Battalions. New Zealand losses for Greece and Crete were 962 killed, 2000 wounded and over 3000 captured.
The Loss of Singapore.
At that time he made the statement he did not know that within a few months of advocating the manufacture and supply to the troops of the Owen Gun
“… quickly and in sufficient numbers. Delay will be paid for in Australian lives”, that a further ill equipped force would suffer a similar fate against the infiltration tactics of the Japanese Forces. 18,067 Australians were lost, dead, wounded and captured at the fall of Singapore. Again supply of machine tools had been orchestrated and Owen Guns had been blocked from supply to the troops.
With losses of Australian lives such as these two examples, and the continued obstruction from the Australian High Command, why was no one admonished or put on trial for causing these losses?
Note;
A submachine gun (SMG) is a firearm that combines the automatic fire of a machine gun with the cartridge of a pistol, and is usually between the two in weight and size.
Early experiments were made by converting shoulder stocked pistols such as the Mauser Model 1896, Luger 1908 and the Colt 1911a1 from semi to fully automatic. These automatic weapons firing pistol rounds were developed during World War I, by Italy, Germany, and the United States. The first dedicated sub machine gun designs were developed in the later stages of World War I to offer an advantage in trench warfare.
- The German Police in Berlin 1919 had more individual firepower than the Australians at the beginning of World War Two.
The Australian High Command and Public Servants Were Responsible! Why Let Them Off the Hook? Why Blame Others?
Why was it so important for these people in high government positions to be defended by the writer Kevin Smith in the” Owen Gun Files”, and why did he feel it necessary to manufacture his spin in scapegoating Evelyn Owen and the Wardell brothers.?He derides Evelyn Owen for plagiarism and in his book the ‘Owen Gun File’ his opening paragraphs states.
“The Origin of the Species
“A strong argument can be advanced that almost all design is either consciously or subconsciously derivative and, in the field of conscious derivation perhaps no better example can be found than that of the design of automatic firearms. In this class of weapons close examination will usually show that most models possess various components or systems which are similar or identical to corresponding items in earlier designs.
The Owen Gun was not an exception to this rule, and it can be argued that its design and development were influenced by four other submachine guns — its design by the Italian Beretta M18 and the German MP 18,1 and its development by the American Thompson and the British Sten.
The Beretta M18 was itself a direct descendant of a light machine gun which had been designed by A.B. Revelli immediately before the outbreak of the First World War. This gun had been patented in the United States in 1915 and was manufactured for the Italian Army by three factories, one of which was located in the Italian town of Villar Perosa from which the gun eventually took its name.
The gun had been designed to provide a light portable automatic weapon suitable for use by alpine troops in the border region between Austria and Italy, and in fact is probably more accurately described as a heavy automatic pistol with an extended magazine.
- The Villa Perosa, 3000 rpm due to the bolts only weighing 280 grams and only travelling of 1 .75 inches. Australia and Evelyn Owen had never seen one to copy.
At the time of its design virtually all fully automatic weapons used standard military rifle cartridges and Revelli no doubt concluded that it was the lock mechanisms and barrel cooling systems made necessary by the use of these cartridges which produced the problems of excessive size and weight that made the guns virtually immobile.
As a consequence the Villar Perosa had been designed to use not the Italian Army’s standard rifle cartridge but its standard 9 mm Glisenti pistol cartridge, a decision which in addition to making the use of an air cooled barrel feasible, also allowed the elaborate positive breech locking mechanisms to be replaced with the much simpler and lighter “inertia lock” system.
This system, which is also known as the “blow back” system, is based on the study of how a mass overcomes its inertia ‘ when subjected to an external force. Applied to firearm mechanisms this study in its simplest form shows that when the force generated by the expansion of gasses within a cartridge case is applied equally to a light bullet at one end of the case and the much heavier bolt at the other, not only will the bullet begin to move earlier than the bolt but it will also move more rapidly — a set of circumstances which allows the bullet to leave the barrel, and for the pressure within the gun to drop to a safe level, before the bolt has travelled far enough to open the action.
Whilst in the case of the Villar Perosa the movement of the bolt was also retarded by a device to prevent the firing of a cartridge before it was fully chambered, the use of the “inertia lock” in combination with a carbine length barrel and pistol ammunition has usually led to it being regarded as the first submachine gun.
The gun itself consisted of two separate bodies each fitted with a magazine and joined together with a spade grip and trigger arrangement at the rear, and it is in the arrangement and style of the magazine that the origins of two features of the Owen can be seen.
The first of these is the vertical configuration which was dictated by the necessity to keep the gun as close to the ground as possible, thus eliminating an under body location, and to keep the width to a minimum, thus precluding horizontal fixing.
The other, and possibly more important feature, was the use of the double staggered column arrangement of cartridges within the magazine. At the time of its design all automatic pistols employed magazines where cartridges were held in a single vertical column, however, with the gun’s voracious appetite for ammunition (at a cyclic rate of 1200 rounds per minute) and with the aim of keeping the length of magazines to a reasonable minimum, it had been decided to employ the system devised by Mauser for use in their rifles where the cartridges were held in a staggered double column with an alternating feed; that is where the uppermost round in the magazine alternates from one side of the magazine to the other as the cartridges are removed from it.
For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was apparently that its limitations in respect of range and accuracy had not been fully understood, the Villar Perosa appears to have eventually lost favour with the Italian Army and, presumably in 1917, the original Villar Perosa factory and the firm of Pietro Beretta in Brescia were called upon to develop a more compact, light and practical weapon utilizing a single body.
Both firms produced workable models, however it was the design of Tuillio, Marengoni of the Beretta works which was to become the more favoured of the two. This model, known as the M 18 from the date of its first issue, utilized the basic Villar Perosa full automatic action, barrel, receiver and magazine which were fitted with a new trigger mechanism and then mounted on a conventional timber stock.
This model was used during the final stages of World War 1 and through the Second World War and details of its design would have been known to, and no doubt specimens of it held by, various Army schools and museums in Australia at the time of the design of the Owen in its final form.
The alpine border region of Italy was of course far from being the only scene of activity involving the Central Powers of Austria and Germany at that time and, for perhaps the greater part of the War, the most destructive conflicts took place in France and Belgium.
These conflicts took the form of a war of attrition fought out over a series of trench lines which were reputed to have extended from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border, and produced new tactics and weapons to cope with the new form of warfare. One of the many requirements was for a light and highly manoeuvrable rapid firing weapon with a substantial magazine capacity which would be suitable for use in the confined spaces encountered in the trenches.
The German Army had met this requirement to a certain extent by taking the 9 mm Luger pistol in its 8 inch barrel Artillery Model configuration and replacing its 8-cartridge capacity magazine with a coil or “snail” magazine holding 32 cartridges.
In view of the developments which were to take place over the next 25 years certain aspects of this coil magazine should be examined, and perhaps the foremost of these is that of capacity.
The standard German Army pistol was the Luger Model 1908 which was issued with two magazines, one in the pistol itself and the other in a special pocket attached to the standard holster. Each of these magazines held 8 cartridges and, no doubt in an effort to reduce wastage of stray rounds, pistol ammunition was packaged in lots of 16 cartridges. The capacity of the coil magazine was therefore calculated in multiples of these packages with two of them giving the capacity of 32 rounds.
The magazine itself was not entirely successful as not only did the loading of the cartridges in a single column arrangement against quite strong spring pressure necessitate the use of a loading tool, but experience in the field showed that it had a marked tendency to jam. This latter problem was however partially overcome when the original conical bullet was replaced with one of a parabolic shape.
Whilst this weapon went quite some distance in the satisfaction of a need, it did not satisfy the design specification which had been issued by the German Army in 1916, and it was not to be until the following year that a successful design to meet that specification was evolved.
This design was the work of Hugo Schmeisser who at that time was an employee of the Theodor Bergmann Waffenfabrik of Suhl and it is generally ‘believed that it was influenced at least to a certain extent by the study of a captured Villar Perosa gun which had been made available by the Army for that purpose.
- The only thing that the Bergmann had in common with the Owen Gun was that the barrel and breech block were in alignment. It had a separate firing pin as per the Sten Gun and the tipping action was disassembled from the rear opposite to the Owen Gun.
Due to the intense demands being made upon Germany’s war industries at the time, Schmeisser’s design was kept as simple as possible and consisted of a tubular body with an “inertia lock” mechanism mounted on a timber stock. To avoid the time loss and expenditure of valuable man hours in tooling UP for new components, the barrel was that of the standard Artillery Model Luger pistol and the magazine was the by then widely used 32-round capacity coil type with an adaptor unit to facilitate its use in the new gun.
In view of the effect that the use of this magazine was to have on the second of Owen’s designs, it should be noted that the butt of the Luger is set at an angle to the centre line of the barrel and the magazine platform is shaped so that although the magazine within the butt is itself at an angle to that centre line, the cartridges within the magazine are parallel to it. As a consequence, when attached to the gun in a horizontal form the magazine has to stand at an angle to the barrel in order that its contents will lie parallel to the barrel centre line and facilitate feeding.
The new gun was fitted with a perforated barrel jacket for ease of handling and was a well-made weapon in very much the traditional manner.
No attempt was made to allow for the selection of automatic or repetition firing, although with the much more practical cyclic rate of fire of some 400 rounds per minute it was possible for an experienced operator to fire single rounds.
By the early months of 1918 the gun, which was to be known as the Maschinen Pistole (MP) 18,1, was in limited production and although a certain amount of conjecture exists in regard to the manner in which the Army intended to use it, it seems most likely that its existence, like that of the new “storm troops” who had been specially trained for the forthcoming “Spring Offensive”, was kept as secret as possible.
The Spring Offensive, which nearly succeeded in driving the British Army back to the Channel coast, eventually waned and seven months later, after a major Allied offensive, hostilities ceased with the signing of the Armistice. However whilst at first sight it would appear that in the confusion of those last months the new weapon had been overlooked, it is obvious that its potential value had been recognised by those who used it or had been confronted by it.
Indeed this recognition was such that under the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty the manufacture of such weapons in Germany was prohibited, and the use of those existing weapons not acquired by the Allied powers was restricted to police forces.
Shortly after the war the Bergmann firm was absorbed by the Lignose consortium and as the Bergmann designs were at that time taken over by the C.G. Haenel company, also of Suhl, it is not surprising to find that in 1921 Hugo Schmeisser joined that firm as its designer and chief engineer.
Apparently during the early years of his association with Haenel requests were received from some police departments for the replacement of the unreliable coil magazine and Schmeisser responded by producing a straight box magazine and a new housing which secured it to the body at right angles.
Once again this magazine was designed to hold 32 cartridges and for compactness departed from the previous single column of the coil magazine and employed the staggered double column arrangement.
However the bolts of the guns which were altered had been made for use with a single column magazine, where cartridges are presented very much on the centre line of the chamber to the barrel, and as a consequence they were quite unsuitable for use with an alternating feed system as had been used in the Villar Perosa or the Beretta M18.
The bolt itself is of course a reasonably complex and costly item to manufacture and, no doubt principally in the interests of economy, it was decided to retain it in its present form and adapt the staggered double column arrangement to suit it.
This decision, which was to prove to be a most unhappy one that would affect numerous other designs in the subsequent years, involved bringing the uppermost round in the new style magazine into the same position in relation to the chamber of the barrel as would have occurred with the single column magazine, and was achieved by the use of shoulders to restrain the double column short of the magazine mouth and present one cartridge at a time on the centre of it.
This “double staggered column with central feed” arrangement had several disadvantages, most of which had their origin in the magazine spring.
The first of these was that the compression of two columns of cartridges into one necessitated the use of a magazine spring of such strength that once again the gun was burdened with the necessity to use a loading tool to fill it. Whilst this was to be regarded as a serious disadvantage in derivations of the design in future years it is quite possible that, at the time the decision was made, the use of such a tool was not viewed as unusual, as a similar device had been required for use with the coil magazine and even the standard Luger pistol had a combination tool which was used to compress the magazine spring and facilitate loading.
The second disadvantage lay in the fact that, despite efforts to strengthen them, in time the lips of the magazine reacted to the high pressures experienced with fully loaded magazines and became distorted, a situation which inevitably led to problems of stoppages due to incorrect feed.“
The Rebuttal
Kevin Smith’s researched material is quite educational and informative but in just a few places strategically and with forethought and planing applies incorrect information to spin to his purpose.
Where he states, “The Owen Gun was not an exception to this rule and it can be argued that its design and development were influenced by four other submachine guns — its design by the Italian Beretta M18 and the German MP 18,1 and its development by the American Thompson and the British Sten.“
- The Thompson mechanism is nothing like an Owen Gun, and even though they were manufactured in 1928 the first one to arrive in Australia arrived in 1940. Does Kevin Smith suggest that Evelyn Owen copied it from seeing in a James Cagney movie?
“This model was used during the final stages of World War 1 and through the Second World War and details of its design would have been known to, and no doubt specimens of it held by, various Army schools and museums in Australia at the time of the design of the Owen in its final form.” ” and it is in the arrangement and style of the magazine that the origins of two features of the Owen can be seen.”
Smith’s Accusation was Defamation, But Who is he Trying To Protect?
These statements are rubbish as at the outbreak of the war in 1939, the only known examples of submachine guns that existed in Australia was a First World War trophy in the Small Arms School at Randwick which was an original ‘Bergmann’ MP 18-I. Earlier in that year a ‘Schmeisser’ MP 38, had been seized by Customs in Sydney from the luggage of a German passenger and was held by the New South Wales Police in Sydney. Early in 1940 the Chief Instructor of the Small Arms School, Captain Latchford, bought an American Thompson gun from a planter in the Soloman Islands, and used it for instructional purposes. Although the Thompson Gun was described in the British Textbook of Small Arms of 1929, no gun of this type had been into Australia prior to that time. Evelyn Owen had began his quest to invent, design and manufacture a sub machine gun in 1931, as he was at that time only 15 years old, many obstacles were obviously in his path. No finance, no tools, no ammunition, no materials, no factory other than his fathers shed. A much greater obstacle was that 1931 was sixty years before the information age. He had never seen one of these sub machine gun he was supposed to have copied. They were not in the Museums of his day, the best he could expect would be a poor image that he had no way of copying in a library book. No Scanners or Photocopiers. Even if he had been able to study their designs with the very basic manufacturing equipment available to him reproducing those complicated accurately machined parts would have been an impossible feat. To compensate, he had to invent and simplify the basic mechanism to a level which would make his gun possible for him to make. The one piece bolt was one of those ideas.
- Not one of the four sub machines guns designed prior to the Owen Gun had a bolt like this and even if they had Owen could not have copied it as he had never seen one to copy.
Kevin Smith also inserts these words into his text above,
“In view of the effect that the use of this magazine was to have on the second of Owen’s designs, it should be noted that the butt of the Luger is set at an angle to the centre line of the barrel and the magazine platform is shaped so that although the magazine within the butt is itself at an angle to that centre line, the cartridges within the magazine are parallel to it. As a consequence, when attached to the gun in a horizontal form the magazine has to stand at an angle to the barrel in order that its contents will lie parallel to the barrel centre line and facilitate feeding.”
Action and Re Action, Theorised by Newton and Proved by Maxim.
He makes it seem that Evelyn Owen was an arch copyist of other people’s patents, when in fact in all designs as he has described cannot ever be patented. As patent officers in any patent office in the world will not allow a patents registration that just acknowledges a law of Natural Science. Just because all use a system of retarded recoil, ‘action equals re-action’, it does not mean that there is a lack of innovations and invention. When anyone wants to apply a sprung loaded magazine carrying the same product to a parallel bolt, the angle of approach has to be the one that works. If Kevin Smith had followed the Engineering sciences instead of his Architectural classes, Smith would have noticed that the angle of the Luger magazine is actually far more pronounced than on the Owen Gun. Every firearm such as these have to have an angle, but depending on the relationship of the magazine loading platform and feeding lips will depend on what precise angle that is.
- MP 18 Bergmann. It has a tubular receiver, a barrel, return spring, but a very different bolt and mechanism.
In fact we will show in following chapters that there are many differences between “the design by the Italian Beretta M18 and the German MP 18,1 and its development by the American Thompson and the British Sten.” Almost every one of those differences is a great improvement and it will be shown that most of the Owen Guns innovations predate the development of the Sten Gun, and that the Sten Gun was subsequently altered to copy the features of the Owen Gun with the design of the Austen. However, as all the firearms listed by Smith had an irrevocable flaw, no modifications to the design was possible, until they began with another design. This was the F1 which was more of a copy of the Owen Gun then anything else, but for many reasons which could fill another book, was just not as good.
- A 3 D cutaway drawing of the Owen Gun shows that there is a separate compartment for the cocking mechanism, at the rear, to prevent mud blocking the feeding firing and extraction. The compact trigger system was also sealed.
As the evidence of planned delays and obstructions on the introduction of the Owen Gun, which was detrimental to the Australia’s survival and cost thousands of young Australians their lives, is now at hand, I propose to bring these people to trial. You the readers will be the Judge, Jury and by your actions, execute change to Australia’s future to ensure that this sad history is not repeated. I will be the (for the first time) the prosecution and Mr Kevin Smiths book the Owen Gun File will be the defence.
Next Chapter the Accused.
Maxim of Thucydides that
“The strong do as they wish, while the weak suffer as they must?
Meaning the voice of the powerful sets all precedents as in the quote from Adam Smith
“Policy making in England,” the principle architects of policy, in his day the merchants and manufacturers made sure that their own interests were most peculiarly attended to, however grievous the effect on others, including the people of England. Unfortunately this maxim plays out in all time and in all places. The full meaning of these quotes will be plain when the following information is supplied on the missuse of government power.
Next chapter of the Owen Gun book Click Here
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