CHAPTER 1 5

SMALL ARMS AND MACHINE-GUN S

IN the late thirties the Munitions Supply Board kept the Lithgow SmallArms Factory moving along making Vickers machine-guns, for whic h

there was a keen demand, and rifles, with which Australia seemed plen-teously supplied, at the rate of only a few hundreds a year. It arrange dthat, in an emergency, production of rifles could be pushed up to about30,000 a year; but in the event, fewer than 3,800 were made in the firstyear of the war .

After the loss of equipment during the withdrawal of the British armie sfrom Dunkirk, unprecedentedly large orders—well beyond the capacity ofthe Lithgow Factory to meet in any reasonable time—began to pour i nfrom the army, which had sent a large part of Australia 's reserve of rifle sto Britain . The Eastern Group Conference also recommended that Aus-tralia 's productive capacity should be stepped up to 100,000 rifles a year ,so that she could help supply Britain and other Empire countries . Forstrategic reasons, and in keeping with the policy of decentralisation, fac-tories were built at Bathurst and Orange and other country centres . At notime was the making of rifles, even though it was essentially mass produc-tion, delegated to commercial industry as was the making of artiller ypieces .' The output of rifles rose to a maximum in 1943 and reached atotal of over 400,000 for the whole war period .

Apart from the voluntary efforts of several firms in making the Owe nand Austen sub-machine-guns, the one attempt to delegate the manufac-ture of small arms to commercial industry—namely the six-chamberedrevolver—proved a failure . The production directorate concerned (whic hconsisted of business men without experience in small-arms manufacture )and the firm to whom the task was entrusted, completely underestimatedthe quality and the precision of the work required . This was one of thefew unsuccessful efforts of wartime manufacture .

The first truly automatic machine-gun, that is one which once the trigge rwas pressed would go on reloading and firing itself while ammunitio nlasted, was invented by Hiram Maxim in 1883 . Some years later the manu-facturing interests of Maxim became linked with those of the armamen tfirm of Vickers, which by applying its wide experience in the manufactur eof munitions, improved the original invention and evolved a weapo nknown as the Vickers Machine-Gun .303 Mark I. As the technique o fmaking machine-guns was very similar to that used for rifles, except tha tthe tolerances for the former were more exacting, sometimes being asclose as one ten-thousandth part of an inch, it was an obvious decisio n

1 Commercial industry did assist in making some rifle components but never acted as majorcoordinating contractors . Rifle furniture (the wooden section of the weapon) was manufacture din an annexe to Slazengers Pty Ltd, Sydney, and bayonet scabbards were made by J . C .Ludowici & Son Ltd, also of Sydney.

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THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTR Y

when during the 1914-18 war consideration was first given to the proposa lfor the manufacture of machine-guns, that the project should be undertake nby the Small Arms Factory at Lithgow. Accordingly Mr Ford, ChiefDraughtsman at the factory, visited England in 1917 and again in 191 8for the purpose of making a complete study of the manufacture of theVickers machine-gun. The Australian-made Vickers machine-gun, pro-duced with the aid of machine tools and gauges also of Australian origin ,was successfully put through its paces in the presence of the Minister fo rDefence at Lithgow on 17th December 1929 .

The Munition Supply Board's plans for expanding the manufacture ofmunitions in 1937 included the Bren machine-gun—a modern and efficientlight machine-gun which was to replace the Lewis light machine-gun i nBritish armies . It was estimated that it would take about two years and ahalf to establish production using Australian resources only . When warseemed imminent it was decided to hasten the project by ordering someof the manufacturing equipment from England, from contractors alread yengaged in supplying similar equipment to the British Government. About1,000 machine fixtures were ordered from these contractors and the remain-ing equipment was reserved for manufacture in Australia, chiefly at theSmall Arms Factory . Orders for cutting tools, of which many thousand swere required, were placed with private industry but the gauges and som eof the more intricate precision equipment were placed with the only factorywhere this work could be undertaken, namely the Small Arms Factory . Indue course about half the machine fixtures ordered were received fro mEngland . Serious misgivings arose when it was discovered that not onl ywere the prices charged excessive but also that the quality was belo wAustralian standards . This led to a decision to cancel the remainder of th eorder and to manufacture the fixtures in Australia .

General Motors-Holden's Ltd undertook to make about 400 ; the res twere shared between the C .C. Engineering Co (Sydney), Telford SmithCo (Melbourne) and the Small Arms Factory. The contracts were com-pleted quickly and satisfactorily, and although payment was made on a"cost plus" basis the charges were about 20 per cent lower than had beenstated in the English quotation .

In spite of disheartening difficulties and of ill-informed criticism in Par-liament, the first six Bren guns passed inspection on 13th January 1941 ,some six months before the planned date . Production figures for Bren gun sand other small arms are shown in the accompanying table .

Production of Small Arms and Machine-Guns1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 Total

Rifles .303-in

. 3,480 35,040 82,098 136,262 113,460 38,310 408,65 0Vickers Machine-

Guns .303-in

. 735 1,791 2,748 2,679 2,132 1,516 11,60 1Bren Guns .303-in 186 3,081 6,848 5,290 1,930 17,335

Despite the fact that Vickers machine-guns were made at an unpre-cedented rate during the months when Australia was seriously menaced by

SMALL ARMS AND MACHINE-GUNS

325

the Japanese, there were not enough to meet all requirements . In the emer-gency someone conceived the idea of collecting trophies from the war o f1914-18 that had been rusting in public parks for over twenty years . Abou t300 machine-guns so retrieved were repaired and adapted to fire .303ammunition, and were used on beach defences and in prisoner-of-wa rcamps. A similar attempt was made to repair old German field guns, bu tsuitable ammunition could not be found .

Mortars, which were usually grouped with though not classified a ssmall arms, were among the most useful weapons in the jungle . They werethe heaviest weapons suitable for porterage, and consequently the heavies tweapons that could be carried into less accessible places . Quite often theywere the only weapons available that relied on high-explosive effect ratherthan the bullet.

The mortar with which the Australian Army was equipped in 1939 wasof a pattern used in the war of 1914-18 ; it has been described as "littlemore than a drain pipe" . The manufacture of more effective weaponsbased on British designs was put in hand soon after the crisis of June 1940 .With experience gained in jungle fighting further improvements were intro-duced—some of them based on features copied from captured Japanes eweapons—which increased range and accuracy and so improved thei reffectiveness that the Australian Army gained a reputation for mortarssimilar to the one it later gained for sub-machine-guns .

All small arms and machine-guns mentioned so far were designed an ddeveloped in the United Kingdom. The practice of adopting exclusivelyweapons of British design and development had been pursued by th eAustralian Services . Britain's leadership in the design of armament srested on her superior industrial resources and great wealth of technicalexperience. It was, moreover, part of defence policy to standardise weapons .A question that naturally arises is, did this policy rule out the possibilit yof developing and adopting outside the United Kingdom useful invention smade in other parts of the British Commonwealth? Whether an answercan be found to this question in the story of an Australian invention —the Owen gun—is debatable . If the question is limited to development ,the answer is simple: the policy did not rule it out but certainly made itdifficult . On the other hand the adoption of a non-standard weapon by anypart of the British Commonwealth carried with it such disadvantages tha tonly a revolutionary change in design could justify it even as a temporarymeasure . Yet unless it is adopted it is impossible to give the weapon it sreal test—on the battlefront . Because of the unusual circumstances sur-rounding its design, development and production, the Owen gun will b edescribed at greater length than its military importance alone woul dwarrant?

3 In writing this section I have had the benefit of the comments of Brig J. W. A . O'Brien, Lt-ColJ. E. M. Hall, Col E. W . Latchford and Mr V . A. Wardell.

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THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTR Y

The Owen sub-machine-gun, which received so much publicity in th eearly part of the war, was first brought to the notice of the army duringJuly 1939 when its inventor Mr Evelyn Owen, 3 then 24 years old, inter-viewed a workshops ordnance officer at Victoria Barracks, Sydney . Afterthe .22-inch calibre model which Owen had brought with him had bee nexamined and ideas for its future development had been noted, Owe nwas told that the army was not greatly interested in the device . 4

The weapon variously described as a sub-machine-gun (America) ,machine pistol (Germany) and machine carbine (Britain) was a ver ylight machine-gun firing a pistol-type cartridge and capable of providin gautomatic and repetition fire . It was particularly useful in providing a tshort notice a relatively large volume of fire effective at a short range only ;hence its great value in the close and confined conditions of the jungle .Although the Thompson sub-machine-gun, or "Tommy gun", which hadbeen developed in the United States was fully described in the British TextBook of Small Arms (1929) no gun of this type had been accepted b ythe British Army as a regular weapon. The same was true of the AustralianArmy; sub-machine-guns were regarded either as unimportant or asweapons for gangsters rather than for soldiers . In fact, no army excep tthe German had at that time conceived or accepted the sub-machine-gun a sa required weapon. This, together with the fact that before 1939 it relie dentirely on Britain for small arms designs, would explain the Australia nArmy's original lack of active interest in Owen 's invention .

At the outbreak of war the only known examples of the weapon exist-ing in Australia were a war trophy in the Small Arms School at Randwick ,New South Wales—the original "Bergmann" machine pistol of the Germa nArmy of 1917—and a later development of the same weapon, th e"Schmeisser" , which had been seized by the Customs in Sydney from theluggage of a German passenger and was held by the New South Wale sPolice . Early in 1940 the Chief Instructor of the Small Arms School ,Captain Latchford,5 contrived to buy for the Defence Department a nAmerican Thompson gun from a planter in the Solomon Islands, and use dit for instructional purposes . This roughly was the extent of the experienc ewhich the army was able to call on when asked to assess the value of th eOwen gun. No small arms of any kind had ever been developed in Aus-tralia .

For a year after Owen had made his first approach to the army autho-rities nothing further was done about his invention . Despairing of makingfurther progress with it, Owen had joined the A.I .F. and in September1940 was on final leave before embarkation for the Middle East . In a las tattempt to enlist interest he placed the working model of his gun in a sugar

• Pte E . E . Owen; 2/17 Bn. Motor mechanic ; of Wollongong, NSW ; b . Wollongong, 15 May 1915.Died 1 Apr 1949 .▪Owen explained that this calibre was adopted only for convenience in making the model and tha tthe gun could be readily adapted to larger calibres .

6 Col E. W. Latchford, MBE, MC, MSM. (1916-18 : 1st AIF and Dunsterforce .) Instructor, SmallArms School 1934-40, Chief Instructor 1940-45 . Regular soldier; of Ascot Vale and Armadale ,Vic ; b . Goulburn Web, Vic, 24 Jan 1889 .

SMALL ARMS AND MACHINE-GUNS

327

bag which he left anonymously outside the flat of Mr V . A. Wardell,6Manager of Lysaghts Works Pty Ltd, Port Kembla . Wardell, who dis-covered that the owner of the gun lived next door, quickly realised tha tsuch a gun, if it were shown to be of military value, could be rapidlyproduced in large quantities . He took the matter up with Mr EssingtonLewis, who promptly sent Owen to see Captain Dyer, 7 Secretary of theArmy Central Inventions Board in Melbourne .

The usefulness of sub-machine-guns for some kinds of military actionhad by now been demonstrated in the European campaigns, and Aus-tralian Army authorities were becoming a little more interested in th eweapon . Dyer was much impressed with the possibilities of Owen ' s inven-tion and though he was discouraged by some of his immediate superiors ,who were aware that there were prospects of a similar weapon being pro-duced in Britain in the near future, he did all he could to arrange for a nearly testing of the gun . Unfortunately, by now, the army's peacetim emachinery for the reception and assessment of inventions had lost itsefficiency owing to dilution of staffs by officers unfamiliar with the correc tprocedures, and also to the pressure of the large number of invention sstimulated by the war . Dyer found it expedient to approach Wardell' sbrother, Mr G . S. Wardell,8 of Lysaghts, privately and unofficially inorder to arrange the construction of further models of the gun . Owenobtained duty leave and within three weeks, with the collaboration o fG. S. Wardell, completed a .32-inch (8 .1-mm) calibre test model inJanuary 1941 ; two months later a second model of .45-inch (11 .4-milli-metre) calibre was completed . Firing trials carried out in April on th e.32-calibre model using rimless ammunition having proved reasonably suc-cessful, Wardell wrote to the Master-General of the Ordnance, Major-General Milford,° and after some delay a meeting was arranged in Mel -bourne at which Colonel Barker, l Colonel Adams, Captain Dyer andPrivate Owen were to be present .

When Owen first presented his proposal to the army, it is certain tha tneither he nor his supporters fully appreciated the nature and extent o fhis immediate problem, which was twofold :

(a) to prove that his invention could be developed into a reliable weapon, an d

(b) to convince the army that it required a weapon of the kind he was proposing .

At the time of this meeting much still remained to be done about (a) bu tin respect of (b) the situation had changed considerably : by now the armyhad come round to the view that it did need sub-machine-guns, but no t

Owen's .

', V. A. Wardell, BSc. Acting Manager, Lysaghts Newcastle Works, Port Kembla Branch, 1939-46 ,Director since 1944. B . Melbourne, 13 May 1903 .

' Capt C . M . Dyer. (1916-18 : 1st AIF, and RAF .) Sec, Army Inventions Board 1940-42. Motor

transport engineer ; of Hawthorn, Vic ; b. Hobart, 19 Oct 1876 .

G. S . Wardell, Chief Engineer, Lysaghts Works Pty Ltd, Port Kembla . B . Melbourne, 24 Oct 1904 .

' Maj-Gen E . J. Milford, CB, CBE, DSO . (Served 1st AIF.) CRA 7 Div 1940 ; MOO AHQ 1941 -42 ; GOC 5 Div 1942-44, 7 Div 1944-45 . Regular soldier; b . Armadale, Vic, 10 Dec 1894.

' Brig L. E . S . Barker, CBE, DSO, MC. (Served 1st AIF.) CO 2/1 Fd Regt 1940-41 ; Dir o fArty AHQ 1941-42 ; BRA NGF 1942-43 and 1943-44, First Army 1943 and 1944-45 . Regularsoldier ; of Mulgrave, Vic; b. Mulgrave, 5 May 1895 .

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THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTR Y

At this meeting Owen was told for the first time of the major obstacleto the development of his gun . Milford explained that British Arm yexperts, with far more experience than was available in Australia, wer eproducing a sub-machine-gun that had already been given 12 months 'testing and had proved an acceptable weapon . This was the Sten2 gun,a version of the German Schmeisser.

A number of Sten guns together with full drawings and all manufactur-ing details were expected to arrive in Australia before the end of 1941 . Inthe belief that the Sten would prove to be a well-finished gun of high qualit ysimilar to other types in current use the army was prepared to wait for it .In the event, it was found that the Sten had been hurriedly designe dfor cheap and rapid production, to meet the threat of invasion. In thisprocess of simplification many standards of functional performance wer eabandoned under the pressure of the grave situation . Had Australian Armyauthorities known this at the time, they might have taken a greater interestin Owen's gun ; but they were confidently awaiting in the Sten a weaponin the best tradition of British small arms design .

Before the Sten gun was designed no belligerent had even contemplate dthe development and production of small arms departing so far as di dthe Sten and Owen from the high standards of design and productio nhitherto considered normal. It is difficult to convey in a few lines, oreven by means of photographs, the different degrees of sophistication o fthe Sten and the Owen and of the more conventional contemporary type ssuch as the Thompson and the Schmeisser . To the expert the two type swere worlds apart.

Later events were to show that in addition to the gun's deficiencies o fdesign and finish, its development in Britain was not so far advanced a sthe Australian Army had been led to believe .

On the strength of the preliminary trials the Wardell brothers wereconvinced that the Owen gun had possibilities and that Lysaghts couldmake it if given the opportunity . Up to this stage Lysaghts had done al lthe technical and developmental work on the gun on their own initiative .Owen was paid a salary, and it was agreed that he would receive an yroyalties from the gun, which by now had been patented . 3

There appear to have been extraordinary obstacles in the way of testin gthe gun properly, owing to almost endless confusion over the calibre re-quired and over obtaining suitable ammunition. The choice of calibre wa sdifficult to make ; it lay ultimately between making the weapon work withammunition already being manufactured in Australia, and adopting th e9-millimetre calibre which was standard for sub-machine-guns made in

7 The Sten was designed under the supervision of Col R . V . Shepherd, the Chief Engineer Arma-ment Design (Small Arms) by a Mr Turpin, and takes its name from the initials of thes egentlemen and the first two letters of the Enfield Small Arms Factory, where the prototypeswere made. Similarly, the Bren got its name from Brno in Czechoslovakia where it was designed ,and Enfield.

3 Australian Patent 115,974 . Owen received a substantial reward for his invention : Royalty atthe rate of 5/- per gun amounted to about £11,000, which after taxation was reduced to £8,000 .He then sold any rights to the gun to the Commonwealth for a sum of £2,000, which bein gcapital was not taxed. This was one of the earliest awards made to inventors and was paid beforethe end of the war.

SMALL ARMS AND MACHINE-GUNS 329

Britain . The latter course was finally agreed to and the manufacture o fthe ammunition in Australia begun; events proved that it was the correctdecision . The army was, however, very slow in giving a lead in thes ematters, being more inclined to await the development of the Sten gun .Impatience with the delays in reaching this decision provoked question sin Parliament and comment in the press, and the Owen gun rapidlybecame a subject of controversy in the political world .

The Government now took an unprecedented and quite unorthodo xstep. It decided to take the matter out of the army 's hands by placing anorder for 100 Owen guns. This was a denial of the fundamental principl ethat the army should decide its own needs . The normal way would havebeen for the Directorate of Ordnance Production to place the order whe ninstructed to do so by the army. What happened was that on 16thJune 1941 the Minister for the Army, Mr Spender, 4 instructed the Master-General of the Ordnance to place the order . The army did not submitpatiently to this overriding of its prerogative . The Military Board suggeste dthat the order should not be placed but that further trials should be made .The Minister for the Army was adamant : the order stood and extensiv etrials on some of the first hundred Owen guns in both .45-inch and 9 -millimetre calibres were carried out under the supervision of Lieut-Colone lLatchford at Long Bay Range on 29th September 1941 . This time theperformance of the Owen gun was thoroughly tested and compared wit hthat of the Thompson and the imported Sten . Generally the Owen per-formed very well, and under extreme conditions—such as after being im-mersed in mud and water—much better than the other two . It gave definitepromise of being a suitable and efficient weapon .

There would be little point in quoting the patent specifications of theOwen. A commentary on the specification kindly supplied by the Paten tOffice, Canberra, may give to anyone unversed in the language of patent sa better idea of some of the gun's main characteristics :

THE OWEN GUN(Patent No. 115,974 )

The Owen gun was an automatic firearm of the usual recoiling breech bolt type ,with a fire control member cooperating directly with the trigger .

Its outstanding features included :(a) extreme simplicity of design and construction, which enabled it to function

successfully under difficult service conditions ;(b) the rapidity with which it could be taken to pieces and reassembled ;(c) the system of fire control which facilitated economical expenditure of ammuni -

tion ;(d) a tubular stock body and, in later models, a hollow breech bolt ;(e) high muzzle velocity, which helped to make the gun a very effective short -

range weapon.By placing the magazine on top the centre of gravity of the gun was made to

coincide with the gun's longitudinal axis. This gave greater accuracy of fire underfully automatic conditions .

Another great advantage was gained from this placing of the magazine : if mudgot into the weapon round the breech it would drop straight to the ground; if it

4 Hon Sir Percy Spender, KBE . MHR 1937-51 ; Assistant Treasurer 1939, Treasurer 1940 ; Ministerfor the Army 1940-41, for ExternalSydney, 5 Oct 1897 .

Affairs 1949-51 ; Aust Ambassador to USA since 1951 . B.

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THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTR Y

entered the magazine it either tended to drop out or was pushed out by the magazin espring. The Sten gun, on the other hand, was loaded on the side and ejected spen tcartridges to the other side so that mud tended to lie in the bottom of the casin ground the bolt. It was the Owen gun's ability to operate under muddy condition sthat made it superior to other sub-machine guns in the jungle. All these advantages,combined with an unusual simplicity of design, singled the Owen gun out from it scontemporaries and its predecessors .

On the strength of the September trials Mr Spender increased the orde rfrom 100 to 2,000 . This was his last action as Minister for the Arm ybefore he was succeeded by Mr Forde, 6 a member of the newly electe dCurtin Government . But the troubles of the Owen gun were by no mean sover . The manufacturers had underestimated the difficulties of securin gthe necessary machine tools, which were under the control of the Depart-ment of Munitions .

On 5th November 1941 the Sydney Daily Telegraph published anaccount of what it believed had been done to hinder production of th eOwen gun. Here, the newspaper maintained, was a most promising Aus-tralian-designed weapon of a kind urgently needed, that was not bein gdeveloped as rapidly as it should because of army opposition .

It is questionable how far public ventilation of technical matters in themidst of a war is a good thing. Chief justification for publishing storie sof inefficiency in munitions production—a condition which can arise i nany country at war—is that it may be expected to lead to the removal o fthe causes of inefficiency . The issue in the present instance, however, wa snot simply a matter of efficiency but of decisions on technical matters o fsome complexity. The reports were certainly not fair to the army sinc esome of its experts, notably Colonel Latchford, were doing everythingpossible to help production along .

There can be little doubt that at this period the army was unduly con-servative about the gun, but it was not long before it took fairly drasti caction to put its house in order. Younger administrative officers with morerecent experience of active warfare were placed in charge of the technica lsections responsible for small arms . By mid-1942 there was effectiveliaison between the army and the manufacturers of the Owen gun .

Production of the Owen gun was held up not only by troubles overmachine tools but also by protracted arguments concerning modification sof design suggested by the Directorate of Ordnance Production, whic hwere intended to facilitate mass production and reduce the manufacturingtime. In an attempt to settle the issues, the Minister for the Army, M rForde, who strongly supported the development of the Owen gun, calle da conference in Melbourne on 24th November 1941 at which representa-tives from the army, Munitions Department and Lysaghts were present .

General agreement was finally reached, as a result of which Lysaght shad to put about seventy requests for minor changes of design throug h

6 Rt Hon F. M . Forde . MHR 1922-46 ; Minister for Army 1941-45, Defence 1946 ; Deputy PrimeMinister 1941-45 ; Prime Minister Jul 1945 ; High Commnr for Aust in Canada 1946-53 . B .Mitchell, Qld, 18 Jul 1890 .

SMALL ARMS AND MACHINE-GUNS

331

the usual channels for the approval of the army and the Ordnance Pro-duction Directorate before the sealed drawings of the gun were ready fo ruse. These changes did not, however, amount to the complete redesign o fthe gun advocated by the directorate . 6

Among the matters brought up at the conference was the question o fsteel for the barrel of the gun . The Ordnance Production Directorate, inconsultation with army experts, had altered the steel specifications drawnup by Lysaghts, which called for a good, approved ordnance steel thenin production at Newcastle Steel Works and readily available . This steel,which had been used in the model guns made earlier, also had the advan-tage that its manufacture required no nickel, which was then very scarce .Lysaghts ' original specifications were finally accepted .

While Lysaghts were struggling to get the Owen gun into productio nthe army prudently placed an order for 20,000 Sten guns . It should beremembered that the Owen had not yet been tried out in battle, and ha dit failed the Master-General of the Ordnance would certainly have beenheld responsible for not exploiting the Sten . The Department of Munitions ,in the early stages at all events, also tended to favour production of th eSten, because it considered that effort should be concentrated on on e

proven type of gun . In the department's view the superiority of the Owenhad not been so marked as to warrant its exclusive production .

Allegations made at the time that some of the scarcity of machinetools experienced by Lysaghts was due to the parallel production of twosub-machine-guns can be given little weight . This shortage was felt inevery munitions project, and moreover the Sten—or Austen as the Aus-tralian version was called—employed a large number of die-cast com-ponents ; this meant that manufacturers of the two weapons were not com-peting for the same kinds of machine tools .

On making a detailed analysis of requirements for manufacturing th eSten gun the Directorate of Ordnance Production discovered that it wa snot in the advanced stage of development anticipated and that, in England ,it had rapidly undergone changes and reached a Mark III model . Thegun itself was, by customary standards for small arms, extremely crud ehaving been designed for quantity rather than quality . The Australiancontractors to whom the gun had been assigned, Die Casters Ltd (Mel-bourne), had, through the drive and enthusiasm of their technical manage r

Mr R. W. Newton, developed the technique of diecasting to a high degre eof efficiency and by applying it to the Austen were able to attain a fast rat e

of production . Indeed the company claimed that the Austen could be pro-duced in six man hours and a half, as compared with 37 man hours fo r

the Sten . The Austen was so designed that it could be taken to piece sand reassembled in 15 seconds, a feature by which the army set grea t

store . Newton reintroduced into the design certain features of the Schmeis -

The object of O .P .D's proposed redesign was greater ease of production with the facilitie s

available. For instance the barrel would have been broached in one or two operations thus

facilitating mass production. The normal method of producing barrels up to that time ha dnecessitated a larger number of operations with a consequent drop in the rate of production bu t

greater precision in the finished article .

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THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTR Y

ser which Turpin had rejected when designing the Sten . His applicationof the die-casting technique represented a definite advance in manufacture .So also did several novel features which he added. Thus the pendulu mswung from the relatively sophisticated Schmeisser to the rough-and-read ySten and back again to the less austere Austen . The ingenuity displaye dby the manufacturers of both the Austen and the Owen gained for Aus-tralia a notable reputation for its work on sub-machine-guns .

Figures for the output of sub-machine-guns were :Owen, Mks I and II

Lysaghts Pty Ltd, Port Kembla, NSW

. 45,477Austen, Mks I and II Die Casters Ltd, Vic, and W. T. Carmichael

Ltd, NSW 19,904

Soldiers who used both Austen and Owen guns in the South-West Pacifi cArea were, it appears, in favour of the Owen. In Latchford's view, th ehandiness of the Owen put it out in front . It still had one or two minordefects when first used in New Guinea—reports on operations in th eAitape-Wewak campaign mention defects arising from the design of th esafety catch—but on the whole the Owen was the more reliable of th etwo guns in that after immersion in mud and slush it could still b erelied on to fire . The Austen could not . In time the Owen became th e"forward area" weapon .

An authoritative assessment of the qualities of the Owen gun is to b efound in the report of tests conducted by the Ordnance Board of Britainduring December 1943 . In competition with five other guns, the Owen wa srated first in four of the five tests and first in over-all order of merit .

The Owen survived long enough to be used in the Korean war of 1952 ,where it was still highly regarded by the men who used it . Its reputationwas such that Mr Blunden,7 Scientific Adviser to the Military Board,planned operational research on the Owen with a view to comparing itwith what was then the latest British development in sub-machine-guns--the Patchett . While the Owen certainly justified the hopes and efforts o fthose who worked so enthusiastically to have it introduced during the war ,it is not difficult to sympathise with the caution shown by army an dmunitions officers who were anxious that the country's production potentialshould not be squandered in making a weapon about which at that tim ethey had doubts. However the gamble was successful and the gun proveda major contribution to British small arms design .

The uncertainty and disagreements which surrounded the Owen gu nin the early phases of its development brought about one notable reform .It forced on the army authorities and the Government a realisation of th eneed for some means of rapidly and authoritatively assessing inventions,not only for their technical feasibility but also for their possible usefulnes sto the armed services . The maladroit handling of the Owen gun by th eArmy Central Inventions Board was one of the main reasons for settingup the Army Inventions Directorate, a civilian body which took a mor erealistic and helpful attitude towards inventors .7 Lt-Col W. R. Blunden, BSc, BE. DADME (RDF) MGO Branch LHQ 1943-44, Att Admiralt yGunnery Estab as Design Engr 1944-45 ; Scientific Adviser to Aust Mil Board since 1952 . BSydney, 18 Jun 1916 .