The ‘Forgotten’ Australian Gun Built Because Britain Couldn’t Arm Its Own Soldiers D

In 1941, Australian soldiers in the Pacific were dying because they didn’t have enough weapons. Not because of bad tactics. Not because of poor training. Because Britain fighting for its survival in Europe and North Africa simply could not supply enough firearms to arm every soldier in every corner of its empire at the same time.

Australian infantrymen were facing Japanese forces armed with modern weapons while carrying bolt-action rifles that dated back to the First World War. The submachine guns that could have made a difference, the Sten, the Thompson were either unavailable in sufficient numbers or completely unsuitable for jungle warfare.

Into this crisis walked a 20-year-old Australian with no formal engineering training a design he had sketched in his spare time. Had a weapon that the Australian Army had already rejected twice. His name was Evelyn Owen. His gun would become the finest submachine gun of the Second World War. And the Australian Army would spend years trying to pretend it didn’t need it.

This is the story of the Owen gun. To understand why Australia needed the Owen gun, you need to understand what Britain’s strategic situation looked like in 1940 and 1941. Britain was fighting everywhere simultaneously. The Battle of Britain had just been won at enormous cost. North Africa was consuming men and equipment at a staggering rate.

The Atlantic supply lines were under constant threat from German submarines. Every factory, every production line, every available weapon was desperately needed closer to home. Australia was part of the British Empire. Australian soldiers had fought in North Africa, in Greece, in Crete. But Australia itself was at the far end of supply lines that were already stretched beyond their limits.

When Japan entered the war in December 1941 and began its rapid advance through Southeast Asia Australia suddenly faced a direct threat to its own territory with whatever weapons happened to be available. What was available was not enough. And what was available was often wrong for the environment. The Sten gun Britain’s mass-produced submachine gun was a weapon born of desperation.

Designed to be manufactured quickly and cheaply after Dunkirk it worked adequately in European conditions. In the humidity and dirt of Pacific jungle warfare it jammed constantly. Soldiers who depended on it in close quarters jungle combat found themselves with a useless piece of metal at the worst possible moment.

The Thompson was reliable but heavy and expensive. Production couldn’t meet demand. Australian units were issued them in numbers far below what combat requirements demanded. Australia needed a submachine gun designed for Australian conditions built in Australian factories available in the numbers Australian soldiers actually needed.

Evelyn Ernest Owen was born in Wollongong, New South Wales in 1915. He had no formal engineering qualifications. What he had was an instinct for mechanical design and a habit of sketching weapon concepts in his spare time. In 1939 at the age of 24 Owen had already developed a prototype submachine gun design and attempted to interest the Australian Army in it.

The Army rejected it without serious evaluation. They were expecting to be supplied by Britain. There was no need for a locally developed weapon. Owen enlisted. The Army put him to work in a clerical role, his design sitting in a drawer somewhere, officially uninterested. What changed everything was a conversation between Owen’s friend and a director at Lysaght’s Newcastle Works, a steel manufacturing company.

The director looked at Owen’s design, saw something worth pursuing and arranged for proper prototypes to be built and tested. The results were immediate and obvious. The Owen gun worked. In conditions that made the Sten jam and the Thompson feel like carrying a piece of furniture through dense vegetation, the Owen gun functioned reliably and consistently.

The Australian Army, which had twice rejected Owen’s design suddenly became very interested. The Owen gun looked strange. In an era when every other submachine gun had its magazine below or to the side of the receiver the Owen gun’s magazine pointed straight up. This was not an aesthetic choice. It was engineering logic.

A top-mounted magazine meant that gravity assisted feeding. Dirt, mud, and debris that would enter a bottom or side-mounted magazine and cause jams fell away from the Owen gun’s feed system. In jungle conditions where weapons were submerged in streams, dragged through mud and operated in humidity that corroded everything this single design feature made an enormous practical difference.

The Owen gun also had a separate barrel that could be removed and replaced quickly. If a barrel was damaged or fouled beyond clearing a soldier could swap it in the field in seconds. No other submachine gun issued to Allied forces offered this capability. The caliber was 9 mm using the same ammunition as the Sten gun.

Simple to manufacture available in quantity familiar to trained soldiers. In trials conducted by the Australian Army, the Owen gun was tested alongside the Sten and the Thompson under conditions designed to replicate Pacific jungle warfare. It was buried in mud submerged in water dragged through sand dropped repeatedly.

The Owen gun kept working. The Sten kept jamming. The Thompson kept working but remained heavy and expensive. The conclusion was unavoidable. Australia had accidentally developed the best submachine gun available to any Allied force in the Pacific theater. Military trials prove what weapons can do in controlled conditions.

Combat proves what they do when everything is wrong. Australian soldiers who carried the Owen gun in New Guinea in the island campaigns in the brutal close-quarters fighting that characterized Pacific warfare gave it a reputation that spread through the entire force. It worked. That was the summary.

In conditions that broke other weapons the Owen gun worked. Soldiers who had been issued Sten guns and experienced the particular horror of a jam in close-quarters jungle combat understood exactly what this meant. The Owen gun’s reliability was not an abstract statistic. It was the difference between firing and not firing when a Japanese soldier was close enough to touch.

The Australian Army eventually ordered over 45,000 Owen guns. Production ran from 1942 through to 1945. The weapon served in every major Australian campaign of the Pacific War. When the war ended, soldiers were supposed to return their weapons. Many Owen gun users refused. Weapons that had been through the entire Pacific campaign that had proven themselves in the worst possible conditions were not surrendered easily.

The Army had to make specific efforts to recover Owen guns from veterans who had decided they were keeping them. Evelyn Owen died in 1949, 4 years after the war ended. He was 33 years old. The precise circumstances of his death are private but he did not live to see the full legacy of what he had created.

The Owen gun remained in Australian service until the 1960s. Eventually replaced by the F1 submachine gun. It served in Korea. It served in the early stages of Australian involvement in Vietnam. What the Owen gun represents is something that military history tends to overlook. The gap between what empires promise and what they deliver.

Australia was part of the British Empire. British weapons were supposed to arm British subjects. When the crisis came the weapons weren’t there. The ones that were there didn’t work in Australian conditions. A 24-year-old with a sketch and no formal qualifications solved a problem that the entire British Imperial weapons procurement system had failed to solve.

Britain couldn’t arm its own soldiers. Australia armed them instead. If you enjoyed this, subscribe for more forgotten weapons history. See you next time.