I was watching a show on how manufacturing and especially in the auto industry was affected by the great depression.
Then I got to thinking about how during world wars one & two the majority of materials labour & energy went into the war effort.

In those times the common man did not have much of a disposable income & yet we still see sporting guns manufactured & sold during those times.
Were there many sporting guns produced in those years or was production way down ?
Do year by serial number charts reflect a trend ?

I myself have two British doubles that were made during the wars, one in 1916 & another in 1942. Right in the mid years of the wars.
A lot of WW II military gear that I see is stamped 1942 so it must have been a big year geared for war manufacturing & yet some still made non essential sporting arms.
It was a time of metal scrounging & recycling for the war effort, yet in this time of privation & rationing people still made & bought double guns.

Are there some further insights into this that any of you can share ?

O.M

If you go to this BB's home page and scroll down to "other useful information", you can check out production for American sxs during the war. Not a lot was happening, although in the case of both Fox and Parker, they'd essentially stopped making doubles (at least the REAL Foxes) before the war started. SxS production at Ithaca and LC Smith wasn't much more than a trickle during the war, and Ithaca only made a few thousand NID's after the war ended. Only Elsie continued production of American classic doubles (along with the Win 21) in any kind of numbers after the war. So it's a little hard to judge how much was the impact of WWII and how much of it was the fact that sxs production was dying out even before Pearl Harbor.

As for the rest of American industry, the automobile companies shifted almost entirely to war production. My father was exempt from military service because he worked at John Deere. During the war, instead of making tractors, they made parts for tanks and planes.

There was also the issue that during the war, ammunition for civilian use was hard to come by. And many of those who might otherwise have been hunting or breaking targets were serving in the military.

I have a 1919 L C Smith. One of those immediate post war productions.

O.M

War production was altered for a number of reasons. Profit margins on low grade guns, which are the greatest portion of production, had always been very thin. So the opportunity to get government contracts with high profit margins could not be passed up. Many plants expanded and even added extra workers or extra shifts Demand did decrease slightly as men entered service, or went to work in factories and ammo for hunting became scare. Disposable income did go up as war industries paid good wages. So any gun you see made during the war was a trickle due to efforts going elsewhere.

The lasting problem for double makers after WWI, was that returning servicemen had very little interest in the old style doubles. Repeaters, both pump and semiauto were what they wanted. 3-4-5 shots not two. Wars introduce men to technology and this was true in firearms. Cars replaced horses, repeaters replaced single and doubles. Single shot rifles were replaced by bolt action repeaters, then semi automatic rifles and then fully automatic rifles in the military. Speed of fire became more of interest than having different chokes to choose from.

By the end of WWII it was all over for doubles. They were on life support and still are to this day. The problem for doubles is the flood of cheap used guns which have few people interested in them. Hard to sell a new Sterlingworth when there are 50,000 used ones. In some ways the British market had the same problem after WWI. Lots of used doubles, tens of thousands of dead young men, who never would buy doubles for three or four decades of expected life, or use a double in the family. So large numbers of doubles either sat in a closet or just got sold off as there was nobody to use them. Too much supply and almost no demand.

A.H. Fox Gun Co. greatly expanded during The Great War years. First a plant to make Mauser rifle barrels for Serbia, then Moisen-Nangant magazine parts for Czarist Russia, then Colt Model 1911 parts & Very flare pistols for the U.S. Government --





After the Armistice much of this excess capacity had to be sold off and the rest of it certainly didn't go to making antiquated double guns. The Godshalks went to making automobile accessories, golf equipment, fishing reels, toy guns, etc. Finally, after two big additions to the Ansley H. Fox shotgun line, the single barrel trap and the Super-Fox, neither of which set any sales records, by late 1929 they sold off the remaining shotgun business to Savage Arms Corp. and continued on into the early 1980s making all manner of light industrial items as Fox Products Co.

In the UK, alot of guns definitely moved onto the second hand market as a result of the war, when a large portion of that generation's middle and upper classes didn't come home from the war. That's one reason some makers pushed guns that were unlike those for sale before the war: Churchill's XXV and, somewhat later, the 2" 12ga being a couple examples. And it seems that there was a general shift to slightly shorter barrels in general: 28" vs 30".

Skeet did give target shooting a pretty fair shot in the arm between the wars here in the States. And all the sxs makers turned out purpose-built skeet guns. I'll have to check the poster in the men's room at one club where I shoot, but Winchester was bragging about what was then the long run in skeet--set by a chap shooting a Model 21.

I have a graded Fox built in 1915-16. With Krupp barrels. I would have thought that German-made barrels would not have been used during that period. Chromox barrels were available before the war, perhaps Chromox shotgun barrel production ceased during WWI?

C Man,
We didn't get into it until 1917, and even then Fox would have had stock "on hand".
Mike

My 12-gauge, 28-inch Krupp barrel, straight gripped, B-Grade, shipped in September 1918. I have seen a couple of 1920 vintage Fox doubles roll-stamped CHROMOX on top of the barrels with vestiges of the FLUID-STEEL-KRUPP-ESSEN markings underneath.

What amazes me is the number of German guns that often show up with proof marks as late as 1944. And they’re usually well finished sporting guns.

My guess is there was a lot of money around in the war economy. Things appeared in our house I hadn't seen before. As a kid, I remember full racks in gunshops and department stores. My A&N, Sauer and Elsie were made during WWI.

That cutting tells it all for Ithaca.
Now I wonder if some manufacturers did not have military contracts & tried to make their way as normal before the war.

O.M

Great Ad. I once owned an Ithaca 1911. I presently have one of the last factory runs of an M37R 20 ga. made in 1941 just before the war. Gil

The ad certainly conveys a message . . .but it isn't dated. The SN list available on the home page here shows 900 Western Long Range doubles and 1,300 Lefever Nitro Specials dated 1942. But then it's entirely possible those guns were part of a govt contract and used to teach aerial gunnery. Walt Snyder's book shows a few dozen Knicks, also dated 1942. In both cases, it's possible that these were simply the tail end of civilian production before Ithaca converted its entire production effort to govt contracts.

Smith Corona made guns, a manufacturing company which made mail boxes made guns, sewing machine makers made guns or gun parts. And we just think about government contracts for guns used by the US but you had multiple foreign governments buying guns. Guns designs which our military passed on became sellers to overseas countries desperate to arm themselves. It must have been a great time to ge a manufacturing concern. Contracts with good profits, demand and cash to he made. Who needs to be making two bucks on a Sterlingworth when you could get a contract to make thousands of a item with a bigger profit.

While at the U.S. entry into WW-II the great bulk of Ithaca's inventory of entry-level guns went to the government, but they were still moving high grade guns out to the civilian market --



By the serial numbers on these No. 4Es they had all been in inventory for quite a while.

That ad shown above was a bit wrong as the Western Arms Long Range never reappeared after the war, a few Lefevers in 1946, and a few NIDs in Field Grade and No. 2 through 1948. The first time I visited Creekside Gun Shop in New York, in the early fall of 1986, Terry Turnbull had a big cardboard box full of fully completed 16- and 20-gauge NID Field Grade stocked receivers, but no barrels or forearms for them.


Here is a similar 1943 vintage ad from the Fox Gun Division of Savage Arms Corp.

Hey, Gil, the war started in '39. Canada declared against Japan a day before the US. By '41 my Dad had trained hundreds of Americans under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan before going overseas to be shot down in '42 and become POW in Stalag Luft III.

Interesting question. Certainly in the U.K. guns sales were hit in different ways. Most gun firms during WWI were contracted for government work. Gunmakers such as Purdey and Holland's were doing things like fixing scopes on sniper rifles. Most of the staff who were of military age were called up with many working as Armourers. Post WWI a lot of guns that had been on order did not have their customer anymore having become a casualty so that there we a number of already made up guns going second hand. The Government put huge restriction of gun making firms under The Defence of the Realm Act so that they could be fully utilised on war contract work. Similar in WWII with most on war work. I suppose that those that were made during this period were almost finished items that required little further work. Oddly, I have two Belgian guns with WWII war time date codes on them. Lagopus…..

Somewhat related to your post, Lagopus, is an August Lebeau 12b. BLNE that I've shot for some years that 'letters' from the present-day Lebeau-Courally factory as having been ordered/started in 1914 and finally shipped to the client in South America in 1918. That individual requested his name be tastefully engraved on both sides of the frame prior to shipment, which it was. Would be nice to know the full stories behind such guns.

In North America, the Interstate Association/ATA held the Grand American Handicaps right through both WW-I and WW-II. No skeet national championships were held in 1943, 4 & 5 though.

Thank you for that British information lagopus.
Interesting that Belgian gun makers were producing sporting guns during the second WW.
Does anyone have any idea as to what was happening with French military contracts ?

The closest German made production date to WW II that I personally own is April 1936 on a Walther double.
I do believe that Wather only made those guns for about a four year period prior to WW II & then their plant went to military production.
There seem to be very few of those Walthers that survived Hitlers gun grab in Europe. Mine came though Papua New Guinea & must have gone there when still a very new gun. Quite a few German missionaries went to PNG in those days. One way to escape the dark cloud of impending war I suppose.

O.M

Quite a few guns that survived Hitler's gun grab did not survive the gun grab by the American army of occupation. Not unusual for some of those guns to have made their way home in some returning GI's duffel bag.

British troops were forbidden to take any weapons back at the end of WWII by the military authorities even though gun laws were quite lax in the U.K. at that time. I understand that they made a brisk trade in selling Luger pistols to the G.I.'s. I do have a nice Belgian 24 bore that I suspect managed to get smuggled in; probably by a high ranking officer that could get away with it. Lagopus…..

In my research of the Money family, Capt. Albert W. Money of the American E.C. & Schultze Powder Company (aka Bluerock) and his sons BG Noel E. Money and Harold Money (De Shootinest Gent'man), I found that Noel served with General Allenby and the British forces in Palestine. From Noel's journals, within the week after the fall of Jerusalem, he and his fellow officers had shotguns and shells and were out hunting Chukars. When Noel's unit retired to Alexandria for the winter, he spent much of this time shooting ducks in the Nile delta.

Had an uncle who was in Egypt in the late 50’s. Before they went over into the Russian sphere. His host was some big shot in the government who tried to talk him into going on a shooting trip up the Nile. But his wife and her sister were waiting for him in Paris and I think he was afraid they would shop too much.

I can't complain about the shooting we had in Morocco for Barbary partridge (close relative of both redlegs and chukar) and coturnix quail. Returned home with both my first sxs and my first bird dog.