doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com WW I & WW II years double guns.

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.