Women’s Machine Gun Squad: A 1918 Lewis Gun on an Excelsior Sidecar
A Lewis machine gun, an Excelsior motorcycle sidecar, and three women from the Police Reserve make this 1918 photograph one of the more unusual motorcycle service images from the World War I era. It is not a front-line combat photograph, and it should not be read that way. Its value is different: it shows how far home-front preparedness, civic reserve work, and motorcycle-mounted weapons training could reach by the final year of the war.
A Lewis Gun on an Excelsior Sidecar
The motorcycle is an Excelsior sidecar outfit carrying a Lewis machine gun during Police Reserve practice. Sidecar outfits were already being studied as practical military motorcycles: they could move faster than a horse-drawn rig, travel roads that were still rough or incomplete, and carry a passenger, gear, ammunition, or a mounted weapon.
The Lewis gun was one of the best-known light machine guns of the period. The 1918 description called this example a gun “to be sent to the front,” with a killing range of two miles and a firing rate of 600 to 800 shots per minute.
Motorcycle-mounted guns could be photographed in dramatic form, but their usefulness was situational. A sidecar combination gave a crew mobility and a stable place to carry equipment, but it was still exposed, lightly protected, and dependent on roads or firm ground. That is why early motorcycle gun platforms are best understood as experiments in mobility, communication, and rapid response rather than simple replacements for infantry or artillery. The same period produced many armed motorcycle and sidecar experiments, from dispatch duty to machine-gun carriers.
The Women in the Police Reserve Photo
The July 26, 1918 identification names the three women as Captain Elise Reigner on the gun, Miss Helen M. Striffler in the sidecar or rear seat, and Mrs. Ivan Earasoff driving the Excelsior. The arrangement turns the motorcycle outfit into a three-person weapons platform for the camera: driver, gunner, and supporting passenger or spotter. Whether the outfit would have been practical in field service is a separate question, but the photograph clearly shows women being presented as trained participants in a modern weapons drill, not merely as decoration beside the machine.
Civic Training, Not a Deployed Combat Unit
The most important distinction is that this was a Police Reserve and home-front preparedness image, not evidence of an American women’s motorcycle machine-gun unit deployed overseas. Surviving descriptions place the photograph within a small group of World War I-era civic and military-adjacent women’s gun-training efforts. These units could train, drill, and demonstrate preparedness, but they did not become front-line U.S. combat motorcycle units in France.
In 1918, the public image of women operating a Lewis gun from a motorcycle sidecar was still unusual. The war had already pulled women into factory work, medical service, clerical work, transport, communications, relief work, and local defense activity. A Police Reserve machine-gun squad sat at the edge of that wider shift: not full military combat service, but far removed from the idea that women’s wartime work was limited to passive support.
Women, Gun Crews, and the Larger Wartime Pattern
During World War II, women in several countries served in anti-aircraft and artillery-related roles on a much larger scale. British ATS women worked in Anti-Aircraft Command with predictors, rangefinders, height-finders, radar, searchlights, and plotting equipment. Women’s military motorcycle service was also more visible by the next war, including British women motorcycle dispatch riders who carried messages through wartime streets. U.S. WAAC and WAC personnel were tested in mixed anti-aircraft crews during the Battery X experiment, operating searchlights, radar, predictors, and fire-control equipment while men handled the tasks the Army still defined as direct firing or loading. Soviet women served in anti-aircraft units in far more direct combat conditions, including the defense of Stalingrad.
Those World War II examples should not be pushed backward onto this Police Reserve photograph. The New York squad was not the same thing as a wartime anti-aircraft regiment or a deployed artillery battery. The comparison is useful only because it shows a longer pattern: women were repeatedly brought into technical weapons work when war, manpower needs, and public pressure forced institutions to test old assumptions.