The HORRORS of the Tommy Gun in WW2

Holzheim, Belgium. The 29th of January, 1945. Staff Sergeant Leonard Funk and a scratched platoon of clerks and paratroopers have just cleared 15 German- held houses and taken roughly 80 prisoners. Then the guards get careless. The prisoners overpower them, snatch back their weapons, and a German officer jams a pistol into Funk’s stomach and demands his surrender.

Funk lowers his head. He seems to comply. Then, in the words of his Medal of Honor citation, he brought the muzzle of his Thompson into line and riddled the German officer where he stood. He screamed at his men. The fight that followed lasted seconds. When it ended, 21 Germans were dead. More were wounded and the rest were prisoners again.

That is the horror of the Tommy gun. Not at distance, up close, where there is no time to aim and nowhere to run. So, how did a weapon this flawed become the thing men feared most in a doorway? The man whose name it carries never fired it in a war. John Talia Pharaoh Thompson was a career army ordinance officer.

He had helped bring the Springfield rifle and the 45 caliber service pistol into American hands. Near the end of the First World War, he set out to build something new, a weapon that could sweep an enemy trench clean in a single sustained burst. He called it a trench broom. The trouble was timing. His first prototypes were sitting on a New York dock, waiting to ship to France when the armistice was signed on the 11th of November, 1918.

The war the trench broom was built for was already over. So, the gun went looking for another customer. It found one in prohibition era America in the hands of bootleggers and bank robbers where the newspapers christened it the Chicago typewriter and the chopper. Thompson hated what his invention had become.

His company nearly went bankrupt. He was pushed out of his own firm. He died of a heart attack in June of 1940. About 18 months later, the attack on Pearl Harbor turned his unwanted, unloved trench broom into one of the most soughtafter weapons in the world. On paper, it never made sense. The Thompson weighed about 10 12 lb empty and roughly 11 lbs with a loaded magazine.

That made it heavier than the M1 Garand, the standard American battle rifle. A soldier hauled all that weight for a weapon that fired a pistol cartridge. The 45 ACP round is heavy and slow. It fired a 230 grain bullet at around 900 ft per second. Up close, it hit like a hammer, but it dropped fast, arked like a rainbow at any real distance, and punched through cover poorly.

Its effective range was about 50 m. Past that, it was a liability. Then there was the cost. In 1939, a single Thompson cost the United States government $29. That was roughly the price of a belt-fed Browning machine gun for one submachine gun. That’s not a typo. The Army spent the next several years frantically simplifying it.

They stripped out the complicated friction delay lock, the cooling fins, the muzzle compensator. By the spring of 1942, the price had fallen to $70. By February of 1944, the final M1 A1 variant cost $45. and the army was already replacing it with a crude stamped steel weapon, the M3 grease gun that cost a fraction as much.

By every number on the spec sheet, the Thompson was a bad weapon. Heavy, expensive, short-ranged. But the number that mattered was never on the spec sheet because range was never the point. Most of the killing in the Second World War did not happen far away. Study after study of the fighting in Europe found that the majority of infantry engagements took place under 100 yards and very often much closer than that.

A gap in a hedgero, a sunken Norman lane, a staircase, a trench, the black mouth of a bunker. In that world, the long range rifle was a problem, not an advantage. The German Carabiner 98K was a bolt-action rifle, deadly accurate at 400 m and far too slow between shots when an enemy appeared 3 ft away. The American Garand was a fine rifle, but long and clumsy in a doorway, and it stopped to reload after eight rounds with a distinctive metallic ping.

The Thompson had no such weakness inside 50 m. One pull of the trigger sent a wall of heavy 45 slugs into whatever stood in front of it at 600 to 700 rounds per minute. It spoken a slow, heavy booming bark deeper than the high ripping snarl of a German machine gun. Now, you have probably heard that the 45 round physically knocked men off their feet.

That part is a myth. No handheld cartridge carries enough force to throw a body backward. But the truth was bad enough. A burst of heavy slugs at close range put a man down and kept him there. Inside a room, the Thompson did not wound. It erased. The first Allied troops to learn that up close were not Americans. They were British commandos.

On the 27th of December 1941, men of number three commando raided the Norwegian island of Vago, hitting the German-h held fish oil factories along the waterfront. Captain Algae Forester led his troop down the main street, firing his Thompson from the hip and hurling grenades into the houses as he passed until he was cut down at the door of the sunund hotel.

The commandos had received their first Thompsons only months earlier. One of them, Sergeant Tommy Dales, remembered it plainly. They had all seen the gun at the pictures in the hands of Al Capone. So for a while, the men walked around talking like James Kaggy. The guns, he said, were beautifully made, but blime me, they were heavy things.

On the far side of the world, the Thompson became the heart of a new kind of unit. Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson built his Marine Raiders around a three-man fire team. One M1 rifle, one Browning automatic rifle, and one Thompson. On the Mon raid in August of 1942, a 19-year-old raider named Ben Carson crouched ready to kick in the door of Government House and empty a magazine into the room beyond.

A month later on Guadal Canal, roughly 840 Marines under Merritt Edson held a low ridge against more than 2500 Japanese attacking through the dark. The fighting collapsed to a few yards. At that range, the volume of fire a Thompson could throw was worth more than any rifle’s accuracy.

And then there is the most famous small unit action of D-Day. On the morning of the 6th of June 1944, Lieutenant Richard Winters led about 23 men of Easy Company against a battery of four German 105mm howitzers firing on Utah Beach at a place called Breeort Manor. His paratroopers worked forward through the hedge rows with grenades and Thompson fire, taking the guns one by one.

It became the textbook example of how a small force clears a fixed position. Much of that work was done at the range where the Thompson was king. In the Voj mountains of France in October of 1944, a young soldier named Audi Murphy saw his patrol ambushed, flanked the German position, and wiped it out with a Thompson and grenades. He earned a silver star that day.

He would finish the war as the most decorated American soldier of all. If you are getting something out of this, take a second to subscribe. There is a new story like this one every week. Now, back to the gun and to the city that earned it its darkest reputation. In October of 1944, the American First and 30th Infantry Divisions fought their way into Aken, the first major German city to fall to the Allies.

Correspondents compared it to Stalingrad. The fighting went attic to attic and sewer to sewer. Every building a fortress that had to be cleared by hand with grenades, flamethrowers, and short-range fire. This is the kind of battle where the Thompson’s reputation was forged. And it is also where we have to be honest about a popular story.

You will often hear that German soldiers came to dread the slow, heavy roar of the Thompson that they feared the sound itself. It is a good line, but the documented record does not back it the way the legend claims. The sound that both German and Allied accounts agree was genuinely terrifying belonged to a different weapon.

The German MG42 machine gun with the ripping shriek that earned it the name Hitler’s buzzsaw. What is true is simpler and harder. The German soldiers clearing those same houses were not carrying long range rifles into the fight. The man across the hall was usually holding a carabiner 98K or just as often an MP40 submachine gun. The MP40 fired a 9mm round.

Lighter, a little faster cycling, but without the heavy punch of the .45. Inside a room, the Thompson was not facing a rifleman with the advantage. It was facing another submachine gun, and it hit harder. German house clearers did not need a legend to respect what a Thompson could do at the end of a hallway. They had seen it.

Still, the Thompson’s flaws were real, and they killed men who trusted the gun too far. The 50 round drum magazine, the one every gangster film made famous, was almost universally abandoned in combat. It rattled, which gave a man away on patrol. It was heavy and fragile, and it had to be loaded with the bolt already cocked.

British troops shipped thousands of them back across the Atlantic in exchange for simple 20 and 30 round box magazines. The final M1 A1 could not even accept a drum. And the weapon’s short reach carried a darker lesson. At the end of January 1944, near Cesterna in Italy, two of Darby’s Ranger battalions, a raiding force built around Thompson firepower, infiltrated toward the town in the dark and were caught in the open at dawn by German infantry and tanks.

Of 767 Rangers, only six made it back to Allied lines. Their automatic weapons meant nothing against armor and machine guns firing from 200 yd away. The Thompson ruled the world inside 50 m. Step outside it and the gun could not save you. By the end of the war, the Thompson’s days were numbered and not because it had failed.

It was a victim of its own lesson. The Second World War proved that most fighting happened close. That volume of fire mattered more than long range precision and that the future belonged to a weapon that could do both at once. The Germans had already glimpsed it in the Stormg 44, the first true assault rifle, firing an intermediate cartridge that split the difference between pistol and rifle.

That idea would lead to the AK-47 and to the M16, and the pistol caliber submachine gun would slip from the front line forever. The cheap stamped steel grease gun replaced the Thompson on the assembly line, but it never replaced it in the memory of the men who carried it. Because for a few brutal years, in the hedgerros and the ruined cities and the bunker mouths of a global war, there was no weapon a soldier would rather have had when the door swung open and the room was full of the enemy.

Leonard Funk understood that better than anyone. a pistol against his stomach, a demand for surrender, and in his hands a heavy, slow, overpriced, short-ranged weapon that the spec sheet said he never should have wanted. It was the only thing in that room that mattered.

 

 

 

The HORRORS of the Tommy Gun in WW2

 

Holzheim, Belgium. The 29th of January, 1945. Staff Sergeant Leonard Funk and a scratched platoon of clerks and paratroopers have just cleared 15 German- held houses and taken roughly 80 prisoners. Then the guards get careless. The prisoners overpower them, snatch back their weapons, and a German officer jams a pistol into Funk’s stomach and demands his surrender.

Funk lowers his head. He seems to comply. Then, in the words of his Medal of Honor citation, he brought the muzzle of his Thompson into line and riddled the German officer where he stood. He screamed at his men. The fight that followed lasted seconds. When it ended, 21 Germans were dead. More were wounded and the rest were prisoners again.

That is the horror of the Tommy gun. Not at distance, up close, where there is no time to aim and nowhere to run. So, how did a weapon this flawed become the thing men feared most in a doorway? The man whose name it carries never fired it in a war. John Talia Pharaoh Thompson was a career army ordinance officer.

He had helped bring the Springfield rifle and the 45 caliber service pistol into American hands. Near the end of the First World War, he set out to build something new, a weapon that could sweep an enemy trench clean in a single sustained burst. He called it a trench broom. The trouble was timing. His first prototypes were sitting on a New York dock, waiting to ship to France when the armistice was signed on the 11th of November, 1918.

The war the trench broom was built for was already over. So, the gun went looking for another customer. It found one in prohibition era America in the hands of bootleggers and bank robbers where the newspapers christened it the Chicago typewriter and the chopper. Thompson hated what his invention had become.

His company nearly went bankrupt. He was pushed out of his own firm. He died of a heart attack in June of 1940. About 18 months later, the attack on Pearl Harbor turned his unwanted, unloved trench broom into one of the most soughtafter weapons in the world. On paper, it never made sense. The Thompson weighed about 10 12 lb empty and roughly 11 lbs with a loaded magazine.

That made it heavier than the M1 Garand, the standard American battle rifle. A soldier hauled all that weight for a weapon that fired a pistol cartridge. The 45 ACP round is heavy and slow. It fired a 230 grain bullet at around 900 ft per second. Up close, it hit like a hammer, but it dropped fast, arked like a rainbow at any real distance, and punched through cover poorly.

Its effective range was about 50 m. Past that, it was a liability. Then there was the cost. In 1939, a single Thompson cost the United States government $29. That was roughly the price of a belt-fed Browning machine gun for one submachine gun. That’s not a typo. The Army spent the next several years frantically simplifying it.

They stripped out the complicated friction delay lock, the cooling fins, the muzzle compensator. By the spring of 1942, the price had fallen to $70. By February of 1944, the final M1 A1 variant cost $45. and the army was already replacing it with a crude stamped steel weapon, the M3 grease gun that cost a fraction as much.

By every number on the spec sheet, the Thompson was a bad weapon. Heavy, expensive, short-ranged. But the number that mattered was never on the spec sheet because range was never the point. Most of the killing in the Second World War did not happen far away. Study after study of the fighting in Europe found that the majority of infantry engagements took place under 100 yards and very often much closer than that.

A gap in a hedgero, a sunken Norman lane, a staircase, a trench, the black mouth of a bunker. In that world, the long range rifle was a problem, not an advantage. The German Carabiner 98K was a bolt-action rifle, deadly accurate at 400 m and far too slow between shots when an enemy appeared 3 ft away. The American Garand was a fine rifle, but long and clumsy in a doorway, and it stopped to reload after eight rounds with a distinctive metallic ping.

The Thompson had no such weakness inside 50 m. One pull of the trigger sent a wall of heavy 45 slugs into whatever stood in front of it at 600 to 700 rounds per minute. It spoken a slow, heavy booming bark deeper than the high ripping snarl of a German machine gun. Now, you have probably heard that the 45 round physically knocked men off their feet.

That part is a myth. No handheld cartridge carries enough force to throw a body backward. But the truth was bad enough. A burst of heavy slugs at close range put a man down and kept him there. Inside a room, the Thompson did not wound. It erased. The first Allied troops to learn that up close were not Americans. They were British commandos.

On the 27th of December 1941, men of number three commando raided the Norwegian island of Vago, hitting the German-h held fish oil factories along the waterfront. Captain Algae Forester led his troop down the main street, firing his Thompson from the hip and hurling grenades into the houses as he passed until he was cut down at the door of the sunund hotel.

The commandos had received their first Thompsons only months earlier. One of them, Sergeant Tommy Dales, remembered it plainly. They had all seen the gun at the pictures in the hands of Al Capone. So for a while, the men walked around talking like James Kaggy. The guns, he said, were beautifully made, but blime me, they were heavy things.

On the far side of the world, the Thompson became the heart of a new kind of unit. Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson built his Marine Raiders around a three-man fire team. One M1 rifle, one Browning automatic rifle, and one Thompson. On the Mon raid in August of 1942, a 19-year-old raider named Ben Carson crouched ready to kick in the door of Government House and empty a magazine into the room beyond.

A month later on Guadal Canal, roughly 840 Marines under Merritt Edson held a low ridge against more than 2500 Japanese attacking through the dark. The fighting collapsed to a few yards. At that range, the volume of fire a Thompson could throw was worth more than any rifle’s accuracy.

And then there is the most famous small unit action of D-Day. On the morning of the 6th of June 1944, Lieutenant Richard Winters led about 23 men of Easy Company against a battery of four German 105mm howitzers firing on Utah Beach at a place called Breeort Manor. His paratroopers worked forward through the hedge rows with grenades and Thompson fire, taking the guns one by one.

It became the textbook example of how a small force clears a fixed position. Much of that work was done at the range where the Thompson was king. In the Voj mountains of France in October of 1944, a young soldier named Audi Murphy saw his patrol ambushed, flanked the German position, and wiped it out with a Thompson and grenades. He earned a silver star that day.

He would finish the war as the most decorated American soldier of all. If you are getting something out of this, take a second to subscribe. There is a new story like this one every week. Now, back to the gun and to the city that earned it its darkest reputation. In October of 1944, the American First and 30th Infantry Divisions fought their way into Aken, the first major German city to fall to the Allies.

Correspondents compared it to Stalingrad. The fighting went attic to attic and sewer to sewer. Every building a fortress that had to be cleared by hand with grenades, flamethrowers, and short-range fire. This is the kind of battle where the Thompson’s reputation was forged. And it is also where we have to be honest about a popular story.

You will often hear that German soldiers came to dread the slow, heavy roar of the Thompson that they feared the sound itself. It is a good line, but the documented record does not back it the way the legend claims. The sound that both German and Allied accounts agree was genuinely terrifying belonged to a different weapon.

The German MG42 machine gun with the ripping shriek that earned it the name Hitler’s buzzsaw. What is true is simpler and harder. The German soldiers clearing those same houses were not carrying long range rifles into the fight. The man across the hall was usually holding a carabiner 98K or just as often an MP40 submachine gun. The MP40 fired a 9mm round.

Lighter, a little faster cycling, but without the heavy punch of the .45. Inside a room, the Thompson was not facing a rifleman with the advantage. It was facing another submachine gun, and it hit harder. German house clearers did not need a legend to respect what a Thompson could do at the end of a hallway. They had seen it.

Still, the Thompson’s flaws were real, and they killed men who trusted the gun too far. The 50 round drum magazine, the one every gangster film made famous, was almost universally abandoned in combat. It rattled, which gave a man away on patrol. It was heavy and fragile, and it had to be loaded with the bolt already cocked.

British troops shipped thousands of them back across the Atlantic in exchange for simple 20 and 30 round box magazines. The final M1 A1 could not even accept a drum. And the weapon’s short reach carried a darker lesson. At the end of January 1944, near Cesterna in Italy, two of Darby’s Ranger battalions, a raiding force built around Thompson firepower, infiltrated toward the town in the dark and were caught in the open at dawn by German infantry and tanks.

Of 767 Rangers, only six made it back to Allied lines. Their automatic weapons meant nothing against armor and machine guns firing from 200 yd away. The Thompson ruled the world inside 50 m. Step outside it and the gun could not save you. By the end of the war, the Thompson’s days were numbered and not because it had failed.

It was a victim of its own lesson. The Second World War proved that most fighting happened close. That volume of fire mattered more than long range precision and that the future belonged to a weapon that could do both at once. The Germans had already glimpsed it in the Stormg 44, the first true assault rifle, firing an intermediate cartridge that split the difference between pistol and rifle.

That idea would lead to the AK-47 and to the M16, and the pistol caliber submachine gun would slip from the front line forever. The cheap stamped steel grease gun replaced the Thompson on the assembly line, but it never replaced it in the memory of the men who carried it. Because for a few brutal years, in the hedgerros and the ruined cities and the bunker mouths of a global war, there was no weapon a soldier would rather have had when the door swung open and the room was full of the enemy.

Leonard Funk understood that better than anyone. a pistol against his stomach, a demand for surrender, and in his hands a heavy, slow, overpriced, short-ranged weapon that the spec sheet said he never should have wanted. It was the only thing in that room that mattered.