Why German Officers HATED the M3 “Grease Gun”

In December of 1944, German troops in the Ardennes started picking up a new American submachine gun off the bodies of dead GIs. They examined it. Stamped sheet metal, welded seams, a wire stock that looked like it had been bent out of coat hanger wire. The whole weapon cost the United States Army $20.94 to build.

A fraction of what the Wehrmacht had paid for the MP 40 every Landser in those forests was carrying. By every measure of German industrial pride, this gun was an insult. It was also working. The Americans had stamped it out of headlight presses in an Indiana factory at a rate German engineers could not match. In the snow and mud of the Bulge, in the close quarters fighting where finally machine weapons were jamming, the cheap American tube was firing.

This is the story of the M3 Grease Gun. The cheapest submachine gun the United States Army ever issued. The cheapest weapon to outlive its enemies by four decades. On the night of August 7th, 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson’s 1st Marine Raider Battalion landed on Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. The Raiders went in with Thompson submachine guns at the head of every squad, clearing Japanese coastal positions cave by cave.

The Thompson was perfect for that fight. Heavy, slow-firing, devastating at close range. There were not enough of them. There never were. This was the problem the United States Army could not solve with money. The Thompson cost the War Department over $200 per gun in 1942 dollars. Each one took hours of skilled machine work by men who had been making them since prohibition.

There were not enough machinists in America to scale Thompson production to what a global war required. In Britain, the answer was already in the field. The Sten, designed in 36 days by Major Reginald Shepherd and Harold Turpin at Enfield, was being stamped out for under $10 a piece. British paratroopers were jumping into occupied Europe carrying weapons that cost less than their boots.

The Wehrmacht laughed at the Sten. Then they started getting killed by resistance fighters carrying air-dropped ones. The United States Army Ordnance Department took notes. Colonel Rene Studler, [music] chief of small arms research, issued specifications on February 6th, 1941. The new gun had to fire the .

45 ACP round. It had to hit 90 out of 100 shots on a 6-ft target at 50 yards. It had to use no critical war materials. And it had to be cheaper than what the British were paying for the Sten. The man who would build it had been born in a small German village in 1888. His name, on the day of his birth, was Georg Hyde.

He arrived in America in the 1920s and Americanized his name to George Hyde. By 1942, he was the chief designer at General Motors Inland Division. He had spent his career in automotive engineering, not in an arsenal. That mattered. Hyde did not look at submachine gun design the way an arms manufacturer did. He approached it the way an engineer approached building a million headlight assemblies. Stamp it. Weld it.

Machine only what fired the bullet. The result was the M3. Two halves of 1 and 1/2 mm sheet steel [music] spot welded into a tube. 8 in of cold swaged barrel. A bolt with the firing pin milled directly into the face. The wire stock served as a barrel wrench and a cleaning rod. The pistol grip was hollow and held the oiler.

The cocking handle was a crank on the side like winding a child’s toy. It fired the .45 ACP round at 450 rounds per minute. Half the cyclic rate of the Thompson. Slower than the MP 40. The math seemed wrong. A slower gun was, in theory, worse. In practice, the M3’s slow rate of fire meant something nobody had predicted.

It meant a green, terrified American draftee could hold the trigger down and keep the muzzle from climbing. The recoil cycle was so slow that even an untrained soldier could put a sustained burst into a window or a foxhole. Production began at General Motors Guide Lamp Division in Anderson, Indiana. A factory that normally stamped headlight reflectors.

The first lot of 20,000 guns was rejected outright. Inexperienced welders had warped the receivers with too much heat. By May 1943, the line was running. By June [music] 6th, 1944, the first M3’s were going out the back of C-47 transports over Normandy, slung across the chests of paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.

In the hedgerows around Sainte-Mère-Église that night, the gun went into the war for the first time in the hands of men who had been training on weapons that cost five times as [music] much. Five months later, near Nancy, France, on November 5th, 1944, Corporal Carlton Chapman of the 761st Tank Battalion was photographed sitting in the open hatch of his M4 Sherman.

An M3 lay across his lap. The 761st was the first African-American Tank Battalion to see combat. The Black Panthers, attached to Patton’s Third Army. The M3’s 21 and 9/10 inch collapsed length made it the only submachine gun that fit comfortably inside a Sherman hull. Chapman would be killed in action four days after that photograph was taken on November 9th, during his battalion’s attack across the Seille River, the gun he is holding in the photograph is one of the cheapest weapons the United States Army ever issued.

It is also the weapon that was supposed to keep him alive. Within weeks of that photograph, in a darkened German farmhouse on a winter night, the cheap American tube would do something the MP 40 had been designed to do and could not. That story is coming. First, the forest where Americans stopped doubting the gun.

The Hurtgen was where the M3 stopped being a curiosity and became a weapon men trusted. From September 1944 through February 1945, the United States First Army drove into a 100-square-mile killing ground of dense pine, deep snow, and prepared German positions. The 28th Infantry Division, the Bloody Bucket, took the worst of it.

Soldiers from the 309th Infantry Regiment were photographed clearing villages along the Ruhr with M3s pressed tight against their chests, wire stocks collapsed for close quarters work. Yank correspondent Sergeant Mack Morris filed his dispatches from the press camp at Spa, Belgium. His soldiers had a complaint.

The magazine release was so loose that when the gun hung from a sling, the magazine would simply fall out. The GIs had a fix. They took a ball-peen hammer to the release and bent it tighter. Then, they kept fighting. On January 4th, 1945, soldiers of the 290th Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division, were photographed near Amonines, Belgium fighting through snow that was 2 ft deep.

The Ardennes had become an industrial scale ice locker. American Browning machine guns were freezing solid. GIs were urinating on the bolts to thaw them. Both sides were fighting their own weapons. The M3 with its loose tolerances and minimal moving parts was less fussy than most. The same sloppy manufacturing that German officers had laughed at in 1943 was now its greatest asset.

There was nothing for ice to lock up. Nothing that fit so precisely it could freeze closed. Three weeks later near Majorettes, Belgium 3 miles [music] east of Bastogne a sergeant first class of the 253rd Armored Field Artillery Battalion, 6th Armored Division was photographed holding an M3 that had been butchered in the field.

[music] The crank handle had broken off as crank handles did. Rather than wait for a replacement gun the army was not going to send him, he had taken a hacksaw, cut a slot in the receiver, and welded an improvised bolt handle in place. The Musée National d’Histoire Militaire in Diekirch, Luxembourg holds five of these field modified M3s today.

They are not relics. They are evidence. Evidence that American soldiers deep in Germany kept their cheap stamped steel guns running by hand because the cheap stamped steel gun was working better than anything else in the supply chain. On February 5th, 1945 the 99th Infantry Division, the Checkerboard, filed a combat observations report from the Ardennes.

The report ran across every weapon in the rifle squad. The line about the M3 read, “Quote, the M3 submachine gun is the best weapon we use for patrolling. It can be put into action quickly and at short ranges is accurate and powerful. End quote.” That was the United States Army’s own assessment, written in the same forest where 16 months earlier Army Ordnance had been embarrassed by how the gun looked.

If this is the kind of story you came here for, hit subscribe. New WWII documentaries every week, anchored in the unit histories and the after-action reports the popular memory of the war forgets. The defining moment came in a darkened farmhouse in Meckendorf, Germany. The 101st Cavalry Group Mechanized was holding a command post.

The official unit history recorded what happened next. “Quote, the command post door was blown in with panzerfaust fire, and then they came through the windows screaming, ‘SS!’ And the darkened room lighted momentarily from the muzzle blast of a roaring grease gun. End quote.” That is the M3 doing the work it was designed for.

Inside a building at 3 m in the dark against troops who had spent the war perfecting the art of close-quarters combat with the finest submachine gun on the European continent. The men with the cheap American tube won the room. The first mass airborne use of the M3 came on March 24th, 1945. Operation Varsity put the 17th Airborne Division, the Golden Talons, on the east bank of the Rhine.

Colonel Edson Raff’s 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment and Colonel James Koots’s 513th jumped into a defensive position the Wehrmacht had spent weeks fortifying. The M3, with its collapsible wire stock, jumped clean with the man. The Thompson did not. By the time the 17th Airborne consolidated on the ground, the gun GIs had once called the cake decorator, was clearing house after house along the Rhine.

In Hamden, Connecticut, a separate program had been running quietly since 1943. The Office of Strategic Services had asked Bell Laboratories, through Deputy Director Stanley Lovell, to design a suppressor for the M3. The result was a 14 and 1/2 inch tube with 48 ports machined into the barrel, venting through a stainless steel wire mesh expansion chamber.

About a thousand were built by High Standard Manufacturing of Connecticut. Aberdeen Proving Ground tested it head-to-head against the British suppressed Sten, and judged the Bell unit 80% as effective. Most OSS field agents quietly preferred the Sten. But for the agents who carried a suppressed grease gun behind German lines, dropped into Yugoslavia, France, and Burma, the cheap American tube went silent and stayed [music] silent.

This is where the story should turn to the Germans, to the captured documents, the after-action reports. The Wehrmacht officer who wrote home about the cheap American gun that killed his sergeant. That archive does not exist. The German army recorded the MP 40’s specifications meticulously. They cataloged Allied weapons in their Kennblätter Fremden Geräts intelligence bulletins, but no documented first-person German account of the M3 survives.

[music] No nickname. No grudging admission. By the time the grease gun appeared in numbers at the front, the Wehrmacht had bigger problems than writing down what they thought of an American submachine gun made in a headlight factory. The silence [music] is itself a kind of testimony. The men who would have written it were dying faster than they could file paperwork.

The M3 was not perfect. The cocking crank sheared off when soldiers dropped the gun. The first production lot of 20,000 was rejected outright for warped receivers. The magazine release was so loose that the magazine could fall out under sling pressure. The 30-round magazine itself was single feed and difficult to load by hand.

American soldiers fixed every one of these problems with ball-peen hammers, hacksaws, [music] and field welders. They kept the cheap gun in the fight. By war’s end, the Guide Lamp factory had stamped out 622,000 of them. The M3 was supposed to be disposable. It served for 50 years. In Korea, Ithaca Gun Company built another 33,000 of them.

In Vietnam, MACV SOG operators carried suppressed M3s into Laos and Cambodia. When Delta Force was activated in 1977, the suppressed M3 with a thumb safety was its first standard submachine gun. M60 tank crews fired the last official combat rounds from M3 grease guns during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Nearly half a century after a German-born immigrant at a General Motors plant had been asked to design something that should not have worked.

The cheap tube of stamped metal that German officers should have laughed at in 1943 outlived the MP 40 by four decades. It killed in Normandy, in the Hurtgen, in the Bulge, in the Rhineland, in Korea, in the Mekong Delta, and in Kuwait. The men who carried it never quite loved it. They just kept it loaded. That, in the end, was the only test that mattered.

 

 

Why German Officers HATED the M3 “Grease Gun”

 

In December of 1944, German troops in the Ardennes started picking up a new American submachine gun off the bodies of dead GIs. They examined it. Stamped sheet metal, welded seams, a wire stock that looked like it had been bent out of coat hanger wire. The whole weapon cost the United States Army $20.94 to build.

A fraction of what the Wehrmacht had paid for the MP 40 every Landser in those forests was carrying. By every measure of German industrial pride, this gun was an insult. It was also working. The Americans had stamped it out of headlight presses in an Indiana factory at a rate German engineers could not match. In the snow and mud of the Bulge, in the close quarters fighting where finally machine weapons were jamming, the cheap American tube was firing.

This is the story of the M3 Grease Gun. The cheapest submachine gun the United States Army ever issued. The cheapest weapon to outlive its enemies by four decades. On the night of August 7th, 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson’s 1st Marine Raider Battalion landed on Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. The Raiders went in with Thompson submachine guns at the head of every squad, clearing Japanese coastal positions cave by cave.

The Thompson was perfect for that fight. Heavy, slow-firing, devastating at close range. There were not enough of them. There never were. This was the problem the United States Army could not solve with money. The Thompson cost the War Department over $200 per gun in 1942 dollars. Each one took hours of skilled machine work by men who had been making them since prohibition.

There were not enough machinists in America to scale Thompson production to what a global war required. In Britain, the answer was already in the field. The Sten, designed in 36 days by Major Reginald Shepherd and Harold Turpin at Enfield, was being stamped out for under $10 a piece. >> [music] >> British paratroopers were jumping into occupied Europe carrying weapons that cost less than their boots.

The Wehrmacht laughed at the Sten. Then they started getting killed by resistance fighters carrying air-dropped ones. The United States Army Ordnance Department took notes. Colonel Rene Studler, [music] chief of small arms research, issued specifications on February 6th, 1941. The new gun had to fire the .

45 ACP round. It had to hit 90 out of 100 shots on a 6-ft target at 50 yards. It had to use no critical war materials. And it had to be cheaper than what the British were paying for the Sten. The man who would build it had been born in a small German village in 1888. His name, on the day of his birth, was Georg Hyde.

He arrived in America in the 1920s and Americanized his name to George Hyde. By 1942, he was the chief designer at General Motors Inland Division. He had spent his career in automotive engineering, not in an arsenal. That mattered. Hyde did not look at submachine gun design the way an arms manufacturer did. He approached it the way an engineer approached building a million headlight assemblies. Stamp it. Weld it.

Machine only what fired the bullet. The result was the M3. Two halves of 1 and 1/2 mm sheet steel [music] spot welded into a tube. 8 in of cold swaged barrel. A bolt with the firing pin milled directly into the face. The wire stock served as a barrel wrench and a cleaning rod. The pistol grip was hollow and held the oiler.

The cocking handle was a crank on the side like winding a child’s toy. It fired the .45 ACP round at 450 rounds per minute. Half the cyclic rate of the Thompson. Slower than the MP 40. The math seemed wrong. A slower gun was, in theory, worse. In practice, the M3’s slow rate of fire meant something nobody had predicted.

It meant a green, terrified American draftee could hold the trigger down and keep the muzzle from climbing. The recoil cycle was so slow that even an untrained soldier could put a sustained burst into a window or a foxhole. Production began at General Motors Guide Lamp Division in Anderson, Indiana. A factory that normally stamped headlight reflectors.

The first lot of 20,000 guns was rejected outright. Inexperienced welders had warped the receivers with too much heat. By May 1943, the line was running. By June [music] 6th, 1944, the first M3’s were going out the back of C-47 transports over Normandy, slung across the chests of paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.

In the hedgerows around Sainte-Mère-Église that night, the gun went into the war for the first time in the hands of men who had been training on weapons that cost five times as [music] much. Five months later, near Nancy, France, on November 5th, 1944, Corporal Carlton Chapman of the 761st Tank Battalion was photographed sitting in the open hatch of his M4 Sherman.

An M3 lay across his lap. The 761st was the first African-American Tank Battalion to see combat. The Black Panthers, attached to Patton’s Third Army. The M3’s 21 and 9/10 inch collapsed length made it the only submachine gun that fit comfortably inside a Sherman hull. Chapman would be killed in action four days after that photograph was taken on November 9th, during his battalion’s attack across the Seille River, the gun he is holding in the photograph is one of the cheapest weapons the United States Army ever issued.

It is also the weapon that was supposed to keep him alive. Within weeks of that photograph, in a darkened German farmhouse on a winter night, the cheap American tube would do something the MP 40 had been designed to do and could not. That story is coming. First, the forest where Americans stopped doubting the gun.

The Hurtgen was where the M3 stopped being a curiosity and became a weapon men trusted. From September 1944 through February 1945, the United States First Army drove into a 100-square-mile killing ground of dense pine, deep snow, and prepared German positions. The 28th Infantry Division, the Bloody Bucket, took the worst of it.

Soldiers from the 309th Infantry Regiment were photographed clearing villages along the Ruhr with M3s pressed tight against their chests, wire stocks collapsed for close quarters work. Yank correspondent Sergeant Mack Morris filed his dispatches from the press camp at Spa, Belgium. His soldiers had a complaint.

The magazine release was so loose that when the gun hung from a sling, the magazine would simply fall out. The GIs had a fix. They took a ball-peen hammer to the release and bent it tighter. Then, they kept fighting. On January 4th, 1945, soldiers of the 290th Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division, were photographed near Amonines, Belgium fighting through snow that was 2 ft deep.

The Ardennes had become an industrial scale ice locker. American Browning machine guns were freezing solid. GIs were urinating on the bolts to thaw them. Both sides were fighting their own weapons. The M3 with its loose tolerances and minimal moving parts was less fussy than most. The same sloppy manufacturing that German officers had laughed at in 1943 was now its greatest asset.

There was nothing for ice to lock up. Nothing that fit so precisely it could freeze closed. Three weeks later near Majorettes, Belgium 3 miles [music] east of Bastogne a sergeant first class of the 253rd Armored Field Artillery Battalion, 6th Armored Division was photographed holding an M3 that had been butchered in the field.

[music] The crank handle had broken off as crank handles did. Rather than wait for a replacement gun the army was not going to send him, he had taken a hacksaw, cut a slot in the receiver, and welded an improvised bolt handle in place. The Musée National d’Histoire Militaire in Diekirch, Luxembourg holds five of these field modified M3s today.

They are not relics. They are evidence. Evidence that American soldiers deep in Germany kept their cheap stamped steel guns running by hand because the cheap stamped steel gun was working better than anything else in the supply chain. On February 5th, 1945 the 99th Infantry Division, the Checkerboard, filed a combat observations report from the Ardennes.

The report ran across every weapon in the rifle squad. The line about the M3 read, “Quote, the M3 submachine gun is the best weapon we use for patrolling. It can be put into action quickly and at short ranges is accurate and powerful. End quote.” That was the United States Army’s own assessment, written in the same forest where 16 months earlier Army Ordnance had been embarrassed by how the gun looked.

If this is the kind of story you came here for, hit subscribe. New WWII documentaries every week, anchored in the unit histories and the after-action reports the popular memory of the war forgets. The defining moment came in a darkened farmhouse in Meckendorf, Germany. The 101st Cavalry Group Mechanized was holding a command post.

The official unit history recorded what happened next. “Quote, the command post door was blown in with panzerfaust fire, and then they came through the windows screaming, ‘SS!’ And the darkened room lighted momentarily from the muzzle blast of a roaring grease gun. End quote.” That is the M3 doing the work it was designed for.

Inside a building at 3 m in the dark against troops who had spent the war perfecting the art of close-quarters combat with the finest submachine gun on the European continent. The men with the cheap American tube won the room. The first mass airborne use of the M3 came on March 24th, 1945. Operation Varsity put the 17th Airborne Division, the Golden Talons, on the east bank of the Rhine.

Colonel Edson Raff’s 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment and Colonel James Koots’s 513th jumped into a defensive position the Wehrmacht had spent weeks fortifying. The M3, with its collapsible wire stock, jumped clean with the man. The Thompson did not. By the time the 17th Airborne consolidated on the ground, the gun GIs had once called the cake decorator, was clearing house after house along the Rhine.

In Hamden, Connecticut, a separate program had been running quietly since 1943. The Office of Strategic Services had asked Bell Laboratories, through Deputy Director Stanley Lovell, to design a suppressor for the M3. The result was a 14 and 1/2 inch tube with 48 ports machined into the barrel, venting through a stainless steel wire mesh expansion chamber.

About a thousand were built by High Standard Manufacturing of Connecticut. Aberdeen Proving Ground tested it head-to-head against the British suppressed Sten, and judged the Bell unit 80% as effective. Most OSS field agents quietly preferred the Sten. But for the agents who carried a suppressed grease gun behind German lines, dropped into Yugoslavia, France, and Burma, the cheap American tube went silent and stayed [music] silent.

This is where the story should turn to the Germans, to the captured documents, the after-action reports. The Wehrmacht officer who wrote home about the cheap American gun that killed his sergeant. That archive does not exist. The German army recorded the MP 40’s specifications meticulously. They cataloged Allied weapons in their Kennblätter Fremden Geräts intelligence bulletins, but no documented first-person German account of the M3 survives.

[music] No nickname. No grudging admission. By the time the grease gun appeared in numbers at the front, the Wehrmacht had bigger problems than writing down what they thought of an American submachine gun made in a headlight factory. The silence [music] is itself a kind of testimony. The men who would have written it were dying faster than they could file paperwork.

The M3 was not perfect. The cocking crank sheared off when soldiers dropped the gun. The first production lot of 20,000 was rejected outright for warped receivers. The magazine release was so loose that the magazine could fall out under sling pressure. The 30-round magazine itself was single feed and difficult to load by hand.

American soldiers fixed every one of these problems with ball-peen hammers, hacksaws, [music] and field welders. They kept the cheap gun in the fight. By war’s end, the Guide Lamp factory had stamped out 622,000 of them. The M3 was supposed to be disposable. It served for 50 years. In Korea, Ithaca Gun Company built another 33,000 of them.

In Vietnam, MACV SOG operators carried suppressed M3s into Laos and Cambodia. When Delta Force was activated in 1977, the suppressed M3 with a thumb safety was its first standard submachine gun. M60 tank crews fired the last official combat rounds from M3 grease guns during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Nearly half a century after a German-born immigrant at a General Motors plant had been asked to design something that should not have worked.

The cheap tube of stamped metal that German officers should have laughed at in 1943 outlived the MP 40 by four decades. It killed in Normandy, in the Hurtgen, in the Bulge, in the Rhineland, in Korea, in the Mekong Delta, and in Kuwait. The men who carried it never quite loved it. They just kept it loaded. That, in the end, was the only test that mattered.