June 1940, the beaches of Dunkirk are littered with the wreckage of an entire army. Britain has just evacuated over 300,000 men, but almost everything else stayed behind. Nearly 2,500 artillery pieces, over 63,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, and virtually every submachine gun the British army owned, which was not many to begin with.
Britain had no domestic submachine gun in production. None. Not a single factory making one. And now, with a German invasion expected any week, the war office sent an urgent cable to its purchasing commission in New York. The request was blunt. Send as many Thompson machine carbines as possible. There was just one problem. The Thompson submachine gun was the most infamous weapon in America, not because soldiers carried it, but because gangsters did.
Al Capone had bought three from a Chicago hardware store in 1926. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 saw seven men cut down by two Thompsons that fired 70 rounds between them. Hollywood immortalized it. Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson. Every British soldier who went to the cinema knew exactly what this gun was. And the British military establishment wanted nothing to do with it.
The board of ordnance had previously dismissed the Thompson as, according to multiple accounts, a tatty American gangster gun. But there wasn’t even deeper grudge. The Irish Republican Army had been among the Thompson’s very first customers. Nearly 500 were seized on the ship Eastside in Hoboken, New Jersey in June 1921.
The first confirmed combat use of the Thompson anywhere in the world was an IRA ambush on a British troop train near Drumcondra, Dublin that same month. British soldiers had already died to this weapon. Now, Britain was begging to buy it. The purchasing commission in New York had opened negotiations with Auto-Ordnance Corporation back in January 1940.
The first contract, signed on the 1st of February, covered just 750 guns. But Sweden had swept in days earlier and bought 500, draining the remaining inventory before Britain could finalize delivery. Auto-Ordnance had sold only about 10,000 Thompsons in nearly two decades. The company possessed little more than patents, spare parts, and a few unsold guns.
New production had to be arranged through Savage Arms of Utica, New York, starting that April. Orders escalated at a staggering pace. By December 1940, Britain had placed 13 separate contracts totaling 107,500 weapons, valued at over $21 million. Each gun cost roughly $200, and that included walnut stocks, two drum magazines, five box magazines, a sling, 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and a cleaning kit.
After the Lend-Lease Act passed in March 1941, supply shifted to government-managed deliveries, and total British orders eventually reached 514,000 Thompsons. But production bottlenecks and U-boat attacks on Atlantic convoys meant that by April 1942, only about 100,000 had actually arrived. What the troops received was the M1928A1. It was a beautifully machined weapon of walnut and blued steel that weighed 10.
8 lb empty. With a loaded 50-round drum magazine attached that rose to a punishing 14.75 lb, it fired .45 ACP ammunition at 935 ft per second with a cyclic rate of 600 to 800 rounds per minute. Practical effective range sat between 50 and 100 m. The British army quickly condemned the drum magazines for their excessive weight and the rattling noise they made on patrol, eventually shipping thousands back to America in exchange for 20-round and 30-round box magazines.
Inside the bolt sat the Blish lock, a delayed blowback mechanism based on a theory by United States Navy Commander John Bell Blish. A phosphor bronze piece allegedly created adhesion against steel grooves under high chamber pressure to delay bolt movement. The theory was wrong.
British armorers in North Africa proved it by removing the Blish lock entirely and replacing it with a simple hex bolt. The guns kept working perfectly. Sam jams decreased. The Blish principle was elegant nonsense, and British field ingenuity rendered it irrelevant years before American engineers officially admitted the same thing by designing the simplified M1A1 in October 1942.
That stripped-down model deleted the Blish lock, removed the Cutts compensator and barrel fins, replaced the adjustable sight with a fixed aperture, and eliminated drum magazine capability. Cost dropped from $209 per unit in 1939 to $45 by 1944. Now, before we get into how this gun performed in combat, if you are finding this interesting, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right. Back to the Thompson. The gun found its spiritual home with the commandos. Their shoulder badge featured a stylized Thompson, a symbol still used today. While standard infantry sections typically issued one Thompson to the section corporal, commando sections carried significantly more.
And when the cheaper Sten gun arrived in 1941, commando brigades were specifically exempted from the switch. According to Martin Pegler, former senior curator of firearms at the Royal Armouries, Sten guns became a priority for all European theater Commonwealth troops, with the exception of the commando brigades, who were mostly supplied with Thompsons and wanted to keep them.
The reasons were obvious once you held both weapons. The Sten Mark II weighed 6 and 1/2 to 7 lb empty, fired 9 mm Parabellum, and cost roughly $10. It could be built in five man-hours from stamped metal by unskilled workers. It was also plagued by jamming from its single-feed magazine and had a dangerous habit of discharging when dropped while cocked.
Soldiers called it the plumber’s nightmare and the stench gun. Britain produced over 4 and 1/2 million of them because it had no choice. The Sten was never meant to be superior. It was meant to be good enough in impossible quantities. The Thompson proved itself in action on December 27th, 1941 during Operation Archery at Vågsøy, Norway.
576 men of number three commando hit German positions in what became fierce house-to-house fighting against mountain troops on leave from the Eastern Front, exactly the close-quarters environment the Thompson was designed for. The raid killed over 120 Germans, captured 98, and seized a complete copy of the German naval code.
British losses were 17 killed and 53 wounded. Three months later came the greatest raid of all, Operation Chariot at St. Nazaire on March 28th, 1942. 256 commandos from primarily number two commando were tasked with destroying the only Atlantic dry dock large enough to service the German battleship Tirpitz. Protection teams guarding demolition parties while they set charges were armed specifically with Thompson submachine guns and one Bren gun per five-man party.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman led his men Thompson in hand. Of 612 raiders, 169 were killed and 215 captured. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, the most for any single British operation in the war. In Burma, Lieutenant George Nolan of number one commando snatched up the Thompson of a fallen comrade during a desperate defensive action.
According to his Victoria Cross citation, he sprayed the advancing enemy and was mortally wounded stemming the assault, though not before killing and wounding many of the attackers. His section held their position for 12 hours despite 14 of 24 men becoming casualties. Against its German counterpart, the Thompson offered a different kind of superiority.
The MP 40 weighed 8.82 lb empty and fired 9 mm at 1,247 ft per second, giving it better range and a flatter trajectory. It cost about $24 per unit, and its folding stock made it compact for vehicle crews. But the Thompson’s .45 ACP round weighed nearly twice as much as the 9 mm, 230 grains versus 125, delivering catastrophic stopping power inside 50 m.
The Thompson also offered select-fire capability, both semi-automatic and full-automatic, while the MP 40 was full-automatic only. And the Thompson’s double-column, double-feed magazines were more reliable than the MP 40’s notoriously finicky single-feed design. The Thompson was not without flaws. Its weight was a genuine burden on long patrols.
In Burma, the heavy, slow-moving .45 round could not penetrate most small-diameter trees, limiting its effectiveness in dense jungle. In North Africa, the tight machining tolerances invited sand into the action, and the ammunition supply was a constant headache since .45 ACP was an American caliber that had to be shipped across the Atlantic.
While the Sten could fire captured German 9 mm rounds picked up on any battlefield. By war’s end, approximately 1.7 million Thompsons had been manufactured across all variants. Britain received the largest share of any foreign customer. The weapon continued in British service through the Korean War and was not formally declared obsolete until the early 1950s, when the Sterling submachine gun replaced it.
The man who designed it never saw any of this. General John Taliaferro Thompson created the weapon during the First World War as what he called a trench broom to sweep enemy positions. The prototypes were sitting on a dock when the armistice was signed on November 11th, 1918. He spent two decades watching his invention become famous for all the wrong reasons.
He died of a heart attack on June 21st, 1940, aged 79, just as those desperate British orders were finally proving him right. Think about what happened here. A nation that had rejected a weapon for its criminal associations and its role in Irish Republican violence found itself, within weeks of its greatest military disaster, scrambling to buy every single one it could get.
The gun arrived wrapped in its gangster reputation. British soldiers joked about Al Capone and talked like Jimmy Cagney. Then they carried it into some of the most daring raids of the war, made it their emblem, and refused to give it up even when a weapon costing 1/20th the price was pushed on them. Wartime Britain, at its most desperate and resource-starved, allowed its commandos to keep their expensive American submachine guns.
That single decision tells you everything about what the Thompson meant to the men who fought with it. The gangster gun became the commandos’ weapon, and the commandos never let it go.
The ‘Gangster Gun’ Britain Bought In Desperation That Commandos Refused To Give Up
June 1940, the beaches of Dunkirk are littered with the wreckage of an entire army. Britain has just evacuated over 300,000 men, but almost everything else stayed behind. Nearly 2,500 artillery pieces, over 63,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, and virtually every submachine gun the British army owned, which was not many to begin with.
Britain had no domestic submachine gun in production. None. Not a single factory making one. And now, with a German invasion expected any week, the war office sent an urgent cable to its purchasing commission in New York. The request was blunt. Send as many Thompson machine carbines as possible. There was just one problem. The Thompson submachine gun was the most infamous weapon in America, not because soldiers carried it, but because gangsters did.
Al Capone had bought three from a Chicago hardware store in 1926. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 saw seven men cut down by two Thompsons that fired 70 rounds between them. Hollywood immortalized it. Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson. Every British soldier who went to the cinema knew exactly what this gun was. And the British military establishment wanted nothing to do with it.
The board of ordnance had previously dismissed the Thompson as, according to multiple accounts, a tatty American gangster gun. But there wasn’t even deeper grudge. The Irish Republican Army had been among the Thompson’s very first customers. Nearly 500 were seized on the ship Eastside in Hoboken, New Jersey in June 1921.
The first confirmed combat use of the Thompson anywhere in the world was an IRA ambush on a British troop train near Drumcondra, Dublin that same month. British soldiers had already died to this weapon. Now, Britain was begging to buy it. The purchasing commission in New York had opened negotiations with Auto-Ordnance Corporation back in January 1940.
The first contract, signed on the 1st of February, covered just 750 guns. But Sweden had swept in days earlier and bought 500, draining the remaining inventory before Britain could finalize delivery. Auto-Ordnance had sold only about 10,000 Thompsons in nearly two decades. The company possessed little more than patents, spare parts, and a few unsold guns.
New production had to be arranged through Savage Arms of Utica, New York, starting that April. Orders escalated at a staggering pace. By December 1940, Britain had placed 13 separate contracts totaling 107,500 weapons, valued at over $21 million. Each gun cost roughly $200, and that included walnut stocks, two drum magazines, five box magazines, a sling, 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and a cleaning kit.
After the Lend-Lease Act passed in March 1941, supply shifted to government-managed deliveries, and total British orders eventually reached 514,000 Thompsons. But production bottlenecks and U-boat attacks on Atlantic convoys meant that by April 1942, only about 100,000 had actually arrived. What the troops received was the M1928A1. It was a beautifully machined weapon of walnut and blued steel that weighed 10.
8 lb empty. With a loaded 50-round drum magazine attached that rose to a punishing 14.75 lb, it fired .45 ACP ammunition at 935 ft per second with a cyclic rate of 600 to 800 rounds per minute. Practical effective range sat between 50 and 100 m. The British army quickly condemned the drum magazines for their excessive weight and the rattling noise they made on patrol, eventually shipping thousands back to America in exchange for 20-round and 30-round box magazines.
Inside the bolt sat the Blish lock, a delayed blowback mechanism based on a theory by United States Navy Commander John Bell Blish. A phosphor bronze piece allegedly created adhesion against steel grooves under high chamber pressure to delay bolt movement. The theory was wrong.
British armorers in North Africa proved it by removing the Blish lock entirely and replacing it with a simple hex bolt. The guns kept working perfectly. Sam jams decreased. The Blish principle was elegant nonsense, and British field ingenuity rendered it irrelevant years before American engineers officially admitted the same thing by designing the simplified M1A1 in October 1942.
That stripped-down model deleted the Blish lock, removed the Cutts compensator and barrel fins, replaced the adjustable sight with a fixed aperture, and eliminated drum magazine capability. Cost dropped from $209 per unit in 1939 to $45 by 1944. Now, before we get into how this gun performed in combat, if you are finding this interesting, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right. Back to the Thompson. The gun found its spiritual home with the commandos. Their shoulder badge featured a stylized Thompson, a symbol still used today. While standard infantry sections typically issued one Thompson to the section corporal, commando sections carried significantly more.
And when the cheaper Sten gun arrived in 1941, commando brigades were specifically exempted from the switch. According to Martin Pegler, former senior curator of firearms at the Royal Armouries, Sten guns became a priority for all European theater Commonwealth troops, with the exception of the commando brigades, who were mostly supplied with Thompsons and wanted to keep them.
The reasons were obvious once you held both weapons. The Sten Mark II weighed 6 and 1/2 to 7 lb empty, fired 9 mm Parabellum, and cost roughly $10. It could be built in five man-hours from stamped metal by unskilled workers. It was also plagued by jamming from its single-feed magazine and had a dangerous habit of discharging when dropped while cocked.
Soldiers called it the plumber’s nightmare and the stench gun. Britain produced over 4 and 1/2 million of them because it had no choice. The Sten was never meant to be superior. It was meant to be good enough in impossible quantities. The Thompson proved itself in action on December 27th, 1941 during Operation Archery at Vågsøy, Norway.
576 men of number three commando hit German positions in what became fierce house-to-house fighting against mountain troops on leave from the Eastern Front, exactly the close-quarters environment the Thompson was designed for. The raid killed over 120 Germans, captured 98, and seized a complete copy of the German naval code.
British losses were 17 killed and 53 wounded. Three months later came the greatest raid of all, Operation Chariot at St. Nazaire on March 28th, 1942. 256 commandos from primarily number two commando were tasked with destroying the only Atlantic dry dock large enough to service the German battleship Tirpitz. Protection teams guarding demolition parties while they set charges were armed specifically with Thompson submachine guns and one Bren gun per five-man party.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman led his men Thompson in hand. Of 612 raiders, 169 were killed and 215 captured. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, the most for any single British operation in the war. In Burma, Lieutenant George Nolan of number one commando snatched up the Thompson of a fallen comrade during a desperate defensive action.
According to his Victoria Cross citation, he sprayed the advancing enemy and was mortally wounded stemming the assault, though not before killing and wounding many of the attackers. His section held their position for 12 hours despite 14 of 24 men becoming casualties. Against its German counterpart, the Thompson offered a different kind of superiority.
The MP 40 weighed 8.82 lb empty and fired 9 mm at 1,247 ft per second, giving it better range and a flatter trajectory. It cost about $24 per unit, and its folding stock made it compact for vehicle crews. But the Thompson’s .45 ACP round weighed nearly twice as much as the 9 mm, 230 grains versus 125, delivering catastrophic stopping power inside 50 m.
The Thompson also offered select-fire capability, both semi-automatic and full-automatic, while the MP 40 was full-automatic only. And the Thompson’s double-column, double-feed magazines were more reliable than the MP 40’s notoriously finicky single-feed design. The Thompson was not without flaws. Its weight was a genuine burden on long patrols.
In Burma, the heavy, slow-moving .45 round could not penetrate most small-diameter trees, limiting its effectiveness in dense jungle. In North Africa, the tight machining tolerances invited sand into the action, and the ammunition supply was a constant headache since .45 ACP was an American caliber that had to be shipped across the Atlantic.
While the Sten could fire captured German 9 mm rounds picked up on any battlefield. By war’s end, approximately 1.7 million Thompsons had been manufactured across all variants. Britain received the largest share of any foreign customer. The weapon continued in British service through the Korean War and was not formally declared obsolete until the early 1950s, when the Sterling submachine gun replaced it.
The man who designed it never saw any of this. General John Taliaferro Thompson created the weapon during the First World War as what he called a trench broom to sweep enemy positions. The prototypes were sitting on a dock when the armistice was signed on November 11th, 1918. He spent two decades watching his invention become famous for all the wrong reasons.
He died of a heart attack on June 21st, 1940, aged 79, just as those desperate British orders were finally proving him right. Think about what happened here. A nation that had rejected a weapon for its criminal associations and its role in Irish Republican violence found itself, within weeks of its greatest military disaster, scrambling to buy every single one it could get.
The gun arrived wrapped in its gangster reputation. British soldiers joked about Al Capone and talked like Jimmy Cagney. Then they carried it into some of the most daring raids of the war, made it their emblem, and refused to give it up even when a weapon costing 1/20th the price was pushed on them. Wartime Britain, at its most desperate and resource-starved, allowed its commandos to keep their expensive American submachine guns.
That single decision tells you everything about what the Thompson meant to the men who fought with it. The gangster gun became the commandos’ weapon, and the commandos never let it go.
The ‘Gangster Gun’ Britain Bought In Desperation That Commandos Refused To Give Up
June 1940, the beaches of Dunkirk are littered with the wreckage of an entire army. Britain has just evacuated over 300,000 men, but almost everything else stayed behind. Nearly 2,500 artillery pieces, over 63,000 vehicles, 600 tanks, and virtually every submachine gun the British army owned, which was not many to begin with.
Britain had no domestic submachine gun in production. None. Not a single factory making one. And now, with a German invasion expected any week, the war office sent an urgent cable to its purchasing commission in New York. The request was blunt. Send as many Thompson machine carbines as possible. There was just one problem. The Thompson submachine gun was the most infamous weapon in America, not because soldiers carried it, but because gangsters did.
Al Capone had bought three from a Chicago hardware store in 1926. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 saw seven men cut down by two Thompsons that fired 70 rounds between them. Hollywood immortalized it. Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson. Every British soldier who went to the cinema knew exactly what this gun was. And the British military establishment wanted nothing to do with it.
The board of ordnance had previously dismissed the Thompson as, according to multiple accounts, a tatty American gangster gun. But there wasn’t even deeper grudge. The Irish Republican Army had been among the Thompson’s very first customers. Nearly 500 were seized on the ship Eastside in Hoboken, New Jersey in June 1921.
The first confirmed combat use of the Thompson anywhere in the world was an IRA ambush on a British troop train near Drumcondra, Dublin that same month. British soldiers had already died to this weapon. Now, Britain was begging to buy it. The purchasing commission in New York had opened negotiations with Auto-Ordnance Corporation back in January 1940.
The first contract, signed on the 1st of February, covered just 750 guns. But Sweden had swept in days earlier and bought 500, draining the remaining inventory before Britain could finalize delivery. Auto-Ordnance had sold only about 10,000 Thompsons in nearly two decades. The company possessed little more than patents, spare parts, and a few unsold guns.
New production had to be arranged through Savage Arms of Utica, New York, starting that April. Orders escalated at a staggering pace. By December 1940, Britain had placed 13 separate contracts totaling 107,500 weapons, valued at over $21 million. Each gun cost roughly $200, and that included walnut stocks, two drum magazines, five box magazines, a sling, 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and a cleaning kit.
After the Lend-Lease Act passed in March 1941, supply shifted to government-managed deliveries, and total British orders eventually reached 514,000 Thompsons. But production bottlenecks and U-boat attacks on Atlantic convoys meant that by April 1942, only about 100,000 had actually arrived. What the troops received was the M1928A1. It was a beautifully machined weapon of walnut and blued steel that weighed 10.
8 lb empty. With a loaded 50-round drum magazine attached that rose to a punishing 14.75 lb, it fired .45 ACP ammunition at 935 ft per second with a cyclic rate of 600 to 800 rounds per minute. Practical effective range sat between 50 and 100 m. The British army quickly condemned the drum magazines for their excessive weight and the rattling noise they made on patrol, eventually shipping thousands back to America in exchange for 20-round and 30-round box magazines.
Inside the bolt sat the Blish lock, a delayed blowback mechanism based on a theory by United States Navy Commander John Bell Blish. A phosphor bronze piece allegedly created adhesion against steel grooves under high chamber pressure to delay bolt movement. The theory was wrong.
British armorers in North Africa proved it by removing the Blish lock entirely and replacing it with a simple hex bolt. The guns kept working perfectly. Sam jams decreased. The Blish principle was elegant nonsense, and British field ingenuity rendered it irrelevant years before American engineers officially admitted the same thing by designing the simplified M1A1 in October 1942.
That stripped-down model deleted the Blish lock, removed the Cutts compensator and barrel fins, replaced the adjustable sight with a fixed aperture, and eliminated drum magazine capability. Cost dropped from $209 per unit in 1939 to $45 by 1944. Now, before we get into how this gun performed in combat, if you are finding this interesting, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right. Back to the Thompson. The gun found its spiritual home with the commandos. Their shoulder badge featured a stylized Thompson, a symbol still used today. While standard infantry sections typically issued one Thompson to the section corporal, commando sections carried significantly more.
And when the cheaper Sten gun arrived in 1941, commando brigades were specifically exempted from the switch. According to Martin Pegler, former senior curator of firearms at the Royal Armouries, Sten guns became a priority for all European theater Commonwealth troops, with the exception of the commando brigades, who were mostly supplied with Thompsons and wanted to keep them.
The reasons were obvious once you held both weapons. The Sten Mark II weighed 6 and 1/2 to 7 lb empty, fired 9 mm Parabellum, and cost roughly $10. It could be built in five man-hours from stamped metal by unskilled workers. It was also plagued by jamming from its single-feed magazine and had a dangerous habit of discharging when dropped while cocked.
Soldiers called it the plumber’s nightmare and the stench gun. Britain produced over 4 and 1/2 million of them because it had no choice. The Sten was never meant to be superior. It was meant to be good enough in impossible quantities. The Thompson proved itself in action on December 27th, 1941 during Operation Archery at Vågsøy, Norway.
576 men of number three commando hit German positions in what became fierce house-to-house fighting against mountain troops on leave from the Eastern Front, exactly the close-quarters environment the Thompson was designed for. The raid killed over 120 Germans, captured 98, and seized a complete copy of the German naval code.
British losses were 17 killed and 53 wounded. Three months later came the greatest raid of all, Operation Chariot at St. Nazaire on March 28th, 1942. 256 commandos from primarily number two commando were tasked with destroying the only Atlantic dry dock large enough to service the German battleship Tirpitz. Protection teams guarding demolition parties while they set charges were armed specifically with Thompson submachine guns and one Bren gun per five-man party.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman led his men Thompson in hand. Of 612 raiders, 169 were killed and 215 captured. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, the most for any single British operation in the war. In Burma, Lieutenant George Nolan of number one commando snatched up the Thompson of a fallen comrade during a desperate defensive action.
According to his Victoria Cross citation, he sprayed the advancing enemy and was mortally wounded stemming the assault, though not before killing and wounding many of the attackers. His section held their position for 12 hours despite 14 of 24 men becoming casualties. Against its German counterpart, the Thompson offered a different kind of superiority.
The MP 40 weighed 8.82 lb empty and fired 9 mm at 1,247 ft per second, giving it better range and a flatter trajectory. It cost about $24 per unit, and its folding stock made it compact for vehicle crews. But the Thompson’s .45 ACP round weighed nearly twice as much as the 9 mm, 230 grains versus 125, delivering catastrophic stopping power inside 50 m.
The Thompson also offered select-fire capability, both semi-automatic and full-automatic, while the MP 40 was full-automatic only. And the Thompson’s double-column, double-feed magazines were more reliable than the MP 40’s notoriously finicky single-feed design. The Thompson was not without flaws. Its weight was a genuine burden on long patrols.
In Burma, the heavy, slow-moving .45 round could not penetrate most small-diameter trees, limiting its effectiveness in dense jungle. In North Africa, the tight machining tolerances invited sand into the action, and the ammunition supply was a constant headache since .45 ACP was an American caliber that had to be shipped across the Atlantic.
While the Sten could fire captured German 9 mm rounds picked up on any battlefield. By war’s end, approximately 1.7 million Thompsons had been manufactured across all variants. Britain received the largest share of any foreign customer. The weapon continued in British service through the Korean War and was not formally declared obsolete until the early 1950s, when the Sterling submachine gun replaced it.
The man who designed it never saw any of this. General John Taliaferro Thompson created the weapon during the First World War as what he called a trench broom to sweep enemy positions. The prototypes were sitting on a dock when the armistice was signed on November 11th, 1918. He spent two decades watching his invention become famous for all the wrong reasons.
He died of a heart attack on June 21st, 1940, aged 79, just as those desperate British orders were finally proving him right. Think about what happened here. A nation that had rejected a weapon for its criminal associations and its role in Irish Republican violence found itself, within weeks of its greatest military disaster, scrambling to buy every single one it could get.
The gun arrived wrapped in its gangster reputation. British soldiers joked about Al Capone and talked like Jimmy Cagney. Then they carried it into some of the most daring raids of the war, made it their emblem, and refused to give it up even when a weapon costing 1/20th the price was pushed on them. Wartime Britain, at its most desperate and resource-starved, allowed its commandos to keep their expensive American submachine guns.
That single decision tells you everything about what the Thompson meant to the men who fought with it. The gangster gun became the commandos’ weapon, and the commandos never let it go.
