Posted on 12/26/2018 5:04:34 AM PST by w1n1
The M3 "grease gun" was one of the simplest, ugliest, and cheapest personal weapons ever fielded by the U.S. military. But, as one U.S. Marine combat veteran recalled, what this crude submachine gun lacked in looks, it more than made up for that with brutal effectiveness.
The original M3 submachine gun was commissioned shortly before the U.S. entered World War II as a replacement for the Thompson M1928 submachine gun. The Thompson, although a popular and effective weapon, was not well suited to the demands of wartime high-volume manufacturing.
Thompson production called for skilled machinists to perform many complicated machine operations and required large quantities of high grade steel. The result was a weapon that was expensive to manufacture and slow to produce. What was needed instead was barrel, bolt, and firing mechanism.
The one-piece telescoping wire stock can be removed and used as a cleaning rod, disassembly tool and, on the later M3A1 variant, as a magazine loader.
THE GREASE GUN is a compact weapon with an overall length of 29.8 inches with the stock extended and 22.8 inches with the stock collapsed. The barrel is 8 inches long. Read the rest of M3 grease gun.
If you want to see somebody manipulating a grease gun like he was born to it, watch Steve McQueen in “Hell is for Heroes.”
The safety on the M3 is the dust cover. If it’s closed, it locks the bolt in place and can’t be fired. If it’s open, the weapon is ready to rock’n’roll.
So every time McQueen’s character moves “administratively” or sets the gun down, he closes the dust cover. And when it’s “Front Toward Enemy” time, he flips it open. He’s so deft with it, if I didn’t know better I could swear he’d done that for a living. Like maybe from 1947 to 1950.
Funny thing, at the beginning of the movie (during the intro) they go out of their way to specifically state “any resemblance to a living person is strictly coincidental” but given the way the Left is, General Jack D. Ripper is, in their mind, modeled after nearly every officer in the military who ever put on a uniform.
I have heard it said they modeled him after Gen. Curtis LeMay. They sure like to paint LeMay as insane, that is for sure.
I suppose some of his own men thought he was insane when he ordered the bombing raids on Japan that had been ineffective at 25,000 feet to be changed to 7,000 - 10,000 feet.
But he was right...it worked, and that was the end of Imperial Japan.
Even more ironic concerning the Left is that actor Sterling Hayden was gay.
I always thought they were really cool.
When I was little, when we played “war,” (as in the Vic Morrow TV show, or The Rat Patrol,”) we used to use caulking guns as our “Grease Guns.”
I once had a chance to fire one of the earlier models, that had a charging lever. Later models were simpler, with an indentation in the bolt to loop your finger into, to cock the bolt (it fires from an open bolt.) Compared to the Thompson, it had a lower rate of fire, and was lighter and shorter, which made it harder to control.
Mark
Good grief. The more I discern of the Leftist mind, the more repulsed I am by it.
I loved the way “Strangelove” poked at the moral officiousness of the main movie it was lampooning, “Fail-Safe”.
CC
I don’t know...Fail Safe came out in October of that year, while Dr. Strangelove came out in January, ten months earlier. But it could have been a poke at the book which is still the same, and the book “Fail Safe” was published in 1962.
Funny, I never liked “Fail Safe” as a serious movie.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.