Posted on 07/13/2020 5:55:57 AM PDT by w1n1
The M3 'grease gun’ was a rude, crude, effective submachine gun that saw service from the Korean War through the late 1990s.
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 first time I went to use my rifle, it went 'click', so I busted it over a rock and picked up a dead Marine's grease gun," said USMC Korean War veteran Don Campbell. "I was lethal with the grease gun. It worked really well on the enemy." Campbell made his remarks at a machine gun shoot after firing a grease gun for the first time since he served in combat over 60 years ago.
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.
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. The 8.15-pound empty weight of the gun is brought up to 10.25 pounds once a loaded magazine of 30 .45 ACP rounds is inserted.
The M3 is blowback operated and fires from an open bolt. An external cocking handle is used to retract the bolt. The weapon fires fully automatic only at a listed cyclic rate of 450 rounds per minute. The ejection port cover doubles as a safety by locking the bolt in place when closed. The 30-round box magazine is a double-column, singlefeed design based on the STEN. Read the rest of M3 grease gun here.
I liked the British Sterling, I had 2 of those.
My Uncle (tank commander, Battle of the Bulge) was armed with one and a 45 when he escorted a prisoner home from Europe to New York City after the war. Custody of both guns and prisoner was transferred to a couple of MPs at the boat dock. All never to be seen again.
My uncle said he got tired of showing his order papers to practically every officer on the ship on the way over after they saw the M3. LOL
RIP Uncle Frank.
Successor to the STEN.
Now hold it right there, sonnyboy... Where were you in 1944?
Great catch, and that scene in the bar where he confronts the enemy barmaid defines “intense.”
magazines were interchangeable, but sten mags sucked, sterling mags rock!
For a B Action movie, it had a great cast an involved nuanced story.
Bob Newhart in a war action flick??? May have to see it just for that.
Good for _maybe_ 20 yards. Anything else, you use up the entire magazine trying to walk it onto the general area of the target.
A far more important WWII subgun was the Russian ppsh.
My father was USAAC & “in B17s” during WWII & was issued a grease gun. - He liked it so well that he “accidentally” dropped it out of the bomb bay over the ocean & thereafter got himself a TSMG, which he liked very much.
His comment to me about 1964 was that the 2 only good things about the Grease Gun was that it was CHEAP to make & easy to conceal under a coat.
(The Resistance in several European nations received the M3 by airdrop, just as the same groups in other places received the STEN.)
In either case, IF you had a M3/STEN you were far from unarmed & with it could get a MP38 or MP40 from a German soldier.
Note: According to my Uncle Jimmy, who was a SGT with the 82nd ABN, the MOST LOVED weapon of the French Resistance was the Walther PPK, because at the close distances that most actions by the Resistance operated, a handgun was adequate AND(perhaps more important) easy to conceal.
He also told me that the Free French group that he briefly served with after D-Day had “a lot of those odd-looking 9mm Astra pistols”.
(The Luftwaffe had bought a large quantity of the Astra Models 300, 400 & 600 Spanish 9x19mm pistols & issued them to aircrews, starting with pilots of the “Volunteer pilots” of the Condor Legion.- After 1942 an additional 65,000 Astra Model 600/43 pistols were bought by the German government bought/issued as “substitute standard” to all sorts of military & police formations.)
Note: The OSS & British Intelligence groups also bought/provided considerable quantities of ASTRA 400 “COMMERCIAL” pistols, to various Resistance Groups.
Yours, TMN78247
Valkyrie Arms makes a civilian version. It’s semi-automatic and comes with a longer barrel to make it a rifle or a standard length barrel as a Short Barrel Rifle (SBR).
Thanks for sharing that.
I believe my dad had access to one in the ‘nam ,, he was a young engineer officer and said it always worked ..
From IMDB:
Director Don Siegel did not want to shoot the scene where Bob Newhart’s character has a fake telephone conversation with “headquarters” to fool the Germans listening through a microphone planted in the US bunker, believing that it had no place in the story. He was overruled by the studio, however. Newhart at the time was a hugely popular stand-up comic, and a major part of his act was having one-sided phone conversations. The studio ordered that the scene be shot in order to capitalize on Newhart’s popularity.
A note to tyrants, the M3,Sten and PPSH 43 were designed to be made cheap in Sonny bubba june bug Johnston’s garage, and they worked.
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