I liked the British Sterling, I had 2 of those.
Now hold it right there, sonnyboy... Where were you in 1944?
Good for _maybe_ 20 yards. Anything else, you use up the entire magazine trying to walk it onto the general area of the target.
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).
I believe my dad had access to one in the ‘nam ,, he was a young engineer officer and said it always worked ..
Supplement that with a few cases of grenades.
You need a big foxhole! Just put it on a grassy knoll in your back yard.
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M3
Sten
Insurance
I inherited 3 boxes of US Army issue 9mm dated 1964 and was puzzled as to which weapon they used that required 9mm. Did some research and learned that the grease gun was also made in 9mm. It’s a hotter round than current +P 9mm handgun ammo so I traded it in to a gun store.
The M3 was not designed strictly as a replacement for the Thompson.
Before the M3 existed, the War Dept adopted the M2 to replace the Thompson. It was manufactured in the traditional manner, out of of forgings and machined steel, with walnut furniture. Relatively unknown outside collector circles and among Ordnance historians, it was produced only in small numbers because the military establishment realized compactness and inexpensive mass production were becoming more important in arming and equipping a rapidly expanding army, and for the types of engagements foreseen before World War Two, where submachine guns might be of use.
The Thompson was very heavy, quite awkward, and costly to make, but it was the only submachine gun for which a domestic manufacturing base already existed. So it ended up being produced in significant numbers.
Small Arms Review published at least one scholarly article on the M2, in the 1990s as I recall.
The M2 article.
http://smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticles=4151
An article on the M42, another lesser-known submachine gun of American make.