Posted on 01/30/2015 7:22:17 AM PST by C19fan
On Jan. 29, 1945, First Sgt. Leonard Funk, Jr. faced a determined German army officer ready to kill him with a pistol.
Armed with a Thompson M1A1 submachine gun, the U.S. Army paratrooper had just led an assault against 15 houses occupied by German troops in Holzheim, Belgium. It was part of an operation by the 82nd Airborne Division to clear German soldiers from the area following the Battle of the Bulge.
Leading a makeshift headquarters platoon of clerks, Funk and his unit captured 30 prisoners. He left them with several dozen more prisoners—under guard—and returned to the fight.
While he was away, the German prisoners overpowered their guards and seized their weapons.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
A few years ago, an elderly WWII Army Infantry veteran friend let me shoot the Thompson with drum mag he had used in the European Theater and “brought back” with him...
He said many of the guys he served with thought of the .45s and other weapons as “theirs” after carrying them for so long...
He showed me how he’d employed the “Tommy”, at about waist level, rolling it 45 degrees, and sweeping side to side in a figure eight pattern...I certainly can see how this weapon would be devastating to enemy infantry...
Unfortunately, “his” was lost in a tragic boating accident, and my friend has since passed away...
Non-auto copies exist, I think. A lot cheaper, but not as much fun :)
That one still doesn’t have a compensator, but it does have a pistol-grip forend and the cutout for a drum magazine. Different model than the M1.
“... the weight of a full drum magazine which when loaded plus the gun weighed in at 50 pounds.”
Not even close. I was at a gunsmith’s shop in Wasilla, AK once. The ‘smith had a class 3 license and there was a mint condition M1928A1 complete with a loaded 50 rd. drum mag sitting on a bench. With great trepidation I asked permission to heft the weapon which was granted. It was heavy - probably about 15 lbs. - and it felt incredibly solid. I’ll never forget that experience - it was awe-inspiring.
The heavyweight US weapon of the time was the Browning Automatic Rifle - about 22 lbs. loaded. That was actually the preferred weapon of the gangsters in the Roaring 20’s because using .30-06 AP ammo it would shoot through engine blocks and make short work of the G-men chasing them. The .45 ACP round is pretty anemic compared to a .30-06.
Both of these weapons were available in those days to anyone who had the cash to buy one. Just DANG!
I'll guess the drum was problematic in both mfg and use, not to mention carrying the extra mags.
Weight
10.8 lb (4.9 kg) empty (M1928A1)
10.6 lb (4.8 kg) empty (M1A1)
Length
33.5 in (850 mm) (M1928A1)
32 in (810 mm) (M1/M1A1)
Barrel length
10.5 in (270 mm)
12 in (300 mm) (with cutts compensator)
I got to handle and fire one in Vietnam. It was very heavy but certainly spoke with authority. I carried a Swedish K for a while. light weight, compact, 9mm, relatively slow cyclic rate. I didn’t like it. I wanted a M14 but couldn’t get my hands on one so I ended up carrying the M16 and a 1911. Fortunately, I was an artillery crewman so my personal weapon was not critical.
IIRC, there was a 100 round drum mag as well as the 50 round drum.
Auto-Ordinance,
makes “Chicago Typewriters”
1200 bucks or so can get you going !
1Sgt Funk,,,
A Real Rambo!
No kidding. 50 pounds? Can you imagine packing that sucker around along with a couple spare drum mags? Reminds me of Don Rickles in Kellys Heroes hoisting the 30 cal. “This thing’s as heavy as one of Kelsy’s burgers.”
My dad has two Airsoft models. One the drum type the other the stick magazine. Both look scary.
I saw tankers in 1991 who were issued a grease gun. 1st ID.
My Dad, the best marksman I’ve ever met, had an EIB, so he was familiar with every infantry weapon.
He told me he wasn’t crazy and shooting the Thompson. He said it put out a ton of lead, but it was a bitch to keep on target. He said the first time he shot it, the first bullet hit the target....and the rest started going up in the air as he had not learned how to control it.
“Been a while since I read the book but that total weight of fifty pounds for gun and drum sticks in my mind.”
It’s possible someone handed SkyDancer a miserably edited piece of text.
No Thompson gun has ever weighed more than about 16 pounds, not in any configuration, not even when fully loaded. Browning’s Automatic Rifle M1918 weighed about 16 pounds; the M1919 belt-fed machine gun (also a Browning design) weighed less than 50 pounds.
The Thompson was the only submachine gun of US design with any history of development and series manufacture, at that moment when the United States found itself dumped without ceremony into WWII. Several had been patented or were in development (look up the Reising, UD M42, and US M2) but none showed sufficient promise over the Thompson to justify production in quantity.
Some 1,200,000 Thompsons did get made, mostly by Savage, during WWII, in the M1 and M1A1 variants: redesigns to save money on manufacturing. Very much old school (forged/machined steel, walnut), it was still costly (47 dollars per gun, compared to 26 dollars per US M1 rifle. Figures from the Museum of the National Armory at Springfield, MA).
Drum magazines were dropped for a number of reasons: apart from their heavy loaded weight, they were complex (hence costly), fragile compared to box (stick) magazines, less reliable than box magazines, and terribly fussy to load (partial disassembly required). Worst of all, they rattled when loaded ... not something desired by a commando sneaking up on the enemy.
The M3, developed at Aberdeen Probing Ground and produced by GM, was the first “modern” gun to see service with the US military. Stamped sheet metal frame, many simple - crude - parts made on simpler production machinery, much less need for costly finishing or involved fitting. Many do consider its magazine to be a step backward: single position feed compared to the Thompson’s dual position feed. The argument has never been completely settled: Britain’s STEn used single position feed and was cursed by most users. Germany’s MP-38 and MP-40 used single position feed and turned out to be perfect gems of reliability.
(It’s worth noting that since the Second World War, no submachine gun has relied on single position feed.)
The M3 was handier, lighter, and less costly than the Thompson. Many went to allied nations after the war, but some hung on for issue to vehicle crews and such until after Gulf War I.
Now this is bugging me. I’m chatting with the male portion of the household (dad, uncle, two bro’s) to find out where I came up with that weight ...
Glad to see it was still in use! And here I thought I was "special" :-)
Actually, with 5ID, I thought it was because we had all old crap to begin with!
Never got the chance to run a mag through one, but would dearly love to.
Had a retired FBI SA for an instructor who regaled us with the tale of a shootout back in the 50’s that occurred north-central Florida. Badguys were alone (no hostages) on the bottom floor of a two-story house and wouldn’t come out. The Jacksonville office had most of their agents on scene trying to talk them out and three of the agents had thompsons — that they had never fired before. Bear in mind, this was the 50’s and these were “g-men” and the bad guys were pretty brutal to their victims, so they wanted all the advantage they could get.
Anyway, long story short, bad guys refused to come out and one of them fired a couple of shots, at which point the entire assembled crowd of FBI and Sheriff’s deputies opened up on the two-story house with an assortment of guns from revolvers to shotguns, rifles and thompsons. Shot them til’ they emptied. In the reload pause, someone yelled “STOP” the bad guys immediately surrendered after that. Absolutely no-one on either side was hit or even scratched.
He said that the interesting part was that after it was all over, and you stopped to take in the scene, you could see the huge truck sized group of bullet holes around the front door and one of the first-floor windows. And then, radiating up from that, you could clearly see a bunch of bullet holes running up the front of the house, past the second floor towards the roof. And he wouldn’t say if he had one of the thompsons or not.
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