American Gun

7 THE THOMPSON SUBMACHINE GUN

At 1:15 p.m. on September 20, 1926, the most powerful gangster in the United States sat with his back to the wall at his favorite restaurant on the first floor of the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, just outside Chicago. He was about to have a sip of coffee when he heard a familiar, and very unwelcome sound: the tat-tat-tat of a Tommy gun blasting away outside.

Al Capone dove under the table. The sixty other patrons inside the restaurant shrieked and scattered. The waiters melted into the kitchen.

Frankie Rio, Capone’s bodyguard and personal hit man, rose, waving his gun. He scanned the windows to the street. The shooting had stopped. Nothing inside the restaurant was damaged, and no one there was hurt.

Just a show?

Capone heard a car speed off. He got to his feet and started for the door to show he wasn’t a pussy.

Frankie Rio flew through the air, tackling his employer and shoving his face to the floor.

“It’s a stall, boss,” grunted Rio. “The real stuff hasn’t started. You stay down.”

Moments later, nine sleek limousines and touring cars slid up in front of the hotel. The barrels of Thompson submachine guns poked through the windows and opened fire. More than a thousand bullets poured into the building. The gunmen were acting on orders of Capone’s rivals, and they didn’t stop until they ran out of ammunition.

As the others paused, a man wearing a khaki shirt and overalls got out of the next to last car. He kneeled down on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, and began spraying neat rows of gunfire across the interior and exterior of the building. Drum mag empty, he reloaded and fired some more. Then he got up and went back to his car. Slow and easy, like nothing had happened.

Three blasts on the horn and the limos burned rubber.

Not one of the bullets fired in Al Capone’s direction hit him. Several other people were wounded, including a five-year-old boy and his mother who’d been outside in their car. Capone paid their medical and other bills, which totaled ten thousand dollars. It was a business expense.

The shooting spree would go down in history as the Siege of Cicero. Its target was overlord of the “Chicago Outfit,” a one-hundred-million-dollar-a-year crime empire based on the three pillars of American vice: gambling, prostitution, and booze. “I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want,” Al Capone once explained. “All I do is satisfy a public demand.”

That was booze, mostly. Prohibition had become law the passage of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act in 1919. From then on, practically every drink a man or woman had put money in the pocket of a criminal somewhere.

Three weeks after his lunch was interrupted at the hotel, Capone got his revenge. Rival gangster Hymie Weiss, who Capone fingered for the attack, was gunned dead in downtown Chicago. The instrument of his execution: a Thompson submachine gun.

The Thompson went by many names. “Tommy Gun” is the one most of us know. It was called that pretty much from the beginning. But the Chopper, Trench Broom, Chicago Typewriter, and the Annihilator have all been popular at one time or another.

The gun has a reputation as being hard to handle. That’s a case of the bark being worse than the bite, at least if you’re prepared and know what you’re doing. The drum mag gives it more balance than you’re led to expect by the stories. The kick is there, sure, but it’s no more serious than most other full autos. Hold on the trigger and the gun begins to climb, but again, that’s pretty much what you’d expect. Most of the Tommy men, which is what they called the mobsters who made it famous, fired only in small bursts. That gave them a lot more control than you see in the movies. Lay on the trigger a bit and the flash is very noticeable in the dark, but it’s really the sound you remember. The old ’30s movies don’t get it exactly right, but they are darn close.

Invented to help clear trenches in World War I, the gun came too late to be used there. Then the gangsters got a hold of it. So did the movies. Capone and his cronies—real and in the talkies—used the rapid-fire weapon so well and so often most of us still consider it a gangster gun. But in fact, the Thompson was a favorite among GIs in World War II, when something like a million and half were made. The gun and its bootleg clones even saw action in Korea and Vietnam.

And why not? It certainly looks cool, especially with the drum magazine. And while not exactly known for accuracy, there’s no arguing with the results. The Tommy gun was far and away the most lethal handheld automatic weapon you could get in the first half of the twentieth century, and it’s still no slouch.

The idea of a rapid-fire battle weapon had been around for centuries, but no one figured out how to make one work until the 1800s.

One of the first prototypes of a fast-firing, multiple-round field weapon was the “Union Repeating Gun.” Nicknamed the “Coffee Mill Gun” by Abraham Lincoln after he viewed a sales demo in 1861, the hand-cranked contraption fired .58-caliber paper cartridges fed into a breech by a hopper. Lincoln, as he often did, spotted its potential.

“I saw this gun myself, and witnessed some experiments with it, and I really think it worth the attention of the Government,” he told his Ordnance Department.

As usual, the department’s chief—dinosaur and enemy of innovation General James Ripley—stalled. A handful were eventually ordered for the Union army’s use, but they saw no use in battle. The Coffee Mill gun had a number of problems, most especially a nasty habit of overheating. So your guess is as good as mine about whether it might have helped the Yanks much.

The Gatling gun was a different story. The multi-barrel, hand-cranked weapon was patented in 1861 by North Carolina–born doctor Richard Jordan Gatling. Richard was a serious inventor and tinkerer. After settling in the Midwest in his thirties, he developed a revolutionary seed planter and a steam plow. When the Civil War started, his imagination turned to weapons. He aimed big, hoping to produce a gun that would do the work of many men.

He definitely got that part right. It took him a few versions and models over the years to perfect his vision and keep the Gatling bullet cannon at the cutting edge of the available technology. But for roughly twenty-five years it was the state of the art.

What it wasn’t, technically speaking, was what we now think of as a machine gun. Because unlike every machine gun today, the Gatling required someone to turn the handle to make it work. It was kind of like an organ grinder, only the music you’d be making had a deadly downbeat.

Gatling guns played an insignificant role in the Civil War, and they didn’t change the course of any battle. Maybe their most dramatic appearance was off the battlefield, when the weapons were mounted on the roof of the New York Times building in Times Square on July 17, 1863.

The good citizens of New York weren’t too keen on being drafted to fight for the Union. They were especially angry at the latest provisions of the law, which allowed the rich to buy their way out of service. Mobs rampaged through the city streets. The Times was a vocal supporter of Lincoln and the Republicans, and the crowd decided that it had exercised its First Amendment rights a little too vigorously.

Journalists were different in those days. A Times editor passed out rifles to his staff, set up two Gatlings borrowed from the Army in the windows for all to see, and placed another one right on top of the building.

He took the trigger himself.

“Give them grape,” he yelled loud enough to be heard over the approaching horde. “And plenty of it.”

“Grape” was a type of shot or bullet fired from cannons, but the expression was basically slang for “cleared hot to fire.” In modern English, his words meant, Shoot the bastards, and do it a lot.

The reporters didn’t get the chance. Seeing the weapons, the crowd decided freedom of the press was an unalienable right, and took off.

Depending on the model, the Gatling had from six to ten rotating barrels that fired two hundred bullets a minute. The rifled barrels cooled just enough between shots to save them from overheating. Heat is a problem every rapid-fire weapon faces, and the reason things like water jackets were invented later on.

With up to 1,200 rounds spitting out in the space of a minute, the Gatling could put a serious hurt on an enemy. But the guns had some drawbacks, as we’ve touched on earlier. They were heavy and had to be carted around on two-wheel carriages like artillery pieces. Unlike artillery, they needed to be pretty close to the action, which made them and their crews conspicuous targets on the battlefield. The guns were mounted high, and a gun still hasn’t been invented that can duck incoming fire.

Another early machine gun, the Hotchkiss “cannon-revolver,” was similar to the Gatling though its firing mechanism worked on a different principle. The gun was designed in 1872 and manufactured by a company owned by Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss. Though he was American, he set up his factory in France, which is where the guns were produced. Société Anonyme des Anciens Etablissements Hotchkiss et Cie made a line of light cannons which were also used by the American Army.

The next leap forward in machine-gun technology was the Maxim gun, introduced in 1884 by Maine-born inventor Hiram Maxim, a farmer’s son and inventor whose works included a better mousetrap. Visiting the Paris Electrical Exhibition in 1881, Maxim ran into a friend who told him there was good money in war. “Hang your chemistry and electricity!” said the friend. “If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater efficiency.”

Maxim apparently took the advice to heart, and gave up on his other inventions to concentrate on guns. Figuring that soldiers needed a portable, fast-reloading, rapid-fire gun, he developed a mechanism that used the recoil of the weapon to load the next cartridge. He came up with the world’s first light, single-barrel automatic machine gun. The self-powered gun was water-cooled and could fire five hundred bullets per minute and more.

By the way, “light” is a relative term. Even the later models weighed forty pounds or more. You wouldn’t have wanted to carry one on your back for very long.

As his friend predicted, Europe pounced on the weapon. In 1896, the British-owned Vickers corporation purchased Maxim’s company and began producing the American-designed machine guns under its own name. During World War I, Vickers guns were standard equipment for British forces. They were even adapted for air combat on the first fighter planes.

Not to be outgunned, the Germans and Russians ripped off the Maxim design for themselves. The lethal firepower of the machine gun was one of the big reasons World War I became such a bloody mess. No war is pretty, but trench warfare brought the ugliness to new lows. Military commanders on both sides were insanely slow to adapt to the new combat conditions on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of troops were mowed down in pointless assaults “over the top” as they ran into the killing fields ruled by the machine gun.

By the time the United States entered the war, there were four fairly decent machine-gun options available on the open market, all conceived by Americans: the Maxim, Lewis, Benet, and the Colt Model 1895, designed by the great John Browning. If you wanted to choose just one, the Lewis gun would have been a pretty good bet, especially since it could be set up and handled by one man, with another toting the ammo. The earliest models of the Browning had performed well in limited service in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the usual delays and muddled thinking at the Ordnance Department meant the Americans ended up with French machine guns at first; only toward the end of the war did the Lewis and Browning weapons start coming to the troops in any numbers.

Those French machine guns? Well, a few thousand were Hotchkiss machine guns, which were manufactured by the company Benjamin Hotchkiss had established in France the previous century. Modern descendants of his “cannon-revolver,” the firm’s family of machine guns were decent, though very heavy for infantry weapons.

But most of the guns the Americans ended up with were Chauchat light machine guns. These featured magazines with exposed cartridges that jammed every time they got into mud or dirt—pretty much an everyday thing in combat. Welcome to war!

There were a few cool things about the Chauchat, like the fact that it had a pistol grip and was lightweight—the “Pig” or Squad Automatic Weapon of its day. But if you were in the trenches depending on a Chauchat to save your hide, prayer might have been a better option.

Until this point, the machine gun was a stationary weapon. It was great at defending territory and providing cover fire for an advance. Nice guns, as long as you didn’t have to move them: the best were heavy mothers. Most took two or more soldiers (and maybe even a horse) to operate, transport, and carry the ammo.

Anyone who thought about it, or busted his hump carrying one of them, knew the future of firearms lay in a fully portable, handheld machine gun. As it happened, one American figured out how to make it happen.

John Taliaferro Thompson was a rare thing: a brilliant and farsighted Army ordnance officer. A Kentucky boy, he headed north and graduated from West Point. A colonel by the time the Spanish-American War started, he did a reasonably good job as the chief ordnance officer attached to the commanding general of the Cuban campaign.

As a member of the Ordnance Department, Thompson played a key role in getting the M1903 Springfield rifle and the M1911 pistol made. He and Major Louis LaGarde supervised the torture tests that selected the winning M1911 pistol design. By 1914, he had automatic weapons on his mind. He retired from the Army and went over to Remington Arms as their chief engineer. He also started a company called Auto-Ordnance to manufacture an automatic rifle. Auto-Ordnance partnered up with a Navy man who had patented a delayed blowback breech system, and went to work adapting it to a rifle design.

The war convinced Uncle Sam that the Army needed Thompson back, and he was recalled to active duty. He was put in charge of American small arms production. But the automatic rifle was never far from his mind, and his company kept working on it.

The blowback breech system had a lot of promise, but the engineers Thompson hired discovered that using rifle cartridges caused too many problems. Bullets had a very nasty tendency of firing too soon, which can really put a dent in the day of the guy holding the gun, not to mention the people around him. Bullets that followed often didn’t eject smoothly, which wasn’t quite as bad a problem but still didn’t make for a happy operator.

The engineers did some thinking and decided what they really needed was a shorter cartridge. Thompson and his team soon turned to one he knew very well: the .45 ACP rounds that did such a good job in the M1911 pistol.

While pistol rounds simply don’t go as far as cartridges made for rifles, in the close quarters of a trench, maximum short-range stopping power trumps long-range accuracy. Since the gun was meant as a trench clearer, Thompson realized, the bullets were perfect.

Re-retired, Thompson went back to Auto-Ordnance. In 1919, the company began testing a prototype. They soon produced a production model unlike anything the world had seen. It could fire more than 600 rounds a minute. The weapon was fed from a 20-round stick magazine, or 50- or 100-round drum magazines. (Later versions had 30-round stick mags.) Because the powerful recoil from the .45 bullets tended to cause the Thompson to shoot high, a forward grip was added to help muscle the gun level.

They called it a submachine gun. Their reasoning was simple: the bullets it fired were smaller than what was in a regular machine gun, and the words “sub-calibre gun” had already been taken, thankfully.

Thompson contracted with Colt to produce 15,000 guns, and waited for the orders to pour in.

But Thompson had missed his moment. With the “War to End All Wars” over, no one needed a “trench sweeper.” Sales stunk. Despite Thompson’s insider connections and impressive live-fire demonstrations, the U.S. Army didn’t bite. The Navy and Marines came through with small orders here and there, but Thompson’s Auto-Ordnance Corporation limped along on the fringe of the firearms industry. Local police forces mostly shrugged. To them the gun looked like overkill, literally and figuratively. And at two hundred dollars, it wasn’t an impulse buy, for them or most private citizens either.

Then, suddenly, the Tommy gun became popular for all the wrong reasons.

It turned out the Thompson was the perfect tool for gangsters hoping to make an impression on their rivals. Small, portable, the weapon made one man into an army. In the hands of hit men and bank robbers, the power and psychological shock of the spray gun could rearrange an underworld command chain in a heartbeat. Instead of the trenches for which it was designed, the Tommy gun came to rule the back alleys of American cities.

Thompson personally didn’t like the association, but few gangsters took the time to ask his opinion. And as he gradually stepped back from running the firm, the corporation pretty much told dealers to sell the gun to whoever wanted it.

Mobsters in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and practically anywhere money was to be made from booze or gambling began shooting it out with submachine guns. The Tommy Gun Wars were fed by wheelbarrows of money, and just as much anger. One killing encouraged three others; revenge became as important as control.

Al Capone certainly wasn’t the only gangster whose boys relied on the Tommy gun, but his crew sure did have a Thompson fetish. In Brooklyn on July 1, 1927, Capone’s old boss Frankie Yale was intercepted and drilled with a hundred bullets by men in a Lincoln chase car. Yale and Capone fell out after Yale started hijacking booze Capone had bought from him, giving new meaning to the word double-dealing. Overkill was part of Capone’s payback: the message it sent, not so much to the dead Yale but everyone else, was Cheat me and I’ll shoot you dead, then kill you some more.

It’s thought that some of the same mobsters who murdered Yale were behind the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago on February 14, 1929. In a real headline moment for American gangsters, six thugs (including the guy who kneeled to spray his Tommy gun at the front of Capone’s hotel) and one unlucky optometrist were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned to death, presumably on Capone’s say-so.

America’s most infamous public enemy of the era was undoubtedly John Dillinger, a Hollywood-handsome bank robber who used the Thompson as his withdrawal slip. The former Indiana farm boy was very polite when he robbed banks. He was even said to be genuinely sorry for the one policeman he’d killed with his Tommy gun. At least eleven others died during his crime spree at the hands of his fellow gang members.

But Dillinger had style.

“He liked to amuse bank customers with quips and wise cracks during holdups,” wrote author Paul Maccabee. “He would leap over the counters to show off his athletic ability and sometimes fired his Thompson submachine gun into the ceiling just to get people’s attention. Witnesses may have been robbed, but they got their money’s worth.”

The ceiling might have been about all Dillinger could hit—he’s said to have been a bad shot.

Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents on the night of Monday, July 22, 1934, after watching a movie at Chicago’s Biograph theater. His big hardware wasn’t with him; instead of the Thompson or his favorite Colt 1911 (modified with a Thompson grip), Dillinger started to pull a 1908 Pocket Model Colt .380. He never had the chance to use it. The G men were packing M1911s. The Bureau had Tommy guns, but they would have been too dangerous here. As it was, a stray bullet injured a bystander.

Dillinger’s sometime partner in crime was another Tommy gun lover, a psychopathic cop-killer named Lester Gillis, better known as Baby Face Nelson. Baby Face staked his claim to fame by killing more FBI agents than any other criminal.

Les earned his nickname during a sidewalk stickup in 1930. He shoved a handgun in the gut of Chicago mayor “Big Bill” Thompson’s wife and made off with jewelry valued at eighteen thousand dollars. “He had a baby face,” she said, describing the thief. “He was good looking, hardly more than a boy.”

Baby Face had a personal gunsmith who customized his weapons for maximum performance. He also had a short temper and a heavy trigger finger. During a bank robbery in Mason City, Iowa, he machine-gunned an innocent bystander. “Stupid son of a bitch,” he told the man as he lay bleeding. “I thought you were a cop.”

Baby Face was one sick pup, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Like quite a few outlaws and criminals romanticized by the media and film, he was a psychotic nutjob in real life. After shooting a policeman during a robbery on March 6, 1934, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he yelled, “I got one of them! I got one of them!” and danced on top of the bank counter.

Dillinger and Baby Face blasted their way out of an FBI ambush at a Wisconsin resort called Little Bohemia on April 20, 1934. One federal agent and a civilian were killed in the ruckus. Just before shooting one of the federal agents with his Tommy gun, Baby Face growled, “I know who you are! A bunch of fucking government cops with vests on! I can give it to you bastards high and low!”

And he did.

Ten days later in Bellwood, Indiana, three police officers recognized Baby Face and his gang. They stopped the car without waiting for backup.

That was a mistake.

The psycho jumped out with his Thompson and took them prisoner instead. He beat the driver down to the pavement, then told the other two lawmen to run away. According to author Jeffery King, “Nelson calmly aimed a machine gun at their backs. The other outlaws begged Baby Face not to shoot, telling him it would only make things worse for them. He lowered his weapon, then suddenly whirled and peppered the police car with machine-gun fire, completely destroying it and shooting out most of the glass.”

Finally, on the afternoon of November 27, 1934, FBI agents and state police caught up with Baby Face in Barrington, Illinois. A wild shoot-out erupted.

Baby Face’s Ford was a mobile weapons vault, stuffed with ammunition, loaded magazines, and guns—including a Tommy gun, a Winchester .351 carbine with extended magazine, and a civilian version of the Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR. When Baby Face ordered a flunky to open fire with the BAR, he let loose straight through the front window. The roar of the gun in the car could have shattered a skull on its own.

The battle peaked with Baby Face charging the lawmen on foot, blazing away with his Winchester. “It was just like Jimmy Cagney,” remembered eyewitness Robert Hayford. “I never seen nothing like it. That fellow just kept a-coming right at them two lawmen, and they must have hit him plenty, but nothing was going to stop that fellow.”

The lawmen pumped Baby Face Nelson full of lead, but they couldn’t stop him. The wounded outlaw managed to kill two federal agents and somehow drive off. Baby Face died in bed with his wife that night in a safe house, nursing no less than seventeen wounds. He was twenty-four.

On July 22, 1933, George Celino Barnes, aka “Machine Gun Kelly,” took his shot at a big score. The bootlegger and bank robber kidnapped superrich oilman Charles Urschel at the point of a Thompson.

Machine Gun Kelly’s reputation tended to outshine his actual abilities. Despite his nickname, he didn’t use the Tommy gun on many of his outings. But in this case, there is no doubt that he picked his victim wisely. He also turned out to be a man of his word. When Urschel’s family paid off the $200,000 in small bills, the Oklahoma City victim was released unharmed.

But Machine Gun probably hadn’t counted on the FBI getting involved in the case. After a ninety-day nationwide investigation and seventeen-state dragnet, the FBI was able to trace a Tommy gun from a captured gang member. Piecing together other clues, they grabbed Kelly. He was tried, convicted, and put away for life.

Legend has it that Kelly gave FBI agents the nickname “G-men” when he pleaded for mercy during their raid. But that story is an urban legend. People had been using the term on their own for years. Not that facts ever really slow down a good story. Just ask Willie Sutton.

Sutton was one of the last Thompson-toting “gentleman bandits” to be caught. He had a simple reason for using a Tommy gun: “You can’t rob a bank on charm and personality.” Sutton would know: he robbed around one hundred financial institutions in the New York area between the 1920s and his final capture in 1952.

Sutton is the smart-ass who’s supposed to have answered the question “Why do you rob banks?” with the answer “Because that’s where the money is.”

Great answer, but it’s probably another urban legend.

But he did give an answer to the question in a book he wrote after his capture, and it makes just as much sense as the other one. “Because I enjoyed it,” he said. “I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life.”

After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the Tommy Gun Wars petered out. Meanwhile the company was close to going bust pretty much through the 1930s. A few government contracts helped keep it alive, but the books were filled with red ink when John Thompson died in 1940. The majority shares of the company ended up with Russell Maguire, who reorganized the firm just in time for World War II.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the company suddenly had more business than it could handle. The Tommy gun was the only proven light machine gun available, and in a reversal of fortune, soldiers embraced its bad-boy reputation. Great Britain ordered several thousand Thompsons; the compact guns became favorites in their elite commando units. Once when Prime Minister Winston Churchill spotted a British soldier with one, he borrowed it and posed for a photo. The picture became famous as an “F-U” to the Nazis.

The gun Churchill flashed had a drum magazine. Soldiers used both the drum and a smaller, though easier to carry, stick mag. The kits sold to the Brits came with two round drums and four stick magazines. There was also a thousand rounds of ammo, which probably lasted about as long as snow in south Texas. The contractor that supplied the cases, Savage Arms in New York, got $225 for each weapon set.

More than a million Thompsons were ordered by various branches of the American military, including new versions that were improved and tweaked for mass production. Despite occasional complaints of jamming and control problems, the Thompson proved to be a winner.

“It was the perfect weapon for close-defense,” said one Army colonel. “Carrying one provided perhaps the best life insurance a man could have.”

Short-barreled and firing the bruising .45 ammo, the Thompson was ideal for commando operations behind the lines. There were a lot of those missions. The commander in chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a big booster of special-op forces, and seems never to have heard of a commando raid he didn’t like. Unlike some later presidents, he kept asking for more.

In the Pacific Theater, Thompsons were used by the 2nd Marine Raiders, nicknamed “Carlson’s Raiders” after their commander, Major Evans Fordyce Carlson. The major explained to FDR that the ten-man squads were designed for “high mobility” and “maximum fire power.” The squads packed five Thompson submachine guns, four M1 Garands, and one Browning Automatic Rifle. Often they would be deployed via submarines and inflatable rubber boats on missions that took them deep behind Japanese lines.

When landing at a target, the Raiders locked a circular 50-round ammo drum into their Thompsons. When it was empty, they chucked it and slapped in an easier-to-carry 20-round stick. The Raiders brought their Thompsons along on August 17, 1942, when they wiped out the Japanese base on Makin Island in one of the earliest ground attacks waged by U.S. forces in the war. And the Tommy gun was along on their legendary thirty-day “long patrol” through fiercely defended Japanese territory in the jungles of Guadalcanal in November and December 1942. The unit took down some five hundred enemy soldiers, at a loss of just eighteen of their own.

Elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific, General Joseph Stilwell toted a Thompson through Burma, and General Frank Merrill’s “Marauders” deployed Thompsons in commando attacks behind Japanese lines.

The Thompson served in Europe as well. On D-Day—June 6, 1944—First Lieutenant Harrison C. Summers and his brothers in the elite 502nd Airborne regiment liberated St.-Germain-de-Varreville, France, close to Utah Beach. Summers was then ordered to attack and capture a building complex simply called WXYZ on a field map.

Following orders, the paratrooper and two buddies located WXYZ and charged in. What they didn’t know was that the building housed the barracks for at least a hundred German soldiers.

It took five hours, but when Summers emerged, thirty Nazi soldiers were dead, fifty were prisoner, and the building was secure. “Summers is a legend with American paratroopers,” noted popular historian Stephen Ambrose, “the Sergeant York of World War II. His story has too much John Wayne/Hollywood in it to be believed, except that more than ten men saw and reported his exploits.”

Harrison Summers, who died in 1983, was nominated twice for the Medal of Honor; it was denied him both times. But there are numerous Medal of Honor citations involving Tommy guns. One of the most incredible involved another paratrooper, First Sergeant Leonard A. Funk Jr. of the 82nd Airborne’s 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment. During a blizzard in eastern Belgium on January 29, 1945, Sergeant Funk and his men humped fifteen miles through waist-deep snowdrifts before reaching their target—a village filled with Nazis near the German border. Despite artillery shelling and constant enemy fire, Funk’s squad rapidly cleared fifteen houses and took eighty enemy prisoners. Funk could only spare four of his troops to guard the POWs while he took the rest of the unit to secure the area.

While he was away, a Nazi patrol materialized. They freed their comrades and took the American guards captive. When Funk returned, he walked right into the Nazis’ trap. A German officer shoved his Luger into the sergeant’s stomach and ordered him to surrender.

Funk slipped his Thompson off his shoulder, moving very slowly. He was outnumbered something like a hundred to one, and clearly knew the jig was up.

Except he didn’t, and it wasn’t. In a flash, he swung the gun level and filled the building with that famous rat-a-tat-tat roar. As the Nazi officer dropped to the ground, Funk turned his Tommy gun on the remaining Germans, cutting down twenty-one of them and taking the rest prisoner—this time for good.

“1st Sgt. Funk’s bold action and heroic disregard for his own safety,” reads his Medal of Honor citation, “were directly responsible for the recapture of a vastly superior enemy force, which, if allowed to remain free, could have taken the widespread units of Company C by surprise and endangered the entire attack plan.” Funk survived the war and returned home to work for the Veterans Administration, where he served his fellow vets for more than two decades.

In 1942, the British edition of Yank magazine printed the story of a U.S. Army Air Corps sergeant who seemed to be a pro with the submachine guns that had just been issued to his unit. He took a Tommy gun apart piece by piece, then quickly snapped it back together, and blasted away a target. When a major asked him where he learned the skill, the sergeant shrugged.

“Well, sir, you see,” he said, “I once hadda take these things apart in the back of a car going seventy miles an hour.”

He’d been a bootlegger before going to work for Uncle Sam.

Born out of the horror of WWI’s trenches and made infamous by Prohibition-era gangsters, John Thompson’s submachine gun had finally fullfilled its promise during WWII. The gun remained in the U.S. military inventory for years after the war. Some were still being used for special missions during the 1960s.

A friend of mine named Donnie Durbin runs the best gun store in Texas, in my opinion. Donnie is a Marine—I won’t call him a retired Marine, because once you’re a Marine, there is no such thing as retiring from the Corps.

Donnie did a stretch of fighting in Vietnam. While he was there, he happened across a Thompson submachine gun that had been dropped by a VC somewhere along the way. (VC means Viet Cong, aka the enemy, for y’all under thirty.)

He carried it around for a few days, and liked it. Even though from a different era, it still had plenty of power, wasn’t really that hard to control, and best of all, it was just cool. A gangster gun.

But after a week or so, he decided to give it to someone else. The thing got to be heavy carrying through the jungle. It wasn’t just the gun; the bullets and their drum magazine added several pounds to his kit. And if you don’t think a couple of pounds make a difference to a warrior, you’ve never thrown on a loaded ruck and humped it ten miles.

At the same time, gun technology had given Donnie and his brother Marines rifles that could fire nearly as fast on full auto and were about two pounds lighter when empty. While those rifles had not yet been perfected, they clearly owned the future.

You might make an argument that the Tommy gun redeemed its reputation with all the good work it did in World War II. There’s a lot of stock in that—it was the instrument of freedom for a lot of people. Of course, history is a complicated subject. The good sits right next to the bad pretty much all the time. The same fella who was a bootlegger and might’ve used a Tommy gun against the police turned out to be a soldier who used it against death camps and extermination.

The Tommy gun defined the submachine gun category. But that definition has gotten narrower over the years. Today’s true submachine guns, such as the MP5 family, are now mostly specialty weapons. In one direction, they’ve been replaced by squad-level machine guns that have the power of some of the heavy weapons of World War I and II. On the other side, they’ve seen lightweight carbines take up much of their territory.

Then again, as cool as it was, the Thompson was never the top gun in the American inventory, not even in World War II. Pride of place there belonged to a weapon that both continued old traditions, and broke new ground: the M1 Garand.