June 1944. Somewhere in the Norman Bokeage, an American airborne sergeant crouches behind an ancient earthen wall, listening. The banker head rises chest high. Then the hedge climbs above it. A living wall of roots, brambles, and tangled vegetation. Somewhere beyond it, German machine gunners wait.
They have presited every gap. Every opening is a killing ground. The sergeant checks his weapon one final time. It is heavy, nearly 5 kg fully loaded, and his shoulders ache from carrying it since the pre-dawn drop. But he would not trade it for anything in the American arsenal. In his hands is a gun that German soldiers had already seen in American gangster films.
A gun whose reputation preceded it across the Atlantic. A gun that would make every hedro gap in Normandy a close quarters nightmare for the Ve marked. The Thompson submachine gun arrived in France carrying 20 years of criminal notoriety. it would leave carrying a very different legacy. The story of the Thompson begins not with Al Capone, but with a retired army general watching men die in the trenches of the First World War.
John Talia Pharaoh Thompson was no ordinary inventor. A West Point graduate, he had supervised development of the M1903 Springfield rifle and chaired the board that approved the M1911 pistol. By 1916, he understood that the war in Europe had become a slaughter of static positions. Machine guns dominated no man’s land. Infantry attacks dissolved into mud and blood.
Thompson believed he had the solution. He called it the trench broom, a portable one-man automatic weapon that could sweep enemy trenches while soldiers advanced. He founded the autoordinance corporation with backing from tobacco magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan, and development proceeded through 1917 and 1918.
The project was internally cenamed Annihilator 1. The timing proved catastrophic. According to auto ordinance company records, the first prototype shipment arrived at New York docks on November 11th, 1918, the exact day the armistice was signed. Postwar military budgets collapsed. The United States Army officially deemed the Thompson unnecessary and undesirable in 1928.
With 15,000 Model 1921 guns manufactured by cult and almost no military buyers, auto orordinance accumulated over $2 million in debt. Thompson himself was forced out of his own company due to poor sales. The weapon designed for honorable warfare would instead find its first eager customers in American organized crime. Before the National Firearms Act of 1934, anyone could purchase a Thompson submachine gun from hardware stores, sporting goods outlets, or mail order cataloges.
No registration, no background checks, no questions asked. At $200, equivalent to roughly $3,500 today, the Thompson was wildly expensive, closer to the price of a car than a sidearm. But for well-funded criminal enterprises, this was a trivial investment. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre on February 14th, 1929 catapulted the Thompson into national infamy.
Seven members of George Moran’s northside gang were lined against a Chicago warehouse wall and executed with approximately 70 rounds from two Thompson submachine guns. The massacre, widely attributed to Al Capone’s organization, transformed public perception overnight. High-profile criminals cemented the mythology. Machine Gun Kelly earned his nickname when his wife Catherine bought him a Thompson and encouraged him to practice distributing spent cartridges as souvenirs at speak easys.
Babyface Nelson used Thompsons to kill multiple FBI agents. John Dillinger escaped his St. Paul apartment by firing through the door with one. The Kansas City massacre on June 17th, 1933, where gunmen with Thompsons killed four law enforcement officers shocked the nation. In the aftermath, Hoover pushed to arm the bureau. Thompson’s included.
The National Firearms Act followed in 1934, imposing a $200 tax on machine gun transfers, deliberately matching the gun’s retail price to discourage civilian purchases. For the next 6 years, the Thompson languished, a weapon without a war, a solution without a problem. Then Germany invaded Poland. The original M19281 Thompson was an engineering marvel, poorly suited for mass production.
According to Ordinance Department records, it weighed 4.9 kg unloaded, over 6.8 kg with a 50 round drum magazine. It featured a thinned barrel, cuts compensator, adjustable lyman rear sight, and a complex delayed blowback mechanism that required extensive machining from solid steel. Unit cost in 1939 reached $29 per weapon.
The heart of the original design was the Bliss principle, which claimed that dissimilar metals exhibited enhanced adhesion under high pressure. British armorers in North Africa would later discover they could remove this mechanism entirely, and the guns functioned perfectly. The simplified M1 variant, adopted in April 1942, eliminated the Bishlock along with the barrel fins, cuts compensator, and drum magazine capability.
Production time dropped by half. Unit cost fell to $45 by 1944. The Monet 1 variant simplified production even further by machining the firing pin directly into the bolt face. Total wartime production reached approximately 1.7 million units manufactured by Savage Arms and Auto Ordinance between 1940 and 1944. The specifications that mattered in Normandy were straightforward.
The Thompson fired45 caliber automatic Colt pistol ammunition at a muzzle velocity of 285 m/s. Rate of fire was 600 to 700 rounds per minute. Effective range was 50 m. Magazine capacity was 20 or 30 rounds in the simplified wartime variants. These numbers tell only part of the story. The Thompson’s true advantage lay in what happened when those heavy, slowmoving bullets struck human flesh at close range.
Now, before we see how this performed in combat, if you are finding this interesting, consider subscribing. It takes a moment, costs nothing, and helps the channel continue producing this research. Now, back to the hedros. Norman hedro terrain transformed the Thompson’s supposed weaknesses into decisive advantages. The ancient earthn banks rose waist to chest high with dense vegetation climbing above them to create walls of foliage that blocked all visibility.
They created a battlefield of small irregular fields rarely exceeding 90 m across. According to German Panza layer commander General Biolin’s afteraction reports, his armor had to fight at maximum ranges of around 180 m because hedges concealed everything beyond that distance. Infantry engagements occurred at even closer range. Carl H. Cartage Jr.
of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment. 101st Airborne Division provided one of the war’s most detailed Thompson testimonials. In his memoir, he wrote that he fell in love with the Thompson the first time he picked it up. He noted that Time magazine had called it the deadliest weapon pound-for-pound ever devised by man.
In combat, he found this to be an understatement. He swore the gun hit like a sledgehammer. Three rounds and a man stopped moving forward fast. The physical impact felt enormous, even if the physics were less dramatic than his description suggested. Cartage’s account directly addresses German reactions. He recalled that France was the toughest and fiercest fighting of the war.
Word spread quickly through the German ranks about what the paratroopers called bastards in baggy pants and about their terrible Thompson gun. The Germans learned quickly that the Americans had many of them, and their use made the American gangster films the Germans had seen pale by comparison. American tactical doctrine placed Thompsons with non-commissioned officers, officers, scouts, and patrol leaders.
The men making split-second decisions at hedro gaps. Standard approach involved engineers blowing gaps through the earthn walls, tanks providing suppressive fire, then armed NCOs leading infantry through the fatal funnels where every opening was presited by German machine guns. Charlie Feebach of the 24th Infantry Division explained the Thompson’s tactical niche.
He noted that he liked the Thompson and found it a good combat weapon. A lot of the fighting they did was at close range, and the Tommy gun was the ideal weapon for that. Sometimes the enemy were right on them and would pop up out of a hole. The Tommy gun was excellent for close range because you did not have to be a particularly accurate shot.
At Point Duok on D-Day, First Sergeant Leonard Lamel of the Second Rangers used his Thompson in an improvised role. After destroying two German 155mm guns with thermite grenades, he wrapped his field jacket around the Thompson’s butt and used it to smash the sights of five more artillery pieces. The weapon’s rugged construction matched the desperate resourcefulness of the men who carried it.
The hedro fighting continued for weeks after D-Day. Each field became a separate battle. Each gap in the ancient earthworks became a potential death trap. The terrain negated American advantages in armor and artillery. Tanks could not see targets through the dense vegetation. Artillery observers could not identify enemy positions. The fighting devolved into small unit actions where firepower at close range determined survival.
In this environment, the Thompson proved its worth repeatedly. Patrol leaders moving through gaps needed weapons that could deliver immediate overwhelming fire. A rifleman with an M1 Garand could fire eight rounds before reloading. A Thompson gunner could empty a 30 round magazine in under 3 seconds. When German defenders revealed their positions, that concentrated firepower meant the difference between overrunning a position and being pinned down in a killing zone.
The weight that soldiers complained about during long marches became an advantage in sustained firefights. The Thompson’s mass absorbed recoil, keeping the muzzle on target during automatic fire. Lighter weapons climbed during bursts, spraying rounds above the intended target. The Thompson stayed level. British forces had their own relationship with the Thompson.
When General Thompson first demonstrated his weapon at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield on June 30th, 1921, British officers dismissed it as that tatty American gangster gun. 19 years later, with German invasion appearing imminent, Britain desperately ordered Thompsons at $225 a piece.
Britain placed large early orders through lend lease, but deliveries were uneven. Shipping losses to Ubot, and competing priorities shaped who received weapons first. The Thompson became standard issue for elite commando units, who preferred them by far to the Sten despite the Sten’s ready availability and dramatically lower cost.
Sergeant Thomas Dales of number two commando recalled receiving the new weapon in April or May 1941. They had all seen them at the pictures of course, Al Capone and the rest. So they went around talking like Jimmy Kagny for a while. In fact, the weapons were very wellmade. Beautiful really, but they were heavy things. Thompson armed commandos participated in Operation Chariot at St.
Nazair in March 1942, where protection teams defended demolition specialists destroying the only Atlantic dry dock capable of servicing the battleship Turpetss. One veteran recalled gathering all the Tommy magazines he could carry during the fighting retreat. The raid succeeded in disabling the dry dock for the remainder of the war, though at tremendous cost in commando casualties.
Earlier in December 1941, commandos armed with Thompsons participated in operation archery at Vagso, Norway. Iconic photographs from that raid show British soldiers carrying Thompsons through Norwegian snow during the combined arms assault that destroyed fish oil facilities critical to German explosives production.
The Thompson’s reliability and extreme cold proved crucial. Lubricants thickened in Norwegian temperatures, but the Thompson’s relatively simple action continued functioning. David Sterling’s special air service used Thompsons throughout their desert airfield raids in North Africa. Though Vicar’s K machine guns mounted on jeeps provided the primary firepower that destroyed 37 German aircraft at Sidihan airfield in July 1942.
Thompson served as personal weapons during close quarters fighting around hangers and fuel dumps. The Sten became priority issue for all European theater commonwealth troops according to war office documentation with the exception of the commando brigades who retained their Thompsons. The narrative of Germans fearing the Thompson requires careful qualification.
Evidence comes primarily from American sources rather than extensive German documentation. The Germans cataloged captured Thompsons in their FMGA foreign device documentation as MP760 with suffix letters indicating country of capture. This systematic categorization indicates professional military assessment rather than irrational fear.
Captured Thompsons were designated for local use only, limited primarily by45 caliber ammunition availability. What the evidence does support is that Germans recognized the Thompson from pre-war Hollywood gangster films. The45 caliber ammunition caused more severe wounds than 9 mm at close range. Thompson inflicted casualties in field hospitals showed devastating injuries.
German soldiers respected effective enemy weapons. What the evidence does not support is any specific German military documents expressing systematic terror of the Thompson. No sound recognition protocols for identifying Thompsons by their distinctive report have been found. No Thompson specific tactical countermeasures were developed.
German soldiers had their own effective submachine gun, the MP40, with similar close quarters capabilities. The truth likely lies between pure myth and genuine fear. German soldiers respected the Thompson’s formidable close quarters arament, particularly when wielded by aggressive American paratroopers, but their primary concern centered on American artillery superiority, air dominance, and the M1 Grand semi-automatic capability rather than any single weapon.
Comparing the Thompson to its contemporaries reveals both strengths and limitations. Against the German MP40, the Thompson delivered superior stopping power with its heavier ammunition, but sacrificed range and portability. The MP40 weighed approximately 4.3 kg compared to the Thompson’s 4.7 kg. Its 9 mm ammunition traveled faster at 400 m/s, extending effective range.
Cartage addressed this comparison directly. He noted that they found the MP40 to be a good gun and often used captured examples against the Germans. The problem was that one of their men hit with an MP 40 would go back to the aid station and rejoin the line in half an hour. A man hit with a Thompson, whether killed or not, went nowhere.
However, weight mattered significantly in mobile warfare. Some veterans claimed that paratroopers from Salono to Naples ditched their Thompsons whenever they could acquire lighter German submachine guns. Whether this happened often is debated by historians, but the complaints about weight were universal.
Against the British Sten, the comparison was even starker. The Sten cost approximately £210 shillings, roughly $10, versus the Thompson’s $45 to $200 depending on variant. Britain could produce 15 to 20 Steen for each Thompson. The Sten could be temperamental and in the wrong hands, unsafe. It earned nicknames like stench gun and plumbers’s nightmare due to its crude construction and documented reliability problems.
Yet, commandos universally preferred the Thompson despite this disparity. As one parachute regiment veteran explained, when you went into a village or went into a house, whatever it was, it was a reliable weapon. The Thompson served far beyond the Second World War. During the Korean War, American troops encountered Chinese Communist forces armed with captured or domestically produced Thompsons during night assaults.
The distinctive sound of the Thompson, already familiar from training, now came from enemy positions. In Vietnam, South Vietnamese forces used Thompsons before M16 introduction. United States Navy personnel employed them for shipboard defense well into the 1960s. The FBI retained Thompsons until the early 1970s when they were declared obsolete and ordered destroyed.
Many instead found their way into police museum collections across the United States. Yugoslavia received 34,000 M1 variants in the 1950s as part of Cold War military assistance, some appearing in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. As recently as 2011, Ukrainian Ministry of Defense warehouses reportedly contained between 10 and 20,000 Thompsons in storage.
Today, original transferable Thompsons command extraordinary collector prices. Pristine Colt model 1921s with provenence sell for $50,000 to $120,000. The fixed supply ensures values continue climbing. The Thompson appears in over 1,000 films and television shows from Little Caesar in 1931 through Saving Private Ryan and beyond.
General John Thompson died on June 21st, 1940, just months before the massive wartime orders vindicated his life’s work. He never saw his trench broom fulfill its intended purpose, arriving 22 years late to the war it was designed for. But when American paratroopers dropped into Normandy’s hedros, they carried exactly what Thompson had envisioned three decades earlier.
The Thompson submachine gun was not the most accurate weapon in the American arsenal. It was not the lightest. It was not the cheapest. But in the killing grounds of the Norman bokeage, where combat occurred at distances measured in meters rather than hundreds of meters, none of that mattered. What mattered was stopping power. What mattered was reliability.
What mattered was the ability to end a fight before it began. Carl Cartage summarized it best. By experience, they felt that a man with a 9mm submachine gun was effectively unarmed. In the hedge of Normandy, that assessment proved itself day after bloody day. The gangster gun had become a solders’s weapon, and German officers learned to fear every hedro gap where an American sergeant might be waiting with that distinctive silhouette in his hands.
The Thompson submachine gun began as a failed military project. It became a symbol of criminal excess. Then, it became a symbol of Allied victory. Few weapons in history have traveled such a strange path. Fewer still have earned such lasting recognition. The trench broom arrived 22 years late for the war it was designed to fight.
But when it finally saw combat, it proved that General Thompson had been right all along.
