Wednesday, October 24, 2007 Rama: The Mustang, Tommy and Rock and Roll By Karlon N. Rama Stage Five
ABOUT a year or two ago, an enterprising friend of mine asked if I could organize a shooter’s version of show-and-tell to impress an American he wanted to get close to for business.
With the proviso that he’d supply all the ammo, I then called a couple of other gun-owning friends to assemble a collector’s dream—a cache of licensed guns that included pistols, revolvers, bolt-action scoped rifles, some World War 2 weapons, an m16 and, what I’d thought would be the centerpiece, a Chinese clone of the Russian AK47.
Everyone agreed to help and they subsequently brought their guns to the firing range on the set date. They even took turns briefing the American on the guns that lay before him.
The guy, who said he’d never shot a gun before, first fired a few rounds from a nineteen-eleven after getting a run-through on gun safety.
He, as I’d anticipated, then picked up the AK47. Oddly enough, however, he never fired it.
Instead, he put it down and took up a Thompson Sub Machine Gun, which came with a 50-round drum magazine full of .45 cal. cartridges, and had a wild time playing Al Capone with the range’s steel poppers and plates and ignored all the rest.
The Tommy Gun, if not popularized enough by gun flicks then certainly by gangster movies reflecting the “roaring twenties”, is as big a part of American culture as the Mustang and Rock and Roll.
It was developed for use during World War 1 and should have faded into obscurity at the outset because its designer, Brig. Gen. John Tagliaferro Thompson, wasn’t able to finish the concept until the near end of the conflict.
Thompson, who spent most of his military career in firearms design, began earnestly working on the gun in 1914, when he retired from service and took on a job as a consulting engineer with Remington.
His chief problem was finding a breech-locking system that hadn’t already been patented by another firearms company, a search that ultimately led him to a fellow retired serviceman, John Blish, of the US Navy. The two, together with financier Thomas Ryan, then formed the Auto-Ordnance Corp.
But work on the gun stalled because Blish’s system couldn’t work well with existing rifle cartridge design. It only began making headway again when one Oscar Payne joined the company and started experimenting with a pistol cartridge—the .45 cal.
The first prototype, according to writers Ian Hogg and John Batchelor, came out in 1918 and was a complete failure. It came with two pistol grips—one at the fore and one aft—and was belt-fed. It didn’t have a trigger guard or a butt stock.
The second prototype appeared a year later and was called the annihilator. It still came with two pistol grips but was now loaded through a box magazine. It had a barrel hood with air holes bored into them. It still didn’t have a butt stock.
A third prototype appeared in the same year with a tapered and finned barrel—this version was closest to the end product.
The people at Auto-Ordnance initially marketed their finished product as the “Trench Broom”, giving the impression of some sort of handheld machine gun.
But since the war was closing – their first production actually arrived too late for the front lines – marketing took a different turn and, in 1921, the words Thompson “Sub Machine Gun” came into public consciousness.
Official military recognition came in 1927. The US Marine Corps christened it the M1928 and used it in oversees operations in China and South America. Production of the gun was bolstered at the outbreak of the Second World War, when Britain and France made massive orders.
By the end of 1940, a total of 318,000 units had been manufactured for military use.
Other models were made with certain modifications. The army needed cheaper ones that could be built quicker. But the image of the Thompson stayed the same —large, heavy and loud. Just the way Joes like them.
