American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms

by Chris Kyle

  7

  THE THOMPSON SUBMACHINE GUN

  “The Thompson [is] the deadliest weapon, pound for pound, ever devised by man.”

  —Time, June 26, 1939

  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.

  Al Capone—nicknamed “Scarface”—made national headlines and inspired numerous films, such as this 1932 Howard Hughes production.

  United Artists Corporation (bottom)

  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.

  A six-barreled Gatling gun.

  Library of Congress

  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 fir
e.” 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.

  A rare sight: U.S. troops operating a Maxim machine gun. Texas, 1911.

  Library of Congress

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.

  General John T. Thompson and his legendary gun.

  Library of Congress (top)

  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.