A Machine Gun for Every Man: Submachine Guns and Assault Rifles

^{West Point Museum}

^{German machinenpistole 44 – really an assault rifle, rather than a submachine gun, because it uses a rifle cartridge. The designation was later changed to sturmgewehr, assault rifle.}

The landings of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the other paratroop outfits in Normandy on D day were nothing like what happened on maneuvers. Each landing was mass confusion – almost chaos. The troops landed at night, a pitch‑black night, scattered over a strange countryside. Some spent hours trying find another paratrooper. Many were unable to join all their regular units for quite a while.

Staff Sergeant Harrison Summers was at least able to join his battalion, the first battalion of the 502nd Regiment. Summers’s battalion commander, desperately short of men, gave the sergeant 15 strangers and told him to capture a German coast artillery barracks. Summers took his Thompson submachine gun, a basic load of ammunition, and the 15 strangers. Because the other men didn’t know him and didn’t trust him, Summers knew he’d have to lead them, not just tell them what to do.

The “barracks” was actually a number of buildings, strung out over almost half a mile. Summers ran up to the first building, kicked in the door, and mowed down four of the defenders with his tommy gun. The rest dashed out the back door. Summers looked around and saw that he was alone. “His” men were hiding in a ditch. He left them there and charged the second building. The Germans there saw him coming and fled. That encouraged one of the 15, a machine gunner, to set up his weapon and fire on the third building, covering Summers’s next charge. The Germans in the third building opened fire on Summers. From somewhere, a lieutenant appeared and told Summers he would join him. The officer, though, was hit as he and Summers reached the door. Summers entered alone and sprayed the room with his submachine gun. He killed six Germans, and the rest fled.

While Summers was catching his breath, a captain appeared and offered to join him on his attack on the next building. They set out, but the captain caught a bullet in his heart. Once again, Summers broke into a building with his tommy gun blazing. He killed six Germans, and the rest surrendered. Summers’s scratch platoon had moved up cautiously, and one of them volunteered to join him on his next attack. The machine gunner followed to give them fire support. Summers and his two companions killed 30 more Germans.

Summers kicked in the door of the next building and found 15 German soldiers eating breakfast, apparently never having noticed all the shooting that had been going on around them. With his tommy gun Summers shot them all down at the table.

Harrison Summers was a man of great courage and initiative. But he could not have accomplished what he did without his submachine gun. The submachine gun (often abbreviated SMG), a small machine gun that fired pistol ammunition, was born in World War I. It achieved maturity in World War II, where it became the most valuable weapon in every army for clearing buildings and urban fighting.

In the Soviet Union’s Red Army, it was as important as the rifle. In a typical Red Army attack, submachine gunners in the first wave laid down a barrage of small arms fire from 200 yards and worked their way forward. Then the tanks, with “tank riders” advanced. Tank riders were soldiers with submachine guns and hand grenades who fired on any enemies they saw. They protected the tanks from antitank guns in the enemy front lines as well as from infantry with antitank grenades and panzerfausts. The panzerfaust was a very small recoilless gun, an ancestor of the Russian RPG‑7 (erroneously called a rocket‑propelled grenade launcher), which fired a shaped‑charge shell considerably larger than its diameter. Tank riders led a life that was short and not at all merry. A single burst of machine gun fire could – and usually did – clear a tank of all its tank riders.

Towards the end of World War II, the submachine gun became obsolescent. The U.S M‑2 carbine, a smaller, lighter, and more powerful automatic, indicated the trend of the future, but it was the German sturmgewehr, or assault rifle that revolutionized infantry small arms and introduced the weapon that would replace both rifle and the submachine gun.

Some authorities say the first submachine gun was the Italian Villar Perosa, a very strange weapon. The Villar Perosa was a pair of tiny machine guns firing the 9 mm Glisenti cartridge, an underpowered version of the 9 mm Luger. It was fired from a bipod or tripod, from a truck mount, and even from the handle bars of bicycles. Each barrel fired at the rate of 1,200 rounds per minute. Each barrel was fed from a separate 25‑round magazine. With that rate of fire, the soldier with a Villar Perosa must have spent a lot of time changing magazines.

The idea of a pistol‑caliber automatic may have reached Germany from the Italian front, or it may have occurred independently to Hugo Schmeisser, who designed a short, heavy automatic weapon for the 9mm Luger cartridge called the Bergmann Musquete or by German troops, the Kugelspritz (bullet squirter).

The Bergmann gun, the MP (for maschinenpistole) 18, was carried by some of the “storm troopers,” who spearheaded Ludendorff’s 1918 offensive. It took the 32‑round drum magazine that had already been developed for the Luger pistol and had a cyclic rate of 400 rounds a minute – much more reasonable than the Vilar Perosa’s 2,400 a minute from both barrels. The German army planned to issue submachine guns to every infantry company officer and NCO

as well as 10 percent of the privates. Each company was to have a submachine gun squad with six SMGs, six gunners, and six ammunition bearers. The six ammunition bearers would push three handcarts loaded with cartridges and magazines. Production of SMGs never reached a point that would allow the Germans to even begin that kind of distribution, however.

Meanwhile, Tulio Marengoni of Italy’s Beretta factory separated the two barrels of the Villar Perosa, made each barrel a weapon for an individual soldier, added some other improvements, and, although the new gun was not ready for World War I, Beretta ended up with the Model 38, one of the best submachine guns of World War II.

In the United States, retired General John T. Thompson conceived the idea of a light automatic weapon that could be used by an individual soldier in the vicious, close‑quarters fighting that characterized trench warfare. Before any news of European developments reached them, Thompson and his employees were working on a hand‑held machine gun firing .45 auto pistol cartridges.

Oscar Payne of the Thompson organization came up with a workable gun. The war ended, though, before Thompson could offer the government his “trench broom.”

The U.S. Army wasn’t interested in Thompson’s “trench broom” when the war ended, and the Allies outlawed all SMGs for the Germans and Austrians except for a few to arm the police. Most Thompsons went to police agencies.

The Coast Guard used them in its campaign against rum runners, and the Marine Corps adopted the gun for its brush‑fire wars in Central America and the Caribbean. Gangsters also used them, but not as many as the gangster movies of the 30s and 40s would have you believe. The Germans couldn’t keep submachine guns, but they turned out several submachine gun designs and sold them around the world. Most of them were chambered for the 9 mm Luger cartridge, which is one reason why that is now the world’s most popular cartridge for military pistols. The Finns produced their own submachine gun, the Suomi, which they considered their most important weapon in the Winter War of 1939–1940 against the Soviet Union. That war also stimulated Soviet interest in the little, pistol‑caliber machine guns.

The American and British armies were among the last to adopt submachine guns on a large scale, but when they did, they came up with two of the most easily mass produced SMGs in history: the U.S. “grease gun,” officially the M 3, and the British Sten gun.

Meanwhile German ordnance specialists were working on the problem of the rifle. They had started before the war. The problem was known to all ordnance men. The infantry rifle was too powerful. It was designed to kill enemy troops at more than 1,000 yards, but you seldom saw an enemy soldier that far away. And given the marksmanship training they had, few of the soldiers in World War II’s mass armies would be able to hit a man at that distance. To get that power, the rifle used ammunition that was at least 50 percent heavier than it needed to be, and which gave the rifle a kick that recruits found disturbing and inhibited their marksmanship.

Most of the rifles in World War II had hand‑operated bolt actions. Only the United States had generally issued a semiautomatic. The German ordnance people dreamed of giving every soldier a fully automatic rifle – or better, a selective fire rifle, capable of either automatic or semiautomatic, as with the best submachine guns. To produce a workable, handheld automatic rifle, the power would have to be greatly reduced in anything of around the weight of a standard infantry rifle. Otherwise the repeated recoil would make the rifle unmanageable.

So the Germans designed a new cartridge. It was the same 8 mm caliber as the standard round, but it had a lighter bullet – 120 grains instead of 198 grains – and a lower velocity: 2,250 feet per second instead of 2564. The cartridge case was shorter and the whole round weighed about half the weight of the standard cartridge, so soldiers could carry more ammunition.

Then, they built a rifle to use the new cartridge. Legend has it (and it’s probably true) that Hitler violently objected to reducing the power of the standard rifle cartridge – it would be unmacho, or whatever the German equivalent is. So ordnance specialists changed the designation of the experimental guns from maschinen karabiner to maschinen pistole. Hitler was not happy with a low‑powered rifle, but he liked a high‑powered submachine gun. Then some of the generals on the Russian front asked for more of those new MP 43s and MP 44s. The Nazi dictator decided that such a successful weapon should have a more macho name. It changed from maschinen pistole to sturmgewehr, or assault rifle. “Assault rifle” is the name now applied to all low‑powered, selective fire (both full automatic and semiautomatic) military rifles. In spite of many American politicians, no semiautomatic‑only rifle is an “assault rifle.”

And the basic personal weapon of soldiers all over the world is now the assault rifle.