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.
Chapter 39
Hidden Death: Land Mines
Land mines have been around for a long time, and it’s only in the last few years that they have aroused public concern. A few land mines were used in the American Civil War, although they seem to have been mostly improvised devices — usually an artillery shell with a percussion cap arrangement where the time fuse would have gone. The public took a dim view of these “land torpedoes,” calling them, as they did submarines, “infernal devices.” The Turks used land mines on the beaches at Gallipoli, but they were not common on most of the major battle fronts. Barbed wire and the machine guns provided a pretty complete defensive system. Land mines would just have complicated things when it was time to advance.
It was the appearance of the tank that caused a quantum jump in land mine warfare. The Achilles’ heel of the lumbering monsters was their caterpillar treads.