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  In truth, the tommy gun was rarely used even by the mob in Chicago. It was unnecessarily destructive, would bring unneeded attention, and was, even for the mob, rather expensive. The gun could cost up to $2,000 on the black market. Although the Chicago gangland wars are embedded in the nation’s consciousness, it was the freelance violence of the tommy gun–wielding gangs that roamed the Midwest and elsewhere that had a far broader impact on law enforcement, which was especially shocked by the contemporary linking of motorized criminality with the machine gun.

  It was men like James “Killer” Cunniffe, who in 1926 robbed a postal office truck in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the middle of the day, killing two and escaping with the impressive sum of $161,000, who really scared Americans.9 The robbery was a national story, and experts quickly concluded that Cunniffe could never have pulled off such a daring criminal act without a tommy gun in his hands. “Killer” never had the chance to enjoy his bounty, as he was murdered in an argument with a gangland associate named William “Ice Wagon” Crowley. But how long before other small-time Depression-era criminals would follow his lead? newspapers wondered. The answer was not long at all.

  In 1932, a gunman named Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll allegedly (and accidentally) shot four young children with a tommy gun, killing one five-year-old, in a failed kidnapping attempt in Manhattan. On October 14, 1933, the swaggering outlaw John Dillinger and his gang walked into the police headquarters of the small Indiana town of Auburn, locked up the officer on duty, and swiped all the department weapons, which included a Thompson submachine gun. The gang went on to murder three policemen using Thompsons in the coming year. The attractive Bonnie Parker (who, though present, rarely actively participated in criminality despite legend) and Clyde Barrow took it further, raiding National Guard armories across the Midwest, grabbing not only tommy guns but even a Browning automatic rifle. When thirteen officers in armored cars and armed with Thompson machine guns surrounded the gang near Kansas City, Missouri, they were outgunned by the Barrow gang’s BAR. Since the guns could penetrate trees and cars, the scene resembled a minor military engagement.

  Pretty Boy Floyd was particularly fond of the submachine gun, removing the front grip and butt stock and carrying it as a pistol. Baby Face Nelson died in a shoot-out involving tommy guns that claimed the lives of two FBI agents. In July 1933, “Machine Gun” Kelly (his real name was George Kelly Barnes) and his gang busted into the Oklahoma City mansion of oil tycoon Charles Urschel in a kidnapping plot. Kelly died in Leavenworth on his fifty-ninth birthday, but most public enemies met more gruesome fates.

  To combat the growing violence, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover soon approved the use of Thompson submachine guns. Melvin Purvis, head of the Chicago office, insisted that every officer in his department qualify in the gun. Hoover tapped top FBI agents, national police department heads, and other experts to discuss how to combat the rising criminal behavior. In a 1934 “Memorandum for the Director,” Hoover’s Executive Committee considered arms that should be bought and “obtained for all purposes and should be supplied in appropriate quantities to all field offices . . .”10 One of the guns was the Thompson submachine gun.

  Marcellus Thompson’s pitch to police departments had been simple. His gun was so formidable that criminals would be awed and unwilling to face the odds. It would, he argued, be the only way to effectively stop the rise of motorized criminality. The car might have been invented in Europe in the 1800s, but by the 1920s Henry Ford and the Big Three had innovated the mass-production techniques first used by gunmakers in the last century. By 1913 the United States produced some 485,000 of the world’s total of 606,124 motor vehicles.11 Everything had gotten faster, and that included criminality.

  In 1922, Thompson put on an exhibition for police departments in Tenafly, New Jersey (outside New York City), in which tommy guns destroyed cars to demonstrate the stopping power of his gun. There was, of course, the small matter of practicality. Would police organizations now be equipped with military-grade weapons? Using them against civilians would undermine norms that had existed for hundreds of years. This debate resumed later. For now, a mix of genuine criminal violence and a good dose of scaremongering gave police the justification to use the gun. As we’ll see later on, President Roosevelt claimed in 1934 that he was pushing the first of his two gun control bills because “Federal men are constantly facing machine-gun fire in the pursuit of gangsters.”12

  Thompson would see some success, although not in the way he had hoped. Law enforcement agencies armed themselves with the Thompson, which Time magazine in 1939 described as “the deadliest weapon, pound for pound, ever devised by man.” Murder rates fell to historic lows by the early 1940s. By then the 1930s spasm of violence had begun to change the way many Americans thought about guns. By 1935, Auto-Ordnance was still in possession of around 4,000 of the initial order of 15,000 the United States Army had ordered at the end of World War I. Thompson’s company was in near bankruptcy, its gun synonymous with crime. Thompson wrote, “I want to pay more attention now to saving human life than destroying it. May the deadly [Thompson submachine gun] only ‘speak’ for God and Country. It has worried me that the gun has been so stolen by evil men & used for purposes outside our motto, ‘On the side of law and order.’ ”13

  It wasn’t until November 1939, when Great Britain was already at war with Germany, that large orders for the gun saved the company from bankruptcy and gangsters. The company opened a new factory in Connecticut Valley but had trouble keeping up with orders, licensing the gun to other manufacturers. The British became big believers in the tommy gun. Winston Churchill was famously photographed in a pinstriped suit and smoking a cigar while holding a short-barreled Thompson submachine gun during an inspection of invasion defenses near Hartlepool in July 1940. The Americans, too, noticed how modernization had made warfare kinetic. By this time the Germans had their own submachine guns made by Maschinenpistole. Only weeks after John Thompson passed away in 1940—his son Marcellus had died the year before from complications of a stroke—the U.S. government placed the largest orders on record for the tommy gun.

  By 1942 the company had a new design that jettisoned the needlessly complex and expensive Blish lock, dropping the price from around $200 a gun to around $44. Nearly 2 million of these models were produced. The first American paratroopers were given Thompsons—and the gun went on to be used in nearly all American operations and by all services. Although the company continued to make drum magazines with 100 rounds, more soldiers carried 20-round rectangular magazines that were easy to load and carry. Unlike the criminals of the 1930s, Allied troops learned that controlled bursts of three shots were more effective than spraying entire areas with bullets. However, these soldiers would soon find themselves part of the world’s largest and most powerful army. They would need guns to suit their new status.

  18

  GREAT ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY

  “In war, you win or lose, live or die—and the difference is just an eyelash.”1

  —Douglas MacArthur

  You Can’t Afford to Miss Either!

  The young man had been infatuated with guns his entire life. By the time the First World War had broken out in Europe, the soft-spoken eighteen-year-old John Cantius Garand found himself toiling away on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a micrometer plant. And when he wasn’t reading about the newest developments in firearm technology, he was spending his spare time in the popular Coney Island and Times Square shooting booths. “One Saturday, when he was finding out about rifles by using Coney Island as a laboratory, he shot at every target there. By nightfall, he had set up an all-time high for himself, not only in score but in expense as well,” one later profile of Garand would remark. “He had spent $100 at the galleries in a single day!”2

  Garand was born on New Year’s Day, 1888, to a farmer in the small town of Saint-Rémi, Québec, the seventh of eleven children. The family settled in Connecticut in 1898. Another autodidact, Garand quit his formal edu
cation at the age of eleven to begin working in a textile mill, where he learned everything there was about the machines that buzzed on the floor he was tasked to sweep. When he was fourteen, Garand invented a new jackscrew and by seventeen he was a sought-after toolmaker working in Rhode Island before ending up in a successful if tedious manufacturing job in downtown New York.

  It was during this time that the engineer ran across a newspaper account of John Browning’s development of machine guns. Apparently, to the consternation of some in the military brass, one of Browning’s new guns had malfunctioned at a high rate. Although Garand could only deduce the specific technical problems in play, the article jolted the hobbyist’s mind. He sat down in his apartment that day and began designing a new automatic-firing lock to fix the problem and mailed his proposal to the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance.

  A few months later, the impressed brass invited the unknown engineer to a conference in Washington. No doubt surprised by this slender figure who looked to still be a teenager, the Navy soon hired Garand to consult the government on small arms. By 1919, Garand, who would gain U.S. citizenship in 1920, was offered a job at the Springfield Armory, which remained his professional home until retirement in 1953. Lacking the flare or entrepreneurial instincts of America’s most well-known gunmakers, the dutiful civil service employee worked his way up to become chief ordnance designer and de facto head of the government armory over his first decade in Springfield. It was there that he created the gun that became the standard service rifle of the U.S. military during World War II.3

  During his early years at Springfield, Garand was one of the few champions of a military-grade semiautomatic rifle. Until the mid-1930s, it was generally assumed that an automatic rifle could be utilized only as a complementary weapon on the battlefield. Moreover, most of the government’s gunmakers thought it unrealistic to expect that such a gun could fire the potent ammunition the high command demanded.

  At first it seemed that they might be right. Tests did not initially go well for Garand’s new gun, although his luck began to change in 1932 when Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur insisted that any new standard rifle had to be a U.S. standard .30-caliber to match the ammunition used in the Browning automatic rifle and the Springfield. As luck would have it, Garand’s competitors were working with different ammunition.

  Garand spent the next decade perfecting his clip-fed, gas-operated semiautomatic rifle. The idea, patented in 1934, allowed a soldier with basic training to fire the gun at least three times faster than the .30-caliber bolt-action Springfield standard rifle the infantry had carried for over three decades. By the mid-1930s the Garand was easily outperforming its main competitor, the Pedersen rifle, in field tests, both because of its simplicity and its accuracy. “A man who has never seen the rifle can be taught its stripping and assembling within a few minutes,” one ordnance tester concluded.4 By the end of that year, plans were in place to begin manufacturing them. In January 1936, the Army officially adopted the rifle, and was soon followed by the Navy and Marines.

  By the time the Army made the next switch to the M14 in 1957, it had handed out nearly 6 million M1 Garands.

  Garand was surely listening to the radio on December 29, 1940, when President Franklin Roosevelt, during one of his most famous fireside chats, implored the American people to aid in the armament of Allied forces battling the Nazis in Europe. During his radio address, the president asked the nation to transform itself into “the great arsenal of democracy.” The United States was, in effect, already entangled in the immense conflict against fascism. For now, it was not a matter of supplying combatants but rather the equipment to arm those who were already fighting, the president said. “The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting,” Roosevelt explained. “They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security.”

  Roosevelt went on to mention “guns” three more times in his short talk with the American people. Within a few months Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, allowing the United States to send implements of war to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” The most well-known were the then-fraught British, but others like the Soviet Union and China also benefited greatly before it was over. The United States ended up sending $50 billion worth of material to thirty-five nations in the war effort. America, in fact, has never stopped offering foreign aid to this day.

  The act was heavily debated at the time. Noninterventionists argued that the change in policy would almost surely pull the United States into the fighting. Others contended that a nation that was itself in the process of ramping up its military might could not afford to worry about producing for others. On the industrial front, critics had little to concern themselves about. The rapid and total mobilization of the manufacturing sector of the United States was an extraordinary act of national muscle flexing. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed—and America has never relinquished its place as the world’s military leader.

  To put this effort in some perspective, consider that the United States had virtually no war industry in 1939 and only 334,473 men serving in the armed forces. The general staff had concluded in a 1936 report that the nation would struggle to supply “airplanes, tanks, combat cars, scout cars, antiaircraft guns, searchlights, antiaircraft fire control equipment, [and] .50 caliber machine guns” for an army of even 100,000 men.5 Yet by the middle of the war, the Willow Run plant built by Ford in Michigan was pumping out one B-24 heavy bomber per hour. By the time the war ended, more than 13 million of Garand’s inventions would be produced.

  When it came to small arms, thousands of men and women made this mass armament possible, but one man’s ideas were its driving force. By the end of the war, Garand’s gun, the M1, had been shot by more Americans than any other firearm in history. Almost as important as the gun’s durability and accuracy were the speed and precision with which it could be manufactured. One of the first jobs Garand tackled when he was hired by the government was to retool the Springfield plant, which, at the time he arrived in the late 1910s, had a slew of antiquated machines, some dating back to the Civil War era.6 By the end of 1937, Garand had the armory producing ten of his guns a day. By 1939, workers were finishing one hundred per day. By the start of 1941, Springfield was pumping out six hundred every day. By the end of the war, it could make 1,000 a day. Even that would not be enough. The government needed so many, it licensed work out to companies like Winchester, which made half a million M1s during the war. As efficiency and manufacturing increased, the price per gun began to drop precipitously, from over $200 a gun to $26.7

  What made the Garand special? During the First World War the bolt-action rifle was standard in nearly every nation, including the United States. After every shot, a soldier had to pull back the bolt handle, unlock the breech, and eject the shell casing. The shooter then loaded a new round or cartridge into the breech and closed the bolt. The Garand was a semiautomatic—a term, despite much confusion in the modern gun debate, that merely tells us that every time a shooter pulled the trigger, the gun reloaded itself. It allowed the American soldier to fire eight shots as fast as he was able to pull the trigger eight times.

  As we’ve seen, the concept of semiautomatic guns was not new. Others, including the French, who had created the semiautomatic Fusil Automatique Modèle 1917 rifle, already utilized the technology on the battlefield. By the start of the Second World War, the British, the Russians, and the Germans had all experimented with semiautomatic rifles. None, however, except the Americans had the technical or production capability to make the semiautomatic rifle standard for all their infantry during the war.

  The decision to embrace the sturdy M1 gave the U.S. soldier a distinct advantage over his enemies in firing capacity. In truth, the M1 was somewhat unwieldy to carry, weighing just under ten pounds, and was around forty-three
inches long. But it could shoot with precision and tremendous force. The MI’s magazine allowed it to be reloaded quicker than any rifle used by enemy infantrymen during the Second World War. The gun was fed by an “en bloc clip”—a clip holding all the rounds together—allowing the shooter to insert the cartridge into a magazine or the gun. It used a .30-06 cartridge (known to millions of soldiers and hunters as the “30 aught 6”). The ammunition had become standard for the United States Army in 1906. The “30” signified the caliber and the “06” the year it was introduced. The bottleneck cartridge made it powerful despite its modest caliber. One of the first military cartridges to use the more powerful smokeless powder to propel a pointed bullet at higher velocities, the Americans would use the .30-06 into the 1980s in a multitude of guns, including all of Browning’s World War I inventions.

  The only gun that rivaled the M1 Garand’s popularity was the M1 carbine. American military leaders wanted another gun that would be more substantial than a pistol but not quite as cumbersome as the M1 Garand. So a team of Springfield engineers came up with a lighter gun, partially based on Garand’s design, to support troops who didn’t need a full-sized rifle or were inhibited by one. Machine gunners, paratroopers, and artillery teams would all carry them. The carbine, which sometimes featured a pistol grip and folding metal stock, was adopted in May 1942 for airborne troops. It shot smaller .30-caliber ammunition and remained standard issue into the Vietnam War.

  Soon the loud pinging noise that the M1’s clip made when striking the back of the receiver would be recognized by both Americans and their enemies (and any kid playing Call of Duty on a video game console). Stories about the gun’s effectiveness soon filtered home as soldiers began idealizing their M1s. “I believe in the force of a hand grenade, the power of artillery, the accuracy of a Garand,” remarked Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated soldiers of the war. John R. McKinney, a private who won the Medal of Honor for his bravery in the Battle of Luzon, sang the praises of the Garand rifle he had used to storm a machine-gun nest held by ten Japanese troops—seven of whom he killed shooting at close range, three more whom he fought off using his heavy rifle as a bat. “In my opinion,” General Patton wrote in a letter to the Springfield Armory at the end of the war, “the M1 rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised.”