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| Thompson Submachine Gun & Tommygun Jan Hyrman One of the most famous of the Allied weapons, the Thompson submachine gun, was also used by the Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade Group. The relatively heavy, luxuriously made, carefully machined gun was very reliable. The U.S. and the British armies adopted the original design, which - as the use of the gun soon proved - had to be changed to make the gun lighter and easier to produce. |
| Already in 1940, the British soldiers found out that the 50-round drum magazine is quite impractical as the .45 cartriges moved back and forth in the magazine, making a noise in the least convenient moment, so the drum was abandoned and the army began to use a box magazine. Later, further changes were made by the producers themselves to speed up production. The mechanism of the gun was simplified, the characteristic fore-end pistol grip was replaced by a wooden stock and the $209 M1928A1 became $45 M1 submachine gun in 1942. Still, the gun was heavy and large, but the reliability of the weapon was so |
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| outstanding that soldiers often refused to part with it as long as there was ammunition. Its virtues were so great that it became a part of the badge of the British Combined Operations Command. |
| The original gun, with a large, 50-round drum magazine, was designed by Auto-Ordnance Company team led by General John T. Thompson, whose idea was to make a "trench broom" for use during World War I. However, the war ended and the gun never saw active military service until the Second World War. In November 1939, the British and the French ordered a large number of these submachine guns and the U.S. Army soon followed their example. Until the end of WWII, 1,383,043 weapons were produced by Auto-Ordnance, Colt and Savage Arms Corporation; the latter two made Tommyguns under license. |
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| The picture comes from an English-Czech and Czech-English Dictionary published by the Cs. govt.-in-exile. |