The rise of the machine gun made warfare even more deadly, and the value of these weapons were proven on the battlefields of the First World War, when tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides were literally mowed down by powerful guns that could fire hundreds of bullets under a minute. Machine guns, however, were heavy and required a crew to staff. John Taliaferro Thompson, an American army commander, determined to build a portable weapon that could quickly fire a hail of bullets but that could also be carried and operated by one man.
Over several years, Thompson and the company he founded engineered and tested several designs, until they created what became known as the Thompson submachine gun. Also called the Tommy gun, the Thompson featured a revolutionary round cartridge cylinder design that allowed it to fire one hundred bullets under a minute. But by the time the Thompson came on the market, the need for weapons of war had greatly diminished. Saddled with a large inventory of unsold weapons, the company starting cutting corners and was less discriminating in who it sold weapons to. Soon, American gangsters, spurred by Prohibition and the bootlegging business, armed themselves with the Thompson. This led to several mass shootings, which then triggered even more gangster and police purchases.
As the age of the gangster ended, sales for the Thompson guns once again fell, but the Second World War revived the company's fortunes, and the Thompson saw action in Europe and in the Pacific. By that time, however, better weapons had been developed, and the Thompson fell out of favor even before the end of the war. Regardless, the Thompson submachine gun had a profound impact on American criminal history, and became the symbol of a gun-loving society. To this day, a Thompson carried in a violin case remains one of the classical images of the 1930s.
Fans of history and of military weapons will be fascinated by this biography of a deadly weapon misused for a decade.
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