Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy
Auction House where we are continuing with our
look into the history and the
development of the Thompson submachine gun.
And today we're going to be taking a look at
Savage production guns and the 1928A1.
So, to put ourselves in the proper perspective: it is currently 1928.
And there are a couple of major changes that are going to be happening here for Auto Ordnance.
One is that General John Thompson retires, steps back from the business and is no longer involved.
And his personal influence had been a major impact on the company,
so what he said kind of went.
Well, with him gone, things start to get a little bit looser.
And right about the same time Thomas Fortune Ryan dies.
Now Thomas Ryan had been the financier for Auto Ordnance right from the beginning.
You know, it's not cheap to contract Colt to make you 15,000 very nice guns,
and that money largely came from Ryan.
Well, they've been having trouble selling these guns, and Ryan owns a big stake in the company.
The company is heavily in debt to Ryan, so when he passes away in, I believe, 1929,
his estate pretty much immediately wants to liquidate their
interest in the company, which means selling the whole company.
Now the other investors, the minority investors in ... Auto Ordnance,
were able to prevent this for about 10 years.
And that's 10 years where they managed to sell about 5,000 more guns.
It's really selling quite slowly, this is not a successful business.
They've made a military gun, and they're trying to sell it in a peacetime market.
And ... they're getting a few, police are buying some, individuals are buying a very small number.
At any rate, by 1939 this comes to a head,
and the Ryan estate is finally able to force the sale of the company.
And the guy who ... arranges to buy the company is a guy by the name of Russell Maguire.
And he is not popular with a lot of the minority shareholders.
A lot of the shareholders in this company are people who are very much attached to the company,
they've been in it from the very beginning, and they think they see the potential in the gun,
and the quality, and they don't want to see the company destroyed.
And Maguire has the reputation of being what they'd call a corporate raider.
Certainly the same sort of person that still exists today.
His modus operandi was to find failing companies, buy them up, and then split up the company.
And write off what debts could be written off, sell whatever assets were available,
squeeze all the remaining value out of the company, and then walk away leaving it just an empty husk.
And a lot of the shareholders didn't want to see that happen to Auto Ordnance.
And they were in luck, well sort of, if you can consider it lucky,
because it's 1939 and World War Two is starting.
And all of a sudden now there's starting to be some significant demand for military submachine guns.
And within just a couple of months of acquiring the company
Maguire would get a contract with Savage to ... restart production of Thompsons.
He actually tried to get Colt to do this first,
but Colt was busy with other firearms manufacturing work,
and they didn't want to take on the project.
But, as part of the terms of the original manufacturing contract with Colt,
Auto Ordnance owned all of the manufacturing tools that had been used,
that had been developed by Colt for the production.
Those, at the end of that original production run, became the property of Auto Ordnance.
So when they got Savage to agree to a production contract,
they were able to provide Savage with ... basically a complete set of production tooling,
which allowed Savage to tool up and start making the guns very quickly.
And they signed a contract in December of ... 1939,
and by April of 1940 the first guns were actually coming off the line and being delivered.
So these first contracts would go one of them to France for, I think, 3,750 Thompsons.
France was of course very desperately trying to put some of its own guns
into production before Germany invaded, before the war with Germany really heated up.
And so they decided to spend some cash money and buy some available guns from the US.
Same thing basically would be true for the British.
Great Britain would order hundreds of thousands of Thompson guns starting in 1940.
And so there were some contracts for ... guns going to Britain, and as this began
the gun that they were producing was basically identical to the 1928 pattern gun
that, well, dated all the way back to 1928.
It had the fancy Lyman rear sight, it had a finned barrel,
it had that vertical, fancy, distinctive looking vertical front grip, it had a Cutts Compensator.
Those are the sorts of guns that went to Britain, and that went to France,
and were available for commercial sale early on, like before the US entered the war.
But that would change,
because as the war heated up, major, huge, US military orders started coming in.
And ... Auto Ordnance and Savage
would have to make some compromises to be able to keep up with production.
So, we have two different patterns here,
and there are a couple of different varieties of what came to be designated the 1928A1.
We're going to take a look at a bunch of those, but I want to point out a couple of things first.
Savage would do the bulk of the production of these guns during World War Two.
However, Auto Ordnance did reinvest some of its profits back into the company,
and they actually bought up an old abandoned, or defunct,
brake lining factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
And they turned it into a production facility of their own.
And Auto Ordnance started producing receivers and trigger frames for their own Thompson gun.
So this was the first time since World War One
that Auto Ordnance actually had its own manufacturing facility.
And they would produce about a quarter of the guns made during World War Two themselves.
So, they'd produce the receivers, they subcontracted out most of the other parts,
but then did the assembly themselves.
So with these ... basically call them World War Two production guns, the 28s and 28A1s,
you'll find both Savage production guns and Auto Ordnance production guns.
So, with that in mind, let's go ahead and take a closer look at these two,
and go through what changes were made over the course of this production.
Let's start with markings ... although actually even before that, let's take a look at the finish here.
Because this is not the same high-gloss blue finish that Colt put on the 1921 guns.
Well, there was actually a change in the standard
of finish of the guns when Savage took over production.
And they now, instead of being blued, they used a finish called Du-Lite,
which, when it was applied to a sandblasted surface like these receivers,
it came out kind of a flat grey like you see here.
This one's got a little bit of wear on it as well.
So these don't have sort of the lustre of the pre-war guns,
and that makes sense, they're trying to make them in much greater quantity now.
So that aside, we have the general nomenclature here.
Thompson Submachine Gun, by the way it is John Thompson himself who coined that name.
"Submachine gun" was a creation of Auto Ordnance and John Thompson as a way to
describe this new handheld, pistol calibre, well, submachine gun.
It's a term that absolutely took hold, and we still use it to this very day.
Which also, by the way, explains why it's not used in some European countries,
where they prefer terms that basically translate into "machine pistol", when translated literally.
Anyway.
Our designation here is they took a Model of [1928], they added an "A1", and they added a "US".
That "US" was actually added in 1941 because of the Lend-Lease Act.
All guns that were being shipped out for Lend-Lease, sent to other countries,
were required to be marked "US".
And so they added a US to the designation ... for all of the Thompsons
because the Lend-Lease guns were taken out of the regular ordinary production line.
Now, we also have a serial number here, and you'll see this is number S-472230.
This is the only way to determine guns that were made by Savage,
as opposed to guns that were made in Bridgeport by Auto Ordnance.
Savage was not allowed by the contract to put their full name anywhere on the guns,
so all they got was an "S" prefix serial number.
So this particular one is a Savage production gun.
As I said, they weren't allowed to put their own name on it,
the guns were all marked with Auto Ordnance's name, as you see right here.
And there's still some patent information on the back of the receiver.
For comparison's sake, here is an Auto Ordnance production gun.
Note that it is "A.O.", Auto Ordnance, and serial number 150,000 and change.
There are some changes that were made to this,
which I believe are the result of police use after the war.
... It was 1928A1 over stamped "AC", and an "X" added after the serial number,
which, ... if I'm not completely incorrect, indicates a sale to a police department.
One thing I should point out that I didn't mention earlier in this series,
all of the guns are marked "A", so 21A, 28A.
And the reason for this, ... originally
they thought they were going to do two different standards of the gun.
A basic level which would be the "A" model, and a superior model which would have been marked "S".
Just for a fancier finish, fancier wood, that sort of thing.
Well, they never ended up producing the fancy versions, they only made the standard guns,
and thus they all ended up being "A" models.
Then the "C" indicates whether or not the gun was sold with a Cutts Compensator.
So, that's why you'll have 21A, 21AC, 28A ... 28AC,
and then the "28A1" is a military designation instead.
I should also point out we're not going to take one of these apart
because the internals are exactly the same as the previous video,
as the pre-war 1928 pattern guns.
They have the same 600 round per minute rate of fire.
If you'd like to see the internals, I would recommend that you go ahead and take a look at
the previous video in this sequence, so there will be a link to that at the end of this one.
Now the early 28A1s made for the US military largely followed the standard 1928 pattern.
These early ones had a Lyman rear sight (this is a pre-war 28 here with a nice blued finish),
but the early 28A1s maintained this Lyman sight.
What they did was replace the front grip, and we'll touch on that in a moment.
About midway through production they started changing features over
to make the guns cheaper and simpler, and faster and easier to make.
And one of the big changes they made was the adoption of this basically L-bracket style of sight.
That was adopted in December of 1941. It has a big aperture here for 100 yards,
and it has a little tiny, almost unusable, notch on the top for 250 yards.
And that replaced this sight that was adjustable out to 500.
Surprisingly, the Cutts Compensator actually stayed on the A1 for a remarkable amount of time.
In fact I believe all of the Auto Ordnance guns maintained it,
and Savage kept it on there for a while as well.
As for the front grip, ... for the US military guns almost all of them replaced this vertical grip
with a much simpler horizontal grip, like you see here.
Now the British and French contract guns had the vertical grip, as did early commercials.
But almost all the [US] military ones will have that horizontal grip.
One of the other changes made early on was to replace this milled ejector plate.
That goes through into the action, and holds the ejector right there.
They replaced that milled one with a simpler to produce stamped version of the same thing.
So that's three separate parts stamped and riveted together.
And that ... started use with the early US military 28A1s.
And lastly, by the late segment of production the barrel fins were removed.
Basically it was deemed suitable that the gun was open bolt,
that gave it enough cooling capacity.
The extra cooling that you would get from the fins on the barrel was really unnecessary,
and not worth the expense, so they were deleted.
And we ended up with smooth barrels on the guns late in production of the 28A1.
You'll note that this particular one also no longer has a Cutts Compensator.
In addition, the control levers changed slightly.
So on this very nice pre-war gun, you'll notice that the control levers have
nice checkering on them to give you a better grip.
Well, as production continued that would go away,
and the late production 28A1s have these smooth levers instead.
One last element you will see on a lot, if not most, 28A1s
is this big reinforcing bolt through the stock, which was not there previously.
However, this wasn't actually done during production of the guns.
This was a military retrofit that was adopted after production had ended,
and they went back and added the bolt to most of the 28A1s, but not all of them.
And you might have noticed that one of our 28A1 examples had a 30 round magazine in it.
Well, that is because one day before Pearl Harbour, on December 6th 1941,
the US military formally adopted the 30 round magazine.
This was found to be a good way to obviously increase the magazine capacity,
20 rounds was a little short.
The Army experimented with 30s, they also experimented with coupled 20 round magazines,
where you had one upright, and then one flipped around on the side like this.
They found that that was more likely to cause problems
when you went prone and stuffed your spare magazine in the dirt.
And so they ended up adopting a 30 round magazine pattern.
This would go on to be the dominant magazine type used during World War Two.
These 28A1s are still capable of using drum magazines, and they were supplied with them.
Especially if you look at pictures of the British use of the Thompson,
you'll see that they often had drums.
But the drums are bulky, they're very heavy, they rattle,
and in combat these 30 round stick mags were found to be the best compromise
between handling and ammunition capacity.
So these guns started out being sold at the same
really astronomical prices as the pre-war guns, like $200 apiece.
In fact at the beginning of World War Two, the US Army was paying $202.50 for a gun.
Actually more than the commercial retail price
because the Army had some specifications for packing and greasing, and that costs a little extra.
Or at least Auto Ordnance was able to tack on a little extra to cover it.
However, by 1942, when production of the 28A1 ended,
the government price had dropped all the way down to $70.
Now that's still way more than the cost of the models that would replace the 28A1,
and that's of course the primary reason that it was replaced.
And we'll get into its replacement in the next ... episode of this series coming up.
But, to ... stay on the A1 for a minute. In total between call it ... early 1940 and late 1942,
over the production span of this gun, just over a million of these were manufactured.
So Auto Ordnance went from taking basically 20 years to sell 15,000 guns,
to making and selling a million of them over the course of 2.5 years.
So a complete turnaround in the fortunes of the company
because there was a giant war, and that drove a massive amount of demand
for a submachine gun that may not have been the best.
This is still basically a World War One pattern gun.
But it's the gun that was available, that was tooled up and ready to produce.
And that's worth more than a better design
that still has to actually be figured out and put into production.
So this would be the first huge batch of Thompson submachine guns manufactured.
And it wouldn't be the last, because after this the Army is going to adopt
a new pattern that they're going to designate the M1 submachine gun.
So, as I said, we'll get to that one tomorrow.
And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
If you are interested in getting yourself a registered, full-auto, legal, Thompson submachine gun,
take a look at the link in the description text below.
... That will take you to ForgottenWeapons.com, from whence you can follow links to the
catalogue pages here at Morphy's for either of these two guns.
You can also search their catalogue for all of the other Thompson guns
that they have in their upcoming fall Firearms Auction, because they've got a bunch of them.
So, I think that'll hold us until next time.
Thanks for watching.