Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com
I'm Ian. I am here today at the Cody Firearms Museum, part of the Buffalo Bill
Center of the West up in Cody, Wyoming. I'm taking a look at some of the guns in
their extensive and very cool collection including this experimental Thompson
submachine gun. Now this looks very much like a standard 1928 model Thompson
except for the magazine. The magazine is like, too long
well the reason for that is this gun was built in .30 carbine. In 1939 the
Winchester company, a great many whose guns are here in the Cody Museum,
the Winchester company developed the .30 carbine cartridge for the U.S. government.
They were looking for an intermediate power carbine, something that would be
better than a 1911 pistol, that they could issue to kind of support troops--
truck drivers, couriers, artillery men, other guys who didn't need a full-size
M1 Garand rifle but they did need something better than a 1911 for
personal defense. A whole bunch of different companies submitted design
proposals in 1940, and the Ordnance Department did a whole bunch of testing
of them. One of the--one of the requirements--was the guns had to be
chambered for this new .30 caliber carbine cartridge. One of the others was that the
guns had to weigh five pounds or less. Now the Thompson gun was the standard U.S.
submachine gun at the time,
manufactured by Auto Ordinance. Auto Ordinance was concerned that it would
lose a lot of its submachine gun business if this .30 caliber carbine was
adopted and wasn't an Auto Ordinance product, because this would legitimately
replace a lot of submachine guns in combat service. So Auto Ordinance actually
submitted a design for a light rifle which is totally different than
the Thompson submachine gun--we actually will talk about one of those in
another video when I have the chance to get my hands on one.
However, kind of as a back-up plan, and maybe just as a proof of concept, they
also submitted a Thompson submachine gun; this one in
fact in .30 carbine. The barrel obviously is different,
the magazine is obviously different, the bolt of course is different to fit the
cartridge, and the receiver is slightly different to fit the longer magazine
well. However, all of the other parts are totally standard Thompson parts; the sight,
the stock, the grip frame, the firing assembly, the magazine release, all of that stuff
was standard Thompson submachine gun material. The idea here was to show that
this gun could be manufactured with a minimum of retooling. Now the problem was
this thing weighs like... 10 or 12 pounds unloaded, which is, you know--double or a
little more than double of what the U.S. military requirement was for the gun. So
this one was submitted to the Ordnance Department, and they basically took a look at
it and went, "That's nice,
it's more than twice as heavy as we want. Thanks, no thanks."
And that was the end of the testing. As far as I'm aware these weren't even
fired in military testing.
Obviously this didn't meet the requirements of what the government was
looking for, but hey, it was probably not that difficult for Thompson to make it,
so why not submit one as a "just in case" sort of thing? So let's take a closer
look at a couple of the bits. We'll check out the magazine, I believe it's a
15-round magazine--the requirements for magazine capacity changed over the
course of the testing but, lets take a look at it up close. So the receiver here of
course has to be made longer in order to fit the longer magazine for the longer
cartridge, and so our markings on here are hand stamped "Thompson submachine gun".
What's kind of interesting is that the caliber is not marked .30 carbine because
it wasn't the official designation in 1941 when this gun was actually made. Its
marked, "caliber .30, short rifle M-1, self-loading cartridge", which was I guess
kind of the working definition of the cartridge at the time. Now the selector
markings are the same as a standard Thompson... serial number up here is "1"--no way
you're going to mistake that--and then, on the opposite side, we have the
standard machine-done roll mark for the Auto Ordinance corporation because they were
able to copy that.
That's the same marking as they'd have on any standard
Thompson gun, as well as the various patent numbers. The rear sight on this
experimental gun is a standard 1928 model lineman rear sight, like Thompson
was using on all the regular pieces. Now of course it's the magazine that is
really interesting and different here--as i mentioned, the magazine catch is
exactly the same, it's this somewhat awkward Thompson system where you push
up on this lever and it releases this catch inward. Unfortunately, I don't have
any .30 caliber dummy cartridges to load in this to demonstrate but, I think you
get the idea. This was a double-stack magazine. Not entirely sure on the
magazine capacity here...this may have been 15, this may also have been a 20 or
30 round, or maybe even 25 round. A lot of the guns that were submitted to the M1
carbine trials program had a wide variety of magazine capacities, of magazines
submitted with them--everything from five up to 50 rounds. The [.30] carbine cartridge
is a pretty narrow one,
so this is a narrower magazine than you would typically expect to see, definitely
double stack, and then of course it's got the big hole in the back here which is
the locking tab for the the Thompson system. Thanks for watching guys, hope you
enjoyed the video. I always, of course enjoy, going to take a look at some
prototype guns like this, even the ones that were dismal failures from what they were
intended to be used for. If you enjoyed the video, please consider checking out
my Patreon account. That's what helps me travel to cool places like the Cody
Museum to take a look at guns like this and bring them to you, and of course if
you should ever find yourself in the vicinity of Cody, Wyoming, you should
absolutely stop and check out the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and the Cody
Firearms Museum in particular. Their collection really is quite extraordinary
and well displayed on top of that, so thanks for watching.