Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction House,
where we are taking a look at the final World War Two
iteration of the Thompson submachine gun.
This is an M1A1 pattern of Thompson.
Now this isn't quite the last Thompson, production would continue
for the civilian market after World War Two
with guns made in West Hurley, New York.
But we're gonna leave those for a separate video, because
we're focusing on the military use of the guns for this series.
So, what we have here is the result of the US government really
finally being tired of paying out the nose for Thompson guns.
And part of this was making a profit for Auto-Ordnance,
but part of it was also that the original Thompson
was really a very expensive gun to produce.
It was fairly complex with its Blish lock system and a lot of pre-war, very nice finishing touches,
things that you really don't need on a mass-produced military gun.
So, late in 1941 the Army sat down with Auto-Ordnance and Savage and initiated this discussion of,
"Look we need this gun to be cheaper. Let's look at what we can do to redesign it in ways that make it more efficient to produce."
And Savage's engineers would come back with what was the M1 pattern.
And they made a couple of really substantial changes. First off, and I'm sure they'd been looking at this for a while,
they didn't think that this Blish lock nonsense was even necessary.
They figured, "It's a submachine gun, it can just be blowback and it'll work fine."
So they redesigned the bolt to be basically a big lump of metal, and not have any fancy brass moving widgets inside it.
And, lo and behold, that worked just fine.
The charging handle was moved to the side, as you can see here.
In addition to simplifying the construction by getting rid of internal parts of the bolt,
that also simplified the internals of the receiver, made it easier to manufacture.
They got rid of the ability to use drum magazines, because by this point
the military had decided these drum magazines really aren't feasible or practical.
You know, sure they're fine and whatever for the civilian market, but they're noisy and they're bulky,
and ... they're hard to carry a lot of, they rattle a lot, they're really heavy, they're not as reliable as stick mags.
Just forget it, we'll go with stick mags. In late 1941 they adopted the 30 round stick magazine.
That took care of the capacity issues for the gun.
So, by getting rid of the ... compatibility for drum mags, Savage was able to further simplify the receiver design.
And then there were some small changes that were made as well, which we'll touch on in a minute.
Ultimately, this pattern was tested in March of 1942 by the Army.
Testing was pretty quick and easy, like, "Yep, it works, looks good."
It was then adopted in April of '42, and by the summer of 1942, June, July,
Savage had transitioned, or was transitioning, their production from the 1928A1 to the M1 pattern gun.
Now the M1 wouldn't actually last all that long. It's in fact almost probably the rarest of the Thompson variants to find,
and I apologise, I don't have ... an example of it here to show you today.
The difference was, ... well, let me back up a step.
By October of '42 the M1A1 had been adopted,
so the M1 pattern only existed as a standard gun for about six months.
The ... primary difference between the M1 and the M1A1 was a further simplification of the bolt.
The original Thompsons, all the previous ones, had a floating firing pin and a hammer in the front of the bolt.
And when the bolt hit the front of the receiver, that would hit the hammer, which would trip the firing pin, and it would fire.
The M1A1 further simplified that by getting rid of it entirely, and going to a fixed firing pin in the bolt face.
And that was kind of an obvious further simplification, and it was also adopted by the Army.
The line between M1s and M1A1s has kind of been blurred a bit as a result of
military rebuilding programs, because the receivers are completely interchangeable.
So if an M1 had problems and had to go back to an armoury to be rebuilt or refitted,
... you could just drop an M1A1 bolt into it. Now you've got a gun marked M1, but with M1A1 parts.
So there is a mixture of those bits that you'll find if you're out in the Thompson collecting community looking at these guns.
So probably the most substantial change in the M1 and M1A1 Thompsons over
all the previous models was the charging handle, which is now located on the right side instead of on the top.
So that's your charging handle. And by the way, it still locks open on an empty magazine.
This is a little bit awkward to release left-handed,
there we go.
So we do still have Auto-Ordnance, Bridgeport, Connecticut, marked on the the right side of the gun.
And the left side has the rest of the designation: Thompson Submachine Gun, Calibre .45, M1A1.
Note that, especially the Auto-Ordnance guns, you will relatively commonly find a gun that is an M1
that has had A1 basically hand stamped on as an addition.
This isn't because it was an M1 that was updated to the new pattern,
instead it's because Auto-Ordnance actually had a lot of problems getting the new M1 manufacture up and running.
And by the time they were really ready to go, and they had a bunch of receivers ready,
and they were in a position to complete them into guns, the pattern had been replaced by the M1A1.
So they had existing receivers marked M1 and they just added on the A1 by hand to bring them up to spec.
Serial number is down here. You'll note that there is no ... prefix
as there used to be to indicate which company made the gun.
If you want to know which company, you will have to look for some markings on some other parts.
Most notably, for example, the grip frame right here has a little "S". That's a Savage part.
There was also a serial number placed on the trigger frame for a while, not all of them.
And mismatched upper and lower assemblies are entirely common on the M1 and M1A1 Thompson guns.
... The parts were all completely interchangeable, and there was very little effort put into maintaining
matched guns. So very similar to the M1 Garand in that respect
We do have a Thompson bullet logo here on the top of the receiver, just in front of the rear sight.
And a "US Property" mark just behind the rear sight on the top of the receiver.
The controls remained really the same, although the levers themselves changed.
So on these guns, the M1 and M1A1, you have these round ... pegs with pins
that are nice and very easy to manufacture. They work the same way.
... You still have a single selector for safe and fire, and a second selector for semi-auto and full-auto.
The magazine release also remains the same. The magazines for the M1 and M1A1 are the same
as all of the earlier pattern Thompsons, with the exception of the drums.
These guys are no longer equipped to take drum magazines.
You can see that the receiver grooves for the drums are no longer present.
For a US military acceptance Thompson there will be a number of inspector's stamps up here.
"GEG" is George E. Goll who was one of the inspectors, I believe he was a Savage inspector.
We have another set of initials here.
That Springfield stamp indicates that this gun was refinished or rebuilt by Springfield Armory at some point during its service life.
Let's see, some other changes. The pistol grip is changed. So I can show you that, so here's a 28A1,
it's kind of a subtle change, but notice there's a little step here.
This is basically because they redesigned the lower trigger assembly,
and so they had to redesign the pistol grip just slightly to make it fit the new assembly.
The 28A1s also had a button back here to allow you to remove the buttstock.
That is no longer deemed important on the military guns by this point, so no button.
The stock is just permanently screwed straight into the receiver.
Disassembly is exactly the same. It's ... maybe a little bit awkward now to reach that button.
But you push in that button, hold the trigger down in full-auto, and slide the
bottom assembly, which now includes the buttstock, off of the receiver.
While these look pretty similar, there's actually a substantial amount of difference in their construction.
So we have a 28A1 here on top, and we have our M1A1 on the bottom.
And for starters, the disassembly method is actually different.
This looks the same, but on the 28A1 we pull the spring forward,
and then,
carefully,
lift it out (there we go), in order to get the spring out. And then we can just pull this back,
lift the bolt out,
and then forward,
take the Blish lock out, and then back again and take the actuator out.
So that's the 28A1.
With Savage's simplified model here, you actually start by pushing in on the end of the recoil spring guide.
But you can't pull it in and lift it out, instead you have to take out this,
and then the recoil spring and guide rod come out through that hole in the back of the receiver.
Then (note we now have a charging handle on the side),
we bring the charging handle back to this half circular cutout right there, and then we have to lift the bolt
slightly up, and that allows the charging handle to come out.
And then we can lift out the bolt.
Note that there is no actuator and there is no Blish lock any more.
So in terms of construction simplicity we've gone from three parts, including one weird brass one,
to just one part. Unless you count the charging handle,
but that's just a simple turned dowel, so that's super-easy to make.
In fact this entire bolt is really quite easy to make, because it's just one big block with a hole drilled in it.
Now on the M1A1 version we also have a fixed firing pin, which makes this even simpler still.
On the earlier M1 version you had a solid bolt like this, however (and I apologise I don't have an M1 here to show you),
but the M1 had a hammer very much like this guy,
that would actuate and trip the firing pin when the bolt hit the front of the receiver.
So a little additional simplification made the gun, well, even simpler.
And there was more to it than just simplifying the bolt assembly,
there's also a substantial simplification to the receiver itself
So when you get rid of that Blish lock, you no longer need these channels in the side of the receiver for it to run in.
They also decided that the buffer pad here was no longer necessary, so that was scrapped.
You don't need the sheet metal, you don't need the felt, that can all go away.
And what we have now with the M1 here is basically just a simple open box. Much easier to machine and to fabricate.
Note also that the front profile of the receiver has changed.
There's no longer a drum capability required, so this has been narrowed.
Where on the 28A1s and everything that came before that, this had to be relatively wide to properly support the drum.
That's no longer an issue. The grooves here are gone.
And this whole thing can be made narrower because it's only gonna fit a box magazine.
One element here that I do find interesting is that the rate of fire climbed substantially with the M1 model.
And remember that's the single piece bolt with a floating firing pin here.
It climbed up to apparently maybe as high as 900 rounds a minute, certainly more than 800,
coming from the 600 to 650 of the 1928A1 pattern. So what that says is that
while Savage's redesign was able to make the gun work just fine as a blowback action,
the amount of weight they added didn't quite compensate for,
not the Blish system (which didn't really do much), but for this ... piece being forced to travel against friction up an incline.
So, leaving aside Blish's idea that there's this weird change in ... frictional constants based on pressure,
just the fact that there is a static amount of friction that has to be overcome for this piece to slide up,
that did provide a delaying action to the cyclic rate of the gun.
And it slowed it down compared to what would come later with the single monolithic bolt of the M1.
Now the other curious part is when they went from the M1 to the M1A1,
namely getting rid of the floating hammer and having a fixed firing pin, that actually brought the rate of fire down
a measurable amount, down to like 700 rounds minute.
And I don't have a particularly good explanation as to why.
Short of like the firing pin itself decelerating the bolt as it's forced to crush the primer
instead of having the hammer do it. That doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense to me,
but M1 and M1A1 bolts are virtually exactly the same weight, so it's not an issue of additional mass in the bolt.
But something in that fixed firing pin does actually slow down the rate of fire compared to the earlier M1 version.
And lastly, the rear sight changed slightly.
So when M1 production began, the rear sight was the same as on the ... 1928A1 here,
which is just a bent up L shaped aperture sight.
What they did was to improve durability of the guns, to protect the rear sight,
they replaced it with a ... larger sheet riveted to the receiver, the sides are bent up to form protective wings.
And you have the exact same style of notch and aperture sight here at the back.
In total Savage was able to cut like 10 hours off of the production time of a Thompson gun.
Which is really a huge simplification, they brought the prices way down.
By the end of the production run, the government was paying something like 43 dollars for a Thompson gun.
Now that's still a lot more than they would pay for the gun's replacement.
And that replacement was the M3 Grease Gun, that was adopted in January of 1943.
And the plan was to phase out production of the Thompson of course, in favour of the newer, cheaper (mostly cheaper) Grease Gun.
That didn't quite work as planned, there were some hiccups in getting the M3 production up and running.
And so production of the Thompson would be extended a couple times, and it wasn't actually until February of 1944
that the very last batch of M1A1 Thompsons was produced and delivered to the Army.
And after that Thompson production for the military had ended.
This was simply too expensive of a gun.
The M1 and the M1A1 did a good job of being able to reduce the cost and reduce the manufacturing time required.
But ultimately this was a World War One pattern gun, and you could only improve it and simplify it so much
before there's just no room left on it and they had to go to a modern, stamped sheet metal type of submachine gun.
So, hopefully you guys have enjoyed this series on the development, the evolution of the Thompson submachine gun.
It is really a pretty interesting gun, and of course it's the iconic submachine gun of the United States.
You know we have the Single Action Army Colt revolvers, and we have the Thompson submachine gun.
And there are probably no more recognisable American guns than those.
So I do have one very cool thing coming up, and that is our next and actual last ... episode in this series
is going to be out on the range. Where we're going to take a bunch of the guns that you've seen in the last
four episodes, and we're gonna take them out and do some side-by-side shooting.
We're gonna take a look at the various rates of fire between the M1A1, the 1928A1s, the 1928s, the 1921s,
and see how they handle and what feels better, ... which of these changes were good and which of them were not so good.
So, definitely stick around for that, that's coming up.
And if you're in the market for your own legal, full-auto, NFA registered Thompson submachine gun,
take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com,
from whence you can get to Morphy's catalogue page on this particular M1A1.
As well as all of the other Thompsons that they have in their upcoming Fall Firearms Auction.
Thanks for watching.