Blast from the past II
So I rented an M-3A1 ‘grease gun’, a submachinegun that came out late in WW2 and saw action in Korea and a little in Vietnam, being phased out of the US inventory in the late 1980s.
I was stuck by the weapon’s crude appearance and ‘no frill’s’ design: the only safety was the ejection port cover; the weapon could not fire unless the cover was open. To cock the weapon you opened the cover and inserted a finger into a depression in the bolt and slid it back. It gave the feel of well-machined parts as you did so. With the bolt locked back and the port open you are ready to fire.
The sights are a simple circle and post familiar to the users of the M-16, only non-adjustable at either end. The stock is simply a steel rod outline, but the recoil is minimal and at 25 yards I was able to tear up a target quite easily. It was full-auto-only, but a two or three round burst was easy to obtain.
The magazine was of a conventional style and could easily be loaded and unloaded via a button release.
The weapon is interesting because the steel rod that makes up the stock can be used as both a cleaning rod and a wrench to remove the barrel, and the pistol grip is an oil reservoir, so the essential cleaning tools are built into the weapon.
The M-3 was intended as a replacement for the Thompson, and while I found it to be a bit less accurate, it was also much lighter, compact, and well-balanced. It did not have the Thompson’s selective fire, but it was not burdened by the Thompson’s odd placement of selector and safety switches, and unlike the Thompson it was free of sharp edges and projections which would be very important when living with the weapon. It’s more modern reloading system made it vastly superior to the Thompson in the sort of close-quarter for which both weapons were intended.
Firing these two weapons threw my notions of them on my head. I had always thought of the Thompson as a grand old dame while the M-3 was a poor-crafted upstart, but after handling them I realize that the Thompson, while finely crafted, was poorly designed for a new style of war, whereas the M-3A1 is clearly the first generation of modern submachineguns.
