Category: War

The quest for treasure has consumed human imagination for centuries, whether buried pirate gold or submerged, shipwrecked Spanish doubloons. But what about finding long-lost firepower? Florida-based Bowman Arms says it’s bringing a load of surplus Thompson submachine guns to the market after they spent decades “submerged” in a secret location.

Where did they come from?

Bowman Arms hasn’t said the actual location of these submachine guns, but originally, they were Model 1928 Thompsons owned by the British military in World War II. After World War II, the Brits packed them with grease and hid them away—they stored them so carefully that according to Bowman, they figured the Brits planned to come back for them later.

Bowman showed the Thompsons in a thread on Reddit, starting off with these details:

“These are British surplus WW2 (Model 1928) Thompsons. Dumped on 1946 at a now submerged zero oxygen Alpine location. Recovery efforts are slow but all will be saved through time. These fire after simple power washing and often times are still covered in oil and grease.”

That’s purposefully vague, and it sounds like wherever these guns were wasn’t originally flooded. Maybe they were in an old mountaintop bunker or a mine?

Some of the first-recovered sub-guns were pitted, but functional, says Bowman. And, hard as it may be to believe, there are thousands at the dump site, wherever it may be—”Almost the entire British supply of 1928 Thompsons,” they figure.

That’s a lot of surplus Tommy guns, and Bowman says that despite the indignities that must be performed to bring these full autos into the States, they have a market for them. Once they’ve met customer demand in the U.S., they plan to sell them in the EU as well, as dewats. And, Bowman says “We hope to by then store them in an FTZ stateside to save them.”