Category: All About Guns
The M3A1 Grease Gun was the very image of simplicity. This made it cheap and reliable.
On 4 November 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Teheran, Iran, and took 52 Americans hostage. What followed was arguably the most humiliating period in American history. The nascent Islamic Republic, under the unhinged leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, thumbed its nose at the most powerful nation on earth and got away with it.
With the benefit of hindsight, Jimmy Carter was a wonderful man but a pretty lousy president. Our response to this egregious affront was insufficiently robust in the early stages, and this served to embolden the lunatics. However, by 24 April 1980, we were finally ready to do something about it. Operation Eagle Claw launched into the Iranian desert in an effort to free American hostages.
The beating heart of Eagle Claw was Colonel Charlie Beckwith’s Delta Force. Patterned off of the British 22d Special Air Service, Delta was a specially selected, exquisitely trained counter-terrorist unit purpose-designed to do stuff like this. However, the learning curve for such things is steep. While the Delta shooters were certainly up to the task, the support structure required to execute such a complex operation on hostile shores lamentably was not.
There resulted burning aircraft, frenetic abort commands, and eight dead Americans. After a nighttime taxi accident at the desert staging base destroyed an RH-53D helicopter and an EC-130 Hercules transport, the troops boarded the surviving Air Force C-130s and fell back to their staging area on Masirah Island in Oman. They left behind five RH-53D helicopters and a great deal of chaos.
The Grease Gun was undeniably crude, but it shot plenty straight.
The political fallout ushered in the Reagan era and ultimately indirectly led to the end of the Cold War. It also sparked the ascendency of radical Islam and the Global War on Terror. The hostages were eventually released after 444 days in captivity. For the guys on the ground, however, none of that mattered. They were just trying to survive.
The original scheme of maneuver had 93 Delta operators and another 13 Special Forces soldiers drawn from Detachment A of the Berlin Brigade assaulting the facility where the hostages were held after an ingress in pre-positioned trucks. Egress was to be by helicopter. A dozen Army Rangers were brought along to secure the Desert One operating base. Another company of Rangers was tasked to seize the abandoned Manzariyeh Air Base to facilitate extraction via C130. AC130 gunships orbited above to provide on-call fire support. While complicated, it was a solid plan.
The Delta shooters were figuring this stuff out as they went along. The state of the art in small arms was not nearly so advanced then as is the case today, so these pioneering commandos made do with what was available. For many of the Delta operators at Desert One, that meant cheap pressed steel submachine guns developed nearly half a century earlier during World War II.
At the onset of WWII, the U.S. military fielded the M1928A1 Thompson submachine gun. Heavy, expensive, and unduly complicated, the Thompson was the only show in town. American industry tooled up to produce the Thompson and eventually built some 1.5 million copies. However, it was obvious that we could do better.
In 1941, the U.S. Army Ordnance Board launched a journey to find a simpler, cheaper, more effective replacement. Drawing inspiration from the German MP40 and British Sten, the new design was to be built from pressed steel and fire the standard .45ACP round. George Hyde designed the gun while in the employ of the General Motors Inland Division. The resulting T20 eventually morphed into the M3.
The first combat deployment of the M3 Grease Gun during WWII was the D-Day invasion.
The M3 was designed from the outset to be able to be converted to fire 9mm Parabellum via a simple drop-in kit. Allied planners envisioned dropping these compact weapons to resistance forces behind the Axis lines and wanted the guns to be capable of firing captured ammo. The end result was ugly as homemade sin but undeniably effective. The derogatory epithet Grease Gun spawned from the esoteric similarity between George Hyde’s utilitarian gun and the familiar mechanic’s tool.
The M3 weighed 8.15 pounds and fed from a 30-round double-column, single-feed magazine. The buttstock was formed from heavy wire. The gun’s receiver was pressed in two halves and then welded together. The bolt was somewhat undersized and ran on a pair of rods inside the receiver chassis. These loose dimensions made the gun notoriously resistant to fouling. The combat debut of the new SMG was the D-Day invasion in Europe.
The original M3 included an unnecessarily complicated ratchet mechanism to charge the gun. The improved M3A1 debuted in December 1944 and dispensed with this component in favor of a simple divot in the bolt to accept a standard human finger. The pivoting sheet steel dust cover was the gun’s sole mechanical safety. Close the cover, and the gun was safe. Open it, and the gun was hot.
The Grease Gun was bulky, heavy and awkward. However, it shot straight enough and was legendarily reliable. The Delta guys in Iran often outfitted theirs with tactical lights and sound suppressors. They had their parachute riggers sew magazine pouches inside their field jackets to pack extra ammo before dying the whole thing black.
The lessons learned on this ill-fated mission ultimately shaped Delta into the premier counter-terrorist unit on the planet. Their subsequent exploits have been nothing short of amazing. However, had things gone ever so differently that horrible night in the Iranian desert, Operation Eagle Claw might have changed the entire course of Western civilization. Sometimes little things can be big things.
The M1 “Garand” rifle is objectively heavier than bolt-action rifles and specifically all those that fought in the war. But when you have the rifle in your hand, that weight translates into sturdiness. That is the feeling it conveys, that of a strong and robust weapon, not a heavy weapon. That perception is accentuated when shooting with it.
Then everything fits, because that weight and that robustness, which is a perception that you have a lot to do with the forceful design of the weapon and especially the shape of its butt/handle, is perfect to prevent recoil from dislodging you. You get the feeling of shooting a very balanced rifle and then the weight factor is diluted. I say all this by stating that I am by no means a regular shooter, nor an expert on the subject.
Regarding breakdowns, the M1 had some during the war. The biggest was in the design of the gas intake cylinder, which caused the firing cycle to be interrupted and forced it to be completely redesigned. In addition to that and others that I described in the article, which were solved very early on, there were others that came to light during the conflict and were solved along the way.
One of them was that the mounting lever, being integral with the piston, could break at a certain point after too much use. It was not serious at all, but it did mean that almost at the end of the war all field workshops received the order to make a small circular cut at the point where the piston rod joins the lever in all rifles. Received for any type of repair, in order to relieve the tension of the lever. This is why rifles where that cut is not present are somewhat rarer to find.
Another “illness” was that the firing cycle would sometimes stop when exposed to long periods in the rain. The solution was to give the soldiers very small bottles of a special oil called “Lubriplate” that had to be poured around the bolt to lubricate it and that completely solved the problem. The canisters were designed to be stored inside the buttplate of the rifle.
Another relatively notable “failure” was in the finish of the gas cylinder, located in the muzzle of the rifle. Being made of stainless steel, it could not be parked, but a special paint had to be applied. With use in combat conditions, the paint would peel off and the shine on the metal could give the soldier away. The solution was to create a new paint mix that was more durable than the old one.
Regarding the last question, the truth is that the feeling that I have after reading a lot of literature on the rifle is that there was never a very enthusiastic attempt to turn the M1 into a sniper rifle. I get the feeling that this position was well filled by the Springfield M1903 and that the Ordnance Department never made much of an effort to make the M1 its replacement.
Keep in mind that the power system of the M1 prevented putting a scope “as God intended”. I imagine that the sight that was placed on the M1C would not be very pleasing to an elite shooter due to its forced position and surely he had to make some additional correction to compensate for such a strange position. Consider that no M1 modified as a sniper rifle was shipped to Europe during the war. On the other hand, the standard M1 rifle was actually pretty accurate overall if it was in the right hands. No soldier complained that it was inaccurate in combat.
Johnson’s rifle was mechanically just as good as Garand’s, and had even more capacity. However, from what I’ve read, it was somewhat more complicated to mass-produce than the M1, which is another reason it was scrapped. It was also unclear whether it would have been reliable enough in the hands of an infantryman, as only elite troops used it in the war. There is no doubt about the behavior of the M1 Garand, which fulfilled perfectly and demonstrated its qualities and quality during two wars.
It is curious that, like other weapons of its time, the old M1 has continued in the gap, hitting shots to this day, as if it refused to die. That says a lot about its robustness and reliability. As an example, this photo of an M1 captured in Iraq, in the last war.
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A Sears Model 200 in 12GA
