David Olusoga’s Hidden Histories
David Olusoga is professor of public history at the University of Manchester and the presenter of several BBC documentaries
One of the most famous photographs of Winston Churchill is also one of the more controversial. It was taken in July 1940, while Churchill was on a visit to a coastal defence position near Hartlepool. Recently appointed to the post of prime minister, Churchill already looks the part. He stares straight down the camera lens. He is wearing a dark pinstripe suit, the obligatory cigar is lodged in one corner of his mouth and in his hands is a weapon that, although part of the official armoury of the British forces, was infamous: associated not with military service but with crime and vice.
The weapon in question was the Thompson submachine gun – the Tommy gun. Already two decades old in 1940, it had been invented during the First World War by US Army general John T Thompson. Like many of the military innovations of the years 1914–18, the Tommy gun had been envisaged as a war-winning weapon, and was described at the time as the ‘trench broom’: the gun that would sweep the Germans out of the Hindenberg Line. After a huge array of technical challenges were overcome, in 1918 the first prototypes were ready to be shipped to the western front to be tested in battle conditions. However, two days before the guns were due to leave the US, the First World War came to an end.
The coming of peace instantly rendered General Thompson’s machine gun redundant. The US Army and the armies of the European powers were demobilising and decommissioning. No one was interested in purchasing a new weapon that – unlike almost every other one in 1918 – had not been tested on the battlefield. In desperation Thompson attempted, with limited success, to interest America’s police forces in the new weapon. But in the 1920s, as today, it was legal for civilians in the United States to buy and own automatic weapons, and so the Tommy gun went on general sale, priced at $200. Almost immediately, it began to take on a life of its own. Some of the first guns sold were smuggled to Ireland and used by the original Irish Republican Army. Others from those early batches stayed in the United States, where some ended up in the hands of men who, although technically civilians, were engaged in their own form of warfare.
The Tommy gun stopped being a mere firearm and became one of the 20th century’s more macabre cultural icons in 1925, when two Chicago gangsters, ‘Polack Joe’ Saltis and Frank McErlane, attacked another Chicago gang with Tommy guns. This first use of the weapon in gang warfare – so the evidence suggests – led Al Capone to conclude he needed to arm his men with the same weapon. But the event that transformed the Tommy gun from the ‘trench broom’ to the infamous ‘Chicago typewriter’ was the St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. The gun’s fame was amplified by a spate of gangster films.
Having proved itself, in an unexpected way, one of the most deadly weapons of its age, the weapon that had been designed to win the First World War appeared on the battlefields of the Second. One-and-ahalf million were manufactured between 1939 and 1945. Yet despite its war record, the Tommy gun remains firmly associated with the mobsters of the roaring twenties. So when the photograph of Churchill holding one began to circulate in 1940, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels seized on the image, turning it into a poster that denounced Churchill – predictably – as a ‘gangster’.