Of all American firearms, probably the Thompson submachine gun is the one most widely recognized yet least understood by the public. To the average person, it connotes mainly Chicago bootleggers and Depression bank robbers. Until this book was first published by Macmillan in 1969, not even the country's firearms historians had more than a rudimentary knowledge of the Thompson as gleaned from a few short and often inaccurate references in old magazine articles and ordnance books. This is the story of that gun, of the man who developed it, and of the important role it played in American social, political, criminal and military history over almost half a century-updated in this Gun Room Press edition with a special chapter by George C. Nonte, who reports on the rebirth of the Auto-Ordnance Corporation and the "new" Tommyguns of today.

General John T. Thompson was an idealistic man of great personal integrity who devoted much of his life to the United States Army. Shortly after the outbreak of World War I in Europe, he retired from military service to become designer and supervisor for the Remington Arms Corporation. When the United States entered the war, Thompson returned to military service as Director of Arsenals for the Ordnance Department and privately sought to develop a new type of semiautomatic rifle. His research led inadvertently to the development of the first weapon to be called a "submachine" gun.

Too late for use on the battlefields of the Great War, the Tommygun, as it quickly came to be called, nevertheless was to write its own grim chapter in history on quite another kind of battlefield, one totally unintended by Thompson and his associates. In April 1 921, it involved the government of the United States in a loud and politically embarrassing smuggling scandal; and the gun that, according to predictions offered in 1922, was "to reform or remove bandits instantaneously," soon became one of their favorite weapons, and America's cities their bloody battlegrounds.

William J. Helmer describes how the gun was ignored by the military and the policeuntil it fell into the hands of the Capones and the Dillingers and acquired a notoriety that inspired Thompson near the end of his life to write: "It has worried me that the gun has been so stolen by evil men and used for purposes outside our motto, 'On the side of law and order.'

The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar brings alive a part of America's recent past, and the reader feels the rub of excitement, pure motives, and patriotism against heartbreak, financial skullduggery, tragedy, and crime. The book also offers precise descriptions of how the gun was developed; and, in an appendix, the author presents a reprint of the original 1921 Handbook of the Thompson Submachine Gun, which describes the weapon and gives directions for its operation, dismounting, assembling, care and preservation, and ammunition and ballistics.

The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar lists for $24.95, but at Rutgers Book Center, we sell it for only $22.45.