Category: All About Guns

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 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 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.