CHEAP SHOT
On June 5, 1940, the smoldering beaches at Dunkirk, on the west coast of France, were largely silent. German soldiers, having stormed across Western Europe in less than a month, now milled about the bomb-blackened sands. Over 10 frenetic days, the British Royal Navy and a vast fleet of auxiliary civilian vessels had managed to evacuate more than 330,000 soldiers—all that was left for a fragile but continued resistance to the German juggernaut. Yet the physical evidence of a massive British defeat lay all around. In the last-gasp scramble to escape enemy clutches, British forces had abandoned nearly 2,500 artillery pieces, 85,000 vehicles (including 445 tanks), 75,000 tons of ammunition, 416,000 tons of supplies, 11,000 machine guns, and tens of thousands of other small arms.
Great Britain now faced an industrial as well as a military emergency, compounded by accelerating casualties from the German U-boat campaign, the ongoing neutrality of the United States (its Lend-Lease program would not begin for another year), the expansion of its armed forces through national conscription, and the looming specter of a German invasion. A particularly pressing problem was how to arm Britain’s newly constituted Home Guard, which by July 1940 numbered 1.5 million men. The guards, embarrassingly short of weapons, were sometimes forced to drill with broomsticks, eliciting nervous laughter from the British public. If the country was to survive, its fighting men had to be properly armed.
Some soldiers called it the “Plumber’s Nightmare” or even the “Stench Gun.”
Fortunately, an unlikely—and unlovely—solution was about to appear. It would officially be known as the Sten gun, though some soldiers would come to call it the “Plumber’s Nightmare” or the “Stench Gun.” By any name, it would prove to be one of the most unusual and ubiquitous weapons of World War II.
Britain’s disastrous campaigns of 1939 and 1940 made at least one thing clear: Its armed forces needed submachine guns. During numerous close-range scraps in Norway and France, British soldiers—almost exclusively armed with .303-inch bolt-action Lee-Enfield No. 4 rifles—had come off worse against German troops armed with 9mm MP 38 and MP 40 submachine guns, which delivered blistering fire at 500 rounds per minute over an effective range of 200 yards. Besides increasing British firepower, submachine guns would also be also ideal weapons for
