America's Forgotten SMG: The Hyde/Marlin M2
America's Forgotten SMG: The Hyde/Marlin M2
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The United States went into World War Two with the Thompsons submachine gun – a weapon far too heavy and too expensive for its role. The British went to the other extreme with the Sten and while the US did not want a gun quite that crude, the Sten did spur a desire for something cheaper than the Thompson. George Hyde (the working for the Inland Division of GM) had worked on submachine gun designs in the 1930s, and he put together a weapon that would fit US needs. It was much cheaper than the Thompson and weighed in a full 2 pounds lighter. At tests in the spring of 1942, it also proved to be much more accurate in automatic firing, as it had a much more ergonomic stock design than the Thompson. The weapons was approved as the M2 submachine gun in 1942, and a contract went to Marlin to produce it (Inland had no extra production capacity at the time).
The receiver of the M2 was made through a metal sintering process, and Marlin had trouble getting this properly tooled up. The first gun delivery didn’t actually happen. Until May or 1943, and by that time Hype had finished designing the M3 “Grease Gun”, which was cheaper still, and more attractive to the military. The contract for the M2 was cancelled in June of 1943, with only 400 guns delivered. There are only six known surviving examples today, split between private collections, museums, and military institutions.
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Bet that thing is a kitten to shoot, big ole hunk of metal in that bolt to soak up 45ACP recoil. It’s basically a camp 45 in form factor, which is a dream to shoot
Looks like what we’d get from Hi-Point in WW2
That thing is the most gun looking gun i can think of.
Yeah
Yo dawg.
I heard you like recoil springs.
So we put a recoil spring inside your recoil spring, so you can recoil while your recoil spring recoils…
Same thing, I need one. Actually two. One to shoot, one to display, huge parts bin.
I like this "chunky boi" 👍😊👍
… needs another hole in the stock fer my Habana cigar
– Maduro Robusto…
Stand the rest into a gutted BAR magazine fer my field jacket pocket. Nice ‘n’ _near_ safe. Mind thee, it’s WWII. A Sarge gotta keep ahead of th’ game!
I like that the center-of-bore aligns just above & along the comb’s sweet spot.
Nn-nn-nice.
Awesome video!
looks like a pretty good layout, too bad it didn’t make it. funny how you can never tell if a gun is good just based on how good it looks. or whether a good gun will get adopted.
what I always wanted to know, everyone complains that the Thompson is way too expensive, yet you say they were making 300% profit on each gun. couldn’t they have insisted they sell it for less being wartime? or at least there should have been some public anger that they were making such profit off the war by selling a needed item for such a huge markup when they could have made money by selling at a much lower price
It’s hideous…. I want
So an M1 Carbine and Thompson walk into a hotel…
Seems like would be a good SHTF weapon, big chunky durable parts
If you asked me as a child, to draw a sub-machine gun. It would have looked like that.
Whether it be a semi auto version or even an air soft version: replicas of this would sell like hot cakes… probably
Sad that so few remain. If I had the finances for a transferable MG that would be at the top of my list. Just such a gorgeous design.
That system of disassembly is remarkably similar to that used on the prewar Mannlicher Schoenauer Take Down Model.
Very interesting submachinegun and all that info that’s packed in the story of its creation. Pity, it never went into production. Aren’t there weapons based on this design today???
The wood can give you woody.
And as a funny note. The M-3 had problems when it went into production with the stamped half warping when they were welded together. Thompson production was to end in 1943, the last Thompson can off the line in June 1945.
The more you study WW2 era firearms the more you realize how difficult it was to come up with a decent mass produceable submachine gun. The M1 Thompson submachine gun was obsolete for WW2. It was to heavy, tended to be inaccuate due to muzzle climb and recoil making it difficult to keep on target even at close ranges of 50 meters. The M2 submachine gun here used metal sintering a process too complicated for mass production. The M3A2 submachine gun without the charging handle proved to be a much superior weapon to churn out of the factories. The need for welding, spot welding and metal stamping with a minimum of machining is essential to churning out large numbers of submachines guns.
The Soviet Union had numerous version of the PPD submachine gun before coming up with the Ppsh-41 submachine gun. The British Sten gun had issues with poor magazine quality something the Czech paratroopers who assassinated General Heydrich found out to their dismay. The Finns had the best submachine gun in the Suomi submachine gun but this SMG required much machining and would have been entirely inappropriate for WW2 mass production. It is very hard to come up with a mass production submachine gun that was both simple, reliable and robust but still accurate enough to hold up under field conditions. So many nations engineering staffs struggled mightily to come up with a submachine gun that could be mass produced and still perform adequately. The US ended up with a slower rate of fire in the M3 submachine of about 450 rounds per minute contrast this to the Ppsh-41 with a 900 round per minute rate of fire.
Looks like they tried to hammer a Thompson body into an m1 carbine
That’s a good looking gun for combat
when it comes to WWII weapons, Marlin is a rarely if ever mentioned name
The notch is going to be for longer range, aperture for closer.
The notch being used is basically “raising” the rear sight, which will depress the rear of the gun.
Awesome
I bet the tooling is sitting in storage somewhere to this day.
Always happy to see some Marlin representation.
GHD George H Drewry…
I want a clone.. warts and all.
Im trying to be a service weapon, but im dummy thicc and the clap of my chunky bolt keeps disturbing the test evaluators
I really like the aesthetics of this firearm. Like another comment pointed out, this gun looks like the love child of an M1 carbine and Thompson. The way it functions and disassembles is interesting. It’s a shame the gun was not around longer, but it makes sense. The M3 submachinegun has certainly proved itself a reliable firearm and much easier to produce.
M3 by comparison is a true engineering feat…simple, reliable and effective. Truly KISS (keep it simple stupid).
Truly a forgotten weapon
Very cool, rare weapon that I’ve never even heard of before. Thank you.
MIM basically for the top of that receiver
"There have been very few guns I didn’t like, I don’t like this gun".
Mikhail Kalashnikov
It’s like a Camp 45 on steroids!
I saw at least one thing, why to not to adapt this gun into service. Because you have to cut A LOT of metal on the laith in order to make a bolt for one of these. It is cheaper and easier to cut just a 2-3 mm of metal from a metal cylinder for a M3 smg, rather than cut all that metal in order to make a M2 bolt.
Twice as accurate as the Thompson? Yeah, baby. Put a polymer stock on it and I’m in. 😄
It looks like an off-brand version of the Thompson. Which I guess was the idea.
Cooper Carbine?
An sks got drunk with a thompson one night.
That is one of the coolest looking SMG’s I have ever seen. Beautiful weapon.
I’ve managed to hold one of the 2 on them on the private market, I guess it was other one
This look likes an innovative and well made gun.
Early MIM process..
OP can you contact me. I’ve one of these. #278 or 9, I’d have to to look. Pappy had it and grand Pappy got it mid 1940’s. In my closet now. I always thought it was a .30 Carbine. Looks like one kinda.
gotta say, including an oil bottle in the stock makes one wonder about the reliability of the gun. why did they think oil was so important that it had to be kept with the gun?
Kinda looks like an SKS from above