Plumber’s Dream, Nazi Nightmare : The STEN gun
When the chips were down in World War II, the British Army needed a reliable submachine gun that could be mass-produced without tying down vital munitions factories that were already overstretched. This led to a gun, designed as an emergency weapon, which has become a classic of modern firearms design.
When Hitler invaded Poland in Sept. 1939, that country’s allies, Britain and France reluctantly declared war on Nazi Germany. Fast forward nine months and the Germans had defeated and occupied not only Poland, but also Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, and France, leaving the Brits to face Hitler’s immense military machine alone.
Worse, in the evacuation of the British Army from France at Dunkirk, the Tommies had lost much of their pre-war armament.
This left the country in dire need of firearms to equip not only the regular forces, but also a rapidly growing Home Guard ready, as Winston Churchill promieed at the time that, “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
But they needed a good, cheap gun, and lots of them.
