Getting iconic weapons wrong ...and right

Here's Virginia McKenna as Special Operations Executive agent Violette Szabo, in that stiff-upper-lip classic Carve Her Name With Pride (a movie on which, as I've already mentioned, my Uncle John assisted in an uncredited capacity, alongside SOE's mysterious Vera Atkins and a couple of her surviving field agents).

The scene with poor injured Violette holding off the whole Das Reich Division was an inspiration to me from a young age, as it obviously was for the illustrators of the poster – and no, in the movie itself, as in real life, she didn't still have her parachute harness attached!

But what she did have, as you can see, was a Sten gun: the iconic epitome of Britain's unglamorous, utilitarian, egalitarian war effort. (Yes, I'm back on that again...)

Cut to the present. I'm reading a newish novel set in the world of the F-Section agents and thinking it a pretty good twist on a familiar subject, actually. But one thing keeps jarring – the description of the Sten gun as an American weapon.

I know. Yawn. Mansplaining bore nit-picks on something no one else will notice. But in fact, since I can’t remember which book it was and I had two on the go at the time, one by a female author and one by a male author, it may not technically be mansplaining at all. And if I am indeed, briefly, nit-picking, that’s not my purpose here.
 
You see, I am British, with a dash of South African and German, so obviously I wouldn’t want the ‘ruddy Yanks’ to get credit for the cheap-and-dirty submachine gun we bashed out for troops and resistance fighters alike during the war (nor, I gather, would they want it).

Also, being British, I dread the embarrassment of being seen to get something wrong – or even the embarrassment of just imagining the embarrassment of being seen.

But as I might have mentioned, I am British (more or less) and as such I don't have the option to teach myself by shooting off military weapons at the range. Air rifles and shotguns, that’s our limit here (although my South African roots have enabled me to get shot at by more exotic firearms, so there is that…)
 
So no, I'm not pontificating. What this is is an expression of sympathy with authors of action sequences who can’t quite get their heads around the weapons involved – for I am one of you!
 
Here’s an example. When I wrote my early drafts of The Borodino Sacrifice, in which my male MC snatches a Sten away from my female MC in Chapter One, I had her bring the gun to bear on him and him think thus:
 
…there should have been a side-loading magazine and it looked like this one had come off in the crash. (He) didn’t think she’d be fool enough to drive around with the gun cocked: these knocked-out British weapons had no safeties to speak of.
 
Sounds OK, right (if a bit derivative maybe)? Establishes his proficiency with all things military (we’ve only just met him, after all) and makes me sound like I really know my stuff.
 
Except I don’t. Because the thing I’d picked up from the likes of the Bond books and was trying to get across – that guns can still have a round in the chamber, even if the magazine is out – applies to certain guns, like 007’s semi-automatic pistols, but not to simple blowback submachine guns like the Sten. And, thankfully, I doubted myself enough to check.
 
A-ha! Wikipedia told me that the Sten 'fires from an open bolt'. But what did that even mean? I couldn’t get my head around it. We may have played WWII soldiers with Tommy-guns as kids – as I riffed off in my still-to-be-completed novella 76 – but none of those gloomy neighbours who’d done it for real stopped and showed us how they worked, and nor did any of the war films, not really.
 
So I had to dig deeper, and I discovered the world of YouTube firearms content, which includes all the wannabe Navy Seals, as you can imagine, but also a few responsible channels run by dedicated history and engineering experts. From whom I found out about guns like these: how unlike ‘closed bolt’ firearms that are cocked and locked with the bolt forward and a round in the chamber, when you cock the Sten by pulling back the bolt like Virginia here and then you pull the trigger, the bolt comes forward, strips a fresh round out of the magazine, slams it into the breech and fires it all in one go (and so on, and on).

So the finished draft just has to say:
 
…but its distinctive side-loading magazine was missing. He snatched it from her.
 
…which unfortunately doesn’t make it sound like he or I know anything clever about the weapon, but is more accurate and plausible than what I had before. (And shorter. Hooray!)
 
From then on, there was no stopping me correcting myself. Mercifully, writing about the immediate postwar period, I didn’t need to describe any characters thumbing back the hammer on a Glock or clicking off its safety catch (neither of which it has), but I was able to steer clear of other notorious pitfalls such as the ‘smell of cordite’ (keep that for my Boer War period epic…) or a revolver with a silencer…
 
And that’s really all I wanted. To avoid making a fool of myself. Not to give characters who've just picked up a gun an unlikely knowledge of that gun, and definitely not to info-dump gun porn on the reader by having a character think that an MG-34 is firing 7.92×57mm Mauser... but rather to get it right that in this period he’d probably (and wrongly) identify the machine gun as a ‘Spandau’ and not an MG-34 at all.
 
But here’s the thing. Along the way, I started caring about the more egregious errors I encountered, because they reflected how a lack of knowledge (or an acceptance of TV cliches) can influence your narrative detrimentally. An example would be the habit of interchanging rifles and submachine guns based purely on the coolness factor, without stopping to think that one is designed to hit something far away, sometimes even further away than you can see with the naked eye, and the other’s basically for pistol range only – Lost and Walking Dead fans take note! In a similar vein, on a subject I know even less about, I've heard that archers get furious with Legolas et al for drawing their bows and then keeping them drawn to threaten people or make long speeches, as though they were handguns and not weapons based on completely different and very physically demanding physics…
 
Plus I started seeing how choosing to feature more appropriate, interesting or, yes, forgotten weapons instead of the obvious ones had the potential to enrich the story – in exactly the same way as one might avoid overworked settings or character traits to make them more distinctive. So by the time I got on to Book Two, I was letting Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons and Jonathan Ferguson from the Royal Armouries point me towards unusual things like the De Lisle silenced carbine, which I was able to see for myself on a visit to the latter in Leeds (well worth it!). And understanding the capabilities, limitations and availability of that weapon helped shape the story itself.
 
So, not a gripe. Just a bit of well-meant advice, from someone who’s learning from his mistakes. Double-check the stuff you kind-of-know you’re not too sure of.  And please let me know what things I'm still getting embarrassingly wrong, won't you?
 
And in the meantime… Oi, Yanks! Hands off our Sten guns! (Seriously, I now know they’re horrible to hold!)
 
P.S. – I’ve just realised that much of the above may be largely irrelevant if you’re a gamer, playing those games. But I don’t. My namesake Trevor is quite enough for me!

And seriously, I know full well that neither YouTube, gaming – nor escapist action thrillers – can give you an accurate impression of what it's like to use one of these weapons in the flesh or, God forbid, to have it used on you. But that doesn't mean that as creators we shouldn't try to get closer, does it?


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THE BORODINO SACRIFICE, the first book in my CHASING MERCURY series, is now available on Amazon here.