Скачать или смотреть The Germans Named It “Double Death” — For One Terrifying Reason

American infantry aren’t being overrun because they lack courage or numbers.
They’re being killed by a flaw measured in seconds.
A Thompson submachine gun burns through its magazine almost instantly.
And every reload creates a four-to-five second silence.
In the Hürtgen Forest, that silence is fatal.
German defenders learned to wait for it — and when American guns went quiet, they struck without mercy.
Then something appeared on the front line that the Wehrmacht had never encountered before.
Staff Sergeant Bobby Castellano was issued a modified Thompson unlike anything in the field.
Two complete firing systems mounted into a single weapon.
Twin barrels.
Twin magazines.
A combined rate of fire approaching 1,400 rounds per minute.
When German forces assaulted his position, the result shocked both sides.
The weapon didn’t merely slow the attack — it tore it apart.
Surviving German troops radioed rear command in panic, reporting entrenched heavy machine guns.
In reality, they were facing one soldier armed with an experimental submachine gun.
The weapon was never meant to exist.
It was built in a small, improvised workshop behind the lines by James Watkins — a machinist turned soldier who ignored doctrine, bypassed regulation, and solved a problem commanders couldn’t.
Only 183 of these weapons were ever produced.
To the Germans, they became “Doppeltod” — Double Death.
To the Americans who carried them, they were something far simpler.
They were survival.
This is the classified story of a battlefield innovation that briefly changed the balance of close-quarters combat, defied every rule of procurement, saved lives under impossible conditions —
and then vanished from official history for more than three decades.