Comments by "Horizon" (@Horizon344) on "The Sten - It's a Toob, Innit?" video.

Nice film but the History is a bit awry. In 1940 the retreat from France was caused by the total collapse of the French Army, leaving 300K British troops facing 2 million+ German troops on the warpath, hence the retreat - hardly a matter of picking up bad French habits. The STEN was created not because British Army had left its small arms on the beaches of Dunkirk (they left heavier kit, armour & artillery, taking their small arms with them), but that there was a gap in the British Army's armament with a lack of a sub-machine gun. This had been provisionally covered in the late 1930's by use of the USA's Thompson, but that model was impossible to import into England from America in 1940 and too material intensive and difficult to manufacture in England in the numbers required for the national emergency that it faced with the imminent threat of a German invasion. Hence the improvized creation that is the STEN as a stand-in until something more refined was made with the Sterling.
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