The Franken-Gun of Iwo Jima: How a Marine’s Weapon Built from Aircraft Scrap Became the Deadliest on the Island
The black volcanic sands of Iwo Jima were never meant to be a place for innovation. In February 1945, it was a place of industrial-scale slaughter. As 30,000 U.S. Marines poured onto the eight-square-mile island, they were met by a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon and a defense system designed by Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi to be a meat grinder.
Beneath the ash, 21,000 Japanese soldiers waited in eleven miles of tunnels. They held the high ground on Mount Suribachi, peering down through 800 reinforced pillboxes. Their orders were simple: Kill ten Americans before you die.
Corporal Tony Stein, a 23-year-old former tool and die maker from Ohio, hit Beach Green 1 at 9:02 a.m. As his boots sank into the treacherous ash, he realized the standard-issue weapons of the Marine Corps were failing. The Browning M1919 machine gun was too heavy, required a crew of four, and fired too slowly to suppress a hidden enemy that appeared and vanished in seconds.
But Stein wasn’t carrying a standard weapon. He was carrying a “Stinger”—a salvaged aircraft gun converted into a handheld dealer of death. This is the story of how scrap metal and frontline ingenuity created the most feared individual weapon of the Pacific War.
I. The Bougainville Problem
The DNA of the Stinger was written fourteen months earlier in the jungles of Bougainville. In late 1943, Marines were being picked off by Japanese snipers hidden 60 feet up in the rainforest canopy. The mathematics of the engagement were brutal: a sniper needed 0.3 seconds to fire; a Marine machine gun crew needed over 4 seconds to set up and return fire.
The Marines needed a “hose”—something with a cyclic rate so high it could saturate a treetop in a heartbeat. They found their answer in the wreckage of crashed Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers.
The Dauntless carried an AN/M2 Browning .30 caliber machine gun in the rear cockpit. While the standard infantry M1919 fired 450 rounds per minute, the aircraft-grade AN/M2 screamed at 1,200 to 1,500 rounds per minute. It was light (21 lbs) because it was air-cooled by the 200 mph slipstream of a plane. On the ground, however, it was an “unauthorized” nightmare: it had no stock, no sights, and no trigger—only spade grips and a solenoid button.
II. The Machine Shop in the Jungle
Sergeant Milan Grevich, a machinist from Minnesota, saw the potential of the AN/M2. He teamed up with Tony Stein, whose pre-war experience at Patterson Field making aircraft parts made him a wizard with steel. Together, they began a “Frankenstein” project to make the aircraft gun walkable.
The engineering was a feat of sheer desperation and brilliance:
The Stock: They salvaged a wooden buttstock from a broken M1 Garand and bolted it to the back of the aircraft gun’s buffer tube.
The Bipod: They ripped the bipod off a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) to allow for stabilized firing.
The Sights: They machined a rear sight from a BAR and welded it onto the receiver.
The Trigger: This was the hardest part. They had to fabricate a mechanical linkage that translated a finger pull into a physical strike on the gun’s internal firing mechanism.
They built six of them. They called it the Stinger. It didn’t sound like a machine gun; it sounded like “tearing canvas.” At 25 rounds per second, it could saw a coconut tree in half.
III. The Eight Sprints of Tony Stein
When Stein landed on Iwo Jima, his platoon was immediately pinned down by three Japanese pillboxes. The fire was coming from reinforced concrete slits that traditional rifles couldn’t penetrate.
Stein did the unthinkable. He stood up.
At 5’6″, he was a small man made of pure muscle. He raised the Stinger to his shoulder—a feat requiring immense strength to manage the violent recoil of a gun firing 1,200 rounds per minute—and opened fire. The Stinger’s mechanical scream drowned out the sounds of the beach.
In three minutes, Stein neutralized all three pillboxes, killing 20 enemy soldiers. But the Stinger had a flaw: it ate ammunition faster than the Marines could carry it. A 100-round belt lasted exactly five seconds.
Stein ran back to the beach for more. On his way, he saw a wounded Marine. He slung the Stinger, threw the man over his shoulder, and ran through a hail of mortar fire to the aid station. He grabbed more ammo and ran back.
He did this eight times.
By the fourth trip, the volcanic ash was dragging him down. In a move that became Marine Corps legend, Stein kicked off his boots and threw away his helmet. Barefoot and bareheaded in the black sand, he sprinted back and forth through the killing zone, delivering ammo to his platoon and carrying wounded men back to the sea.
IV. The Resilience of the Weapon
The Japanese realized this one man with the “chainsaw gun” was breaking their line. During his sixth trip, a sniper’s bullet slammed into the Stinger’s receiver, nearly knocking it from Stein’s hands. He checked the action, saw it was still cycling, and kept moving. On his seventh trip, another round shattered the wooden stock. Stein simply wrapped it in a rifle sling to hold the wood together and went back into the fight.
By the end of D-Day on Iwo Jima, Tony Stein had single-handedly destroyed eight fortified positions and evacuated eight men. Remarkably, he hadn’t been touched by a single bullet.
V. The Final Return
Stein fought for four more days until a mortar fragment caught him in the shoulder. He was evacuated to the hospital ship USS Samaritan. From his bed, he listened to the radio reports. His company was being decimated at Hill 362A, a hellish landscape of ravines and caves.
Stein couldn’t wait. On the night of February 28, he stole a rifle, bribed a boat crew, and snuck back onto the island to rejoin his men.
On March 1, 1945, Stein volunteered to lead a nineteen-man patrol to locate a hidden machine gun nest that was pinning down the entire company. He moved up a narrow draw, his shoulder still bleeding under his tunic, his battered Stinger held tight. He located the cave, stood up to deliver a suppressing burst, and was struck in the throat by a Japanese sniper. He died instantly.
The Legacy of Scraps
Tony Stein was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. He was one of the few Marines to earn the nation’s highest award for an action involving a weapon that was technically “contraband.”
The six Stingers built by Grevich and Stein are gone. They were never entered into official serial number logs. After the war, they were likely tossed into scrap piles on Iwo Jima and melted down for their aluminum. No museum holds a Stinger today; they exist only in the yellowed photographs of the men who carried them.
It took the U.S. military forty years to catch up to what two Marines built in a maintenance shed. The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), adopted in the 1980s, finally provided what Stein had: a lightweight, high-fire-rate weapon operated by one man.
Tony Stein’s story isn’t just one of courage; it’s a story of the American industrial spirit. He didn’t wait for a better weapon to be shipped from Washington. He saw a problem, found a crashed plane, and machined his own solution. On the black sands of Iwo Jima, he proved that sometimes the most powerful weapon isn’t the one you’re issued—it’s the one you have the guts to build yourself.
