Tom Hanks famously depicted Captain John Miller in “Saving Private Ryan” toting his trusty Thompson submachine gun — “Tommy gun” — from the beaches of Normandy far into the interior of France in 1944.

Bill Yenne’s 2009 book, “Tommy Gun: How General Thompson’s Submachine Gun Wrote History,” describes how, toward the end of the war, infantryman Mike Colalillo was sitting atop a Sherman tank during ...