The Toolmaker’s War: The Legend of Tony Stein and the Stinger

Chapter 1: The Scrapyard Solution

It was 10:00 AM on a humid Tuesday in November 1944, and Marine Corporal Tony Stein wasn’t following the script. While others cleaned rifles or marched in formation, Stein was elbow-deep in a pile of twisted aluminum and scorched rubber at a naval air station in Hawaii. To the casual observer, he looked like just another bored Marine picking through trash. But Stein wasn’t searching for souvenirs—he was hunting for survival.

Stein grew up in Ohio, a toolmaker by trade, a man whose hands were more comfortable with metal than with maps. He understood the war was moving, and so were the rumors: the next target wasn’t going to be a jungle like Guadalcanal. It would be a fortress—an island turned into a concrete labyrinth by twenty years of Japanese engineering. The standard Marine weapons, the M1 Garand and the BAR, were reliable in the trees, but Stein had a gut feeling they’d be useless against bunkers and caves.

He needed something heavier. He needed a can opener.

Stein’s search ended at the tail section of a wrecked Douglas Dauntless dive bomber. The plane was a skeleton of metal, battered and abandoned in the weeds. But inside the wing, Stein found what he was looking for: a Browning AN/M2 machine gun. To the untrained eye, it looked like any other .30 caliber machine gun. But Stein knew the difference.

The infantry version was built like a tractor—heavy, slow, and reliable, firing about 500 rounds per minute. The aircraft version was built like a drag racer—lighter barrel, skeletonized receiver, designed for speed. In the air, a split second meant everything, so this gun was tuned to scream. It fired not 500, but 1,200 rounds per minute—twenty bullets every second.

Stein pulled the gun from the wreckage, grime and hydraulic fluid coating the metal. It lacked a stock and a trigger, designed to be fired by an electric solenoid on a pilot’s stick. It was a piece of industrial machinery, not a soldier’s weapon. When Stein hauled it into the machine shop, his fellow Marines scoffed. What was he going to do with a broken airplane gun?

He told them he was going to carry it into combat. They laughed. The experts and officers listed the reasons why it was a terrible idea. The rate of fire was too high—uncontrollable recoil, like wrestling a fire hose. It would eat ammo too fast; a standard Marine carried 200 rounds, which this gun would devour in ten seconds. The barrel was too thin, designed to be cooled by wind at 300 mph; on the ground, it would melt in a minute.

They called it a Frankenstein. They called it a waste of good metal.

But Stein wasn’t deterred. He didn’t see what the gun was—he saw what it could be. He cleared a space on his workbench and got to work. He scavenged a battered M1 Garand, sawed off the wood stock, and bolted it to the rear of the aircraft gun. Now he could shoulder it. He ripped out the electric solenoid and fabricated a manual trigger. He stole a bipod from a BAR and welded it to the barrel jacket.

The result was ugly—three guns smashed together in a car wreck. It was the size of a light machine gun with the power of a fighter plane. Stein built a custom aluminum box magazine to hold 100 rounds of belted ammo. He called it the Stinger.

When Stein took it to the test range, the laughter stopped. He didn’t fire short bursts. He braced his boots in the dirt and held the trigger down. The sound was terrifying—like a giant sheet of canvas ripped in half. The target didn’t just get holes; it disintegrated. The volume of lead turned wood into sawdust in a blink. The barrel glowed cherry red, smoking in the humid air.

Stein grinned. The Stinger was hungry, temperamental, and the deadliest thing on the island.

He built five more for his squad. They became a special club, carrying unsanctioned, experimental weapons. If the gun jammed or exploded, there was no manual. They were on their own.

Chapter 2: Sulfur Island

February 19, 1945. The Marines floated off the coast of a small, ugly island shaped like a pork chop. The maps called it Iwo Jima. The sailors called it Sulfur Island. The air reeked of rotten eggs, even miles offshore. For three days, battleships had pounded the island with shells the size of Volkswagens. Bombers dropped tons of high explosives. The island looked ruined.

The admiral said nothing could survive. They said the Japanese would be dead or too stunned to fight. They said it would be a walkover.

Stein sat in the landing craft, the Stinger on his lap, checking his custom magazine and strapping extra belts of ammo across his chest. He looked like a Mexican bandit. The other Marines trusted the bombardment. Stein didn’t. He kept his hand on the welded grip of his Frankenstein gun.

The ramp dropped. The world turned to hell.

The bombardment hadn’t killed the Japanese—it had woken them up. General Kuribayashi had built a fortress underground. No trenches, no tents—the entire army was hidden in tunnels and pillboxes. As Marines ran onto the black sand, the pillboxes opened fire. The sand wasn’t normal—it was volcanic ash, coarse, black, and soft. Every step sank a man to his ankles. You couldn’t run. You couldn’t dig a foxhole; the walls collapsed.

The Marines were trapped in a slow-motion nightmare, slogging through black quicksand while invisible machine guns cut them to pieces.

Chapter 3: Walking Into Fire

Stein’s platoon hit the beach and dove behind a ridge of black ash, bullets snapping overhead like angry hornets. Men screamed, medics called for help. Fifty yards up the slope, a Japanese pillbox—a low concrete dome with a narrow firing slit—was hammering away with a heavy machine gun. The Marines fired their M1 Garands, but the bullets sparked uselessly off the concrete. The BARs were too slow; the Japanese gunners ducked between shots. The pillbox was impenetrable, a dragon breathing fire down the beach, halting the American advance.

The lieutenant called for a bazooka team, but the bazooka man was already down in the surf. Every time a Marine raised his head, he was shot. The words of the officers back in Hawaii echoed: “Standard equipment is all you need. That airplane gun is a toy.”

Stein looked at the pillbox, then at his pinned-down friends. He realized that standard equipment was going to get them all killed. The Japanese didn’t care about regulations—they cared about volume of fire. Stein checked the Stinger, racked the charging handle, feeling the heavy, smooth mechanism. He knew the risks: the gun could jam, he could run out of ammo in seconds, and standing up in this firestorm was suicide. But he was a toolmaker. He had brought the right tool for the job.

He didn’t crawl or signal for cover fire. Tony Stein stood up, wrapped his hand around the carry handle he’d welded to the barrel, tucked the Garand stock into his hip, and stepped out from behind the ridge, boots sinking into the black ash. He walked straight toward the pillbox.

The Japanese gunners saw him—one lone Marine walking upright, holding a strange, ugly metal tube. They swung their heavy Type 92 machine gun, the “Woodpecker,” toward him. It fired big, heavy bullets that could punch through a man and the guy behind him. But before the Woodpecker could get its rhythm, Stein introduced them to the Stinger.

He didn’t fire a burst. He clamped his hand down on the homemade trigger and leaned forward to counter the recoil. The Stinger roared—a scream, not a thud. The sound blurred into a single, continuous noise, like a giant canvas being ripped in half. Twenty bullets a second. The stream of tracers hit the pillbox, and the sandbags stacked around the firing slit didn’t just get holes—they evaporated. The wall of lead hammered through the opening, ricocheting inside the concrete box like angry bees in a blender. The Japanese gunner didn’t have a chance to duck. The pillbox fell silent.

Stein kept walking. He didn’t stop to reload or check his work. He walked right up to the side of the pillbox, pulled a demolition charge from his belt, and tossed it through the firing slit. The explosion muffled inside the concrete. One pillbox down—but he was just getting started.

Chapter 4: The Rhythm of Survival

Another pillbox, fifty yards away, was chewing up his squad. Stein swiveled the Stinger, the barrel already smoking, the metal turning a dull gray-blue from the heat. He charged. This time, the Japanese soldiers tried to run out the back to reposition. Stein caught them in the open, sweeping the Stinger across them. The aircraft gun chopped them down like a scythe cutting wheat. The Stinger didn’t wound—it destroyed.

Then the inevitable happened. The gun snapped on an empty chamber. The Stinger was hungry, eating ammo faster than any infantry weapon ever made. Stein’s 100-round box magazine was empty. He’d fired 200 rounds in less than a minute. He was standing in the open, holding a useless metal club, with angry Japanese soldiers still shooting at him.

Most men would have dove for cover and waited for a runner to bring up ammo. But Tony Stein wasn’t most men. He knew his squad was still pinned. If he stopped, the momentum would die and the Japanese would reorganize. So he did something crazy: he took off his helmet, threw it on the black sand to mark his position, and ran back toward the beach—through the kill zone, dodging mortar blasts and sniper fire.

He made it back to the landing craft where the ammo crates were stacked. He didn’t wait for permission. He grabbed massive belts of .30 caliber ammo, draping them over his shoulders, grabbed fresh box magazines, and looked like a walking ammo dump. Then he turned and ran back into the fire—back to his helmet, back to the front.

This became the rhythm of the battle: shoot, kill, run empty, dash back, reload, repeat. Stein did this eight times. Eight times he ran the gauntlet of Iwo Jima’s beach, a one-man logistics train. At one point, his boots were so full of sand he couldn’t move fast enough. He kicked them off and sprinted across sharp volcanic rock in his socks.

The Marines who were pinned down watched in awe. They saw this lone figure running back and forth, covered in grime and sweat, carrying a weapon that sounded like a dragon. They saw pillbox after pillbox go silent. They saw the “useless” airplane gun tearing apart fortifications that had withstood naval bombardment. Stein destroyed a third pillbox, then a fourth. He cleared a path for the entire platoon.

The Japanese couldn’t target him because he never stopped moving—aggressive, fast, armed with overwhelming firepower. He was using the Stinger exactly as it was used in the sky: hit hard, hit fast, and don’t stop shooting until the target is smoking.

Chapter 5: The Anvil and the Hammer

By the time Stein hit the fifth pillbox, the barrel of the Stinger was glowing cherry red, the heat burning his hands through his gloves. The welds on the handle were holding, but just barely. The gun shook itself apart with the violence of its own action, but it kept firing. Stein flanked the fifth bunker, cut down the defenders, and blew the door. He stood amidst the ruin, chest heaving, steam rising from his weapon. He looked back at the beach—littered with the bodies of Marines, but his squad was up and moving. He had punched a hole in the impenetrable Japanese line, single-handedly killed more than twenty enemy soldiers, and silenced the guns that had slaughtered his friends. All with a piece of junk pulled from a scrap pile.

But the battle for Iwo Jima was far from over. The beach was just the doorstep; the real house of horrors waited inland. As the sun began to set on D-Day, the Marines dug in, exhausted and terrified, surrounded by the dead. The Stinger gunners—Stein and the five others he’d built weapons for—were busy, cleaning their guns, scavenging more ammo. They knew the next day would be worse.

The invasion moved inland toward the airfields. The terrain changed from flat sand to rocky ridges and canyons—a sniper’s paradise. The Japanese were hiding in spider holes, tiny camouflaged pits where a soldier would pop up, shoot, and disappear. Stein’s reputation spread. Officers who had laughed at the Frankenstein gun now called for him by name. “Get the guy with the Stinger!” became a battle cry when a patrol hit a stubborn bunker.

Stein became a specialist—a bunker buster. When he suppressed a bunker with the Stinger, he would wave the demolition teams forward. “Blow it! Blow it now!” he’d shout over the roar. While Stein held Japanese heads down with a torrent of lead, Marines with satchel charges rushed in. They threw explosives into the smoking firing slits that Stein had just cleared, and the heavy concrete roofs lifted into the air and slammed back down, sealing the tomb forever. Stein was the anvil; the demolition teams were the hammer.

Chapter 6: The Toll of Ingenuity

By the afternoon, Stein had cleared a massive sector of the beachhead, destroyed pillbox after pillbox, and killed twenty enemy soldiers who had charged him. But the toll was mounting. Adrenaline masked the pain, but his body was breaking down. His feet were cut to ribbons by volcanic rock, his shoulders bruised black and blue from the recoil, his hands blistered from the heat of the barrel. On his eighth run, he stumbled, falling into the black sand, chest heaving.

The air on Iwo Jima smelled of sulfur, rotten eggs, and death. It filled his lungs, choking him. He looked at the Stinger lying in the dirt next to him—a piece of junk, paint peeled off, metal stained with carbon, the Garand stock cracked. But it was the only thing keeping his friends alive.

Stein grabbed the carry handle, felt the heat sear his glove, gritted his teeth, and stood up. He moved toward a massive fortified position holding up the entire flank—a complex of bunkers connected by tunnels. The Japanese inside were throwing grenades, rolling them down the hill toward the Americans. Stein walked right up to the mouth of the cave, planted his feet, leveled the Stinger, and held the trigger down until the magazine was empty. The sound was deafening. The Stinger poured fire into the dark opening, rounds ricocheting off rock walls, creating a blender of lead inside the tunnel. The grenades stopped coming. The shouting stopped.

Stein stood for a moment in the silence that followed, the barrel of his gun pinging as the metal cooled. He was empty again. He looked back at his squad—they were standing up, no longer pinned down. The beach behind them was littered with wreckage and bodies, but the path forward was clear. The Frankenstein gun had punched a hole in the Atlantic wall of the Pacific.

Stein dropped the empty magazine in the sand, reached for his last belt of ammo. He didn’t know it yet, but he had just performed one of the most legendary feats of individual combat in Marine Corps history. He had taken a weapon the experts said was useless and used it to break the back of an impregnable defense.

Chapter 7: The Night Falls

As the sun set over Iwo Jima, the sky turned a bruised purple. The fighting didn’t stop—it never stopped on Iwo—but the intensity of the beach landing was fading. The Marines dug in for the night. Stein sat on a crate of rations, looked at his feet—socks shredded, stained with blood and black ash. His hands shook, not from fear, but from the vibration of holding a handheld aircraft cannon for six hours straight.

He picked up a rag and started to wipe down the Stinger, cleaning carbon off the bolt, checking the welds, treating it with the tenderness of a father caring for a child. To the rest of the world, it was an ugly, dangerous abomination. To Tony Stein, it was a masterpiece.

He didn’t know the hardest part of the battle was still ahead. He didn’t know about the caves of Hill 362A. He didn’t know he only had a few days left to live. All he knew was that the Stinger worked, and tomorrow he would need it again.

Chapter 8: Into the Heart of Darkness

The battle for Iwo Jima did not end on the beach. The real fight was inland, in the maze of ridges, caves, and sulfur pits that made up the northern half of the island. The terrain was a nightmare—jagged rocks, hidden tunnels, and spider holes where Japanese snipers waited in silence. The defenders weren’t just in bunkers anymore; they were inside the island itself, fighting from a network of tunnels that stretched for miles.

Tony Stein carried the Stinger into this new hell. For the next nine days, he became the tip of the spear. Every time a patrol got pinned down by a sniper in a spider hole or a machine gun nest hidden in the rocks, the call went out for Stein. He would come running up the line, the heavy aircraft gun cradled in his arms, ammo belts draped over his shoulders. He was a specialist now—a one-man siege engine.

The gun took a beating. The aircraft aluminum receiver wasn’t designed for the grit and mud of ground combat. It was meant for the clean, cold air of the stratosphere. The volcanic ash got into everything, grinding against the moving parts like sandpaper. Stein cleaned the gun constantly, pouring oil into the action until it dripped out the bottom. He treated the Stinger like a living thing, nursing it through the abuse, keeping it alive for one more belt, one more fight.

But the human body has limits that even a toolmaker can’t fix. Stein was exhausted. He hadn’t slept in days. His feet were raw meat inside his boots. The adrenaline that had carried him through the beach landing was fading, replaced by a deep, bone-weary fatigue. Yet he kept volunteering, kept leading the way, as if he believed that as long as he had the Stinger, nothing could touch him.

Chapter 9: The Last Run

On March 1st, 1945, Stein’s luck finally ran out. He was leading a patrol near Hill 362A—a jagged ridge commanding a view of the northern plateau. The Marines were trying to clear the caves that riddled the slopes. It was slow, terrifying work. A sniper could be hiding ten feet away, invisible until the muzzle flash.

Stein spotted a Japanese position ahead. He raised the Stinger, ready to unleash the familiar tearing sound that had saved his life so many times. But this time, the enemy was faster. A single shot rang out from the rocks—not a machine gun burst, but a sniper’s bullet. Stein fell. The Stinger dropped from his hands, clattering against the volcanic stone. The weapon that had destroyed five pillboxes and killed twenty men lay useless in the dirt.

The patrol rushed forward, dragging Stein to cover, shouting for a corpsman, but there was nothing the medic could do. The toolmaker was gone. He was twenty-three years old.

The patrol had to keep moving. They couldn’t stop to mourn. They left the Stinger there for a moment—a silent pile of metal in the dust. Without Stein, it was just heavy trash. Nobody else knew how to unjam it if it stalled. Nobody else knew the trick to loading the custom magazine. It was a weapon made for one man, and that man was dead.

Chapter 10: The Ghosts of Iwo Jima

In the days that followed, the other five Stingers—the ones Stein had built for his buddies back in Hawaii—met similar fates. The war on Iwo Jima destroyed them. One by one, the gunners were wounded or killed. The guns themselves shook apart. The high rate of fire shattered the welds on the handles. The barrels burned out, the rifling worn smooth by thousands of rounds. The extractors snapped under the violence of the cycle.

By the time the island was declared secure on March 26th, the Stingers were extinct. They had vanished into the debris of the battlefield, buried under the black sand or tossed into piles of captured weapons. Not a single complete Stinger survived the war. They became ghosts.

When the reports from Iwo Jima finally reached the rear echelon, the officers read them in stunned silence. They read the citations for the Medal of Honor. They read eyewitness accounts of a corporal who ran barefoot across a beach eight times to feed a machine gun that fired like an airplane. They read about the impossible weapon that had punched a hole in the Japanese line.

The experts who had mocked the gun back in Hawaii, the ones who called it a toy and a waste of metal, had nothing to say. The evidence was carved into the ruined pillboxes of the landing zone. Stein had proven them wrong in the most absolute way possible. He had proven that firepower is the only language a fortified enemy understands. He showed that a weapon isn’t judged by how pretty it looks on the parade ground—it’s judged by how many of your friends it brings home alive.

Tony Stein was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. The citation spoke of his conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life. It described the Stinger and the charge on the pillboxes. It made him a legend in the Marine Corps.

Chapter 11: The Legend and the Legacy

But legends can be slippery things. Because no Stingers survived, people started to doubt the story as the years went on. Gun collectors and historians argued about the details. Some said it was impossible to fire an aircraft gun from the shoulder. They said the recoil would have broken his collarbone. They said the ammo load was too heavy. The Stinger became like the sword in the stone—a myth that grew taller with every telling.

It wasn’t until years later, when photos surfaced from the battlefield, that the myth became solid reality again. Grainy black-and-white pictures showed Stein and his squad, and there, cradled in his arms, was the beast. You could see the Garand stock bolted to the back. You could see the BAR bipod welded to the front. You could see the custom box magazine. It looked exactly as the stories described—an ugly, brutal, terrifying piece of engineering.

The photos proved that it wasn’t magic. It was mechanics. It was the product of a mind that looked at a broken airplane and saw a way to win a war.

The legacy of the Stinger didn’t end on Iwo Jima. The concept of a high-rate-of-fire machine gun for infantry didn’t disappear. Stein had planted a seed. He showed that sometimes you need a saw, not a hammer—something that can cut through cover and suppress an enemy instantly. In the years since, the military has developed weapons like the minigun and the Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), designed by teams of engineers with million-dollar budgets. Tony Stein built his prototype in a scrapyard with a welding torch and a bad attitude.

Epilogue: The Toolmaker’s Lesson

We rescue these stories to ensure that men like Tony Stein don’t disappear into the silence of history. We tell them because it’s easy to look at World War II as a game of generals and maps—a war won by strategy and flags on a board. But the war wasn’t won by generals. It was won by a twenty-three-year-old kid who refused to accept that “impossible” meant stop. It was won by the toolmaker who looked at a pillbox killing his friends and decided to build a can opener.

The Stinger was a freak of nature. It broke every rule of gun safety and design. It was dangerous to the user, heavy, and ugly. But for ten days on the black sands of Iwo Jima, it was the most beautiful thing in the world to the Marines of Company A.

So the next time you hear someone talk about standard procedure or following the manual, remember Tony Stein. Remember the guy who took a machine gun meant for the sky and dragged it through the mud to save his platoon. Remember that sometimes the best solution isn’t the one they give you—it’s the one you build yourself.

This is the story of the Stinger. It is a reminder that the greatest weapon in the arsenal of democracy isn’t a tank or a bomber. It is the ingenuity of the American soldier. It is the mechanic who looks at a pile of junk and sees a way to survive.