In the quiet chaos of Normandy’s hedgerow country, where every field was a trap and every hedge could hide a gun, a nineteen-year-old from rural Kentucky reached back centuries for a solution the modern U.S. Army never saw coming.

His weapon wasn’t a new rifle or a secret Allied device. It was a slingshot.

Not the kind carved by bored kids in barnyards, but a carefully engineered tool built from gas mask rubber, scrap leather and a forked piece of oak. In Jack “Slingshot” Thompson’s hands, it became one of the most unexpectedly effective close-assault weapons of the European campaign.

This is how a soldier everyone laughed at became the man everyone wanted to learn from.

A Deadly Problem in a Green Maze

By mid-1944, after the landings at Omaha and Utah, American infantry ran into a problem maps hadn’t warned them about: the bocage.

Across Normandy, centuries-old hedgerows divided the land into a maze of small fields. Each was bounded by thick earthen embankments topped with dense vegetation. For German defenders, they were ready-made fortifications. For U.S. troops used to training on open ranges, they were nightmares.

Machine-gun crews with MG 42s—the German general-purpose machine gun—could sit hidden ten, twenty, even thirty meters behind a hedgerow and command perfect fields of fire across open ground. A single nest, properly placed, could hold up a company for hours.

That’s exactly what happened to Company C of the 29th Infantry Division on one long, miserable day in hedgerow country.

They had been pinned down for three hours. Every attempt to move across a 200-yard stretch of open field ended in a staccato roar of 7.92 mm rounds from a concealed MG 42, firing at a rate of over a thousand rounds per minute. Artillery couldn’t get the right angle. Mortars couldn’t reliably drop rounds behind the hedge canopy. Rifle grenades lacked range and flew too flat to clear the embankment.

It was a classic stalemate: advancing meant walking into a storm of fire; staying put meant slowly losing men and momentum.

Then a private everyone thought was a little crazy stood up in a foxhole with something that looked like it belonged in a boy’s pocket, not an infantry fight.

The Farm Boy and His “Toy”

Jack Thompson grew up in rural Kentucky, in hills where small game was plentiful and ammunition was scarce. His family simply didn’t have money to waste on cartridges for practice. So Jack did what resourceful kids have done for centuries: he learned to use a slingshot.

By the time he was twelve, he could hit a tin can at fifty yards with river stones. Rabbits, birds, squirrels—he learned their patterns of movement and how to lead them, just as surely as he learned chores and planting schedules.

To him, a slingshot wasn’t a childish plaything. It was a serious hunting tool.

When he landed in Normandy with the 29th Division, he carried his standard-issue M1 rifle, bayonet, gear—and tucked among his personal items, a homemade slingshot. His squadmates found it and did exactly what you’d expect a bunch of stressed, young infantrymen to do: they laughed.

A sergeant quipped that Thompson was “bringing a toy to a tank fight.”

Corporal William Martinez gave him a nickname that stuck: “Slingshot.”

Behind the jokes, Jack was working.

Reinventing an Ancient Weapon

Thompson hadn’t brought the slingshot for nostalgia. He had come with an idea.

He knew the limits of the standard Mark II fragmentation grenade: most soldiers could throw it about 35–40 meters. On a good day, a strong arm might stretch that to 50. But in the kind of hedgerow fights they were getting into, German strongpoints were often sixty to a hundred meters away, positioned just far enough back that grenades couldn’t reach them.

Powerful as they were, those compact grenades did no good if they couldn’t get over the mound and into the actual position.

Rifle grenades extended range, but their flat trajectories meant they slammed into hedges rather than dropping behind them. Mortars had the arc, but not always the visibility or angle. What Thompson envisioned was something in between: a way for a single soldier to throw a grenade in a high arc over a hedge and into a blind spot, from just beyond the enemy’s effective effective small-arms range.

There was no issued equipment for that.

So he started building his own.

His first efforts failed spectacularly. A simple forked branch with poor-quality rubber snapped under the strain and nearly took his eye out. Another split down the middle. A third couldn’t handle the weight and shape of a grenade; the pouch twisted, the flight was unstable, and accuracy was terrible.

The breakthrough came when he realized he didn’t need to scrounge random elastic. The army had already issued him a better material: the heavy-duty rubber from gas mask straps.

He cut and doubled the rubber bands, matched them to a carefully carved hardwood fork, and fashioned a sturdy leather pouch from an ammunition bag. The result was a slingshot strong enough to propel the roughly one-pound grenade out to ninety or even a hundred meters.

That solved the range problem. The hard part was accuracy.

Thompson spent precious spare moments practicing. He tested different angles, different pulling distances, different ways of holding the frame. Eventually he mastered a method: load the grenade into the pouch upside down, pull back with both hands to full extension, aim at roughly forty-five degrees, and release smoothly with a follow-through, much like a pitching motion.

With enough repetition, he could put grenades within three meters of his intended point at eighty meters or more. Given the blast radius of a fragmentation grenade, that was more than good enough.

When he tried to demonstrate this to his lieutenant, the officer dismissed it without even watching. No one wanted to waste scarce grenades on a slingshot experiment dreamed up by a private.

Until the day they ran out of other options.

The Shot That Changed Minds

Back on that hedgerow-lined field, Company C was in trouble. One .30 cal machine gun already had been knocked out. Artillery wasn’t available. Close-range options all ran into the same problem: there was too much open ground between the Americans and the German nest.

In a foxhole with Corporal Martinez, Thompson pulled out his slingshot. Martinez, even after everything they’d been through, still laughed. “You’ve lost your mind, Thompson. What are you going to do—give them a headache?”

Thompson didn’t argue. He loaded a live fragmentation grenade into the leather pouch, braced his feet, and stretched the rubber to its limit. He sighted, adjusted for distance and arc as best he could in that cramped, muddy spot, and let go.

Time slowed.

The grenade rose in a smooth, silent curve, clearing the hedge that had rejected every rifle grenade they’d fired. It disappeared behind the foliage, into the invisible space where the German machine gun team had been hammering away.

Four and a half seconds later, the MG 42 stopped.

When Company C finally reached that position, they found three German soldiers dead and the machine gun no longer operable. The grenade had landed within a couple of meters of the weapon.

The stunned lieutenant who had once joked about “real weapons” stared at the lifeless gun, then at the slingshot, then at the farm boy from Kentucky.

“How the hell did you do that?” he demanded.

“Physics, sir,” Thompson said. “Same way David killed Goliath. Just need the right equipment and the right angle.”

It wasn’t a textbook reply. It was the honest answer of someone who had taken an ancient principle—convert stored elastic energy into projectile flight—and applied it with deadly seriousness.

From Ridicule to Doctrine

One lucky shot could have been dismissed as a fluke. Lieutenant Hayes didn’t do that. He ordered a demonstration.

Thompson set up a series of targets at varying distances. Using training grenades and carefully chosen angles, he showed that his hit on the MG 42 nest had not been blind luck. He could repeat the effect at different ranges.

Battalion leadership took notice. Major Frank Wilson, initially skeptical, watched as Thompson dropped grenades behind hedgerows at eighty, ninety, and even a hundred meters.

By the end of the day, the conversation had shifted from “this is crazy” to “how many men can you train?”

Thompson suggested that a soldier with no prior slingshot experience would need a few hundred practice shots to gain proficiency. That was a significant investment in training time—but compared to the cost of developing and producing new launched grenades, and the value of a tool that could reach behind cover, it was negligible.

Battalion ordered that each company assign men to learn the technique. Thompson not only trained them, he built their slingshots himself from scavenged materials.

The program grew quickly:

Within weeks, the first battalion of the regiment had slingshot teams integrated into every rifle company.

Within months, other battalions in the division were requesting training.

Slingshot teams began showing up in reports as critical factors in taking out fortified positions with minimal casualties.

The simple device exceeded expectations. It could drop grenades into:

Machine-gun nests that rifles and grenades couldn’t reach.

Mortar pits hidden behind embankments.

Sniper hides in ruined buildings.

Small command posts tucked behind hedges or walls.

German troops, who had learned to recognize the telltale thump of mortars and the launch signature of rifle grenades, were caught off guard. They saw no launcher, heard no distinct firing sound—just the sudden arrival of explosives in places they had assumed were safe.

In captured documents, German officers complained about “new American grenade launchers” that seemed to deliver highly accurate indirect fire from short ranges. None guessed the truth: that old-world technology was reaching them by way of gas mask rubber and farm-honed aim.

The War Department Takes Notice

What began as one private’s improvised trick eventually reached command-level awareness. Reports of slingshot-enabled attacks circulated through after-action summaries.

By late 1944, the War Department issued an “improvised weapons” technical manual that, among other field expedients, included guidelines for constructing and using slingshots to launch grenades. It outlined:

Recommended wood types and dimensions for the fork.

Proper ways to cut and attach gas mask elastic.

Pouch construction from scrap leather.

Safety precautions borne from early mishaps in training.

It wasn’t a glamorous addition to the American arsenal. There were no press releases, no official naming ceremonies. But it was there, in black and white: the U.S. military formally acknowledging that plastic explosives and high-speed aircraft alone do not win battles. Sometimes, a carved branch and a good eye matter too.

By early 1945, thousands of American infantrymen had at least basic familiarization with slingshot techniques. Some units in other divisions adopted them enthusiastically. Others used them more selectively. Even at modest scale, the impact was noticeable—especially in the uniquely constricted terrain of Normandy, the Hürtgen Forest, and the Bulge.

A Silver Star and a Barn Wall

In December 1944, during the Ardennes fighting near Saint-Vith, Thompson’s skill was tested again. Once more, his unit found itself on the receiving end of determined German attacks. Once more, he climbed into position with both his rifle and his slingshot.

Over roughly twenty minutes, he launched grenade after grenade into advancing enemy formations and firing points at ranges that kept him relatively safe but left the enemy vulnerable. Machine-gun teams, squad leaders, and small assault groups suddenly found explosives landing among them from unexpected angles.

His actions were cited as instrumental in breaking up a dangerous assault. This time, there was no laughing from above. His battalion recommended, and he received, the Silver Star.

Stars and Stripes wrote a human-interest piece about the “Kentucky farm boy’s slingshot.” The nickname that had started as a joke became a legend.

When the war ended and Thompson went home, he did not bring a trophy rifle or a captured pistol back. He brought his slingshot and hung it in his barn.

He rarely spoke at length about what it had done. But he kept letters from men who had trained under him—soldiers who wrote that they had survived because of a tool and technique most people would have dismissed at first glance.

One of those letters summarized it perfectly:

“I laughed when I first saw it. Then you taught me. And twice, I walked out of a fight because of what you taught me. I’ll never laugh at a slingshot again.”

Why Thompson’s Story Matters

At first, this tale can sound almost comic—slingshots in World War II? Against machine guns?

Look closer, and it becomes something else.

It illustrates several truths that historians and soldiers alike have learned again and again:

Innovation often comes from below. The people closest to a problem—front-line infantry dealing with hedgerows and machine-gun nests—are often the first to see where standard tools fall short.

Simple doesn’t mean trivial. In an age of mechanization and industry, an “old” technology can still be devastatingly effective when applied creatively.

Cultures that tolerate experimentation gain advantages. U.S. commanders could have banned the practice as unsafe or unprofessional. Instead, enough of them watched, measured, and adopted what worked. The German side, more wedded to formal doctrine and engineering prestige, never quite figured out what was hitting them.

Courage isn’t only running into fire. It’s also enduring mockery, trusting your own judgment enough to keep working on an idea everyone else thinks is ridiculous, and then being willing to put that idea to the test in situations where failure means lives lost.

Private First Class Jack “Slingshot” Thompson didn’t change the outcome of the war by himself. But he saved men in his company, helped clear hedgerows and strongpoints that might have stalled advances, and proved that even in the most mechanized conflict the world had ever seen, individual creativity still mattered.

His story is a reminder that history isn’t just written in big arrows on campaign maps or in the production figures of factories. It’s also written in the small, stubborn decisions of people who look at a seemingly impossible problem and say: maybe there’s another way.

Sometimes, that “other way” looks like a forked branch, two strips of rubber, and a soldier who refuses to accept that he has nothing left to try.