Basically, if you took two sides with roughly equal training and numbers, and gave one side civilian weapons and one side WW2 squad level weapons, would one side have an advantage over the other or would it be actually equal?
By civilian firearms I’ll use the example of whatever weapons you could go into a American gunstore in most places and purchase today, so basically no automatic weapons, no grenades or grenade launchers (or explosives in general) and other minor things. By WW2 firearms I mean the standard loadout of a WW2 military in general but for this example I’ll use Nazi Germany (mainly KAR-98k bolt action rifles but with MG-42 machine guns supporting them and NCO’s armed with MP-40’s) and they also have hand grenades and rifle grenades for support.
The Germans easily have the firepower advantage in the MG42 and their entire squad tactics revolve around the MG42 laying down suppression fire to let the rest either flank with rifles or flush them out with grenades) But the civilians have access to semi-auto AR-15 rifles with scopes, hunting rifles with very good optics, and very high capacity pistols and carbines.
Could the civilians put up enough accurate firepower to counter the Germans, or would the power of the machine gun completely overwhelm them?
Well, only 1 in 20 or so of the german soldiers is manning a machine gun. All the rest just have bolt action rifles. While the side armed with civilian weapons has the advantages of :
Faster firing rate
More accuracy
More rounds carried per pound
I mean civilian gun stores sometimes carry level IV body armor. And sometimes they have night vision scopes and there’s probably a gun store somewhere that has a tracking point computerized gunsight.
So the civilian weapon team would be pretty much certain to win if they get to have body armor. And they are going to win at night and in any scenario where they are defending (because you can’t really haul an MG-42 during an infantry assault). Obviously, if the civilian weapon team is forced to attack against that machine gun, it would be more difficult.
However, that gun store also has rifles that can hit 1000 meter targets. Even if there’s no tracking point scope for sale, there would be laser rangefinders. Assuming some of the soldiers have enough training to use that rifle, they could just snipe the machine gunners right out of their nest and proceed to victory.
Thinking about it further, the effective firepower of 20 soldiers dumping magazines with AR15s in semi-automatic is more than 1 machinegun + 19 soldiers armed with bolt action rifles. So I will say that under every scenario, team civilian has the edge. Who actually wins depends on leadership and tactics, but they clearly have overall superior equipment.
Even just given squad level weapons as it says in the OP a group of trained infantry soldiers will wipe out the civilians easily. It’s not like the German Army had bad weapons in WWII. A group of infantry soldiers who have trained as a unit would make laughably short work of a bunch of civilians. Go look at some combat footage from the Middle East to see how easy it is to defeat poorly or untrained personnel in a battle.
I was originally going to go with “curb-stomp”, but the OP specified “equal training and numbers.” So we aren’t talking Joe-Bob and his hunting buddies versus the Wehrmacht. We’re talking one group of Rangers playing paintball against another group of Rangers.
I’m still going to go with the side that has “explosive support” over the “just riflemen.” Grenades and rifle grenades can make a world of difference.
The Germans also had Machine Pistols MP18 to MP41. And the First Assault Rifle StG44 = Machine Carbines MP43 - MP44. And hand propelled Anti-Tank launchers. And Panzerfausts,
The MP40 was copied by the allies, and actually still used up to a few decades ago.
I imagine they would give a good account of themselves. But like automobiles, modern stuff is so good over those times, the civvie-equipped force [ whether Americans or WWII Germans ] would probably win.
M1903, Kar98K Mas36, Enfield MK IV
Those are not inaccurate rifles, their accuracy in the war suffers mostly from war time ammo production, not the rifles themselves.
Ventilate your skull at 600m with iron sights with an M1903?
Oh yes
If you were going to shoot me with NATO 223 or FMJ/AP 30-06 7.65 etc, id pick the 223
Firing rate?
Depends, for the smaller arms yea, but firing rate does not in itself mean a lot.
But there are plenty of BREN BAR FN 29, MG34 MG42 M2 M1919’s around to kind of even that out.
And yes you most certainly can do a moving assault with an MG42, just not in the video game rambo fashion one might be thinking
There are also MP34 MP40 STEN, M1928, MAS38, M3 etc small machine guns
And then there are M1 Garands M1 Carbine, G41, G43, FG42 StG44 MAS40
So no terrible loss in firing rate.
We have not mentioned any japanese or russian arms yet
You actually have more per round firepower in your WWII troops.
That 30-06 AP that guy has in his m1903, it will punch a hole through the roof armor of a lot of WWII tanks, that 223 will not.
Everyone is firing rifle ammo of similar properties to him in the WWII weapons cache.
So they are not outgunned really
You might get a ratio of 20:1 in larger German formations if you count everyone. But German infantry squads in 1939 had a theoretical strength of 13 men with one machine gun. By later in the war it not only shrank to a 9 man squad with a machine gun but three other men had submachine guns, and has been mentioned in some late war squads everyone but the machine gunner had an Stg.44, rather than a combination of Kar98k’s and MP40’s. And to the extent real life squads were typically smaller (from losses) they tended to be even smaller groups of men centered around a ‘universal’ machine gun, MG34 or 42 which in fact could be and were carried forward in the assault and fired on the move. And grenades were a major weapon in close range infantry fighting in WWII besides the ubiquitous Panzerfaust by late war usable against infantry as well as armor.
Whereas opportunities to effectively shoot at the enemy at 1000 meters are rare even if the sights/weapons can do it. The outer part of the fat part of the probability distribution of effective small arms fire is more like 300 m, though there’s some smaller tail of less common cases out further. Assuming normally trained soldiers on both sides, not soldiers v civilians but not super-spec ops ninja’s either.
The original question didn’t seem to include body armor or night vision equipment. Assuming neither, I agree with earlier statement by Loach: the modern rifle armed force might be hard to dislodge from prepared positions especially if there were clear fields of fire to several 100m. But they’d have little chance of dislodging a WWII force from their prepared positions, for lack of grenades and suppressive automatic fire, besides other supporting weapons further up the organizational pyramid.
Which is another hole in the ‘what if’. Both sides would have limited offensive capability against the other in prepared positions if they lacked company/battalion organic infantry weapons like mortars, as well as outside artillery and tank support. WWII infantry relied heavily on those to succeed in set piece actions against opposing infantry in prepared positions. By same token if the modern rifle onlyforce had a little better weight and coordination of its mortar/artillery/tank support, that might make up for a good deal of its weakness in lacking mg’s and grenades.
Just the weapons of squads would matter only in limited scenario’s like recon patrols encountering one another. Likewise if under your assumption the modern gun-store armed force had top level body armor plus night vision that would also make an especially big difference, especially at night, in a patrol action.
Well, yeah, but if you are going to assume that the sporting goods store commandos have night vision equipment and ballistic armor then I’m going to assume that my WW2 grunts have an FO and a battery of 105s at their beck and call.
If we get to play with any army/any loadout, then give me a squad or two armed with Garands, a couple of M1919s, a few bazooka pairs and we’re ready to rock.
How about modern electronics, are those available? There’s many a historical battle that would have gone the other way if the losing side had known exactly where they were and had good communications.
The OP is for both sides to have equal training, just that one side has US civilian weapons and the other side gets WWII professional weapons. It not that one side is a regular army and the other is a random group from the streets.
Sufficiently normal that it had a name: “sturmfeuer” (assault fire). The same idea as the US “walking fire” tactic that the M1918 BAR was designed for: suppression of defenders as your squad advances.
The whole idea fell out of favor, replaced with bounding overwatch, in which suppression is provided by half the attack remaining in cover as the other half advances to the next cover.
