Paul Carrel in Hitler turns east mentions that some German troops in the first winter died because they were wearing steel helmets (the fluids in their brain froze :eek:).
While it can get very cold in Russia, it’s not like the atmosphere is made of liquid nitrogen. What Mr. Carrel describes is probably physiologically impossible - the fluids in your brain might freeze after you die, but they aren’t going to flash-freeze from wearing a helmet. Furthermore, a human being is not just going to stand there and let his head freeze without doing something.
I doubt the number of German soldiers who actually froze to death was a significant number (I can’t find it right now.) The effect of an uprepared army in winter warfare is largely a combination of two problems;
Disabling but non-fatal injuries like second and third degree frostbite, trench foot, pneumonia, and various other things that drain an army of manpower, and
The inability to effectively operate in a winter climate.
Nobody thinks about it until they’re in it, but if your troops don’t have things like skis or snowhoes and have no motorized transport, just moving around is difficult. Deep snow is insanely hard to walk through, ice is tough on horses (most of the German army walked and used horses and mules to pull supplies, and their horses were wholly unsuited to arctic conditions) and it’s harder to find your way around because visibility is reduced and a lot of visual cues are buried in snow. If your equipment is unsuited to arctic temperatures, it doesn’t work. Cold soldiers are demoralized, miserable, insubordinate, tire easily, and act more slowly and less capably at everything except finding a warm place to sit. Military operations in snow are different at a tactical level, too; winter changes the way sound carries, changes the way you have to conceal positions and personnel, changes the effectivess of artillery, and changes the manner in which units must rest and shelter at night. An army unprepared for winter would have a significant disadvantage even if they never suffered a single cold-related casualty, just because they would simply be a less adept army.
Colonial. You’re been here long enough to know our rules in General Questions. You don’t call someone a liar, muchless a “stormfront” liar. You can attack the post but not the poster.
Per Wiki the chrome parts enabled “long intervals between cleaning”,
which I would think promoted the weapon’s anti-jamming property.
Wiki also states: “Its parts (excluding the barrel) could be produced by
a relatively unskilled workforce”. Perhaps magazine manufacture should
be considered entirely separate, though.
The germans were diverting resources in rounding up the jews, like it or not trains are a strategic resource, never mind the rest, their efforts to rid themselves of the jews undermined their own war fighting capacity. never mind the brain power they lost.
wonder weapons require numbers, it doesn’t matter they had tiger tanks, as i said they had too few, and too complicated with no efficient logistical support. wonder weapons are good when they are created in addition to sufficient regular armed forces, this is what the us had with its massive over production of everything, the germans simply couldn’t afford to do what they were doing and thus undermined their regular war fighting forces through those diversions.
For a well designed firearm this is a statement of the blindingly obvious, and would also have been true of the M1, Lee Enfield, etc. A gun’s parts are just interchangeable machined parts that are mass produced on ordinary industrial machines. You don’t have highly skilled artisans making the guns by hand, no matter whose rifle it was. I’ve been in rifle factories and they’re just ordinary machine shops…
.. except for the production of the barrel, which is quite a unique process.
From what I understand, Germany began to have a serious labor shortage, starting in 1942. So many men had been killed in Russia (over 240,000 dead by January 1942), that despite drafting all young men of military age, the army was also compelled to draft industrial workers. This lead to the need to import slave labor from occupied countries.
While all this was going on, millions of Jews were being murdered-why didn’t the Germans use them as industrial workers?
You could also add up what often happens during wartime when an infantry unit is deployed on an elongated forced march by foot, regardless of the era, army, climate or officers.
During this “endless” march, at some point all kind of issued gear starts to find their rest on the roadside. Steel helmets, field shovels, engineer axes and machetes, “extra” clothing, even secondary weapons and so on. Primary weapon and ammo is carefully taken care of, but everything else is at some point about to be ditched. Officers can’t and sometimes even won’t rise any issue on this, they have their hands full and they know they will need every single man under their command without further issues. Yeah, in the end those soldiers will be sorry without the shovel they tossed away just a 30 miles before they suddenly need to dig into soil. But everyone who did that can’t blame anyone else but themselves.
Nowadays it’s a different thing, a “taxi ride” there and back is truly an essential feature in modern warfare. It’s not about the men, it’s about fast moving with even more gear.
Regarding of what OP asked, check out the Finns at WW2. While at it on their own turf and climate the Finns used pretty much everything they had to throw at Russians, no matter where it was originally made.
They had Finnish, Russian, Swiss, Spanish, German, British, American, French and Italian made weapons. Some of those weapons (like Brewster Buffalos) were not even taken seriously in their country of origin. It was like some damn salad of hardware they had at their disposal.
In the end they lost, but if you look into statistics the outcome was pretty impressive.
No one has suggested that any moderrn army is equipped with weapons
made by hand by “skilled artisans”.
However, I expect that many modern manufactured items, including guns,
require a significant number of workers who ought to be termed “skilled”;
that was certainly true on the shop floor I was associated with for 19 years
in various production and QA/QC/engineering positions.
Of the widely issued rifles from that war, the M1 required the most sophistication in production. Garand had to design tooling and processes as well as the rifle itself. That said, once he had done that work, many companies were able to produce the M1, not all of which were gun companies. The other rifles were 19th century guns that could be produced with 19th century technology.
It’s interesting to look at some of the diverse non-gun related companies ending up producing firearms during WWII - car manufacturers, sewing machine makers, agricultural machinery manufacturers, vacuum cleaner makers, and so on. An even wider range made components for guns, too.
And an interesting data point for the thread: All WWII Russian small arms (not including anti-tank guns, captured weapons, or Lend-Lease stuff, obviously) fired a 7.62mm projectile.
When the Russians liked something, they stuck with it. The U.S. sent them a whole bunch of Studebaker US6 trucks early on as part of Lend-Lease, and when they later offered to send them newer, better trucks, the Soviets said nope, we like the Studebaker, we know how to work with it, please send us more.
I read in several trustworthy sources that the common 7.62 bore size across different weapons was an effort to save money and streamline manufacturing processes. The same machinery could be used to bore out barrel blanks for more than one weapon type. Makes some sense, but I note they got away from that idea quickly following WWII.
In a way. Remember that the most common small arms calibers in the USSR until the 70s were the 7.62X39 and 7.62X54*. On the NATO side, the 7.62X51 is a shortened version of the 30-06 and was adopted as the NATO standard. The US switched to the 5.56 in the late 60s but many NATO countries kept the 7.62X51 until the 80s.
*I’m not sure how quick and thorough the switch to 5.45X39 was.
Possibly he’s referring to the fact that artillery does not burrow into the earth and explode underground (or partly underground) in winter, but bursts right on the frozen surface.
Everything from pistols on up had been .30 caliber, dating all the way back to the goofy Nagant revolver. In the early 50’s the 9 x 18mm Makarov became their standard pistol round. They used it in the Makarov pistol, the misbegotten Stechkin machine pistol, and an assortment of submachine guns. Most of the smg’s were either not widely issued or never entered serious production . You can laugh at themhere.
Since the Russians never throw weapons away, the 7.62 and 5.45 variants of the AK were both in inventory and issue at the same time. The 5.45 in its wood stock variants has grooves cut into the sides of the stock as a tactile way of identifying the weapon’s caliber in darkness. In the early 90’s they introduced the PSM and its ridiculously overhyped 5.45 x 18mm cartridge into the mix alongside the still-issued Makarov. For the sake of sanity, let’s just ignore all their more fanciful underwater weapons, integrally silenced cartridges, and not-really-commercial-but-not-military-either cartridges based on the 7.62 x 54 R case.