There is a picture of Ernie Pyle in Wikipedia captioned “Pyle shares a cigarette with soldiers on Okinawa”. They are all carrying M-1 carbines. I thought infantry all carried the M-1 Garand. Artillerymen, drivers, radio guys carried the carbine. What are these guys? Here is a larger picture. There is a guy on a horse. The uniforms differ, one guy is wearing puttees.
These could be mortar men or some other heavy weapon troops who are technically part of the infantry but who aren’t rifle men. Such guys were also issued M-1 Carbines for personal defense.
I don’t know of a reference to the picture saying what who the guys were other than member of the 77th Infantry Division.
The carbine was widely issued at every level of unit including infantry. The only thing you might infer from the guys having carbines is that they are not members of an infantry squad outfitted according to the official Table of Organization and Equipment, which said each man in infantry squad had a rifle except the BAR man (though there was often unofficially more than one BAR per squad by 1945, and the officially unassigned submachine guns would also often be in infantry squads). They could still be officially outfitted guys from an infantry company Hq or weapons platoon (eg machine gunners or mortar men); or from a battalion’s Hq, weapons co etc, or some high level or attached artillery or rear echelon unit. Or…they could be members of an infantry squad nonetheless carrying carbines rather than rifles.
The downside to the carbine’s reputation in terms of ‘lack of stopping power’ was a more widely held opinion in the Korean War, along with the bad impression of the weapon’s reliability in extreme cold. In WWII it was sometimes favored for infantry combat in close and/or difficult terrain due to its smaller size and weight.
This. We also have no idea where these guys are in relation to the ‘front line’. They could be artillerymen or somesuch. M1 Carbines were popular for any soldier who had to carry something besides a rifle.
Kind of a stinker of a weapon though; feeble cartridge and tended to be jam-prone. Probably ok for someone who rarely had to use it.
This men are Marines. 1st Marine Division, fighting in Okinawa. They were going up against extensive tunnel networks, so having a carbine makes a lot of sense.
I don’t know - I still see them a lot here in Israel. They’re popular among tour guides, volunteer police officers and the like. It’s a pistol you shoot like a rifle.
In the Pacific, Sledge regularly trades off Carbine, Garand, and Thompson. It’s just a TV show, but pretty high accuracy it seems.
Okinawa was also later in the war when M1 Carbine production was ramped up considerably. They cost about half as much to produce and if we create a metric for number produced / years produced, they made about 5 carbines for every Garand, despite the much shorter production period. There were also 3 wartime Garand manufacturers, vs. 11 or so for the Carbine.
It’s not too terrible, you gotta be a little forceful. And having used both, I can imagine it being a dream to carry all day, the Garand not so much.
Again that came to be a more common view by the US Army in Korea and has carried on down. Not as much in WWII. Generally popular weapon, not particularly known as jam prone, and ‘lacks stopping power’ in Korea was probably mainly the result of poorly controlled full auto fire with M2 carbines*, IOW enemy soldiers who weren’t ‘stopped’ because they weren’t actually hit.
On the photo, I’ve seen it labelled as both 1st Marine Division and 77th Infantry Division (which also fought in the Okinawa campaign). But at least one guy does have Marine style camouflage cover on his helmet.
Anyway the answer would be virtually the same as far as who carried carbines, Army or Marines at that time. In the Army official TO&E all infantry squad members had a rifle or BAR, in Marine TO&E the differently organized squad had a squad leader with a carbine besides three rifle/BAR equipped fire teams. Army platoon leaders had a carbine, officially, while the Marine platoon hq had 2. But there were plenty of other men in infantry co’s and bn’s in both Army and Marine TO&E who were officially allotted carbines, besides non-infantry units and higher level hq’s. Moreover, photo’s of both Army and Marines late in WWII sometimes appear to show line infantry squad members with carbines in actual practice.
*some of which were also used late in WWII including on Okinawa though the carbines in any given photo on Okinawa are likely M1’s.
The National Archives lists it as 1st Marine Division, April 8, 1945.
In fact speaking of non-official issue M1 carbines, check out the guy furthest to the right in the iconic posed* photo of German soldiers taken at the site of an overrun US unit during the Battle of the Bulge. In the German Army official tables of organization and equipment meant pretty little by 1944. But such tables were not strictly adhered to even in the well equipped US Army/Marines of late war. Any statement that line US infantry didn’t carry carbines is based on official tables.
*as seen in this uncropped version by the guy casually walking along on the left with no helment.
OK then that seems right. But carbine v rifle in the Army and Marines wasn’t much different in TO&E tables, nor apparently in practice.
It’s a proto-personal defense weapon (PDW). A bit like the P90, MP7 or subcompact 5.56 carbines. They might be intended for rear area troops but the small size and weight can make them useful for troops that value mobility and wieldiness. If you’re doing room/bunker/tunnel clearing or use cramped transportation vehicles, you might want a something that’s light and handy but more substantial than a pistol. A carbine would probably have more flexibility than an SMG too while being cheaper and lighter than a Thompson.
As an example, I remember the Peruvian embassy siege in 1996 ending by Peruvian special forces storming the place. I think I saw one of them was carrying a P90; a PDW intended for defense of rear area troops but the Peruvian special forces evidently thought it was suitable for storming in a siege too.
Tl;dr: Yeah, carbines were intended for rear area self-defense but humans will sometimes show innovation when trying to kill each other.
It depended on what he was operating as. He was trained as a Mortar man, but circumstances required him to operate as an Infantryman at times. If he was carrying the mortar tube the Garand would have been very awkward to carry as well, while the Carbine was much better than a simple pistol for personal defense. When he operated as an an infantryman he would have wanted the stopping power of a rifle over a carbine.
In the book “With the Old Breed” Sledge normally carried a Thompson in Okinawa. But I am sure depending on the circumstances soldiers and marines carried what was available.
Thanks, Bear.
I knew a guy who claimed he hit a North Korean twice with a carbine, “saw feathers fly out of his jacket”, his buddy shot the Korean with a Garand, and he fell down. Keltner “lost” the carbine (he carried a radio) and picked up a Garand from a casualty.
And speaking of tunnel networks, you’ll notice that the M1 Carbine was used quite a bit at Iwo Jima as well. In fact, several of the iconic flag raisers carried the Carbine.
Again that idea tended to be Korean War. Although his works of WWII analysis were later called into serious question, I found SLA Marshall’s analysis of Korean infantry combat fairly compelling. In which he concluded ‘lack of stopping power’ was probably mainly enemy soldiers who weren’t actually hit, which also had to do with the injudiciously used full auto setting on M2 carbines mainly used in Korea, in ‘panic fire’. And ‘not reliable’ also cropped up mainly in the extreme cold of the 1950-51 winter campaign in Korea (in devastating defeats of the US Army by the Chinese mainly rather than the North Koreans).
There’s much less anecdotal evidence let alone sound analytic basis to think the M1 carbine was at a huge disadvantage in WWII infantry combat in non severe cold in terrain that limited ranges more toward the maybe 100 yard average of infantry combat rather than say 300 yard relative extreme. Not only ‘tunnel warfare’.
Today with peer combatants almost certainly wearing high performance body armor and maybe irregular combatants too, the original M1/M2 carbine/cartridge wouldn’t be a workable military weapon. But against unarmored mid-20th century opponents at then typical infantry combat ranges in a lot of situations I think the ‘lack of stopping power’ argument has a lack of really good evidence. Even in Korea the Soviet WWII-style armament of the North Koreans throughout the war, and the Chinese once rearmed from 1951 or so, had most of a squad’s firepower in SMG’s firing 7.62x25mm Tokarev (v 7.62*33 carbine) and you don’t read a lot of US anecdotes about how the enemy ‘burp guns’ weren’t much to worry about because they ‘lacked stopping power’. 
In the “strove to be realistic and accurate” 1960s TV series Combat, the lieutenant had a carbine, and the sergeant had a submachine gun. I can’t remember if anyone in the squad used a mortar or machine gun, but everyone else except the medic had a Garand.
Combat was set in post D-Day France, not the Pacific, if that makes any difference.
They had a BAR guy.