Patton said of the Garand, “In my opinion, the M1 rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised.”
Well, it probably wasn’t as decisive as the deployment of the “pointy stick,” but the Garand certainly is a sweet-shooting sucker. Heavier than student-loan debt, true. But even my Frankensteined M1 can blow the balls off a horse-fly at 400 yards, and a .30-06 loading means whatever you hit stays hit.
Outstanding! How are your thumbs?
I loved that show as a kid, not sure how realistic it would be viewed now compared to later generation ‘realistic’ WWII depictions (Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, etc,) But who is to say you can ever capture combat objectively realistically, even if the show or movie matches what veterans, decades later, say they experienced subjectively?.
Anyway a summary of the Table of Organization for Army infantry companies at that time would be three rifle squads to a rifle platoon, three rifle platoons to a company with an additional weapons platoon plus hq. Presumably Sgt Saunders commanded an (understrength) squad and Lt. Hanley was the platoon commander (lowest position in the company filled by an officer). The TO&E did say the platoon commander had a carbine, but otherwise everyone else in the platoon, but the BAR man in each squad, had a rifle. Actually nobody in a rifle company in the TO&E in effect at that time was permanently assigned a submachine gun, although 6 were officially provided as unassigned weapons in the company hq for the company commander to distribute as he saw fit among his 3 rifle platoons/9 rifle squads. But from photo’s and personal accounts, and the huge number of especially the later M1/M1A1 Thompson (Saunders had an M1928) and M3 ‘Grease Gun’ produced, it’s obvious those weapons were more common in reality.
Regular infantry companies had M1919 light machine guns and 60mm mortars in a weapons platoons so no such weapons permanently under rifle platoon commanders like Hanley, though again there were eventually additional light machine guns as unassigned weapons at company hq, and a light machine gun or 60mm mortar squad from the weapons platoon might be attached to a particular rifle platoon for a particular mission. Likewise heavy mg or 81mm mortar squads from the battalion weapons company might be attached to a rifle company or on down to a platoon.
And given the general rate of infantry casualties the small size of Saunders’ command wasn’t unrealistic for any given moment. The fact that it was never, that I recall, at full strength of 12 men was maybe a little less realistic and more about limiting the number of actors.
Feeble? The .30 carbine has more energy at 100 yards then a .357 has at the muzzle.
Well, for an infantry weapon it is sort of feeble. 110 grains at under 2,000 fps isn’t great. It’s not quite 1,000 ft-lbs of energy at the muzzle. Ballistic coefficient is low enough that it’s rapidly going to go down from there. Even near the muzzle, I doubt it’d frag when it hits, and I don’t know if it appreciably tumbles in flesh. They weren’t using soft-point or OTM bullets in WW2. So terminal performance was meh compared to its larger, much faster -'06 brethren. And meh compared to modern 5.56 x 45 loadings which will be around 1,250 ft-lbs of energy, and have much better terminal ballistic performance.
But the M1 carbine beat the snot out of the .45 pistol, Thompson or M3 SMG such people would otherwise be carrying. Ergonomically, it’s a fantastically easy gun to shoot well—especially for people who didn’t do a lot of shooting. Albeit the mag release and safety locations needed a bit of work, and it anecdotally wasn’t the most reliable of semi-auto firearms.
The .30 carbine is something like 1/3 the energy as the .30-06 that the Garand fired, and roughly half the energy of today’s 5.56 NATO round or the 7.62x39 intermediate round.
So yeah, feeble when compared to full-bore or intermediate rifle rounds, but pretty good for a pistol round.
I guess the question really comes down to what the point was- in close, you’d almost certainly prefer a Thompson to fire lots of wide, heavy bullets. At a longer range, a rifle would be better. The M1 Carbine seems to have been a sort of a compromise- lighter weight than either a Thompson or M1 Garand, and easier to handle, but not really good at either job.
Not incidentally, that question is a lot of why intermediate cartridges and smaller cartridges became so popular post-war. Research during the war and from WW1 indicated that the vast, vast majority of infantry combat takes place under 300 meters, and that the full-bore rifle rounds used in WW2 (.30-06, 8mm Mauser, .303 British) are drastic overkill, considering they’re effective and accurate at 2-3x that distance. So they scaled back the cartridge and came up with something still effective at 300 meters, but that allowed for shorter and lighter rifles, and significantly lighter ammunition. This essentially obviated the need for a carbine of a different caliber- if anything, armies reverted to the original carbine concept- a shorter version of the standard rifle (M4 vs M16, for example).
As for me? Of all the US WWII weapons I’ve fired (all of them, including the BAR and the M1919A4, believe it or not), I’d want a Garand if my hide was on the line. (that said, I think I’d prefer a AR-15/M16 overall if era was no consideration, with the M14 coming in second, mostly due to the weight)