That was a lot of rifles. Didn’t it create a shortage of the right kind of trees? How did Japan or China have enough hardwood? The UK had all those Canadian trees, but are there that many walnut trees in Russia; or is birch useable?
I believe beech was/is the standard walnut substitute for rifles. I have a Swiss rifle made in 1949 made of beech. It does the job well, but it’s not as pretty.
A rifle doesn’t really have all that much wood when you look at how much goes into making furniture and such.
Roughly how many rifle stocks could be made from one average-sized tree?
Or houses, for that matter. Or all manner of other tools, especially since that time frame was mostly before the use of plastic. And that’s not all that long after the age when ships were made primarily out of wood, which means that all the wood that would have been used for ships was now available for other purposes.
There were scrap drives for wood (among other materials) during World War II, but generally speaking it was much more plentiful than many other resources. Some aircraft, like the de Havilland Mosquito, were even made out of wood due to the scarcity of metal.
Bolt action rifles were also built to last, if stored properly a rifle used in WW1 is as usable today as the day it came out of the factory. The Mosin-Nagant is a popular civilian firearm due to the cheapness with which it can be bought at less than $100. They’re so cheap because the USSR and Warsaw Pact’s military stocks of them became available with the fall of the Iron Curtain, most of them date to WW2 or prior.
According to this manufacturer, its rifle stocks range from two to 4.5 pounds.
And according to this site, the oven-dried weight of a balsam tree with a diameter of 6" is 65 kg, of which 45.7% is stem wood.
Given an average stock weight of 3.3 lbs (1.5kg), a typical tree could produce almost 10 stocks (of course, walnut is a lot denser than balsam, but let’s ignore that right now.)
So you’d need roughly 11 million trees to produce 100 million rifle stocks. It’s a lot of trees, but it certainly sounds doable.
there was this 90s movie starring robert duvall, “the gingerbread man.” 10 acres with a standing inventory of black walnut trees was worth $12 million (not sure if it included cost of land.)
The main rifle for Germany in WW2 used a laminated stock.
So solutions were available even if hardwood had been in short supply.
Otara
And the ‘Spruce Goose’, too.
North European (incl. Russian) military rifles and most all affordable civilian firearms were equipped with birch stocks, while Central Europeans substituted beech. Both were commonly stained to look similar to a walnut stock. Both of these trees were basically the most common hardwood species in their respective areas and had good enough properties (strength, stability, workability) to be used as mass-production raw materials.
Surely that didn’t require very much wood, though?