paratroopers complained the BAR didn’t provide enough firepower for its weight. this doesn’t really make much sense since the obvious comparison is with the M1919 light machine gun that’s belt-fed, fires from a tripod and weighs 41 pounds total. a BAR weighs only 18 pounds.
but as i mentioned earlier, they preferred the 1919 which they can fire as soon as they hit the ground.
just focusing on small arms, do you guys know that small arms from 1900 all the way to desert storm accounted for only 5% of total war casualties? not much sense in arguing which weapon is better.
Oh oh, I provoked a Garand fan. For my next act, I’ll diss on the 1911.
The Springfield ejects dead horizontal: the extractor is centered at 3 O’clock, and the the ejector at 9 O’clock. Pretty much any Mouser derived action, by which I mean, Mousers, Springfields, and also Winchester Model 70s, etc. all eject fine and load with minimal effort with a scope on low bases, even with my big fingers, even with gloves on. The military rifles generally need a low profile bolt handle and a different safety to clear a scope. You can’t use the stripper clips they were designed for, but then how well do Garand en-bloc clips work with a scope? Finally in WW-II reliable rifle scopes were not at all common, and even as late as Vietnam a few snipers were still using aperture sights.
random googling:
[QUOTE=http://www.rt66.com/~korteng/SmallArms/1903A3.htm]
in 1936, the semi-automatic MI Garand was standardized. Because the MI was in very short supply until the early 1940s, the '03 remained the predominate American service rifle for almost 40 years and saw front-line combat service through the end of World War II. Even though the standard bolt-action service rifles were largely replaced after World War II, sniping variants of the '03 saw combat use in Korean War — and some even saw issue as late as the Vietnam War. Clearly, the’03 was no “ordinary” military rifle.
[/QUOTE]
Of the pictures where I can tell, I count 15 bolt actions, 5 autoloaders, and the odd single shot and lever action.
There is no doubt that M1s can be made to shoot well. Decades of competition restricted to this rifle have built a significant base of knowledge and techniques for doing so. How much of what it takes to build a 1 or even 2 MOA Garand was known during WW-II? If you wanted to equip a bunch of snipers with the most accurate, light, and reliable rifle that $1000 (inflated to today’s money) could buy and modify with 1940s knowlege, would it be a 1940s vintage autoloader or a 1940s vintage bolt action?
When people spend a lot of money to build a custom long range big game or varmint rifle, do they start with a 98 Mouser action, a Model 70, or a Garand action? If you are buying $1M worth of .50 cal rifles from Ronnie Barrett, do you get more of them if you buy his bolt actions, or if you buy his autoloaders? Which one would you rather carry 10 miles?
with all due respect for the mauser, i think the greatest bolt gun ever built was the pre-64 winchester model 70. i don’t even believe anything better will ever come out.
Thanks for the spelling help. I obviously buy too much stuff from Mouser and Digikey.
There is no reason (other than hitting the target selling price) you couldn’t make one today. Hell, after ignoring the obvious for decades, Winchester (under new management/ownership) finally is. There are better steels available, and CNC machining, so you could make it either lighter or stronger if you wanted. But even if it is/were objectively “better” by every measure, it wouldn’t be loved as much, because it wouldn’t be a classic. Classics are often the first popular designs that tick all the boxes:Knucklehead Harleys, /2 BMWs, Fender Strats, Piper Cubs, '57 Chevys, M1-Garands, 1911 pistols. Today we build items that are superior by every measure, but nobody has much affection for them.
When you compare the Pre-64 Model 70, and a Mauser '98, it is hard to praise one without casting glory on the other. If you put a '98 in civilian livery, modify the bolt handle and safety to clear a scope, give it a smooth crisp trigger, round the sharp corners, and improve the fit polish and finish, what you end up with is functionally identical, and cosmetically very close to a pre-64 model 70…which is pretty much how Winchester got there. Perhaps the greatest sin of the post-64 design was the abandonment of the Mauser '98 inspired (some would say copied) extractor and controlled feed. The Mauser '98 is not a classic because it was a war horse that took a lot of training and grooming to make into a fox hunting mount. The pre-64 is a classic because you didn’t have to customize it to get there.
Correct - never been much of a gun guy :). Just checked the Wiki and it states the Tokarev 7.62x25 was based on the 7.63 Mauser one and the latter could be fed in weapons chambered for the former, so I must have misremembered that detail and they used their pistol rounds rather than their submachine gun rounds.
The point is, Zee Germans had ammunition they could use with the captured Russian guns long term, whereas for example US grunts would have had to capture more enemy ammo had they fancied MP-40s for some reason (and vice-versa if Germans had captured Tommy guns).
My stepfather was an infantry sergeant and carried a .45 in addition to his normal weapon. I know, because I still have the gun, which he brought home with him after the war like many did.
As did the Brits, who started replacing them with cheapo Stens in '41 for similar reasons. Same reason the Germans replaced the MP-40 with the MP-3008 as the war began to turn for the worse for them, and Russians moved from PPDs and PPSh to the wholly inferior PPS: stamped metal pieces of crap may not have been the most magnificent or reliable weapons ever designed, but they were cheap, plentiful, and a monkey could be taught to make them.
My dad was a tank sergeant in mid-1950s Germany with the 8th Infantry Division, and the “grease gun” is what he was issued on the rare occasion when he needed a gun.
I’d highly reccomend this site to anyone who is interested in what’s being discussed in this thread. It describes the organization and equipment of WW2 battalions, of various nationalities, right down to the individual squad members.
And, though I cannot remember the source for this and thus cannot cite it, I have read in a book someplace that the crews of American PT boats were specially trained and equipped for Close Quarter Battle during the Solomon Islands campaign. One of their primary roles was to intercept Japanese powered barges (like landing craft) sneaking along the beachline usually at night carrying troops, supplies, and ammunition. Their tactic was to shoot these up thoroughly with the machineguns on the boat, then board to seek useful intelligence or prisoners for interrogation, as I recall.
Boarding a sinking, perhaps burning barge in the dark, filled with wounded and desperate men who preferred to die and take you with them had to be one of the grimmer jobs in the war. That’s where the issue of weapons carried really becomes critical and personal “choices” begin to appear. Thompsons, BARs, 1911s, no doubt shotguns, grenades and anything else effective at virtual arm’s length were the specialty of PT boat crews, at least at that stage of the war.
In The Thin Red Line, and elsewhere in his WWII fiction, James Jones relates the average grunt’s obsession to arm himself by hook or by crook with a Colt 45, convinced that he’ll be skewered on a samurai sword without one.
Eugene Sledge, already in the South Pacific with the Marines, had his dad buy a 45 back in Mobile Alabama and ship it overseas to him. The 45 had a lot of credibility: supposedly it was invented during the Philippine-American War because the Filippinos would charge into battle so high on dope that only a big fat slug would stop them. When I was a teenager, a Vietnam vet told me how it was indispensable against doped-up Viet Cong.
muslim warriors who openly carried heir krises didn’t dope up. they either steeled themselves for a sudden furious impromptu attack with their bladed weapons (going amok.) or they really went into seclusion for a couple days, praying, meditating and secreting all kinds of bladed weapons in their persons for a last wild cutting and slashing foray at their enemies (juramentado.) a close-in encounter with a dedicated and suicidal attacker required real stopping power and the old .38 colt or 32-20 didn’t cut it. the old 44-40 or .45 long colt would have done the trick but one was likely better off with an automatic.
Nope, the Brits had been buying and using American Thompsons for a long while (that’s why they’re called Tommy guns - because the Tommies used them), and steadily increased the demand throughout the Phony War. Then they lost a big bunch of their equipment at Dunkirk. American producers could already barely keep up, and then America went to war as well and obviously got priority on Thompson shipments. So the Brits had to find a homegrown alternative in a hurry.
I guess they could possibly still have gotten a trickle of new ones through Lend Lease and such, but from '41 onwards most paratrooper squads and officers got made-in-the-UK Stens instead. And hated them with a passion
