Posted on 07/22/2008 5:21:14 AM PDT by MindBender26
Need some FReeper help re: WWII US infantry weapons.
Know the M1 Garand was the ubiquitous rifle issued to EM once it was availableto replace 1903 Springfield. Two other weapons often seen were the Thompson .45 cal sub-machinegun and the M1 carbine.
I was under impression the Thompson was issued to NCOs and the M1 Carbine to officers.
Recently have seen movie depictions of officers with Thompsons, NCOs with carbines.
Which is correct, and why? I can understand the reasoning for the M1 carbine, lighter weight, more defensive than offensive, so officers can use time for leadership, not as an another rifleman, etc.
But why the Thompson. Of the three, it is the weapon with the shortest effective range. What was purpose/logic of issuing Thompsons to NCOs?
Interesting thread for you. Ping
Things were a little different in WWII.
While everyone was issued a weapon (or two), there was much more leeway in what one was armed with.
Most officers could have issued to them anything they wanted. Most enlisted men would “trade” for their favored arm, or would use a captured weapon if they wished.
Hope this helps.
Disclaimer: I am not a WWII vet, but my father, 3 uncles, and numerous acquaintances were.
As to NCO’s carrying short range Thompsons, their role was often to “cover the back” of their squad, as well as to provide leadership. However, many NCO’s carried the Garand.
My grandfather carried a carbine when he was in the field, however. The Thompson is a %$^#$% heavy piece to carry, and all of the ammo for it doubles the load. :-)
I’m not sure if your premise is correct or not (Officers issued carbines and NCOs issued Thompsons during WWII). The Thompson was mostly a base of fire type of weapon (such as how the M249 SAW is used today) so in my opinion it would not be a good weapon for the NCO who is generally a squad or platoon leader and sometimes a fireteam leader. A carbine may be fine for the officer since they should not be engaged in any long range shooting, but may want something with more range than a .45 pistol
The job of a squad or platoon leader is not necessarily to shoot at the enemy, but to direct their squad/platoons fire and movement on the enemy. The main time that a squad leader needs to use his weapon is when the enemy is at extremely close range when there is not really a need to direct fire and manuever.
Some units in the past have issued 12 guage shotguns to squad and platoon leaders which I think is a good weapon for their duties.
My father, a Sgt, was given a Thompson which he exchanged for a Carbine. He didn’t weigh enough to use a Thompson.
M-1 carbine was developed as a replacement for sidearms in certain specialties like most platoon leaders, ammo carriers etc. The primary automatic support weapon was the BAR. Thompsons were rare, they were complicated and expensive. They cost $350 in the 1930’s. Most NCO’s carried Garands. Thompsons and folding stock M1 carbines were issued primarily to airborne troops. There were many exceptions. The Grease gun sub machine gun was designed to replace the Thompson because it was much simpler and cheaper to produce.
If you pay close attention to the better movies you’ll note that the Thompson starts to disappear in 1945 & is replaced by the M2 ‘Grease Gun’ - which also used .45 ACP. While the Thompson was effective, it was expensive to manufacture. The Grease Gun used stamped parts.
As to your question, some LTs & CPTs carried the M1 Garand. Others preferred the M1/M2 Carbine.
Thompsons were usually carried by a squad leader, though anybody who could pick one up seemed to carry them. They were probably most effective for close-quarter fighting. They were designed for clearing trenches in WW1, but didn’t make it into production soon enough.
The Thompsons are full autos and are used as assault weapons having tremendous firepower. The round drums hold 100 rounds. The M-1 Garand and the M-1 Carbine are both semi-autos. The Garand only held 8 rounds while the Carbine has magazines that held 10, 15 or 30 rounds.
The carbine was intended for issue to combat support troops [drivers, supply trops, etc] to free up the Garands for the line troops. The Thompson was issued [primarily] in the Pacific to the USMC because it was an ideal weapon for jungle warfare. Most officers were issued 1911 A1 semi auto pistols as their weapon. So were all the tankers [who also had the ‘greasegun’ blowback type machine pistol as standard issue.
As with many things in war, what was planned was not necesarily what resulted.
It is my understanding after reading various histories, that the M1 Carbine was developed as an alternate to a sidearm for those troops who could not carry a full sized M1 Garand, such as tankers, support troops, machine gun teams, paratroopers, etc.
So the M1 Carbine would be expected to be issued to personnel who had previously been issued sidearms, including0 infantry officers.
However, during war anyone can pick up whatever weapon is at hand.
From allexperts.com: military history
“Early in World War 2 the US Army had millions of 1903 Springfield. So a squad would have 10 1903 Springfield, 1 or 2 Thompson machine gun and or a BAR.
As production of the M-1 Garand picked up it replaced the 1903 in the US Army first and then the US Marines. A late war squad would look like this, 1 BAR, 1 1903 Springfield Rifle, and 10 M-1 Garand Rifles. Some squads might have 1 Thompson or a M-3 sub machine gun.”
Mostly though movie accuracy on this type of thing stinks.
The M3A1 "Greasegun" was the first weapon that I fired for qualification in 1956. If I remember correctly, the cost to manufacture a Greasgun was $9.50.....much cheaper than the Thompson. In Vietnam, I had a folding stock M2 Carbine and a M79 grenade launcher, both of which were good weapons.
You got that right! Nothing makes me madder than watching a flick and seeing the whole platoon armed with Thompsons. Or BARs. Or some idiot walking around hip-firing a Browning 30cal.
Just the loadout for ammo to feed all of the weapons would weigh a ton. No room to carry food, water, mess kit, trench knives, cigarettes, and all the other required implements of destruction that the average soldier in the field needs. :-)
One reason why I liked "Saving Private Ryan" so much is that they got the weapons right. Someone (Dale Dye?) did their homework on that movie. Watch the BAR man seat the rounds in his clips by tapping them on his helmet. Spot on.
Actually the US never issued the 100 rd drum only the 50 rder. As with the 100 rd drum the 1927 thompson weighed 22 pds. 2 pds more then a BAR but with only an effective range of 100 yds. Later on Stevens arms made a modified version called the M1A had several things changed from the 1927 and the cocking handle was on the side not on the top like the original.
I shot an M1 carbine in May. It is a cool, very light little gun. The ammo is very expensice because it is almost ynique to the gun. It is basically a big .22. My wife and daughter loved shooting it. I have a Garand and a Springfield. The Garand is surprisingly heavy, but very powerful and accurate. People talk about how powerful the BAR is. It is simply a full-auto, bigger garand. They both use the 30-06 Springfield as ammo. The 30-06 in FMJ will penetrate 18” of solid oak at 200 yards. Mine has done 1” groupings at 100 hundred yards with iron sites (not by me but an expert marxman who sighted it for me.) I would have preferred the Garand to a Thompson. The downside of the Garand is weight and a fixed magazine. Plugging in clips and closing the breach can give you “Garand thumb” by removing the tip of it when the breach closes.
Grandpa qualified on and carried the Thompson (until he went in the field). He never said anything about the M3 one way or the other.
I knew someone would correct me.
I fired a British Sten gun which was the british grease gun. The british gu was preferred because the magazine was horizontal to the ground. The longer, vertical magazines of the Thompson and greaseguns made your head stick up dangerously in the prone position.
“and a M79 grenade launcher,...”
...I remember the M-79 and liked it....do they even make it any more?....that little thumper is still floating around the globe though....every so often I see news coverage of some obscure guerilla conflict and there’s a guy carrying an old M-79...
You're both overlooking the curious case of the Johnson M1941...
Although it originally lost out to the Garand for a US contract, the military of the Dutch East Indies had opted for the Johnson, but were overrun by the Japanese before the weapons had been shipped. The USMC took delivery of the weapons and found them superior to the Garand. The Marine Corps tried to replace the Garand across the boards with the Johnson, but politics and money prevented it from being so.
My Dad, a Korean War Vet and one of the first holders of an EIB told me that the Thompson was a pain in the butt. It was heavy, and it was tough to hold on target. He tells a story of the first time he fired one, it took him by surprise and kept pulling up and to the right.
He could shoot anything, and well. He told me he wouldn’t carry one of those things—that there were better firearms to use.
"Trials and development of the rifle continued until the early 1940, when the Army Ordnance Board finally rejected the Johnson rifle as being too long and heavy, and potentially unreliable with the bayonet attached. Same year Johnson submitted his rifle for trials to the US Marine Corps, where it was tested against M1 Garand rifle. First tests results were good for Johnson, but later on the M1 Garand rifle was found superior to it."
Did you know that the 1903 Springfield , a bolt action rifle, had a semi auto conversion called the Pederson Device?
Yep...although most were destroyed there a a precious handful still in the hands of collectors and museums. Every now and then one goes on the market and fetches a price that would easily stop a foreclosure or two. The round developed for it was essentially a long .32 ACP, and kind of the predecessor of the .30 carbine. It was designed to give Springfield riflemen a trench broom in WWI.
I was moderately successful firing single rounds with the Greasegun and managed to qualify for the Expert badge. It was not very accurate, had limited range and I much preferred the Carbine over the Greasgun. The M1 Garand was my favorite - the M14 which followed was better in some respects but its length made it a little cumbersome.
Wasn’t there a slight design flaw in the M1 Garand that when the clip was empty it automatically ejected? So that Japanese or German snipers would wait and listen for the tell tale tinkle and then pop up and fire at the GI with the empty rifle.
As regards the Thompson I recall George MacDonald Fraser (author of the Flashman books) recounting how as a lance corporal fighting with a British regiment in Burma he had his beloved Lee Enfield 303 rifle replaced with a Thompson which he loathed. After capturing some Indian National Army prisoners (INA were Indian troops of the British Empire who had gone over to the Japanese) he relieved one of them of his Lee Enfield and promptly dumped the Thompson in a river, he was never questioned about it by his superiors so presunably in time of war weapons get chopped and changed around a lot.
The bolt-action Mauser rifle that was general-issue for the Wehrmacht was a ‘cut-down’ version of the WW1 Mauser that was standard-issue to the Imperial German Army. The theory was the same: mechanized troops needed a shorter rifle that was more manueverable when dismounting.
Still a very accurate weapon as your relative proved. It should be noted that the ‘03 Springfield was itself a Mauser-pattern rifle.
I heard that the Brit Sten Gun was very tempermental & that most would have to be ‘gone over’ to make them work properly. I read that many a Canadian soldier had a Sten jam on him during the Dieppe Raid. Apparently, OP Security prevented the Canadians from knowing the timing of their invasion. Consequently they were issued their Stens “brand new, out of the box” after boarding ship. Reportedly they were furiously working on their Stens during the crossing.
A lot of US infantrymen turned that to their advantage, throwing an empty clip to draw out the enemy then wasting him. So after a while the advantage was negated by veteran tactics.
Just about every classic bolt action seems to have “borrowed” from the Mauser.
It's amazing how a design gets 'perfected' just before it goes completely obsolete, isn't it? Think about it. P51 Mustang and Iowa-class battleships are 2 other examples of a design reaching its pinnacle right before a revolution in design & tactics.
The problem with the Johnson was that it ejects the brass straight out to the right at a very high velocity. You end up killing the guy in front and wounding your man to the right.
That was Band Of Brothers I think
Never fired it, but it's got to be one of the smaller rifles I've seen.
As others have pointed out there were a lot of informal exchanges and appropriations in the field. When possible, troops and officers picked the weapon most suitable for the assignment, used whatever weapon was available or that they had ammo for.
A lot of this still went on in 'nam too.
The system is a lot more tight-arsed about these things today but under battlefield conditions you do what you have to do.
Additionally, there really was no firm one-size-fits-all standard. Weapons issue had (and has) a lot to do with mission, individual assignments, theater of operation, supply lines, etc.
Tankers were equipped differently than front line infantry, Rangers and Commandos had different requirements, the Army and Marine Corps had different missions and equipped units differently. If you are hitting the beach or dropping behind enemy lines you can only lug so much ammo. Ammo for the Thompson weighs a lot and it uses a lot more than the semi-automatic 30-06 Garand or Carbine.
Shotguns and Thompsons with their limited range and heavy ammo worked nicely in the Jungle or urban areas but much less so in the desert and other open terrain where the long reach of the Garand shines.
Just to make it more interesting. The M1 Garand was also issued in a Tanker model, with a shortened barrel and in a Paratrooper model with a folding stock.
http://www.rzm.com/pvt.ryan/production/filmmakers/dye.html
http://wesclark.com/jw/dale_dye.html
looks like Dye worked on both movies.
Those types of problems are entirely too easy to fix. The camera here seemed to weather the experience of being to the right of the shooter without too much trouble....
I think that Dye advised on both of these excellent movies.
While in command of the 82d Airborne Division, and for the remainder of his service during WW II, Matthew Ridgway carried a M1903 Springfield. According to historians, he preferred it to the M-1 Garand.
It is without doubt one of the sweetest bolt action rifles I've ever fired. In fact a trained Brit rifleman could fire 30 aimed shots in just under a minute with one.
A few years back Navy Arms was selling them for $125.00 a copy. I wish I'd bought half a dozen.
You can see a demo of the 'mad minute' here.
It's pretty impressive.
L
Me, I'm just keeping up... 
the family tradition!
Nothing better to clean out a room, house, cave or trench than an old fashioned Tommy!
It is longer ahd heavier than an '03 and that makes all the difference to me...less felt recoil, better balance, and better all around accuracy.
The sten was a cheap piece of crap. It was the magazine placement that was preferred, not the overall quality. It was basically a disposable machine pistol.
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