In 1953, the Swedish military launched a program to refurbish and refit all of the Ag m/42 rifles in inventory. Aside from replacing broken parts and worn barrels, the program also made a number of improvements to the rifles:
* Auxiliary front magazine catch added
* Large gripping lugs added to bolt cover
* Rubber case deflector added
* Single-piece cleaning rod to replace the two-part original
* Rear sight geometry modified
* Rear sight range dial modified
* Dual-wire recoil spring in place of the original single wire type
These updates were made to virtually all rifles then in existence, and it is very rare to find original pattern Ag m/42 rifles today.
having seen the friberg rifle, it works like the first semi auto shotgun,-competing with the auto-5, from the same country. Also at the end of 1800s
so no change to prevent a 14 moa rifle?
As with all of this, I find the question of “How did they intend to use this weapon in combat?” and “How did they actually wind up using it?”
That may seem to be an extraneous set of questions, but the entire procurement/design/fielding process might best be thought of as a conversation between the engineers, the finance guys, the actual combatants, and “reality itself” as the ideas and effects of those ideas flow back and forth across the mental landscapes of all involved. The actual weapons designed, procured, and fielded are all the end result of this. You can see the outlines of the conversation here, in the AG42B, with the various modifications made to it to improve its form for the needs of its users.
The other thing that’s interesting here is just how the hell the Swedes meant to use this rifle, issuing it not as a replacement for their Mausers as a replacement, but as a supplement. 2 rifles per squad, as opposed to having entire formations armed with it? How did that get worked out? Was the Ljungman meant more as a designated marksman’s rifle sort of affair, or something of a volume-of-fire halfway house between the Swedish Mausers and the Browning Model “D” they had on issue?
There’s not a hell of a lot of material about Swedish small unit tactics out there, but it strikes me as an odd sort of lash-up, with bolt-action rifles, the Ljungman, and the Browning Model “D” BAR down in the squad. How did they use those, and how on earth were they training the leadership to take all those disparate weapons into account, in order to use them most effectively? If you think organizing and maneuvering a modern squad, with a mix of assault rifles, LMGs, and grenade launchers is a pain in the ass, and overly-complex? That Swedish unit must have been a bit of nastiness to train and utilize to maximum efficiencies.
The really interesting thing in most weapons “evolutionary history” is observing the way things flow back-and-forth: Engineers and procurement folks propose, and then the infantry (and, others…) disposes. Observe the conversation between “Grunt” and “Procurement” as laid out in steel and plastic in the form of the M16, as an example: The M16 itself is a result of the “Grunt” effectively saying, likely in monosyllabic and obscene terms, “M14 no work”, followed by Ordnance reluctantly proffering a stop-gap of the AR-15 that the Air Force was looking at as an uber-M1 Carbine. “Grunt” says “Good enough for now…”, and the M16 eventually supplants the M14, as well as demonstrating the utter futility of the SPIW. Then, Ordnance (Army and Marine both) looks at the M16 post-Vietnam and says “Heya, lil’ Grunt, hows about we gives you a match rifle, instead of that nasty old make-do…?” Grunt then says “Well… OK, if that’s what’s on offer…”, which was followed by “Hey, what’re those lil’ ol’ carbine things you’re handing out to the support bubbas…?”, and a wholesale appropriation of a half-assed lashup of a shortened M16 that had only ever been meant to make life a little easier for the hewers of wood and bearers of water, the lower orders of the military.
Thus, we observe the conversation between the involved parties. NGSW, in my opinion, is the result of the Ordnance types yet again ignoring what the Grunt sorts of people were saying, and I’m equally certain that it’s all going to end ugly in another iteration of desire-path engineering. My suspicion is that what’s going to happen is that the M7 NGSW is going to wind up as a left-in-the-Arms-Room affair, while the M4 carbine is again going to be the one actually taken out on the dance floor of “real combat”.
One really has to wonder what the hell the Swedish “conversation” looked like, during the days when the Swedish Mausers, the Ljungman, the Model “D” BAR, and the Carl Gustav SMG held sway in the Swedish infantry formation.
Also, how well would it all have worked, under the rigors of combat?
For Sweden, I’m grateful that whole thing remained entirely theoretical. But, I am curious what the hell leading a squad looked like, with that rather eclectic toolset to hand…
I do not know the Swedish ideas behind issuing one ot two AG42Bs per squad. But that is the style the Wehrmacht distributed its G41 and G43 (later renamed to K43 by Hitler). Usually one per squad.
In my opinion not because of any infantry combat tactical considerations, but simply because only a small number were available.
@JPeelen,
Yeah, that’s another blank spot in it all. German literature on the whole “Yeah, this is how we will use the semiauto rifles in combat…” is very sparse on the ground, along with any reports on how they actually did it.
Which is a reason why I’m very much a cynic on the issue. Did it work? Was there a justification/reason for it? What did they do, and how did they do it?
There’s limited enough documentation on the whole “Yeah, the US Army issued semi-autos to everyone, here’s what they did differently…” From all the evidence, the tactics and drills remain unchanged from the days of the bolt-action M1903. Practically? I’m unable to work out much in the way of difference/improvement from talking to the vets and reading all the after-action stuff that’s extant.
One of the really irritating things about all of this is that the actual documentation and lay-down of how the weapons and tactics are meant to integrate, along with any reflection on just how well they did integrate in practice… It just isn’t out there.
Which is one reason why I suspect that so little of the practical experience from WWI managed to permeate through into WWII and post-WWII practice. They simply did not seek understanding or comprehension of what was going on out where the bullets flew, nor did they think about how everything worked.
This crap continues on to this day: I challenge anyone to go out and ask the average young infantryman, officer or enlisted, whether or not they can give you a rational laydown on what the hell their small arms are supposed to be doing, and how they all work together and integrate. You can work this out from first principles when you look at all the publicly available underpinnings for the NGSW system.
If they’d had one, then the idea that replacing the M4 with an individual weapon optimized to do individual kills out in the 600-800m range band would be the last damn thing they did. Yet, that’s what happened…
For the Wermacht, yes.
But Sweden was a relatively rich country that was not fighting a war. If distributing a small number of semiautos among bolt actions could have been a good idea in 1942 (due to the possibility to be dragged into the war at any moment), it doesn’t seem that valid after the war. In the end, Sweden adopted the G3 only in 1964, so that situation lasted for almost 20 years after the war ended.
I keep putting myself into the situation, and asking myself “How do I use these things…?”
Sad fact is, I can’t honestly think of a good way to use them in any really effective way, other than as a DMR… Which, absent optics, strikes me as a bit of a waste. If the guy with the rifle is good enough to be the DMR, then his marksmanship skills are likely “good enough” to make him deadly with the existing bolt-action rifle, soooooo… How much are we really gaining in lethality, at the squad level, for all the money lavished on these specialist-issue semi-auto rifles?
I may be mistaken in my belief, but I think that the majority of benefit with regards to semi-auto is at the lower end of the marksmanship skills spectrum; you get more shots, have fewer distractions, and faster follow-up for potential misses. So, giving the semi-auto to the guy who’s the best shooter in your squad, with iron sights…? What are you really gaining?
Unless you’re giving the semi-auto rifles to the worst shooters, in order to help them compensate for their deficiencies…
The whole thing is ‘effing opaque, as to “What is the rational basis for this partial-issue idea?”
Yeah, also to me a semiauto mostly affects possible volume of fire (for a limited time, since ammo is limited), not accuracy.
That’s why an army in need can think to put some semiauto in a squad of bolt actions. So that the firepower of all the infantry squads improve in the same way, instead of having 1/4 of the infantry squads with more firepower than the rest.
It’s like having, in the squad, the BAR, two sub-BARs, and the bolt actions.
But, after the war, it seems way better to replace the bolt actions entirely, relegating them more and more to rear-echelons troops, until phasing them out completely.
For either the Germans or the Swedes, I can’t find the actual benefit for replacing just a couple of bolt action rifles in each squad with semiautos.
You could get the same benefit from buying another LMG, and dramatically increase the unit lethality. You could also just add a couple more guys with bolt-actions, or do more training to get the bolt-action armed soldiers up to pre-WWI British Army standards. The logistics challenges for adding new weapons alone…? I’m just not seeing the benefit, and I’d love to see either Swedish or German justifications/rationalizations for it all. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that if there were any, they were nebulous and mostly imaginary.
I’d also be interested to see if anyone thought to concentrate all their semiauto rifles into either assault or defense units, and how that worked out.
It’s my opinion that the M1 Garand, far from being the “ultimate battle instrument” of US Army delusional propaganda, actually added very little value to the squad. The increased volume of fire it enabled just wasn’t enough to be really tactically significant, not spread across the ground a squad or platoon covered, and not supported by eight-round clips. Yes, it was better than bolt-action rifles, but was it the exponential improvement they made it out to be?
I lay you long odds that if the US had done as the Germans did, and went for better fire support weapons like the MG34/42 family, then there would have been vastly superior results. The M1 was an amazing technical achievement, but that’s about it. Tactically, it was not that big a deal. Too much diffusion, too little concentration, and too much training required to make the concepts behind it work in any valid way.
For the M1 to have made the ideas behind it work, they’d have needed to bring every rifleman out there up to the standards of Sergeant York, in terms of both marksmanship skills and initiative/confidence. York wasn’t York just because he was a good shot; he had an innate tactical sense and nous that made him a supremely dangerous battlefield operator. If you had an entire army filled with men like him, you could make the fairy-tale ideas behind the M1 and the “individual rifleman” work. Absent that? You’re way better going out along the lines that the Germans did, with the “machine operator” approach, giving close direction and supervision over a superior firepower-producing implement. The American approach was purest fantasy; the German approach was a cold, hard analytical one, that produced exponentially more casualties on the Allied side. Without the superiority in material and supporting arms, the majority of Allied infantry would have been cooked even worse than it was. Their organic weapons just could not produce the volumes of fire they needed to, in order to successfully dominate firefights.
I don’t think this is what you’re after, Kirk, but it might be of interest. Written in 2007 by an O. Janson about his experiences with an infantry artillery Bn. in 1966-1977:
https://www.gotavapen.se/gota/artiklar/ib1970/inf_brigade.htm
Spent many happy hours on that site, Dave.
I really wish that the Swedish military literature on a bunch of things was more accessible in English. There’s a work on Soviet Maskirovka I’ve been trying to get my hands on, even in Swedish, and it’s damn near impossible. Many Swedish booksellers just ignore anything from the US, seemingly.
The whole of Swedish minor infantry tactics is opaque to outsiders, which I think is a bit of a tragedy. I suspect they’ve got good things to copy, and that it would be illuminating to know what their thoughts were on the whole thing. As I say, it must have been an interesting challenge using the toolset they built for themselves.
Now that they are part of NATO , that will be less cloudy in the future with joint training .
No credits or location provided – would guess an institutional collection provided the rifles but (?)
“(…)made a number of improvements to the rifles:
* Auxiliary front magazine catch added
* Large gripping lugs added to bolt cover
* Rubber case deflector added
* Single-piece cleaning rod to replace the two-part original
* Rear sight geometry modified
* Rear sight range dial modified
* Dual-wire recoil spring in place of the original single wire type(…)”
http://modernfirearms.net/en/military-rifles/self-loading-rifles/sweden-self-loading-rifles/ag-42-ljungman-eng/ claims that …he AG-42B differs from early AG-42 by having stainless steel gas tube without gas “reservoir”, which was originally used to decrease peak pressure…. Did they altered how cartridges were made, which provoked this change? If not, why this change was applied?