Today’s Q&A is brought to you by the fine folks at Patreon, and by Penguin Brutality:
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01:11 – Was the Vickers .50 any good, and why did the British use 4 different heavy cartridges instead of consolidating?
07:35 – The Sten and its single-feed magazine design
10:27 – Owen versus Sten, and German use of the Owen.
14:38 – British wartime work on an “assault rifle” sort of weapon?
15:44 – Why no British semiauto rifle during WW2?
Jonathan Ferguson on British semiauto rifle trials:
18:04 – EM2’s automatic bolt closure system
20:46 – Did the British use other allied weapons besides American ones?
23:15 – Is the PIAT a Destrucitve Device under US law and why?
26:07 – Bren vs Degtyarev
27:50 – Why not make the Sten in .45 to use Thompson ammo?
29:37 – Did the British get M3 Grease Guns?
31:01 – British SMG in .455?
32:03 – Sten vs Lanchester
33:26 – Was there an LSW version of the EM1/EM2 planned?
EM1 Korsac: https://youtu.be/A8ygMDJQ0iY
34:25 – Why wasn’t the BESA in .303?
36:34 – Biggest British missed opportunity during the interwar period?
38:40 – British naval service small arms
41:45 – Did .280 cartridge development begin during the war?
43:24 – Impact of MP44 on British post-war small arms development?
44:25 – Gallilean sights on the Enfield
46:25 – Why is there a semiauto selector on the Sten?
49:17 – Did American soldiers use British small arms?
50:29 – Why did the British choose the Lee action over the Mauser action?
51:16 – Which was better, Sten or Grease Gun?
52:34 – Why did the whole Commonwealth not switch to the No4 Enfield?
[OFF-TOPIC so ignore if you wish]
Recently KELTEC unveiled new automatic pistol model, dubbed PR57
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/the-pr57-keltec-s-stripper-clip-fed-ccw-pistol/
whilst externally it looks like typical 2020s compact automatic pistol, it does 2 things different way that most other 2020s automatic pistol.
It is recoil-operated (which is typical) but locking is through rotating, rather than tilt. This is uncommon, but was sometimes used, e.g. in Glock 46 and should not have greater effect at user.
It has fixed magazine. If I understand correctly what I saw in posted video, chargers are used for loading. I have never seen this in 21th century automatic pistol before. Now I am wondering what would happen if someone would attempt to use charger upside down? And why they did elected to use half-capacity charger, rather than full-capacity (like Repetierpistole M.7), which result in that you need to apply use-charger-action twice to load it fully?
It does use 5.7×28 cartridge, which is in reflected designation, and I found this choice puzzling for compact automatic pistol. Why they elected to use bottle-neck cartridge, often loaded with Spitzer bullet, rather than e.g. Patrone 08? Will have enough effect at target when fired from 4.64″ barrel?
I think a reason for a 10-round charger might be that a 20-round charger would be too long to carry around, as I’ve never seen a double-row charger before.
As for the 5.7×28, it’s finally getting traction in the US market and everyone’s hopping on board. Until now, the complaint had always been ammo availability and price. And generally, everyone is either making a small carbine or a compact pistol, just like FN originally did when it designed the cartridge. Others here are better qualified to discuss the short-barrel ballistics, but capacity seems to be a big attraction to Americans, enabled by the .313 inch case width.
“(…)never seen a double-row charger before.”
Then look at charger used with Breda Modello 30 https://youtu.be/C-D3nN4QycM?t=160
Well, okay, you got me there.
*Why no British semiauto rifle during WW2?
The real question: Why no rimless cartridge during WW2? Yes, yes: The Brits and Americans, aka. “Brother Jonathan” might have both fielded waxed-case .276 Pedersen-caliber Pedersen rifles… Didn’t happen.
The British might have had the SAFN/ FN-49? Maybe? Somehow? Had WWI not ended when it did, the UK might have had .303 caliber Farquahar-Hill rifles left over from the cancelled RAF contract, no?
* Why is there a semiauto selector on the Sten?
Because SMGs should properly be used as self-loading carbines for accuracy’s sake, and if used in full-auto, should fire short bursts. Spraying a whole mag looks cool and all, but as the old saying goes: ‘ya can’t miss fast enough to win a gunfight.’ Incidentally, the British tested Stens, No. 4 rifles, and Bren guns, and the report–which I have a copy of–shows that the Sten gun is surprisingly effective. The recommendations were for a more reliable magazine, a wooden stock, and…. Ya can’t make this stuff up! A bayonet!
* Which was better, Sten or Grease Gun?
For Great Britain in 1940/1941 the answer is overwhelmingly, clearly, unequivocally the STEN. Britain needed an SMG that was cheap and available and could be assembled from parts produced in dispersed work shops, and they needed it yesterday, when they didn’t have any… The Thompson was obtained. Expensive. Short supply. The Smith and Wesson 9mm light rifle was sought. It didn’t work very well, had all kinds of problems, and so the contact was cancelled and instead S&W cut the UK a deal on revolvers. The General Motors M3 Grease Gun was years away.
The real question, to my mind, is: Why didn’t the USA adopt 9mm SMGs, ditch “muh .45” and produce an M-3 Greasgun in 9mm with *reliable magazines* for the entire Allied war effort? Cheap stamped guns with reliable magazines from the “Arsenal of Democracy” in the war of industrial Fordism… Then again, the M-1 carbine contract cranked out fully 6 million from non-firearm factories, and finished up early. So there is that. And the Sherman tank. And the Jeep. And the Liberty Ship.
Actually the USA did develop a 9mm conversion kit for the M-3 grease gun. It is my understanding that not many were produced but that it was an easy conversion. I believe the thinking was to start dropping these to the Marquis, but this never came about.
And of course the British had several million rounds of 9 x 19mm captured in North Africa along with the rest of Garibaldi & Co.’s kit.
As well as barrel-making machinery for .38 Colt Automatic, which is virtually identical to 9 x 19mm.
As for the U.S., we had the .45 ACP, and everything to go with it. If the Army wasn’t going to change rifle calibers (from .30-06 to .276) with the adoption of the M1 Garand before we were involved in the war, they certainly weren’t going to change pistol calibers after the balloon was well and truly up.
Look up the Italians with 6.5mm and 7.35mm Carcano and the Japanese with 6.5mm and 7.7mm Arisaka to see just how much trouble that can cause.
In peacetime, you can afford to experiment with even basic things like rifle and pistol calibers. Once it’s dropped in the pot, though, it’s time to fire the designers, get the production lines moving, and “run what you brung”.
As for the semi-auto selector on the Sten, one overlooked factor is the Sten MK IIs suppressed version. Full-auto fire through a suppressor generally wears out the baffles very quickly. Firing single shots is easier on the machinery, and more appropriate for the usual jobs like removing sentries and guard dogs without being noticed, anyway.
clear ether
eon
Yes. Interest in the 9x19mm cartridge in the UK surfaced during 1938 tests of the Suomi kp/1931. Prior to that, British pistol ammunition in the interwar period was limited to .380 revolver, .455 revolver, and .455 self-loading. According to P. Labbett’s 1996 history of British 9mm ammo, even two months in to WW2, in November 1939, the same month and year the No. 4 rifle was adopted and slated for production, additional tests of what must have been Bergmann SMGs or “machine carbines” in 7.63mm were tested at Enfield, and recommendation for 9mm examples was made. By December 1939, during the sitzkrieg/ phoney war/ drole de querre, again according to Labbett, 2 MP28,IIs were procured and tested with Belgian-made 9mm and trial runs by ICI, the only pre-war British manufacturer of the cartridge. Just before the “big [German] push” and the “Sichelschnitt” through the Ardennes, 2 Beretta “Machine Carbines” and 4k Italian 9mm rounds were procured and found to be excellent. Ordnance requested changes to ICI ammo, and the heads of ICI basically rejected them. ICI wouldn’t make 9mm for the UK military until the 1950s as a result. Finally, with the adoption of the failed Smith and Wesson 1940 light rifle and the Lanchester slated for adoption by early 1941, some 110 million 9mm cartridges were procured from the USA… For a price. How many survived the U-boats is anyone’s guess, I suppose. In any case, whiel the Lanchester by Sterling was being cranked out by January 1941, On 7 March 1941 the Sten Mk.I was introduced, produced by the Singer sewing machine company near Glasgow Clydeside. In June 1941 production drawings for 9mm were scaled up, but U.S. cartridges were Boxer primed (a British invention, but not used by the UK), while UK military cartridges were Berdan primed (a North American invention). Finally, by July 1941 Woolwich and the Ordnance Board came up with a Berdan-primed 9x19mm cartridge, which became the Mk. I.z. in December 1941. The UK even purchased something like 30 million 9mm cartridges from Bolivia, most of it German-made.
https://sites.google.com/site/britmilammo/9mm-parabellum/9mm-parabellum-ball
“Was the Vickers .50 any good(…)?”
.5 inch Vickers cartridge https://sites.google.com/site/britmilammo/-5-inch-vickers emerged in latter part of Great War, it had to be (among other things) be used in aircraft machine guns, due to limitations of then used flying machines, it was important to keep weight low.
“(…)German use of the Owen.(…)”
Germans did include it in https://www.scribd.com/document/220927290/D-50-1-Kennblatter-fremden-Gerats-Heft-1-Handwaffen-Unvollstandig-pdf as Maschine Pistole 752 (e), however considering that they only known cartridge used (9 mm), they likely have access to specimen. Note that merely being included into D.50-1 does not guarantee that given weapon type was actually used.
“(…)Did the British use other allied weapons besides American ones?(…)”
Technically yes, as they used https://www.forgottenweapons.com/british-ballester-molina-for-special-operations-executive/ with place-of-origin being Argentine, which does technically belong to Allies, as they declared war to Empire of Japan in March 1945.
@Daweo… Not an ally by any stretch of the imagination, but the British SOE did apparently also use the Astra M1921/ Modelo 400 9mm largo pistols from Spain to some extent?
Also, I have it that some handful or other of Mexican 7x57mm Mendoza LMGs were somehow used?
I might add that while the Home Guard was stood up, that eventually all .303 caliber rifles–even the Ross!–went to the *regulars* while all U.S. “.300-in.” .30-06 arms like the M1917, BARs, ex-aircraft Marlins/Lewises, etc. went to the HG. Thompsons for the commandoes and “auxiliary units.” There are HG manual descriptions of the old Japanese Type 38 Arisaka, which was acquired for training purposes during WWI. I had thought that all of these were sent to the Czar to keep Russia in the fight against Wilhelm II and the “shackled to a corpse” Austro-Hungarian Empire, but perhaps not?
As for Agentina, the only reason Argentine military leaders declared war on the Axis after Germany was as good as beaten was to ensure the nation would not be excluded from the UN in the immediate postwar. Very, very many Latin American army officers were pro-Axis. To the degree that the Brazilians were popping champagne corks when Paris fell to the Wehrmacht because the “right side” was winning the European War. The only nation that ultimately declared war against Japan *solely* was Ecuador.
SOE used a variety of Spanish-made handguns and even some SMGs in occupied France, as did OSS. Not to mention the Astra 600 9 x 19mm pistol made for the Luftwaffe, officially.
Franco may have been a neutral trending toward the Axis, but he was perfectly happy to play both ends against the middle. Much of the Texas oil, diesel fuel and etc. FDR sent him to persuade him to stay neutral (and not take Gibraltar away from the British) ended up in the Canary Islands- where it was used to refuel German U-boats attacking Allied convoys.
And there was already a tradition of “gray market” sales of Spanish arms in France, due to France’s even pre-1940 strict firearms laws. Never mind all those Poilus of 1914-18 who were issued .32 ACP “Ruby” and etc. Eibar blowback automatics and Spanish-made S&W M10 copies in 8mm Lebel revolver caliber for trench fighting, who never got around to turning them in when they demobbed in 1919.
Plus, if an SOE agent or OSS Jedburgh were caught with something like that, he’d be less likely to be identified as an agent, as opposed to “just” a local Resistance issue. Doubly so for women agents; yes, both groups had them and dropped them into Occupied Europe.
The movies and TV want you to think every SOE op or Jed had a suppressed Colt Woodsman or High Standard HD .22. But they would more likely have a .25 ACP or .32 ACP Ruby or etc., and it and its “silencer” would both be marked “Espana”.
clear ether
eon
“Pirate” Prentiss, a character in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is a British SOE type fanatically attached to his Mendoza, even though “nobody’s even SEEN any 7mm Mexican Mauser ammunition in years.” There follows a fairly accurate description of the type’s details. Whether Pynchon found out there were Mendozas in British spooky service (his rocket science was spot on) or was using wild creative license (read the rest of the book!) is not known to me. His description was so otherwise obscure I thought the Mendoza was a bolt-action rife for many years. Had to see one on this channel to be disabused of the idea. If there is a non-fiction publication stating the type made it to the UK, I am unaware of it.
I’ve been duped! Again! And not for the … erm, uh, well, “first time” either!
Thank you for the corrective. Man. I’ve gotta keep track of all the times I’ve swallowed and then perpetuated codswallop from the *interwebs*. I’ll have to read that book, I guess!
LDC said:
” His description was so otherwise obscure I thought the Mendoza was a bolt-action rife for many years.”
I’m unfamiliar with the work in question, not being a fan of turgid left-wing stupidity, but… The Mendoza semi-autos started as straight-pull bolt action rifles. Ones that saw participation in several competitions, and which I believe also saw some extremely limited production and commercial sales. They were viewed by some cognoscenti of the era as being superior to the Schmidt-Rubin rifles that the Swiss wound up buying, so… Maybe the author was confused about it all?
“(…)Mendoza semi-autos started as straight-pull bolt action rifles(…)”
Is any photo of latter known?
@Daweo,
C&Rsenal just did a piece on them, a few weeks back:
https://youtu.be/0s_DZ7kv37Y?si=MYqrqu3urAGW7WZf
I’d vaguely known that Mondragon started out as a straight-pull, having seen a piece on the Swiss trials, but… I’d really known nothing beyond that, until Othais worked his ADD magic on them.
Bunch of interesting stuff tied in with this, particularly the ammo.
Daweo & Kirk;
I’m not aware of any Mendoza “semi-auto” military rifles.
The Mendoza M1934 (7x 57mm) and RM-2 (.30-06) LMGs were called “automatic rifles” by the Mexican Army, as per British SOP with Brens, etc.
It was the Mondragon rifle line that began with straight-pull bolt actions and evolved into gas-operated self-loaders, mostly made in Switzerland. Some were used as aviator’s armament by the germans early in WW1.
See;
“Mondragon; Mexico’s Ordnance and Ballistics Genius” by Hans Tanner in Guns of the World (NY; Bonanza Books 1977) pp 262-271.
clear ether
eon
Rafael Mendoza designed a 7x57mm “Mexico Rifle–Fusil Mexico” with a five-round magazine, patent application 23 Aug. 1918, obtained 11 Feb. 1919 (1.294,295 serial 251,183). The breech is a fixed block. The rifle handguard would be rotated and then “pumped” forward and back like a pump-action shotgun, but in reverse.It could be readily separated into two components: the butt-stock and reciver with magazine, and the barrel, sights, and front stock. The butt would be kept shouldered while the support hand twisted the barrel to the right, and then pushed it forward.
The M-1934 automatic rifle is a gas-operated, open-bolt design. U.S. Patent no. 2,031,383 dated Feb. 1936. It had 22 parts. It used 20-rd. and 30-rd. top-mounted magazines, albeit offset a bit to the right like the Madsen (which is offset to the left), which was present in Mexico from the time of the Porfiriato. It ejects to the left. Samples were delivered to the Philippines in June 1940.
The reason I thought the UK might have actually had some–being a dupe!–was because Lázaro Cárdenas provided some to Republican Spain in early 1937, about 100 total. Also 20k 7mm Mauser rifles, 8 mil. cartridges, and 3 aircraft.
There is a French source that a further 65 may have been sent later still, along with something close to 2k magazines. In at least one incident, a Mexican ship carrying artillery, Remington contract Mosin-Nagant rifles and so on was seized by Franco’s navy, and the Mexican sailors were executed.
Something like 50 were obtained by Venezuela for Cuba in 1951. Fidel Castro purportedly had a dozen or so aboard _Granma_ during the landing in eastern Oriente province. There are photos of counterrevolutionaries in the Escambray with a Mendoza automatic rifle. There were ten in Costa Rica during that nation’s last 44-day Civil War in 1948. Supposedly 3 were sold in ’52 to the Western Arms Corp. in LA.
When Mexico briefly adopted the .30-06 in 1954. the RM2 was developed with a 20-rd. magazine. Since Mexico also got 3.5k BARs, not many were ever made, apparently. By 1968, Mexico adopted the Belgian FAL, and shortly after that, began manufacture of the Heckler u. Kock G-3.Dave
Some of those WWI Arisakas the British bought as training rifles wound up going to the RN, as every spare .303 rifle went to the front-line regulars (as later in WWII), and a number were sent to T.E. Laurence’s forces in the Middle East (Laurence complained about them in his memoirs). I doubt any went to Russia, as the Russians had earlier bought their own supply (which eventually went to the Finns, which is why Norma in Sweden still makes 6.5 Japanese). So I suppose it’s reasonable the British kept a few as training rifles, and perhaps stored up their Navy stock, and pulled them out in 1940 to issue to HG along with the broomsticks and Martini-Henrys from museums.
Even if the Farquhar-Hill rifle was implausible for adoption in the interwar years, what with a repeat of WWI unthinkable, no public enthusiasm for military preparedness, highly restrictive defense budgets, with what money going toward aircraft and air defenses–sensibly–and toward the Royal Navy–perhaps much less sensibly, in hindsight… Why no movement on the so-called “.303 rimless?” This was taking the hoary-old Paul Mauser-designed 7.65x53mm Belgian/Argentine/Ottoman Mauser cartridge, necking it up a bit to accept the Mk.VII bullet, and “voila!” A ballistic twin of the .303 without the rimmed cartridge case! Why, I’d wager such a cartridge would have rendered the future U.S. infatuation with the 7.62x51mm moot… Or perhaps not.
Heck, even adoption of the 7.92x57mm rimless Mauser cartridge might have been a shrewd move.
Both Bloke on the Range and C&Rsenal have a few things to say about the advantages of rimmed rounds, especially in the areas of ease of manufacture of the weapon in headspacing, and the safety margin in chamber pressures. The rifle-caliber weapon with a removable box magazine wasn’t really a big thing until after WWI, despite the BAR and Chauchat, and the British still had an empire full of rimmed .303. And again, when there wasn’t time for conversion to .303, 7.92 x 57 would do, note the BESA.
Ehh… Sure. Right…. No time for “conversion” to a rimless cartridge with a feel-good non-sequitur fallacy to make a) Limey ex-service men, and b) the all-time kludge defender who knows all the “why this was done” versus what other paths were right there, but not taken…
No “time for conversion” since 1889? 1903? Oh. Right. that whole .276 Magnum Pattern 13 fever dream… 1918? Oh. Right. That whole, “whew! Well! Let’s put that whole senseless butchery behind us, shall we?” 1930s… Never mind, we are working on aircraft–certainly not tanks!–and we don’t really know what sort of aircraft armament is coming, so let’s just double the numbers of aircraft machine guns until we are fully ready to embrace the aircraft cannon in earnest… With the help of foreigners driven out of their homelands by the Nazis… As with so many of our other weapon designs…
“(…)no movement on the so-called “.303 rimless?”(…)”
They were entertaining cartridge known under such name
https://sites.google.com/site/britmilammo/-303-inch-rimless
though it was NOT child of 7.65 mm Argentine Mauser and de facto was semi-rimmed, nonetheless it was so arranged that Lewis machine gun could be easily reworked for it. This cartridge proved prone to malfunctions,
The results of these trials were very unsatisfactory with a large number of separated case, believed to be caused by the “set-up” of the bullet before the deep seated bullet had cleared the case mouth. This may have been the cause, but the srmour-piercing bullets which did not set-up also suffered separated cases.
Imperial Japan also had semi-rimmed 7.7x58mm and also a rimless in the form of the 7.7mm cartridge, which is basically rimless .303. The culprit was the machine guns in use.
“(…)Bren vs Degtyarev(…)”
Regarding magazine sticking from 1st, it should be noted that there existed drum magazines for Bren, with capacity 100, see photos https://www.forgottenweapons.com/bren-100-round-drum/ which would both lower silhouette and provide superior capacity.
Observe that 2nd is limited by poor spring placement, which was exposed to overheating.
USA was never going to adopt a foreign cartridge and stuck with 45 ACP through the 1970’s. The British during the “dark days” after Dunkirk, were less worried about logistics and more concerned about equipping the Army with anything that could go Bang!
I am a little amazed that the US adopted a new cartridge 30 Carbine and then because it was supposed to replace 45 ACP 1911’s and reduce the number of Garands. Have to keep in mind the pre-war mentality where MacArthur as the Chief of staff ordered the Garand be redesigned to use 30 06 because Congress would not approve a new cartridge while there were stacks of 30 06 piled up from WW1.
I would add to your list the LST. Over 1000 were built during the war and some served through Viet Nam. Many amphibious operations would not have been successful without the LST. It put the Western Allies on the offense, designed for the European theatre of operations but was first used in the Pacific.
I am not fully clear on the logic of the Light Rifle competition that led to the M1 carbine, but commenters here have discussed the idea that pistols were seen as too difficult to train conscripts to use effectively. But part of that is due to bullet drop, and the .45 ACP is quite the dropper even out of a carbine-length barrel.
The .30 Carbine round had the virtue of being the same caliber as the service rifle round, and being able to use the same machinery to produce bullets and barrels in the same caliber for both rifles and pistols was deliberate for France and Russia.
@ Gaston: “True that!” Yes, the .45 was foisted on the U.S. military because of Cowboy culture and the pseudo-scientific Thompson-LaGarde tests. Strangely, for those interested in shooting cadavers and barnyard animals to adduce “stopping power” effects, the notorious interwar “pig board” tests were mostly ignored.
The rifle shortage after Dunkirk is a source of great debate. I tend to side with those who argue that it really was quite serious. At first it was everything, literally, that could go bang, even fowling pieces for the “parashots.” But later, logistics did exert a great influence, hence the requirement to put all U.S.rifle-caliber weapons in the Home Guard, and reserve all .303 for the regular army, even Long Lees and Rosses and so on.
The M-1 carbine was a great idea insofar as the post-MacArthur .30-06 M-1 rifle as an excellent battle rifle–“the greatest battle implement ever devised” as far as Patton was concerned–but it was expensive and also quite heavy and cumbrous. So given that a draftee or volunteer can’t be taught to hit much with a pistol in a given training regiment, a lighter, handier shoulder arm was clearly required than the M1903 bolt-action rifle and the M-1. The cartridge was basically a rehash of the old 1905 .32 Winchester self-loading with a nod to industrial efficiency. A bolder or more innovative choice might have resulted in a more efficient “intermediate cartridge,” but at least it was better than a pistol round. As far as the “strategic reserve” of .30-06 cartridges is concerned, something like a quarter to a third of these were transported to New Jersey, signed over to U.S. Steel, and then sold to H Majesty’s gov’t. This is *before* Lend Lease, mind you. The whole thing was a work around of the isolationist sentiment of the U.S. public at the time. As it happened, the U.S. military was provided with rifle ammunition packed on 5-round stripper clips, packed loosely, packed on 8-round “en block” Garand rifle clips, in belts, and so on, .45 acp ammunition, and .30 M-1 carbine ammunition (I think the stripper clips for those are a post-WWII development). A bit of a logistical nightmare, perhaps?
Spot on about the LST for sure.
Good post. In general though this whole thead is guys with perfect hindsight asking why their forefathers lacked perfect foresight
What you call “foresight” many of us would more accurately term “demonstrated inability to learn from the past”. Or, for that matter, the present.
I think it’s more than fair to excoriate the various idjits and numpties that studiously ignored the lessons of war going back to the decades prior to WWII. The Russo-Japanese War, the kerfuffle in the Balkans… All of it pointed towards a revolution in military affairs whose roots lay in the prevalence of things like machineguns, indirect fire artillery, and barbed wire. They should have seen what was coming, in 1914.
That so many ignored the lessons of WWI, and sat studiously ignoring them? While shutting down experimentation in mechanization and building up their horse cavalry forces?
Were people paying attention, a rifle like the Garand is what should have been on general issue in 1914. After the war, the handwriting was on the wall such that they should have recognized that an intermediate cartridge was necessary, along with a good LMG portable enough to integrate into every infantry squad. They did not do this; they had the chance, yet all they did was more of the same-old, same-old. You have to wonder at what the casualty numbers might have been, had the French possessed an infantry arm fully-equipped with something like the MAS-44 in either 1914 or 1940.
Of course, they did not, and the people who did pay attention to the actual lessons of WWI rolled right over them and their nation, bringing untold misery to the world. The military branches of all Allied nations did very little to cover themselves in glory; they went into the war they knew was coming ill-equipped materially and doctrinally. The French had better tanks, and more of them, in 1940. They just failed to utilize them at all competently, along with most of the rest of their military forces. The number of “stored aircraft” under their control in the warehouses was obscene, and many of those aircraft were actually superior to the ones on the front lines. How many Allied airmen died because the French Air Minister was a Communist traitor? Why was he allowed to remain in power…?
WWII should have been a much different war than it was. As it actually was, it was really a second iteration of WWI, but with worse and far less effective leadership. Which is really saying something about the idjits that ran both wars…
Hitler and his Nazis should have and would have been crushed in the cradle, had the Allies had their acts together. They did not, so we wound up with the death toll we did. Mostly due to utter and sublime incompetency…
Cowboy Culture for the .45? Try problems with the.38 Long Colt in the Philippines led to re-adapting a heavier, larger larger-diameter bullet. The44/45 had a long history of killing horses and people in the 19th Century. I don’t think you understand or want to understand U.S. pistol history. Thus, smarmy comments based on pure opinion. Sad.
Physics in action. If you need enough KE to kill a horse with one center hit (which is about 350-400 FPE), there are two ways to get there.
1. Increase velocity; KE goes up with the square of V.
2. Increase projectile mass; KE goes up in linear fashion with more “weight”.
The .38 Colt failed because its 148 grain bullet left the muzzle at about the same velocity as the older .45 Colt’s 255-grain did, i.e. about 260 M/S (850 F/S). Doing the math (in English measure) this works out to 240 FPE for the .38 vs. 410 for the .45.
It was less powerful than the .45, which anybody who understood basic physics could have told them in advance.
If they could have gotten that 148-grain “pill” up to the speed of sound (about 1,086 F/S), it would have cranked about 390 FPE, close to the .45’s energy.
But with the smokeless powders of the day, that couldn’t be done any more than it could have been done with black powder. Not out of a pistol-length barrel.
The final .45 ACP load (230 grain @ 830= 350 FPE) was a compromise between “horse-killing” power and low recoil. It’s a tribute to John Moses Browning and Carl J. Ehbets at Colt, who designed the original Colt “.45 Military” round (200-grain @ 830) in 1905, that the final U.S. standard round simply increased their bullet weight by 30 grains.
The result got the job done until 1986. And it still works today.
Speaking as somebody who (1) carried a .45 on duty for quite a while but (2) also carried a .38 or a .357 at the same time, I have to acknowledge that .357in expanding bullets are considered “good” if they expand to about half an inch diameter on impact and penetration.
The .45 ACP, by comparison, is about half an inch across to begin with. So expansion is sort of irrelevant there.
cheers
eon
The cavalry branch and its constituency for the .45 is an often overlooked part of the equation, when asking the question “Why the 1911 and the .45 ACP”? The cav bubbas were never in favor of the .38, and they wanted something that would be useful as both a “Put the nice horsey down humanely…” and “Kill the enemy horsey en melee…”
Which warped the hell out of the equation. The Europeans, for some reason, were not so concerned with the issue, but then they didn’t necessarily fight their cavalry the way the US did. There was an awful lot of Texas Ranger and other frontier cultural input into US cavalry doctrine, vestigial as that might have seemed. And, the legacy of the Colt Dragoon pistols was there to play its part, as well. Americans wanted great big horse pistols, and those are not generally things that come in calibers below .44 or so…
It was probably also affected by the near-failure of handguns in cavalry use in the Civil War.
If you look at the actual statistics for the revolvers used by both sides, exactly none of them after the Dragoon had muzzle energy levels much over 150 FPE. No, not even the “big” .44s, the Colt 1860 and the Remington New Model Army.
The problem was that there just wasn’t room in their chambers for powder charges much over 25 grains (FFg or FFFg, take your pick). This meant that they had MVs under 900 F/S, and therefore MEs in the range of…a .32 ACP or .380 ACP pocket pistol. Or less.
Shoot a horse with that, you’d pretty much have to hit the brain or the heart for Ol’ Dobbin to even notice.
Wartime accounts show time and time again that cavalrymen tended to fight like dragoons. After the saber charge (which was increasingly rare after they learned the hard way what concentrated infantry rifle-musket firepower could do to them), the “Yellowlegs” would unass, have each fifth man hold the horses behind their position, and get down to business with their generally breechloading carbines, ignoring the handgun entirely.
As one experienced officer put it, “We were not ‘cavalry’, we were mounted riflemen“.
It’s not a coincidence that the .56 Spencer load was designed to deliver the same energy out to 300 yards as the .58 Minie’ ball out of the 1861 Springfield. The .44 Henry may have been an “intermediate” cartridge in its day, but the big Spencer round was anything but.
In the postwar environment, people who needed to be able to deal with obstreperous livestock, like cowboys on cattle drives, needed handguns that could get the job done, because by the time you wrestled the Winchester out of the saddle scabbard, either your bucking horse or that pissed-off bull would have you badly injured or dead. The Winchester was for dealing with serious threats beyond 100 yards, whether a stampede or an Apache war band hunkered down in rifle pits. (Yes, they did that- a lot. Never mind Hollywood.)
So the handgun had to have sufficient power to ensure that a half-ton or so of freaked-out quadruped became “Dead Right Now”.
The more like the old, powerful Dragoon or Walker it was, the better everybody west of the Great River liked it.
This was the reason for both the .45 Colt round and the .44 WCF. Revolver rounds that could put down a large animal with one or two center hits. The .44-40 being both a revolver and a rifle round was one of the more brilliant ideas ever. “One Round To Rule Them All”- and yes, it was more powerful than the already-powerful .45 Colt. (The .45 S&W Schofield was a failure; just not enough FPE.)
The American preference for basically Magnum-level handgun rounds was and is less romanticism than a determination to only have to shoot something or somebody once– because that might be all you have time for.
Or as one old Texas Ranger said when a young one asked him why he stuck to the .45 Peacemaker instead of one of the then-new S&W M&P .38s, “Son, when I shoot some son-of-a-bitch, I don’t want to have to walk around behind him afterward to see what’s still holding him up”.
cheers
eon
Righto. Thank you, as always, pardner, for the details eon!
I stand by my “Cowboy culture” claim. Yippee ki yay!
When revolvers were first invented the navy wanted a .36. The army reasoned they had to kill horses, and so they wanted a .44. That’s not “pure opinion.” That is documented: Navy revolvers were .36. Army revolvers were .44s.
Yes, the .38 long Colt was found lacking. What do you suppose was issued out as a result? Why, the Colt SAA Model 1873. You know, the “Peacemaker.” The quintessential horse cavalry and “cowboy” pistol. The Model 1902 Colt Philippine Constabular revolver was in .41 or .45, and had an extra long trigger so you could get two fingers on it, such was the double-action trigger pull.
The Thompson-LaGarde tests were pseudo-science.
If I can be smarmy for a bit: The history of the .40 S&W cartridge and its full-scale adoption by U.S. police reveals much of “U.S. pistol history.” The single-most over analyzed gun battle in history, generating as many words in print as some battles, was the FBI’s worst day in Miami in 1986. Two bank robbers armed with rifles, shotgun, and hand guns were confronted by Special Agents in a grim and bloody gunfight. So the 9x19mm was found wanting. A 10mm was needed. No one could shoot the 10mm but experts at pistol craft. .40 S&W offered a larger, heavier bullet, but the guns would accommodate more rounds like the 9mms. Meanwhile, ammunition technology was changed to ensure that a given bullet would perform better. Almost 40 years later, it is admitted by trauma surgeons that they can’t see a difference between 9mm wounds, .40 S&W wounds, and .45 acp wounds. And .40s are a bit harder to shoot. And the guns wear out quicker. And the ammo is more expensive. So now literally every other police department is switching to 9mm.
One caveat;
The Colt Model 1851 .36 Belt Revolver was called the “Navy” because it had a roll-stamped scene of a naval battle going around the cylinder. Sam Colt wanted something on that part to “pretty up” the revolver, and the Texas Navy had won an engagement with the moribund Mexican Navy off what’s now Cancun’ in 1846.
The .36 caliber was due to wanting a revolver light enough to carry in a belt holster rather than a saddle holster as with the Walker and Dragoon.
It was only later, just before the Civil War began, that Colt sales brochures and etc. began referring to the Model 1851 as the “Colt’s Belt Revolver Of Navy Caliber”.
It was the 1861 model .36 that was officially named the “Navy revolver”. Entirely due to the colloquial name of the 1851 model.
One roll-stamp, and a resulting nickname became the official definition of caliber and purpose.
Such is life.
cheers
eon
Thanks for the insights and correction. I was aware of the scene of the Texas Navy at the Battle of Campeche roll-engraved on the cylinder. As you note, the marketing scheme worked. The back story to that, as I’m sure you know, is that the Texas Republic acquired all sorts of fairly advanced-for-the-day guns like the Jenks breech loading carbines and some Colt Paterson revolvers. These multi-shot weapons were among the sidearms used by the Texas Navy–and also by Texas Rangers, who wanted a bigger, harder-hitting caliber that could go through man or beast, even if protected by a stout bison-hide Comanche war shield… Two tracks: Colt was pleased to learn of the use of his revolvers by the Texas Navy, hence the roll engraved scene on what shifted from “belt revolver” to Navy revolver. The other track was the Colt Walker, in consultation with Samuel Walker the Texas Ranger.
what’s the lst?
LST=Landing Ship Tank, a British design built by US yards.
So much of WWII technology was like that… The Brits designed it, but didn’t have capacity to build it. Or, actually, the capability… In the US, there was a whole ecosystem of actual production capacity that just didn’t exist in Britain. Like the tube industry that enabled production of the VT time fuse, or the high-quality specialty steel manufacture that made the Bailey Bridge a mass-produceable thing.
People are shocked when they find out how much “stuff” we got off the Brits, and which they had to rely on the US to mass-produce.
Being brutally honest, I have to point out that the UK and the Soviet Union both would have been at the mercy of the highly inept German war machine, and that was because the two of them together were even more inept. Absent Lend-Lease? Hitler would have destroyed most of the Soviet military potential in late ’42 or early ’43, no matter how many bodies Stalin threw at them. It was the food and the trucks and the general material provided by the US that staved off defeat. Even if Stalin hadn’t gone down to defeat, he’d have had to sue for a cease-fire during those years, or he’d have likely been deposed by desperate generals who saw defeat coming on.
Same with the Brits; absent US materials, they just didn’t have enough wherewithal to counter the limited amount of German competence there was at the tactical and operational levels. At a certain point, strategic good sense and better resources don’t matter the least.
Hitler never should have gotten as far as he did; only Allied fecklessness and cupidity enabled him. With Stalin subsidizing the German conquests of Western Europe (probably thinking that there’d be more than token resistance by most of those nations…), Hitler and his minions would have had to fold well before he really got going. At most, I suspect he’d have been stalemated in eastern Poland for a lot longer, without the Soviet stab-in-the-back. This, accompanied by the material expenditures, would have made going up against Western Europe a lot harder. Stalin giving him all those lovely raw materials…? That’s the point where I really lose patience with Soviet apologists. Stalin and his nation got exactly what they deserved in Barbarossa; they should have gotten a bit more, in my book. Every death in the so-called “Great Patriotic War” ought rightly be ascribed to Stalin, rather than Hitler. Hitler would have been a collapsed parvenu, absent all that lovely aid granted him by Stalin.
It didnt seem post ’45 or even less today, that they are a little bit grateful to US for all these “lend” donations that ended up mostly as free gifts with nothing in return.
Not sure about the whole “free gifts with nothing in return…”
The late Clive Ponting fairly well established the degree to which the U.S. massaged loans and “Lend Lease” to the UK into leveraging the British Empire… Made official with the UK’s “hand-off” to the U.S. of the Greek Civil War followed up by Eisenhower slapping down the UK over Suez in ’56… As for the USSR, well, they sort of repaid Lend Lease with all of the blood shed in defeating ze Germans, don’t you think? While this strategy saved a lot of American and British lives, it did end up consigning Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and some other Central and Eastern Europeans to Soviet rule and control for a number of decades…
Dave, I mentioned it only thinking about Ussr, not UK; as for repaying, I don’t think in international relations between major powers things work out that way, like “Hey, were gonna send you free stuff, you just keep on dying fighting the germans”. However, result can be somewhat summed like that.
“(…)USSR, well, they sort of repaid Lend Lease with all of the blood shed in defeating ze Germans(…)”
From https://1997-2001.state.gov/issues/economic/fs_000301_wardebt.html
Lend Lease claims against the former Soviet Union arising from World War II were settled in a 1972 agreement between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. In the 1972 agreement, the U.S.S.R. pledged to make three initial payments totaling $48 million and to repay the remaining Lend Lease debt once the United States had granted Most Favored Nations (MFN) trade status. The Soviet Union made the three initial downpayments, but because it did not obtain MFN status at that time — because of conditions set forth in the 1974 Trade Act — its obligation to make the remaining payments toward its Lend Lease debt was not triggered before the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. However, MFN status was extended to the Russian Federation in 1992, and accordingly, in 1993, Russia signed an agreement with the U.S. in which it acknowledged its liability and agreed to a repayment schedule for the former U.S.S.R.’s Lend Lease debt.
Thanks Daweo for accurate info.
Dave throw the ball with this blood business, turns out theres more than it meets the initial phrase;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_bleed
Putting it into shocking 1941. Trumans words;
“If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances”
seems I was mistaken at above comment, and at core levels noble and humanitarian high politics really function in that insanely selfish way.
thank you
20:46 Perhaps the largest user of the French small arms in UK were the Polish troops, which were the only ones who seemed to have thought about taking weapons with them, evacuating to Britain. And so, for most of the 1940 there are photos showing guys in definitely British-style battledress uniforms, armed with FM24/29 or Berthier or MAS36 rifles. Perhaps the question was triggered by seeing such photos – but they are mostly the Poles.
The Polish Army in the UK built the anti-invasion defenses closest to my maternal grandmother’s home: Largo Bay in Fife in Scotland. The port of Methill was a major coal-export location, and at that time even had ferry service to Belgium.
The bunkers are still there.
Interesting specimen https://augfc.tumblr.com/post/674371287348576256/a-well-travelled-mas-38-prototype-recently-i-got
26:30ish Why is Bren considered better than DP? [facepalm]
It’s in the practice of utilization, my dear boy. Comparing data sheets on computer screen or paper it’s just a waste of time – you don’t fight with a ruler or scale, you fight with guns. And if you do not know what guns are, you’d better sit tight and learn from these who do.
Take the Bren to the range, shoot a little and then take a Degtyarov and you’d know – it’s that simple. My physics teacher always told us: “You don’t have to believe my words, further down your life, your own ass would tell you I was right. One’s ass is the best teacher that is”.
(1) Just try to fire 50-ish rounds from one position and crawl 50 meters to another firing point, and you’ll know. Simply count the burns you suffered with either of the two.
(2) Then fire another 50 rds and try to advance 100 meters shooting on the go. You simply don’t have a place on the hot DP you can hold on to the gun and fire from the hip, holding onto it over the damned turntable on top, other than a free swinging bipod leg, because you have a reciprocating piston underneath. Bren you can handle easily, it is flat, you can fix the barrel handle outwards and hold onto it, you can fold the bipod and use it as the forend, hell, if you’re sturdy enough you can fire it from the shoulder, because why not?
As for the relative height: the relative heights of the guns are irrelevant. It’s the gunner’s head that counts as a target, and that one is at the exactly same height behind DP and Bren. And the enemy is aiming not at the magazine, but the head of shooter. The pan magazine gives no advantage at all. How’s that? Simple, just handle them, and you’ll know.
(3) Try to fill up the damn thing – not even at nighttime in the trench. Just effing load this damned shitty turntable with just two hands, then load the same amount of ammo into the Bren mags, with its two-position magazine lips. ZB26 was even better, and it had a special loading tool, stripping clips, five rounds per stroke. You may load 90 rds into three Bren magazines faster than you put 47 rds into the DP pan. What you need to load each effing cartridge is to (a) pull the ring on the upper table – mind you pull either with your left to right, or then load rounds with your left, because some idiot came with this cockamamie idea how to fill it. (b) drop round into the lips (facing outwards from you into a diagonal channel between the lips and the upper plate). (c) pull and release the ring to let the cartridge drop into its nest in the upper plate, (d) check if it lays flat – you’re fucked if you don’t, cause next round would jam, and you’ll have to unload it. Of course the lips are facing outwards from you, so that you won’t be able to see the whole process, unless your neck can stretch that long. The most efficient way to load the pan is to use at least two guys for it, one for yanking the ring left and right, the other for dropping rounds.
While for the Bren mag, you take a mag into one hand, place a round over the lips with the other and push. Click, it’s done, next round. Which means approx. 2x faster loading for the Bren magazines then with that Fyodorov’s ergonomic disaster on top of the DP.
Have you ever wondered why Dyegtyarov himself tested a Japanese horror-hopper or the Bren-style top mounted magazine feed for the DP, if that pan would be so wonderful? Get to know, then think, then practice – and only then paw the keys in a respectable forum such as this one.
Exquisite exposition…
Only the Russians would have put something like the DP into full-scale production and use.
Although, there may have been method to the madness, in that people often misunderestimate the difficulties inherent to mass serial production of box magazines. Even the US, a manufacturing technology powerhouse of the early 20th Century if there ever was one, had difficulties. Ones you can find in all the oral histories of the US Army during the 1920s-30s, wherein you will find innumerable accounts of people going through crate after crate of WWI-era production BAR magazines to find a set which would work with their BARs for qualification…
With the DP/BREN situation, you’re looking at weapons that are on either side of the demarcation line between “Yeah, we can routinely churn out stamped-metal box magazines that work consistently in all weapons all the time…” and “Yeah, that’s not happening.” DP is from before that time, and remember that the line moves depending on which industrial complex we’re talking about; it was later for the Soviets than it was for everyone else. There were ample reasons that everyone fixated on stripper clips and built-in magazines, as well as other things like Johnson’s fixation on single-position feed single-column magazines.
Mass production of things like magazines isn’t as easy as it looks, from our standpoint today. And, considering how many modern weapons fail due to magazine issues…? It isn’t at all a trivial task, even with today’s advantages.
In the new Browning biography there is a mention of the pre-WWI US Army’s allergy to removable box magazines, officers insisting to JMB that his pre-BAR autorifle would only be an acceptable weapon with Hotchkiss-style cartridge strips! I wouldn’t doubt Degtyarev took his clue from the relative success of the Lewis gun.
Consistent and reliable mass-production of interchangeable box magazines only became a “thing” during the late 1930s. And, only in the most advanced nations…
You could do a lot of box magazines that would interchange, but the cost due to the rejection rate and the care required…? Mind-bogglingly high. Which was why they weren’t used outside the LMG role, and why such ideas as the StG44 were dismissed out of hand.
People really underestimate the industrial capabilities of historical eras, when they speculate on what “could have been”. I’d suspect that if the various parties had been at all rational about what weapon to field circa 1914, we’d have had an intermediate-caliber weapon with a built-in magazine system like the SKS.
Which, frankly, would have been an idea trench weapon, coupled with a nice LMG like the BREN.
Don’t forget the theorists-in-uniforms’ horrors of “soldiers wasting ammunition”. They regarded the PBI as unstable, nervous, flighty little things who would, given detachable box magazines in either the rifle or a self-loading pistol, blast off their entire basic load of ammunition in under a minute.
As here;
-Michel Josserand, with Jan Stevenson, Pistols, Revolvers, and Ammunition, Bonanza Books, NY, 1972, pp 90-91.
As with pistols, so with rifles and even machine guns. Meanwhile, the French General Staff was busy fantasizing about their miraculous M1897 75mm field gun, the “French 75”, rendering heavy support artillery unnecessary by literally drowning targets with massed fire of up to 1000 rounds per tube per hour. Yes, 17 R/M or one round every three and a half seconds. WTF? As Ian Hogg put it, this was the “quick-firing” concept gone totally insane.
Apparently what was considered the sine qua non for the artillery was considered undesirable for the infantry.
This may explain several things. Sedan 1914, Ypres (all five 1914-18), and Verdun 1916 to name just three of them.
clear ether
eon
I’m channeling the 3-round Mannlicher-type magazine of the Berthier 07/15 at the mention…
On the other hand, there really were instances where repeating rifles used in which the PBI did expend all of their ammunition… At least two examples could include the 21st OVI at Chickamauga who devastated Confederate infantry with withering fire from five-shot revolver rifles, the Colt-Root discarded huffily by the Berdan Sharpshooters, but who then ran out of the available non-standard cartridges. Also the USMC at Guantánamo Bay in June 1898, who managed to crank off rather a lot of the 6mm ammo they’d brought for the Lee Navy rifles while responding to a night-time incursion by the Spaniards. There are other examples, certainly.
Dave:
Fun fact;
The Mannlicher-Berthier 07/16 with a five-round magazine had pretty much superseded the M86 Lebel and the earlier 07/15 Mannlicher by mid-1917.
They finally realized that 10 rounds in a tubular magazine or 3 rounds in an en bloc clip were a bad matchup vs. five rounds in a Mauser.
The SMLE was probably the most-admired rifle in the trenches. Ten rounds, stripper-clip reloading, the fastest repeat-fire bolt-action in the game, and next to jam-proof even in Flanders mud on top of everything else.
It was the most lethal weapon other than artillery when in the hands of the pre-war Territorials, and even in later volunteers’ hands it was the most effective fighting rifle on the field.
The one bad thing about it was that it was so effective in massed fire (as in the Retreat from Mons), that the British general staff thought they didn’t need more heavy machine guns to be getting on with.
They were, of course, wrong.
cheers
eon
Amazing how this takes us back up to Mr. Daewoo’s post about the new stripper-clip-fed KelTec — a design choice made to keep the gun compact! Of course, after twenty rounds, to quote Col. Boothroyd, “someone’s been hurt.”
Also parallels the good old Lee-Enfield: ten round fixed mag, load with two five-round chargers. KelTec twenty rounds, load with two ten-round chargers.
eon said:
“Don’t forget the theorists-in-uniforms’ horrors of “soldiers wasting ammunition”.”
One of the really annoying things to discover, reading through period literature, is just how little actual empirical work lay behind all the theory. It’s like the idjits pontificating on these issues just made things up out of thin air, pronounced them, and nobody ever thought to say “Yeah, about all that… Where’s your proof?”
Zero evidence, zero experimentation, zero field trials. Flights of supposition and fancy, floating free of any actual evidence.
“(…)most efficient way to load the pan is to use at least two guys for it, one for yanking the ring left and right, the other for dropping rounds.(…)”
Alternatively you might use rare item known as Устройство Баркова see 1st image from bottom https://war-time.ru/item/perenoska-diskov-dp-i-diski-dlya-dp
There’s that contrivance used by the Russians, and as captured, by the Finns, where you literally nail it to a tree–since you live in the taiga, there’s no shortage of those, right? And then use that to load the DP aka. “Emma” aka. “record player” dish or pan magazines, yes?
Then again, somewhere someone “in the rear with the gear” had this:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/rakov-dp-28-magazine-loader/
Maybe?
30:25ish “Doubtful if the British got a significant number of M1 Thompsons”.
They sure did – there are 100s of photos showing British (and Polish, for that matter) troops in Italy fighting with M1/M1A1 Thompsons. They were scarce in the Northwestern Europe, maybe, but in Italy they were abundant. Have you ever noticed, that there are virtually no Stens in Italy (save for the Italian Communist partigiani)? That’s because the SMGs in the British 8th Army fighting there were mostly the Tommyguns.
On the other hand, I have a photo of Polish tank crew in Normandy, August 1944, wielding a Grease Gun – but whether it was an officialy supplied one, I’d rather doubt. Either it was found there, perhaps at the side of some US casualty or traded for booze (but whom from? The Polish 1st Armoured Div fought outside Caen, the furthest as possible from the American landing zone).
36:22 “The British never used M1919A4 for infantry, just tanks”
Oh yes, they did – and plenty of these. But again – it was with the 8th Army in Italy, supplied by the Americans, and that’s why you do not see much Brownings in France, for example. There, in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany the logistics were of their own, and they kept Vickers in .303-in. In Italy, they mostly used Brownings M1919A4s just like the M1 Thompsons – look for the period photos
Re: 49:17, one lot of Americans used British arms quite a lot, to wit the Eagle Squadrons and the Spitfire fighter. These were Americans who volunteered for the RAF in the years before Pearl Harbor. Upon America’s entry into the war, the planes were re-badged with American markings and the whole unit, three squadrons, planes and all, turned over to the USAAF. The Spitfires were not replaced with Thunderbolts or Mustangs until late 1943. Not small arms, but definitely reverse lend=lease.
USAAF also used F-8 aeroplane https://www.aahs-online.org/pubs/journals/files/521036.pdf which was Mosquito converted into spy plane.
I don’t understand the millenial stupidity behind questioning why Sten had also semi-auto mode of fire. They even patented it! (and thats iirc the only patent with sten)
“(…)don’t understand the millenial stupidity behind questioning why Sten had also semi-auto mode of fire(…)”
You look at STEN and there is switch AND you look at PPS-42 and there is none. Why you would not raise why question then?
MP38/40 was full-auto only, too, as was the American M3.
I believe the difference was that the British called the Sten and other SMGs “machine carbines“, meaning the equivalent of short-barreled rifles. As such, it was expected that the soldier would generally fire aimed, single shots at ranges over 25 yards or so, reserving full-auto fire for close-quarters actions, such as room-clearing.
You see the same idea in the Beretta Modelo 1938, with its twin-trigger setup; front trigger for single-shot, back trigger for full-automatic. In a reflex action, your trigger finger naturally lands on the single-shot trigger first, requiring you to make a conscious effort (after you’ve collected your wits) to move your trigger finger back to the full-auto trigger.
PPS-42 was conceived in Leningrad during the siege. It was made as simple as possible to facilitate production inside the surrounded city. A fire selector was likely a luxury Sudayev concluded he couldn’t afford under the circumstances. Note the later “43” version did have one, as on the PpSh-41.
Also, Russian army doctrine for the SMG was full-auto fire at point-blank in the infantry assault, or in fending off the other side’s attempt at same. Tactically speaking, the SMG was used much like a sawn-off shotgun.
Different armies had different doctrines. And doctrines affect designs.
clear ether
eon
“(…)A fire selector was likely a luxury Sudayev concluded he couldn’t afford under the circumstances. Note the later “43” version did have one,(…)”
Where?
The british are of high class, they would not compromise with ungentlemanly full auto only! I’m not kidding.
eon, pps43 was FA only also iirc. It was designed in Leningrad but ended produced mostly elsewhere, like near Moscow. With ppsh 41 and high rof, semi is very sensible.