Where are all the Allied SMGs?

[Jeff Duquette]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>John Said: How many of the produced US SMG's were shipped Lend Lease?. I have seen photos of UK, & Soviet personel with Thompsons.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I have a photo around here somewheres of a German Infantrymen on the Eastern Front with a Thompson SMG. These things really were widely distributed.

[Wreck]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>

In answer to ASL Vet, I am interested in his theory of the use of Allied SMGs. Does he think they were used as crowbars? Hoes for kitchen gardens? Ad hoc wheat scythes, perhaps?

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

A possible explanation is that they simply spent all the war in armories. Not that I buy that, mind, but it is a possibility.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>

Do I want gamey crew rushes with SMGs? No, certainly not. But I do think when gamey German SMG rushes sweep onto a mortar team (et al), they would not defend themselves with strong language, as they do in CM today.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think they should make a special morale category, rather like "!", perhaps shown as "!!". "!!" infantry would be disallowed all move types except crawl and withdraw. Crews bailing out of AFVs or fleeing a gun would get this status. The point here is that in essence these guys would (and should) feel that they are out of the fight. In real life you would not see a tank crew charging the front to hold an objective, but rather headed rearward.

All in all though, a very interesting thread and good research. I am surprised how many people don't seem to get it.

[JasonC]

"Not that I buy that, mind" - Still waiting for what you -do- think happened to them. As for the "possibility", do you suppose the US government spent $120 million on glorified dust collectors in the middle of a world war? Sure. And there is this bridge in Brooklyn...

[JasonC]

As for team side arms, what bothers most is the lack of close in firepower from typical US weapons platoons. 41 men pull 12 triggers (1 50 cal, 2 30 cal, 3 mortars, 3 zooks, 3 M-1s in the platoon HQ). In reality, probably 20 additional small arms could be firing if the range were short, split between SMGs and carbines mostly.

1 SMG and 2 carbines per 5-6 man team, with only half fp numbers to reflect not all of them up and firing, would considerably improve the realism (+40 and +12 fp at 40 and 100 yards respectively). Then remove the half penalty if they are out of ammo - so e.g. a mortar team would have ~1/3rd of a squad's firepower at close range only, after it ran dry.

[ASL Veteran]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by JasonC:

[QB]In answer to ASL Vet, I am interested in his theory of the use of Allied SMGs. Does he think they were used as crowbars? Hoes for kitchen gardens? Ad hoc wheat scythes, perhaps?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

An army has a voracious appetite for weaponry and it would be difficult to account for every single weapon either in the inventory or that was produced. What did the US do with all their Springfields? Use them for crowbars? Maybe they just didn't use them at all?

At any rate, one simple way to prove that Allied AT gun crews etc had more SMGs would be to post the standard personal weapons assigned to those troops. The bottom line is that I don't have any theory about where all these SMGs are - nor do I feel there is a need to find one. The TO&E of a specific squad type or crew can be found without regard to the use of production figures. I guess I just don't see any relationship between the production figures of SMGs and CM.

[WWB]

Actually, alot of them probably never made it out of US armories. There were several hundred thousand M1s which never made it out of Springfield, for example. Many of those WW II era SMGs are probably still packed in grease in US armories. One must remember that the US was busy building a 100 division army, which only made 65 or so in 1945. And the Government is not known to cancel orders already made.

While better weapons did tend to gravitate towards the front, I don't think SMGs are too far under represented in Allied forces. What would add is instead of having a cookie-cutter squad mentality, BTS added some randomization, around certain norms. I would say that 1 SMG over TO&E was probably likely, especailly as the war drug on. Extra BARs were probably more common than extra SMGs.

One other issue with the mass issue of SMGs and other automatic weapons: Ammo consumption. They use alot more of the stuff than bolt action or semi-auto rifles, and logistics were difficult enough as is.

WWB

[JasonC]

"I just don't see any relationship between the production figures of SMGs and CM"

Willful blindness is not an argument. I will spell out the relationship.

(1) CM overmodels SMG effectiveness by giving them the same ammo endurance in shots as rifles, the same cost in points, but much greater firepower per shot

(2) CM then allows German infantry varieties with any desired level of SMGs in the mix

(3) CM then restricts Allied infantry varieties to nearly pure rifle, or moderate SMG for Paras only

(4) CM thus models a superior performance of German infantry as being due to higher availability of SMGs

(5) the Germans did not have higher availability of SMGs than the Allies did, to start with

Conclusion - CM presents an historical unjustified "thesis" of the cause of superior relative German infantry performance - greater availability of automatic weapons.

Just as a German CM player that always takes AFVs with impenetrable front armor is not learning diddly about how German tankers actually accomplished what they did (since such AFVs were a modest portion of their overall fleet), a German CM player that always takes infantry types with high numbers of automatic weapons (LMGs and MPs both) is not learning diddly about how German infantry actually accomplished what they did (since the Germans did not have flocks more automatic weapons than the Allies did).

Both are technological reductions that give modern players a crutch to boost their performance to something like historical levels even if, compared to the historical counterparts, the modern players are tactical doofuses. This is not a way to learn how such tactical feats were actually achieved.

[Slapdragon]

If we actually lacked data on these weapons, then we would have to use production rates to judge how commonly they were used. Luckily, we know exactly how submachineguns were used in the US Army.

Besides almost 200,000 subguns transferred abroad as Lend Lease (half of which ended up on the bottom of the ocean), the majority of these weapons were accepted into service by 5 groups: 1) Army Ground Forces, 2) Army Service Forces, 3) Army Air Corps, 4) United States navy (including Marines), 5) United States Coast Guard. Only the first one of these groups is modelled in the game, AGF, which at its height consisted of the equivilant of 96 divisions of soldiers, each division including 30,000 soldiers in support and in combat positions, accounting for 2.9 million soldiers under arms by mid 1944. This number is low because there were another 15 or 16 training divisions in the US, but these were school units and not issued weapons like a fighting unit (even if the fighting unit never leaves the US). In addition, there were upward to a hundred thousand soldiers in the training pipe at any one time, invalid, or recovering.

Now think about this. 4 million carbines were produced through 1944, at a rate of around a million a year. Of course the carbine is much ignored, but it has a much greater claim to being the first intermediate cartridge rifle than the various German MP44 models, was lighter, easier to control in automatic fire, and was very reliable.

4 million Garands were on hand mid 1944, and were being produced at a rate of around 750,000 a year. 300,000 M3 Submachineguns were on hand, with production starting to peak at nearly a million units a year. A million M1A1 submachineguns were on hand, with production falling to lower than a 100,000 a year. Maybe a million M1903 and M1917s were on hand in storage or issued on a limited basis.

Not counting the bolt guns, that is 1 million subguns and 8 million rifles and carbines in service to to arm 2.9 million AGF troops. The question should not be what happened to the subguns, but why were so many rifles made? (To make subgun numbers more accurate we would need better on hand numbers for the M1928 and M1, but also would need better numbers of lend lease, which I assumed cancelled out, but which may not have).

The answer is that lost of other people needed guns. The Navy used more than a million small arms, as did the Army Air Corps, and while the Navy kept some M1917 and M1903s on hand, airbase security teams, Navy security, and the Marines used lots of submachineguns. Army service Force which included Engineers, MPs, Supply, and the like had more than 3 million men (its name changed in 1944 but it was still the army's support arm), and used lots of subguns. The Coast Guard has subguns on hand fom 1928, but coast patrol used them extensively.

In other words, the picture is a lot more complex, the weapons were used, they were just not issued to the Army Ground Forces, and it just shows that the US Army never did buy into the whole idea of the submachinegun, at least compared to its love of the rifle.

As I said earlier, a better argument could be made for throwing around some more M2 carbines, but there are no missing subguns.

[Enoch]

Purely anectodal evidence, but I've been looking through numerous WWII books recently. The pictures of US forces almost all show them carrying Garand rifles. This does not mean that there weren't more SMG's in Army service then CM depicts. It suggests to me that they were not that common.

[ 06-28-2001: Message edited by: Enoch ]

[ASL Veteran]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by JasonC:

Willful blindness is not an argument. I will spell out the relationship.

(1) CM overmodels SMG effectiveness by giving them the same ammo endurance in shots as rifles, the same cost in points, but much greater firepower per shot <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Excellent point about CM, but how was it that this relates to total war production figures for SMGs again?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>(2) CM then allows German infantry varieties with any desired level of SMGs in the mix<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Excellent point about CM, but how was it that this relates to total war production figures for SMGs again? Seems to fit the TO&Es just fine though.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>(3) CM then restricts Allied infantry varieties to nearly pure rifle, or moderate SMG for Paras only<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Excellent point about CM, but how was it that this relates to total war production figures for SMGs again? Seems to fit the TO&Es just fine though.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>(4) CM thus models a superior performance of German infantry as being due to higher availability of SMGs<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Excellent point about CM, but how was it that this relates to total war production figures for SMGs again? Oh, and superior performance is going to be terrain dependant. Also the higher availability of SMGs is in perfect agreement with the TO&Es of the forces present.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>(5) the Germans did not have higher availability of SMGs than the Allies did, to start with<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Excellent point about total war production figures for SMGs, but how was it that this relates to CM again?

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Conclusion - CM presents an historical unjustified "thesis" of the cause of superior relative German infantry performance - greater availability of automatic weapons.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well, the fact is that the TO&Es for many low grade German divisions (Volksgrenadier etc) in the late war period did have a substantial number of automatic weapons in them - assigned at the squad level. The availability in CM of SMG squads for the Germans and the lack of them for the Western Allies fits force TO&Es perfectly - unless BTS failed miserably in researching these TO&Es (which I doubt).

[WWB]

One point about VGs: I have read that many were equipped with captured SMGs, making the German production figures that much more irrelevant.

WWB

[JasonC]

Slapdragons comments are useful and interesting. I think it is clear the M-1 carbine was the primary weapon for rear area troops, crews of weapons, etc. It was introduced as a replacement for the .45, and was quite popular with the men. It is somewhat astonishing, but considerably more M-1 carbines were made during the war than M-1 rifles.

One fellow asked what the army did with its 1903 Springfields. The Marines continued to use them for a while before adopting the M-1. They were also used as sniper rifles in Europe. The rest stayed in rear areas. Only 1.1 million existed and they were not in production.

For the whole war, US small arms and LMG/MMGs available comprised -

1.1 million Springfield bolt action

3.8 million M-1 semi auto rifles

6.2 million M-1 semi auto carbines

1.2 million Thompson SMG

0.6 million M3 Grease SMG

0.4 million BAR

0.5 million air cooled 30 cal

For comparison, the Germans had or made -

11.7 million K98 bolt action rifles

0.4 million G43 semi-auto rifles

0.4 million MP44 assault rifles

0.9 million MP38/40 SMG

0.8 million MG34/42

0.2 million misc. LMG (czech, AA, etc)

Now, several things are immediately apparent. The Germans fielded a much larger ground force and fought on several fronts, more against non-US than US, while the majority of US ground effort was against them. Yet the US produced 4/3rds as many SMGs as the Germans did, alone. And about as many LMGs and MMGs, though split between BARs and air-cooled 30s (German MGs were likewise split between squad bipod and heavier tripod mounts).

16% of German small arms produced (1/6) were automatic weapons, 20% of US ones (1/5) were. Undoubtedly, the M-1 carbines were used by rear area troops and crews in large numbers. Likewise, K98s were doubtless scattered through the German rear areas.

There still remains little obvious justification for the idea that the Germans typically had 2-3x as many automatic weapons in formations of the same size, as US forces did. The US squads in CM with 2 and 3 out of 12 in 44 and 45 respectively, have 1/6 and 1/4 automatic weapons, which straddles the production rates and thus reflects no heavier weighting of automatics in combat than not. The German vanilla infantry has 1/3, which is twice the rate of automatic weapons they produced. And the commonly selected better types present in CM have half to all, thus 3-6 times the portion of automatics the Germans actually produced.

I think a the US para mix of BAR, 2 SMG, 2 carbine, 5 rifle, is closer to the likely average mix at the front line. With the larger line squads, perhaps 3 carbines and 6 rifles, and a rifle 45 squad might have 2 BAR, 2 SMG, 2 carbine and 6 rifles. I also think 2 rifles and 2 carbines is more likely for HQs than a pistol and 3 rifles. But since we can't tweak the weapons mixes, that is mostly academic. What players can do is use the paras whenever they like.

On the German side, I think the standard rifle 44 and 45, the security, and the VG rifle squad types are much more realistic than the special types. Meaning 3-4 automatics out of 8-9 men.

Of course the special types are there and will be used. I have already long since suggested tweaking ammo load-outs to balance their impact, compared to rifle squads. And I stand by my recommendation that use of Allied paras, whether the men represented were really paras or not, should be considered a perfectly reasonable option to reflect realistic front line small arms mixes, not as "gamey".

[ASL Veteran]

While I find this exercise in production figures meaningless, I must state that Ian Hogg has the Germans producing more than 1 million MP 40s alone. He also states that it is unknown how many MP 38s were produced, and this is completely ignoring all the other various SMGs produced by the Germans and all the various captured SMGs used (such as the French SMG). I think the number of 900k SMGs produced is low.

[Wilhammer]

Were not many of the Thompsons issued as equipment to AFVs and Recon vehicles, and not just one, but several?

So, if over 80,000 Shermans were issued 5 SMGs, that accounts for 400,000 of them.

I made a big stink when CM first came out about how the engine on small arms favors the Germans, and it is mostly because of the ammo for SMG and Rifles being the same.

The SMGs spend ammo far faster than a carbine or a rifle, yet they carry the same load.

I call it the "Strong German Back" factor.

BTS has promised to change this in CM:BB.

[ 06-28-2001: Message edited by: Wilhammer ]

[Slapdragon]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Enoch:

Purely anectodal evidence, but I've been looking through numerous WWII books recently. The pictures in of US forces almost all show them carrying Garand rifles. This does not mean that there weren't more SMG's in Army service then CM depicts. It suggests to me that they were that common.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I have almost two thousand WW2 combat photographs, which I have looked through dozens of times, the last time looking for pictures of the M29 Weasel. Taken by date, and unscientific because my pictures are not a random draw, the M1 SMG appears occasionally all through the pick, the M3 SMG is usually associated with rear area troops and armored troops (lots of pictures of tankers posing with their grease guns), and lots of Garands. The Carbine starts out common with rear area images, and then becomes common on the front line. Images of officers and NCOs carrying .45s as a primary weapon almost disapeer after July 1944.

[Freak]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Wilhammer:

The SMGs spend ammo far faster than a carbine or a rifle, yet they carry the same load.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Is it true that a SMG soldier carries less ammo loadout then a rifle soldier? I am just trying to understand this a bit more as I don't really know anything about small arms.

[ASL Veteran]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Freak:

Is it true that a SMG soldier carries less ammo loadout then a rifle soldier? I am just trying to understand this a bit more as I don't really know anything about small arms.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Standard ammo load out for a German rifleman would be 45 rounds in 5 round clips. An SMG man would probably have seven clips of 32 rounds in each clip for a total of 224 rounds of ammo. I'm not positive about the SMG ammo load out though. I'll have to check. The SMG man would carry roughly five times more rounds of ammunition than a rifleman.

[Slapdragon]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Wilhammer:

Were not many of the Thompsons issued as equipment to AFVs and Recon vehicles, and not just one, but several?

So, if over 80,000 Shermans were issued 5 SMGs, that accounts for 400,000 of them.

I made a big stink when CM first came out about how the engine on small arms favors the Germans, and it is mostly because of the ammo for SMG and Rifles being the same.

The SMGs spend ammo far faster than a carbine or a rifle, yet they carry the same load.

I call it the "Strong German Back" factor.

BTS has promised to change this in CM:BB.

[ 06-28-2001: Message edited by: Wilhammer ]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Actually battle loads carried by rifleman, and submachinegunners generally equalled the same amount of action time, only support weapons generally either carried a lot more (like the MG42 crews) or a lot less (the BAR). A lot less, and the rest of the team would carry some of the ammo.

The US load for M1903 springfield was 50 to 100 rounds (varrying depending on what action was expected). An M1 basic load was 160 rds (10 clips and 4 boxes in a cloth carrier). SMG gunners went into action with 150-300 rds. MP44 gunners started with 150 rounds but soon started to carry 360 rds. It all equals about the same fighting time, and an infantryman could easily blow all their ammo in a half hour or less, especially if firing wild.

[Michael Dorosh]

Some points that you gentlemen have missed:

a) the Thompson was also used by civilian police forces in the United States, the FBI, and other government organizations. Coast Guard, too, no doubt.

Large numbers of Springfield rifles went to Canada, because all our Enfield P17s, SMLEs, etc. went to the British Home Guard.

[Michael Dorosh]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Slapdragon:

Not counting the bolt guns, that is 1 million subguns and 8 million rifles and carbines in service to to arm 2.9 million AGF troops. The question should not be what happened to the subguns, but why were so many rifles made?

The answer is that lost of other people needed guns. The Navy used more than a million small arms, as did the Army Air Corps, and while the Navy kept some M1917 and M1903s on hand, airbase security teams, Navy security, and the Marines used lots of submachineguns. Army service Force which included Engineers, MPs, Supply, and the like had more than 3 million men (its name changed in 1944 but it was still the army's support arm), and used lots of subguns. The Coast Guard has subguns on hand fom 1928, but coast patrol used them extensively.

.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

WASTAGE WASTAGE WASTAGE

How many SMGs and rifles were lost at Kasserine, or in the ocean off of Omaha? Or at Slapton Sands, Dieppe, Salerno, etc.?

(By the way Slapdragon, it is great to have you back!)

I think you and ASL Vet are doing a sterling service, here, but I think everyone forgets (and forgive me, but I am part of the Logistics Branch up here) that armies over produce because soldiers lose, wear out, and break things! And that's just in training.

You make excellent points about other uses of the SMG; many stayed in the States for training, too, and as I posted elsewhere, civvie organizations used them too.

What about China? Canada produced 9mm Browning pistols and holsters for the Chinese; I gotta believe they got Thompson guns. Same for the Brazilian and Free French troops in Italy and Europe.

In other words - no one aint' never gonna know where they all went without a massive search of your public archives. Unless there is a great Thompson book out there (which is likely) that none of us has bothered to read.

[Maastrictian]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

WASTAGE WASTAGE WASTAGE

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Good point (and rather susinct too ). Don't forget that the Germans didn't have uber-logistics. They would have had some wastage too. I think it is reasonable to supose that the allies had more wastage -- they had farther to bring their weapons (at least those made in USA/Canada). It would be interesting to know how many allied smgs ended up at the bottom of the atlantic due to U-boats.

--Chris

[Simon Fox]

Slapdragon,

I am not at all interested in how naughty US troops got slapped on the wrist for discarding their rifles. Your comments may be pertinent to the hidebound rule constricted US Army but have no bearing on the freewheeling, initiative at all levels Commonwealth forces. In all seriousness my comments in this matter relate to Commonwealth forces only, they were different armies with different weapons and practices and should be discussed seperately.

My points were:

A)Rifles may be dealt with a little severely by CMs firepower/ammo model.

B)SMGs were freely available to Commonwealth forces who followed a 'horses for courses' model, that is for close stuff grab some SMGs off the 2nd echelon.

C)British officers frequently used German or Italian SMGs. Seems like some sort of tradition almost.

The issue of captured weapons is going to come up big time in the desert where it was habitual for both sides.

On the issue of US SMGs the only one issued to the Brits in numbers was the Thompson which was not that popular for a number of reasons. How do US SMGs match up against the rest in terms of effective range, stopping power and general utility. For all it's faults the Sten was sorta handy. Of course the best SMG of WW2 was the Owen

[JasonC]

I love it when everybody gets willfully obtuse to cover something pulled out of someone else's rear end to start with (BTS on the source of their small arms firepower numbers, in this case, from an older thread on the subject).

One, BTS has stated they thought SMG loads were about twice rifle loads in total rounds (comparing German MP40 with US M-1 that is), but the firepower numbers are 3-6 times higher not twice, and each round is not more accurate, so the expenditure of the load would certainly be faster. If you think 2x the bullets are going to last the same length of time, then the fp numbers should be ~2x as high when both guns are close enough to hit what they can see, but they aren't. They are higher.

And incidentally, it is silly to think the loads mentioned have to last the same lengths of time, (or 30 minutes), because in fact they can be burned almost arbitrarily fast if automatic weapons are carried. You can fire 7 clips of SMG ammo in 2 minutes, not 30, if you want to.

Ammo expenditure in combat varies widely with tactical details. The most any ammo system can do is not create unrealistic distortions in the critical tactical variables, like fp per unit time and fp overall.

FP per shot is set by weapon ROF, but the limit over the load is set by accuracy and total load carried only, with ROF largely irrelevant. There is no reason on earth to expect every weapon type to have 40 CM shots. BTS used 40 each because it was simpler than tracking ammo use by weapon type. Abstracted ammo systems are the norm in wargames, and they often introduce ROF vs. total load innaccuracies or present trade-offs unrealistically.

Two, everybody knows that men going into combat carry not standard loads but all the ammo they can carry. If not more for their small arm, they carry more rounds for the squad MG, or grenades. Nobody wastes ability to carry before a firefight.

Three, since ASL Vet found so many of my comments on point about CM's overmodeling of SMGs, I am still waiting for his endorsement of my past ammo tweaking proposals.

Four, the relevance of production to conclusions from planned TOEs is that everybody knows that nobody was at TOE consistently. If TOE says every boy scout gets a Tiger tank but there are more boy scouts than Tiger tanks then they don't have them, regardless of what the TOE says. And if the TOE says they should make do with paring knives but tommy guns were coming out of the army's ears, then they didn't use paring knives at TOE.

Thus, a CM FJ battalion has 62 MGs, but the infantry battalions of the 3rd FJ (a full strength unit) had 26 to 47 on D-Day, average 37. Or in other words, they had 1 per squad like regular infantry squads, not 2 each. In fact, if you believed TOEs literally almost every German squad would have 2 MGs (battalions with 63), but in the vanilla Heer infantry they are well equipped if they have one each (battalions between 25 and 45). Battalions were supposed to have 12 81mm mortars but most had more like 8, and some had only 2-4.

That is the sort of thing you expect when TOE is full of something, above the levels that were TOE in enemy formations, in a category the home front did not outproduce enemies in. Meanwhile, we know the M-1 carbines supplanted some TOE types, which makes some sense with so many of them made, several have reported the extra SMG or two per squad practice for the Allies, given examples of 3000 SMGs above TOE in 3 2/3rds divisions, etc.

To actually outfield enemies in a category it is generally necessary to outbuild them in it. Either that or to destroy all of theirs while losing few of yours, which is quite unlikely with small arms while retreating. Ignoring this because of TOEs would be like pretending the Germans constantly had 2000 operational AFVs in Normandy, and then France during the breakout, because they had 10 Panzer divisions in the area. Worse, actually, since their was about a week when that was actually true.

As for finding the figure of 900K MPs low, take it up with the folks at the Panzerfaust site. "Total production of MP 38 and MP 40 combined was 908,317". Rather more specific than "over 1 million", isn't it? I suspect the 1 million comment is an approximation of all real MPs and the "alone" means "not counting the MP44 assault rifles".

[Slapdragon]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Simon Fox:

Slapdragon,

I am not at all interested in how naughty US troops got slapped on the wrist for discarding their rifles. Your comments may be pertinent to the hidebound rule constricted US Army but have no bearing on the freewheeling, initiative at all levels Commonwealth forces. In all seriousness my comments in this matter relate to Commonwealth forces only, they were different armies with different weapons and practices and should be discussed seperately.

My points were:

A)Rifles may be dealt with a little severely by CMs firepower/ammo model.

B)SMGs were freely available to Commonwealth forces who followed a 'horses for courses' model, that is for close stuff grab some SMGs off the 2nd echelon.

C)British officers frequently used German or Italian SMGs. Seems like some sort of tradition almost.

The issue of captured weapons is going to come up big time in the desert where it was habitual for both sides.

On the issue of US SMGs the only one issued to the Brits in numbers was the Thompson which was not that popular for a number of reasons. How do US SMGs match up against the rest in terms of effective range, stopping power and general utility. For all it's faults the Sten was sorta handy. Of course the best SMG of WW2 was the Owen <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Interesting, so the rules against discarding weapons fairly well enforced in the US Army were not enforced in the commonwealth nations. It is interesting that it is not more widely published, and that their logistics systems were different. It would be interesting to hear from Dororsh or one of the people who actually do logistics if they can find more data on the commonwealth discarding of weapons.

Of course logically we can think up some reaons why this may be so (not based on information in print, but much of this subject is not). First, the commonwealth reliance on a bolt action rifle may have encouraged riflem carryers to toss aside their weapons. Their enemies afterall used the same 9x19mm round, so weapons from them would be usuable until they needed parts.

Second may be that the common wealth may have never developed the cult of the rifle. The cult of the rifle in the United States military saw the battle rifle as the ultimate weapon, and pressed home the care, cleaning, and support of the rifle as the number one job of an infantryman. discarding your rifle in some US circles would be akin to discarding your mother. Not hidebound rules but a cultural quirk which saw the rifle as a symbol of being a soldier. I may have been assuming that this cultural factor, highly developed in the US Army, was universal to western militaries, but that it seems is a mistake.

[Simon Fox]

Who said they threw them away?

That was your assumption not mine.

Best not to make giant leaps of extrapolation from one army to another, don't you think?

Note to self: Slappy needs to be beaten unmercifully over the head with a swag of smileys before he 'gets it'.