Army equipment that shouldn't have seen service
- Thread starter SealTheRealDeal
- Start date
The local Nation Guard unit actually had a bunch of these they stored at the local armory
Deleted member 1487
If you read the link even the ones delivered were worn out. They were used heavily before the Germans even got them and the Germans needed everything they had even in 2nd line duty late in the war, so if they worked they were still used. The Finns were way down the list of people getting top quality gear.
There's a cartoon from either the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes or Yank in which a Japanese officer/NCO/EM is offering to surrender on the condition they not be fed Spam
If we're being absurd Dick Smith's Nationalist Yeast Spreader. (yes, he and it are real: https://dicksmithfoods.com.au/products/ozemite/ )
M520 GOER. Along with the Gamma Goats, Artillery units were saddled with this monstrosity until they were replaced by the excellent Oshkosh HEMTT in the '80s. Luckily, by the time I entered service in 81, most of the GOERs were broken down beyond repair without replacement parts, so they no longer posed a danger to their crews. The few who could move out of the motorpool without being towed were restricted to very low speed on the highway (like 10 mph) when not transporting a full load. This is because their only suspension was via their huge beach ball tires, and they tended to develop an up and down sway that led to many drivers losing control and bouncing off of the road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M520_Goer
Demonstration of safe M520 GOER movement.
It is closely related and ammo interchangeable with the 75mm gun the US was mounting on tanks (and early half track tank destroyers). The key difference is the ammo. The US Army developed OK (if uninspired) AP shells for it, the French AT explosive shell captured by the Germans seams not a success. Had the Germans issued a better shell it could have rendered better service, but these guns were all very old and very tired by that point in any case.
Going to 3 round requires sacrificing the ability to go full auto, and worse the mechanism that actually counts how many rounds fire is delicate, made of several very tiny parts (easy to lose when cleaning) and it is an additional possible source of jams/malfunctions (it doesn’t always play nice if for some reason your 3 round burst is interrupted, such as running out of ammo mid burst). Burst fire is always a nice feature in theory, but mechanicals involved are almost never nice on any design (maybe someday a sufficiently reliable digital system with electrically primed ammo?). Teaching how to shoot a controlled burst is a better idea, but that is lots of time, work, and ammo.
I don’t know if the Army ever officially changed the reload drill, but alternatives are certainly known in both military and civilian circles for use of the non-dominant hand. The choice may be related to the SPORTS immediate action drill to clear a jam. The T in the drill is to Tap the forward assist (on the right side) while the other letters including both pulling and releasing the charging handle, my guess is that drill led to using the same hand for both tasks since it is a rapid and sequential drill (though many argue that the simpler “tap (magazine), rack (slide/charging handle), bang” drill is better because it works on nearly any military long arm or sidearm).
Milk, actually.
In the age before refrigeration Hershey developed the Hershey process (still a trade secret) for causing milk to sour in a controlled way in a safe way that was able to survive transport to the chocolate factory. Butyric acid occurs naturally in milk, and somehow the process liberates the butyric acid from whatever it normally binds with or such. Butyric acid is also a notable part of the taste of Parmesan cheese, or also rotten butter, or the odor. Other chocolate makers in the US started adding a bit of butyric acid to try to artificially match the flavor of Hershey, because Hershey had become “the” chocolate in America and it is what people thought high quality (mass market) chocolate should taste like.
Everyone used towed AT guns, and used them reasonably well. It was a universal and logical solution to the AT problem given the various tactical and technical information then available. We should note that non self propelled AT weapons actually remain the norm to the present day for essentially the same reasons as then, but technology offered the better solution of the ATGM type weapons to modern forces (and no, the bazookas and panzer-whatever’s and PIAT were really the RPG of the day, not the ATGM that the AT gun was the analogue of).
Towed AT guns used very low profile, concealment, cover, and ambush/surprise for survival. Retreat could, if well planned, be covered by supporting arms like artillery/mortars, but often the gun was a loss if its position was overrun, crew survival tended to be mixed, sometimes they could abandon the gun and retreat, other times they were killed by counter fire or overrun. You can dig in and hide a 57mm gun far easier than something like an M18 tank destroyer (2,500 produced). The 57mm (US production, 15,000+), however, was primarily an AT gun for issue at the level of infantry/cavalry maneuver regiments and battalions, manned by infantrymen or cavalrymen, to replace the 37mm (18,000+ produced), not generally issued to the Tank Destroyer branch. The great advantages of a cheap towed gun was the ability to give every formation of battalion size or larger some sort of AT gun, and that meant that wherever the enemy decided to attack it would definitely run into some of your AT guns rather than merely squishies with hand weapons.
The self propelled TD doctrine was entirely focused on being held in reserve (at Corps or higher HQ level) in the rear and then once the main line of advance had been identified (by it having broken through the front line of your defense, or at least your recon/scout/screen) then rushing those TDs at top speed to take up a blocking position along that main line of advance before it can break out into your rear. The experience of Torch showed that the self propelled TD would not arrive in time to properly dig in and prepare a defense/ambush, but that the easier to emplace towed AT guns (which were tied into a combined arms system that the TDs were not) had a better chance of actually getting in those crucial first surprise hits and surviving the fight.
The larger, heavier towed 3” AT gun given to the TD branch proved not to have the ease of maneuver or emplacement of its smaller towed cousins, it was too slow to use as a reactive unit, thus it needed to be deployed forward (this presented logistics problems, and more importantly pushed it into the front line with the maneuver forces, which dumped it into the combined arms fight that the TD branch wasn’t as well prepared to participate in, and worse people started trying to use the 3” AT as an assault gun or for offensive AT work, which it obviously sucked at).
The self propelled TD guns had the problems of not being part of combined arms formations, but being pulled into use as assault guns and tanks, which obviously the TD was built with the opposite design philosophy of an assault gun, and so sucked at that compared to a purpose built system.
The saving grace of the TD branch was that their guns, both towed and self propelled, had sights for indirect fire, and so eventually ended up serving as additional indirect fire artillery tied into either division or corps level artillery fire direction centers. As the war went on and more artillery was desired, the TD branch mostly became a field expedient addition to the artillery (and survived by being in the rear, mostly). Meanwhile the TD branch job and purpose was increasingly filled by actual tanks, though TDs being brought forward to play tank or to make a long range shot or confront heavy armor happened off and on to the end.
The towed AT gun wasn’t the problem, the Tank Destroyer doctrine and tactics and the making of the TD corps into a separate branch were the real problems. The 57mm and 75mm were entirely credible as battalion or regiment level AT weapons for the infantry (but issue both AP and HE shells!). The 3” towed AT gun could have formed an additional battalion as part of divisional artillery. The self propelled tank destroyers on tank chassis either should have been more tanks or should have simply been attached as a specialist AT unit to the existing tank units. Ideally no specialized tank destroyer would have been designed or built at all, and instead something like a 76mm upgunned Sherman arrived earlier and in quantity to supplement the 75mm armed tanks.
In my mind the 75mm on half track was the worst offender, it was the same gun being put on tanks, but on a less survivable and less maneuverable vehicle than the tank. Seriously, fighting tanks, on purpose, in a half track? Oh, and the half track had a limited traverse mounting, while the tanks have full traverse turrets, too. The only excuse for those existing (or the other direct fire half tracks) was a desperate need for mobile firepower at a stage in the war when American tank production was still gearing up.
This doesn’t solve the basic doctrinal problem, but if you can build a sufficiently cheap, very low profile self propelled system it might make sense, but I don’t think anyone ever demonstrated a successful design for such. I will grant if someone magically produced a self propelled gun with the profile of a towed gun and cost the same or less resources than the towed gun plus its prime mover it would turn into an appealing offer. More than likely it ends up diverting resources that could have gone to tanks or something else more useful, though, hence my skepticism.
The Scorpion was a very elaborate form of fratricide or suicide (but then again so is jumping out of perfectly good airplanes and it was intended to support the airborne). It looks great on paper but is a disaster in practice, there is a reason it was not long lived or widely issued. Vastly too much gun on far too little chassis. When firing the main weapon nearly qualifies the crew for flight pay something has gone wrong. Down-gun it to a 75mm or 57mm and it probably works for WW II. It certainly has a commendably low profile and reasonable level of simplicity.
Speed is not a form of useful protection, despite what proponents of both battlecruisers and fast tank destroyers believed (though, actually, the fast tank destroyer wasn’t actually supposed to engage on the move by US doctrine, ideally it was supposed to dig in and hide and ambush, but that almost never worked since the American and allied forces were generally the ones advancing, thankfully the turreted ones were taught offensive tactics as a back up).
The self propelled gun is a very big and very obvious target. It isn’t survivable used offensively in the open and it is only survivable defensively used as part of a sensible combined arms team integrated with infantry, artillery, etc.
Really the unarmored self propelled AT gun is a solution in search of a problem within this context.
What exactly is the problem it solves?
Being an AT gun that can keep up with the infantry?
If you are fully mechanizing all the support weapons of the infantry with matching road and cross country mobility it would be sensible to include the AT guns in that, but as long as your infantry is mostly fighting on foot with man portable or towed weapons the AT gun doesn’t seem to deserve special treatment. Now if you want to posit an early adoption of an APC based mechanized or armored infantry formation with an AT gun on a common chassis I could get behind that as quite sensible.
However, if you want to use the self propelled AT gun as a poor man’s assault gun or tank, you are better off putting the resources into either of those instead.
I have never worn that specific boot, but is there actually anything wrong with the boot itself or is the problem the “oh, we must polish it to a mirror finish” bs that cropped up with it?
Last edited:
They were notorious for crippling soldiers. If they were any good the British Army wouldn't have been issuing crippled soldiers chits that they were "excused boots".
marathag
Banned
High recoil is what you get when you put a powerful 75mm gun on a lightweight carriage. Muzzle brake only goes so far
Pak 38 that was of similar performance was 2350 pounds, the slightly heavier 75mm tube added around 300 pounds.
But I'm not seeing why the recoil would be more brutal, given the the ME of the 50mm Pak38 was 1.4M Joules, while the 97/38 was 1.3M Joules, on a heavier piece with a larger muzzle brake
Remember the goal was something that had a chance against a T-34, some the 37mm had little, either with Shot or with the HEAT Projector, if you want to talk about something with low MV, 110m/s, one fifth what the 97/38 had
anything of better performance was going to weigh much more than that 97/38 or Pak38, the Pak40 was 500 pounds more, the Soviet Field guns, 1000 pounds more.
for their Allies,well, the US would have L-L them, while the Nazis charged a pretty Pfennig.
marathag
Banned
US experience shows otherwise
During the Bulge, towed AT battalions had a 1:3 win loss ratio, unless the were integrated with an Infantry unit, where it improved to 1.3 to 1
win/loss
First Army has 26% losses among the towed AT units during the Bulge, vs 6-8% going across France
Of all 119 TD losses , 86 of them were towed guns.
In February 1945 AGF decided that all regimental 57mm gun companies would be replaced with Pershing platoon, as availiable.
interesting, IIRC Spam ended up becoming pretty popular in Japan.
So it works when properly integrated into a combined arms system? I mean, WWII was the combined arms war after all.
What military allows it's soldiers to field strip a weapon to the point where they are allowed to dismantle a trigger mechanism? Field stripping is the term to describe taking a weapon apart the least amount necessary to allow the soldier to clean it and to prevent it being fouled from firing - in the field. The M16 IIRC correctly that consists of removing the magazine, the bolt and that is it. You do not, indeed cannot remove the trigger mechanism without special tools which are not normally part of the weapon's CES (Complete Equipment Schedule) which every soldier issued with the weapon receives when he is issued it.
Last edited:
The British submarines modified with those blowpipe MANPADs on a telescoping mast were pretty cool even if BLowpipe was worthless.
I remember reading about a US soldier having a nervous breakdown when they realized they were going to have to eat the same K ration meal for the 14th day in a row.
marathag
Banned
British captured a bunch of L/24 K.Gr.rot.Pz , and played around to make a better round
than the US monoblock AP shot, with some lathe work on the driving bands so would work in the Us M2 75mm
Now that APCBC wasn't the best, the Germans did an improved design for AP, with a smaller bursting charge
No reason the German couldn't have made the Pz Gr. 39 with different driving bands for the 97/38.
marathag
Banned
But McNair didn't want the AT assets organic, but in separate units, and they suffered for it.
So you don't use a bullet tip to pop out the pins?
Bullets aren't part of the weapon's CES. Soldiers aren't taught to use bullets for other than shooting at objects/people.
Again, I ask, what military instructs it's soldiers to strip the trigger group when they are field stripping their rifle?