Importance of small arms

How important were small arms in WWII?

I ask this after glancing at yet another thread about swapping out everyone's rifles for something else. Speaking as a Brit who has never fired a gun before, I'm curious about why these are so popular. Most casualties in WWII were inflicted by artillery, and the decisive arms of manouvere were tanks and aircraft. When the infantry fought, their machine guns (as opposed to rifles, submachine guns and a smattering of assault rifles), from what I've read, did most of the damage anyway.

Obviously, small arms aren't insignificant. If the British Army decided to equip everyone with the Brown Bess to fight the Hun, it would have been a pretty poor decision. But, say, the difference between a Lee-Enfield or Sten Gun and an StG-44 or Gewehr... is it that significant in the grand scheme of things?
 
Small arms are tactical weapons, and good tactics without a winning strategy are just noise before defeat. Sure, the German system of machine-gun centered squads with their general-purpose machine guns was in several ways tactically superiour to their opponents - but it didin't change the outcome of the war.

Then again small arms production is strategically pivotally important. And in this regard the Axis powers were notoriously inefficient (Italy) in coordinating their production until it was too late to change the outcome. In comparison the Soviets and Western Allies were able to arm their soldiers with sturdy, reliable and mass-produced small arms like the PpsH-41 SMG and M1 Garant that were definitive improvements over the WW1 vintage Mausers and Arisakas their opponents operated.
 
How important were small arms in WWII?

They were critical, not just in WWII, but all eras of the firearm.


As things go, throughout WWII we can breakdown the infantry small arm into bolt action, semi-automatic and fully automatic sub-machineguns.

Before WWII armies could only really consider the bolt action rifle. For which the skill of the infantryman was to be quick to lay the gun on a target, bring the target into the cross-hairs and fire accurate shots at range.

For an infantry squad to be effective it needed either depth of fire, or sustained rifle fire in order that any enemy approaching would be kept under a fusillade of incoming rounds breaking up their attack and causing them to seek cover. Where upon hopefully the defending forces would be able to single them out at their leisure.

On the attack rifle squads would have to cover each other to move up the battlefield and if either part of the squad was to be broken up or caught from an aside then they would have to hope that their fellow soldiers could cover them to retreat to a more favourable position. This is in part what lead to trench warfare.

In both cases the fairly slow rate of reload, aim, fire meant that soldiers would have to move to position, then take up the firing stance. Them being highly vulnerable upon stumbling into an enemy position.


By WWII early sub-machineguns had been invented. The advantage of a small calibre machine-gun was that with multiple rounds that could be fired in quick succession, a defence works like a trench could be quickly 'swept' by a single man. Likewise the force multiplier that was the heavy machine-guns of the Great War was also present in the lighter man-portible weapons.

Here while accuracy was poor, the volume of fire that could be directed against an entrenched position could allow a smaller number of soldiers to suppress an enemy position, allowing more of the force to move up into close quarters.

Since the automatic and semi-automatic weapons could excel in both rate of fire, and close quarters where troops would stumble into one another meant that these weapons became very important in defining the battlefield since any rife squad on its own would be vulnerable against machine-gun wielding troops if they got in close enough to be able to 'sweep' defensive positions.



All this said, it was never quite a question of superior fire-power, since while infantry semi/automatic weapons excelled in close quarters combat, they were less well suited to fields, plains and desert, where the additional accuracy of the rifle, particularly when used defensively would outweigh the offensive power of a semi/automatic weapon.

Towards the end of the war, as combat entered urban and built up areas the automatic small arm hence became a better and better choice.

Still on its own, equipping entire forces with such a weapon was a bad idea, since if that force was to run into a well placed rifle force, it would be cut to pieces at range. What was needed was automatic weapons with the range and stopping power of a rifle.


Eventually this is what led to the development of assault rifles that could combine the best aspects of both weapon types. The rest we can say is history.
 

CalBear

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Depends on how many casualties you want to wind up with. While Artillery is the Grim Reaper of the battlefield to this day, it can neither take nor hold ground, you need the guys with the sleepy look on their face to achieve that. The right weapon makes a huge difference to those men.

The MG 42 probably, by itself, extended the war by a couple months. The losses it inflicted, and the changes in the way you had to advance to avoid "Hitler's zipper" had serious impacts on every offensive in Europe, both East and West. It was so well designed the that West German Army used a renamed version until the Wall Fell and most military formations use a weapon inspired by it to this day

The same can be said for the M-1 Garand, a weapon that made every rifleman close to a SAW gunner. The Japanese found out just how unhealthy it was to charge a line of troops with Garands across the Pacific, and the Heer discovered the same.

If you replace the MG 42 with, oh, Lewis guns, and the Garand with the Springfield, or the Lee Enfield with Sten Guns, it doesn't change the war's final result. It would have dramatic impact on exactly who came home, on all sides.
 
CalBear said:
If you replace the MG 42 with, oh, Lewis guns, and the Garand with the Springfield, or the Lee Enfield with Sten Guns, it doesn't change the war's final result. It would have dramatic impact on exactly who came home, on all sides.
+1.

To which I'd add, it changes how many get killed/not on a given side. Had the *MKb-42 been standard German issue in '39, Allied casualties in infantry v infantry operations would have been much heavier, & German lower. Stalingrad would have been bloodier for the Sovs. So would, frex, Berlin. In the end, tho...

Same is true of the U.S. being equipped with M2 carbines from the start, or the Brits with Stens.

You change how the war is fought slightly, but the overall outcome depends on much more.
 
Love the thought

Though I have to agree with everyone else...the possiblity of small arms determining the course of a modern war (or the outcome) is almost impossible if not followed by a competent strategic vision and position...I am intriqued by the thought. I have a couple ideas on the small arms and tactical level. One is an alternate Omaha Beach.
Greg
 
It feeds back into Morale.

Telling the troops that they carry the best weapon that the Country can provide, and then finding out that that Team Red has better gear, that isn't good.

Esp. if Team Blue has stuff that just doesn't work reliably, like in jamming, or ineffective, like the Bazookas failing against T-34s in 1950, or M1 Carbines against Chinese 'Volunteers' despite on paper saying that shouldn't have happened.

So you get stories of Marines using captured PPsh SMGs in place of the Carbines.

So now the What If territory.
WI Marines had something like a proper SMG or Assault gun?

WI US Army had the 3.5" 'Super Bazooka' after August 1944, and something even better postwar?

Or conversely,
WI the Heer never got the MG-42, as Werner Gruner never got his prototype working well, so had to go with Rheinmetall's design for a slightly updated MG-34. So Fewer MGs made, lower RoF. No 'Hitler's Buzzsaw' in the TL

So yeah, these posts have merit.
 
Lying about the best

Yup. In both WW2 and Korea the GI had that experience. I have always wondered the effect of 2 BAR's per squad and 6 M1919's in the weapons platoon with a truly smokeless/flashless powder. The lack of automatic fire and smokeless powder made the US infantry (and I was one in the 80's and 90's) much more timid and dependant upon artillery.
Greg
 
Armies demands do not drive weapon design. Designers develop new weapon ideas and armies buy them. Clever armies realise they have to change their tactics to make best use of changing designs. So small arms can become force multipliers when intelligently used.

The Danes found that the advantage the Prussians had with breechloaders was to be able to fire and reload lying down. In the 2nd American Civil War the republican army found that muskets were superior in battle to rifles as they had bayonets and rapid reloading. Once the industrial revolution allowed cheap mass rifling and scientifically designed expanding bullets then rifles became the weapon of choice. SMGs were invented before tactics to use them The Germans finally caught on in 1918 that they were a short range rapid fire rifle not a cut down MMG. I liaised for the British army with the Budeswehr briefly in the 70/80s and the Germans used horrendous amounts of ammunition in their MMGs with long sweeping fire and were always ammunition limited while the British used short aimed bursts and seemed to always have some ammunition in hand. Not that one was better than the other. Just different ( and history with the British treating the GPMG as a belt fed Bren and the Germans using the MG3 as an MG42 in Russia against massed infantry.)

However, unless there is a huge disparity between the small arms of the opposing forces ('we have the Gatling gun and they have not') the importance of small arms lies in their intelligent tactical use and in their impact upon the morale of the soldiers. US troops armed with 1917 bolt action rifles in WW2 would probably have not been much worse off. The British troops were very happy with their bolt action rifles; but if the US troops felt the M1 Garand was a better weapon and they were getting the old stuff instead it would have hurt their morale and performance in seeing themselves as second class armed.

To closely address the question though; the importance of small arms is that you have to occupy ground to win and for that you have always needed a peasant with a pointy stick actually standing there. Small arms are the modern pointy stick and you want your pointy stick to be longer and sharper than their pointy stick. No small arms no victory. Artillery etc. can destroy and deny ground but they cannot occupy ground. In Vietnam the US forces could destroy but not occupy ground permanently except in particular localities. The Viet Cong could not destroy as much but they could occupy much more ground. In Korea the US could both destroy more than the North Koreans and followed it up by occupying the ground. Of course the circumstances differed but small arms allowed the differing victories in both cases.
 
I'm not an expert, but I think it was Col. Jeff Cooper, great proponent of the Browning/Colt 1911 in .45ACP and the Modern Technique of fighting with a pistol who said (paraphrasing) that good hand held weapons don't win many wars, but bad ones get a lot of men killed. Bad weapons have another effect: witness the Japanese who fielded such terrible pistols that the soldier often used a sword that he knew would work. A competent sidearm using a serious cartridge would have served him better.
 
As long as you've advanced past muzzleloading muskets, no, it is not.

While I generally agree with the theme that it's nice to have the better weapon and the Gewehr 98, Lee-Enfield and M1 Garand were all vaguely similar with differences in doctrine and training having much more effect. However I would argue there is a significant difference between those weapons and modern assault rifles. Which really are battle changingly more efficient.
 
While I generally agree with the theme that it's nice to have the better weapon and the Gewehr 98, Lee-Enfield and M1 Garand were all vaguely similar with differences in doctrine and training having much more effect. However I would argue there is a significant difference between those weapons and modern assault rifles. Which really are battle changingly more efficient.
Efficiency depends upon the context. hence the Tailiban engaging assault rifle troops with Lee Enfields at 600 metres+. How will your assault rifle meet this threat?

Equally how would SMG armed troops meet assault rifle fire from 300+ metres?

In, shall we say less overt circumstances, how will you fire a concealed weapon through a door into an insurgent road block if you have an assault rifle not a pistol.

It is horses for courses. No one weapon nor weapon type is 'the best'. that is why a professional army is an all arms team to have the alternatives to be employed as circumstances occur.

In an extreme case, I would prefer a heavily charged musket to stop an elephant at close range above any assault rifle.

However, I would advocate an assault rifle for an untrained insurgent or basic conscript army as it can do most things but an SMG or full sized rifle can be better sometimes if the users know how to use them properly.
 
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