WI the AEF accepts the German protest against shotguns?

Shotguns in Europe at the time, at least to my understanding, were fowling pieces - usually single or double barrel break opens, used by "gentlemen".

Thanks, that was what I was trying to figure out.

Hadn't heard about the uproar that one Australian officer using his shotgun at Gallipoli, but that goes a ways towards explaining why none of the European powers used them as well.

So from this, and the other stuff that's been said in the thread, would it be fair to say that the European armies in WW1 never thought of using shotguns in the trenches for the following reasons:
  1. Any sort of shotgun would have been a special purpose weapon, only really useful for close-quarters fighting such as would occur when someone's storming a trench, and a rifle or MG would be more versatile and generally useful.
  2. The sort of high-capacity repeating shotguns such as the M1897 weren't all that common in Europe, with most being those break-action fowling pieces, which would have been less useful and such weapons would have been what European officers thought of when someone mentioned 'shotgun'
  3. It sounds like it wasn't just the Germans, but most of the armies in Europe who thought that shotguns, were at the very least playing dirty, if not highly suspect (or outright illegal) under their interpretations of the laws of war, regardless of whether buckshot would actually violate the relevant part of the Hague Conventions (or whether it would be any worse on that score than a lot of the other stuff in common use.)
Of course, the US, with the M1897 in its inventory, having experience of how useful they can be in close quarters from recent 'interventions', and being 'supposedly-uncivilized colonials who don't care about point 3 (in the eyes of some Europeans)', went for practicality. IIRC, the German protest included a declaration that they intended to start executing American soliders caught with shotguns as war criminals, to which Pershing responded by announcing that if the Germans did that, than the US would start shooting German POWs in reprisal, causing the Germans to back down.

If one's looking for a way to get the events of the OP to happen, perhaps you could have more British and French influence over the AEF, and the British and French high commands, seeing the shotguns and the US stance on them as likely to lead to a spiral of atrocities, somehow overruling Pershing on the issue and forcing the AEF to stop using shotguns in combat. Of course, with Pershing's insistence on a measure of independence for the AEF and hostility towards allowing foreign commanders to controlling US troops, one might need someone else in charge of the AEF to pull that off...
 
how about Funston?

Assuming his heart attack is somehow butterflied away and he ends up in command of the AEF? I don't know if he could/would have resisted British and French attempts to exert more influence over the AEF, but then again, from his conduct in the Phillipines and related political comments (particularly when he defended the Balangiga Massacre, and publically suggested that congressional critics of that war be lynched, among other snipes at Senators and Congressmen) he doesn't exactly strike me as a particularly diplomatic individual, nor one that concerned with the finer points of the laws of war.
 
Assuming his heart attack is somehow butterflied away and he ends up in command of the AEF? I don't know if he could/would have resisted British and French attempts to exert more influence over the AEF, but then again, from his conduct in the Phillipines and related political comments (particularly when he defended the Balangiga Massacre, and publically suggested that congressional critics of that war be lynched, among other snipes at Senators and Congressmen) he doesn't exactly strike me as a particularly diplomatic individual, nor one that concerned with the finer points of the laws of war.

hmm. Did Wilson have anyone else in mind if he couldn't get Pershing?
 

Markus

Banned
It actually depends on the round. As an example the (IIRC) early 5.56mm round from the M-16 tended to tumble, creating a really nasty wound channel, later versions corrected it (although when they changed the rifling and barrel length of the A2 version of the M-16 the problem cropped up again, but only in Arctic conditions).

The guys said the .303 that replaced the dum-dum did and was intended to tumble after hitting.
 
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The guys said the .303 that replaced the dum-dum did and was intended to tumble after hitting.

That's pretty much correct- one of the service loadings, the Mk. VII, introduced in 1910 and the standard rifle cartridge in both world wars, in addition to introducing a pointed tip, had the front third of the bullet itself inside the jacket made out of aluminum, cellouse, or compressed paper, so that it would yaw and tumble, creating a bigger, messier wound.

The original smokeless loadings of the .303, the Mk. I & II, introduced in the early 1890s were found to have inadequate stopping power in various tribal conflicts, particularlly when put up against dum-dum rounds (issued in limited quantities for a couple campaigns on the Northwest Frontier in 1897-98), and as a result in 1898-99, the British introduced 3 different kinds of partially jacketed soft or hollow-point rounds, the Mks. III-V, but these were soon withdrawn as they ran afoul of the Hague Conventions, and disposed of as surplus or in marksmanship training.

They were ultimately replaced with the Mk. VI, introduced in 1904 (I'm guessing that stocks of MK I & II were used where the Hague Conventions would have been a concern betweeb 1899 and 1904), which used the round-tipped bullet of the Mk. II with a hotter loading and the jacket over the tip thinned in the hopes of getting some yawing and deformation, but that didn't work as planned.

There was also a Mk. VIII loading introduced in 1938 which used a boat-tailed round and a more powerful charge in an effort to get more range from the round, but it was officially restricted to medium and heavy machine-guns, such as the Vickers, because the combination of the boat-tail and the effects of the hotter charge caused excessive bore erosion in rifles and light machine-guns.

The assorted Japanese 7.7mm rounds used a bullet similar to the Mk. VII.

However I haven't heard of any similar tendency to tumble from the 7.92x57 IS, military loadings of the .30-06, 7.62x54R or 7x57.
 
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