 History, datas and pictures of British, US and Russian infantry weapons of WW2.
All this infantry weapons are used in the computer wargame WW2 Total.
In any army the new soldier is
always trained in the use of one
basic form of service rifle, whatever
his eventual trade may be.
During WW2 this was as
true as it is now, but the rifle with
which the individual soldier
might be trained varied a great
deal. Depending on the particular
nation, the soldier might have
been issued with a venerable
antique while in others he might
have received a shiny new model
embodying all the latest technology,
for the rifles vised in WW2 varied greatly.
At one end of the scale there
were the old bolt-action rifles
that had been in use since long
before WW1; and at the
other were the new self-loading
or automatic rifles that eventually
led to the first of what are now
known as assault rifles. There
were none of the latter in service
when the war started in 1939,
but as the war progressed the
first operational models of such
weapons appeared in service.
These gave the infantryman a
greatly increased firepower
potential, but it was not until the
true assault rifles arrived
from about 1943 onwards that
the full quantum jump from the
slow and steady single shots of
the bolt-action rifle to the full
automatic fire of the assault rifle
was fully appreciated. The boltaction
rifles were usually sound
and reliable weapons, but they
lacked the shock effect of an
assault rifle fired in the fully
automatic mode.
Thus WW2 was a war
of transition for the basic infantryman.
When the war started, usually
all he had to hand was a boltaction
rifle of a well-tried but
frequently elderly pattern. By the
time the war was over every soldier
had at least a foretaste of
what the future had in store in
the form of the assault rifle. There
were some odd digressions along
the way, such as the underpowered
US Carbine M1 and the ingenious
but complex German FG
42. Some nations, such as Great Britain, did not make
the transition and relied upon the
Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles
throughout, but the move
towards the self-loading or assault
rifle was still there. |
