Infantry rifles and weapons of WW2
British, US and Russian

History, datas and pictures of British, US and Russian infantry weapons of WW2.
Most of this infantry weapons are used or will be used with 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.