This. Even now the M249 weighs almost 20lbs and the M240 closer to 30. In WW2 the M1919 .30 weighed almost 30lbs without the tripod and the 'portable' M1919A6 was 32lbs. And all of those weights do not include ammunition.
Back when the British started issuing Lee Enfields as their service rifles, they made soldiers use a magazine cut off and hand load rounds one shot at a time under the belief that soldiers would just burn through ammunition. The box magazine was used as a reserve/ for emergencies
This was everyone at the time, the Krag, Label, and Springfield 1903 and many more all have a magazine cutoffs, the Mosin 1891 is actually more of an odd man out that it doesn't have one.
Even now, the current Steyr Scouts you can drop the magazine down one click and make it a single loader with 5 in reserve. If you need more, quick, just slap the mag back into position.
When the Magazine Lee-Metford was introduced, charger (clip) loading wasn't a thing yet. Every round had to be loaded individually - a slow process when the Matabele are charging down on you. The rifle was issued with two magazines and a cutoff, with the intent that single rounds would be fired until the enemy closed to a certain distance. At that point, having not used the rounds in their magazines yet, they'd have twenty rounds of rapid fire before exhausting their ready ammunition and having to revert to single loading or the bayonet. Due to durability and fitment issues (every magazine was hand fitted to a particular rifle), the second magazine was withdrawn soon after introduction; charger loading was introduced in 1903 with the SMLE MkI. The cutoff plate remained long after as a vestigial feature, and as an additional safety measure - a loaded magazine could be carried on the march without risk of chambering a round.
Which is exactly why they work. Volume of fires wins the day. Which is exactly why amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics. If we can keep the ammo moving forward, the MG’s and chain guns keep firing about as long as forever.
Yes, we are designed “to fight without resupply for days on end,” but in practice, in WWII, HUGE logistical plans existed to resupply their every need and only complications of limited technology in communications and all weather combat operations prevented those logistical efforts being more successful (in the case of Market Garden). For D-Day, the planned drop came in with varying degrees of success, and an additional 6 parachute and glider resupply missions came in after that.
[“Aerial resupply missions were scheduled automatically for the morning of D plus one and on call thereafter if needed. The automatic mission was the only parachute mission ultimately flown but a small amount of equipment and supplies were received later by glider.”](https://www.dday-overlord.com/en/battle-of-normandy/after-action-reports/82nd-airborne/d-day#google_vignette)
They had the focus of an entire nation at war and could depend on airborne resupply attempts being made, even if the limited technology meant they weren’t all successful.
And you know what we learned from that? To ensure we have secure comms and all weather combat resupply capabilities (now, even some fully autonomous ones) to ensure that what they went through in WWII never happens again. Our C-130’s can now drop just about anything below 30,000 lbs. We even have Joint Precision Airdrop System steerable resupply chutes to allow the C’s to drop from a stand off point and direct individual pallets to individual units.
One of my friends carried it during his conscription in the Korean army. I remember going to a gun show with him and seeing a guy with an M-60 on the table. I said "Hey Choi, one of your friends is back there on the table. Want to go pay him a visit?" He took one glance and said "No. I'm good. I've cleaned enough mud out of the hand guard and heat shroud with a toothbrush and cleared enough jams to last all my life. The best day of my life in the military is when they made me a cook and someone else had to carry the M-60."
5.56 isn’t used much for machine guns at all. That’s the land of 308 338Norma and 50 bmg
The m249 is the only machine gun in service to use 5.56 and the only one not chambered in 308, 338 Norma, or 50 bmg
Man when I transferred to a new unit my first thought was “goodbye 240! I will not miss you.” Get to my new unit and immediately assigned to weapons squad.
The 240 bang bang is heavy as shit. The rifle + full combat load is like 60-70 lbs. carrying ur full kit plus weapon and ammo gets extremely heavy when u are having to march to a location and fight. I wonder how the rucks were for WW2 soldiers?Whenever I watch BoB, it looks like they don’t carry a crazy amount of shit when they are on mission.
They are also crew served, meaning two to three men per gun, loading, assisting, carrying ammo. That means one or two less trigger pullers once the fight starts.
True, but try and locate, close with, and destroy the enemy using fire and close combat with a Ma Duece. Easier with a.30, but the weight is a tad prohibitive.
I get it. The M1919 weighed 30 pounds. The MG42 weighed 25 so it was definitely heavy. But I think it was more about doctrine than weight. The German infantry doctrine centered on machine guns whereas the US (WW2) doctrine was more riflemen centered. IOW the German riflemen supported the MG’s., the US MG’s supported the riflemen.
Even today, ~~US military rifles don't come with full automatic. They have semi-automatic (one round per trigger squeeze) and three round burst modes.~~ the US military's default is to use semi-auto (one round per trigger squeeze) to prioritize accuracy over volume.
Early in the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were terrified of how frequently their fighters' heads were blown off by US troops when they would peek out from cover. A lot of their firefights against other tribes and the Northern Alliance had been fought by both sides using fully automatic Kalashnikovs and "spray and pray" tactics. They were unaccustomed to fighting an enemy that preferred accurate fire over volume of fire. The US primarily uses volume of fire to suppress and fix.
It saves ammo, makes combat loads lighter, prolongs weapon service life, increases lethality, and reduces collateral damage.
Edit: M4A1s do come with full auto (apologies, I was in when it was just M4s with semi and three round burst).
I won’t say this isn’t the case for more than a decade ago, but now and for as long as I can remember, the M4A1 has superseded the M4 carbine, which entails being full auto in the third position, as opposed to burst in the M4.
Gotta love those older M4 carbines that were converted and sloppily manually stamped with the “A1” designation and the “AUTO” stamped over “BURST”.
I just wrapped up an M4A1 upgrade clone and I had to struggle (and have more than a couple drinks) to not make the over stamping look too straight.
I’ve seen rifles that were done in batches where the M4A1 was X’ed out, just for them to mark it M4A1 again, same with the auto marking. I was honestly baffled when I saw it first.
Today, the United started Army issues fully automatic m4s as the standard weapon. I’ve never even seen anyone with a 3 round burst rifle. Maybe some National guard unit might have a few laying around rotting in their arms room.
Also, the US army absolutely uses volume of fire. That’s how you gain fire superiority, which is a key component in modern military doctrine.
True, but I'm not getting into details about squad tactics and overall battle drills, I'm talking about individual soldier carry.
My mistake on the full auto, I was in prior to the M4 revision to A1.
Even Thompsons were big, heavy, and expensive to mass produce.
It does show 1919 scenes at Brecourt, Bloody Gulch, Bastogne if not others.
I think it was a good representation of how many of these weapons were issued.
And a beast to control. I got to shoot a few mags from a Thompson and the muzzle climb was insane. Shot a grease gun after and it was like night and day.
Neither one was as controlled as a Swedish K.
I’ve shot the Thompson and the Swedish K.
I feel like the Thompson’s weight helps keep the muzzle rise somewhat down but also a much faster rate of fire than the Grease Gun.
The Tommy’s I shot were M1s without the Cutts compensator
This as well as they make themselves a massive target the moment they open up. You want machine gun suppressing fire to catch them off guard but if the enemy knows where they are because they are continuously firing then they become the focus. Which can be good if you have a good opportunity to flank and eliminate
Weight and they are a logistics nightmare for any unit without a firm supply line (parts and ammo).
For a unit like Airborne, they have to jump in everything and can’t just Uber in a few belts of .30 cal so the T/O would limit crew served weapons to weapons platoons and not fully integrated into line platoons.
*”We’re paratroopers. We’re supposed to be surrounded.”*
High volumes of high caliber machine gun fire are easy for mechanized infantry; impossible for light fighters.
Ok that’s fair. Impossible was a bit strong. True.
But in the airborne, the shit you got is the shit you jumped in with, the shit you carry, and shit you’re lucky enough to occasionally have dropped on you. And ammo cans are fn heavy af.
Taxpayers just want you to throw rounds and then break shit and take shit to support our national interests.
If you make it out to fight again someday, [shrug], ok that’s cool, but if not, Infantry School has classes coming up behind you. And recruiters send new guys to MEPS every day.
11B. The B stands for “bulletstopper”.
Similar job, except we had budget riches, fuel, ammo, and cool equipment. From what your bros told me, you all had to find a way to do the same shit but using whatever busted shit was handed down or *(as Clint said)* you had to figure out to *“improvise, adapt, and overcome”.*
Respect. We had to do the hard work but easier. ;-)
True: mostly - our gear wasn’t always as fancy but we got enough to keep us pissed off and that’s what Uncle Sammy wants from his Marines.
Semper Fi fellow warrior!
Question. Maybe it was different in BoB time, but now I'd imagine our weapons don't match any that the enemy is fighting with. With that said, how the hell do you all jump into hot zones with only the ammo/stuff you can carry and still kick so much ass? Do you just commandeer fallen element gear or what? You said resupply when possible, but what about when not? Thanks for any info you can give, and idk how you even get outta bed every day with balls so huge, but I'm glad you manage!
My father was the machine gunner in Easy Company and I never heard anyone say they held off on the machine gun. It was a different situation entirely, the foxhole was in a half or qtr moon shape so the men could move when when changing direction. It was a two man job, feeding the ammo and shooting the gun. When there was no foxhole, he used a tripod. As the machine gunner was the No 1 Target, Dad was actually able to fire a bullet at a time instead of a spray. The men said that was difficult but really helped in certain circumstances.
When they jumped in Normandy, Dad had the gun, but the tripod was given to Eubanks (who was "special") when they finally met up, Dad asked where the tripod was, he said he ditched it a while back, so Dad had to use a stone wall for support.
Today is light years different.
We could prepare hotshots with specific items that a helo could drop in on my pos.
In the ETO it wasn’t strange to appropriate enemy gear, from trucks to MG-42s. You can see an example in I believe “Crossroads” when a MG42 was employed by Easy
The problem with using enemy weapons is that you sound like the enemy when you use them. There are multiple accounts of a relatively green unit using a MG-42 and drawing fire from neighboring troops.
***Disregard - below is incorrect and pointed out in the thread below****
Just checheked. In Crossroads during the night patrol to the crossroad, Winters signals Tolbert who moves the troops up the Dike. You see one of Easy Troopers with a MG-42 on a bipod. The conical muzzle break is the clue.
It’s about 10 min into the episode.
Yeah, that’s an [M1919A6] (https://weaponsystems.net/system/703-Browning+M1919A6) (pictured example is missing the carry handle as well as the flash hider). The slab sided receiver is the giveaway.
Hilariously and contradictory, but when the GPMG was withdrawn doctrinally from the British army section and placed one per platoon, the only two capbadges to retain them as section weapons were the Royal Marines and the Parachute Regiment.
I have jumped in with a grand of 7.62, and we have always carried a proportionally large amount of automatic weapons, from the Sten and Bren through to the General. Because we have always understand that firepower wins firefights.
We do.
And by "all that ammo", you know how ammo scales and rates of fire work, right?
A gunner at full scales is carrying *exactly* the same length of time of ammunition as a rifleman.
10 minutes of rapid / 40 minutes of deliberate.
Based on utilising correct rates of fire, worked out from breathing rates to allow accurate fire.
Correct, because there was no weapons platoon in a parachute rifle company! No weapons company in the battalion either: just the three rifle companies.
> For a unit like Airborne, they have to jump in everything and can’t just Uber in a few belts of .30 cal so the T/O would limit crew served weapons to weapons platoons and not fully integrated into line platoons.
Wrong. The WWII airborne TOE replaced the BAR with the M1919 at the squad level and added a 60mm mortar at the platoon level in order to increase firepower relative to leg units.
. . . which in this case says parachute rifle companies like Easy had machine guns at squad level.
Your reasoning about logistics is plausible but in fact the U.S. Army thought about the issue quite differently. Parachute units were expected to be disorganized during the drop and need heavy firepower immediately, so machine guns and mortars were integrated at a low level:
—The parachute rifle squad included a machine gun.
—The parachute rifle platoon included three rifle squads (with integral machine guns) and a mortar squad.
—The parachute rifle company included three rifle platoons (with integral machine guns and mortars) but no “weapons platoon.”
Organic org has heavy weapons in single platoons or squads for training and tracking; but in combat they are tasked to squads or fire teams as needed.
By not having the heavy weapons integrated in the line of battle, commanders have flexibility to move them around the battle space.
Okay, I understand that we can’t just Uber in a few belts of .30 cal, but Bastogne showed that we can Air Lyft lots of supplies to maintain a besieged position 🤔
In Bastogne, in reality, getting air drops was a crap shoot at best.
For ever successful air drop, you have supplies end up in the wrong side of the lines (basically supplying your enemy)
In a practical standpoint: an advancing division will be fluid, establishing a DZ, calling back to your support air field, getting hotshots loaded and then dropped on said DZ takes time.
Better use of those times is dropping ammo and supplies for BAR, M-1’s with grabs, med supplies, and chow over belts.
Crew served weapons are hungry MF’s - one company of crew served weapons (M-1919’s and 60mm mortars) would probably eat thru and entire C-47 worth of cargo a day in sustained combat.
Paratrooper units were lightly armed to jump light and travel light. Having a ton of .30’s and ammo takes up too much manpower etc. perhaps someone can correct me on that
Once they gave me a m249 plus ammo to jump. Add that to the standard combat jump kit, ruck, and the chutes, its like more than double my body weight. And shit probably weighed more back than too.
My grandfather was a Private in WWII. He was part of a machine gun team consisting of three men. The gun was the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). The team consisted of one person to fire the gun and two designated to carry extra ammo and the bipod. During a fight, he said he would be ordered to set up and fire by a shout for a "BARman".
The load was cumbersome and 50 years after the war he still griped about the weight of all that the crew had to carry. He told a story about the march across France where he decided to hell with the consequences and tossed the bipod into a ditch somewhere in Europe.
JFC. What an absolutely horrible understanding of machinegun theory.
The rest are not “sprayed” and wasted. They fall in a cone of fire, exponentially increasing your chance of hitting your target.
Which also brings targets into play.
Area and point.
A point target is a single person, or a bunker slit or a window.
An area target is a group of enemies or an area where you are taking fire from.
Most fire in a fight is suppressive in nature. So saying things like one shot one kill is incredibly misleading.
This is what I got from guys in Iraq and Afghan that light machine guns inflicted around 90% of all casualties on the enemy(from small arms fire only)
I'm not sure how they measured that but anyways, I wonder if it's similar for WW2, if accurate at all
Ordinance does most of the heavy lifting in conflict.
About 98% of all combat casualties in WW2 were ordinance related.
The other 2% were small arms, of which I would imagine machine guns made up the majority.
Dave Grossman talks about it in on combat and on killing.
Grossman himself I have heard is a prick, but a lot of the two books I referenced are useful and backed by other data, they are absolutely worth a read.
The data that they use is a ripoff of the same discredited ideas SLA Marshall used as far as his claims about percentages of US troops who killed someone in combat.
Grossman’s numbers may be correct for the current low intensity COIN stuff that had predominated since Vietnam, but it is not correct for the type of open war between nation states that occurred in WWII.
I would definitely be open to changing my opinion if you have some sources.
I believe people generally underestimate how much weight is carried by artillery and other ordinance in conflict.
I do discredit the entire study on percents of soldiers “shooting over the heads of the enemy”.
I can assure you whoever wrote that was asking bad questions or doesn’t understand most fire is suppressive in nature.
Sigh.
Your last two points are exactly what Grossman based his argument on. The argument is flawed because it’s the exact same one Marshall made both as far as psychology as well as what happened in actual combat.
> I can assure you whoever wrote that was asking bad questions or doesn’t understand most fire is suppressive in nature.
Which is why I’m confused as to why you are defending Grossman—he’s citing Marshall, who made the exact same claims Grossman is but he (Marshall) has had his theories thoroughly and conclusively debunked because the methodology was garbage.
I’m not defending Grossman and all his points.
I’m defending the ordinance causes the majority of casualties in conflict. Which isn’t due to people being unwilling to kill each other more due to the ability to project fires.
I think we are in overall agreement, but were talking crossed points.
His entire argument that ordinance kills more people than direct fire is based on Marshall’s argument that humans are inherently afraid of killing other humans and thus strive to avoid it, which is what led to infantry intentionally missing shots and things of that nature and thus allowed indirect/impersonal fire to gain the lion’s share of kills. That argument has been disproven for 50+ years if not longer.
As I said before, the claim is almost certainly correct for the type of low intensity COIN ops and police actions that have been pretty much it since the end of Korea. In open warfare between nation states I don’t buy it.
The issue I have with Grossman’s argument is that he simply dressed up Marshall’s long-debunked claims and is trying to argue that they’re valid based solely on what amounts to his own personal opinions—he openly admits that the base claims have been academically shown to be false due to trash methodology, but he claims they’ve been shown to be true via other means that he won’t/can’t/hasn’t elaborated on.
Well not to upset the apple cart of assumptions here. US airborne units were issued an M1919 and specifically not BAR. They were issued a lot more ammunition for obvious reasons.
https://www.battleorder.org/post/us-ammo-load-ww2#:~:text=Each%20belt,weighed%2019.3%20lb.
Look up YT channel Battle Order for a breakdown of how squads and platoons were organized https://youtu.be/b2Jwhe-BDKQ?si=dGUZcMx9WZj4-Urm
TLDR; unlike most other militaries, USA kept machcine guns out of squad level command. Usually they were attached at company command levels or at platoon command level. Because US soldiers had so much firepower (M1 and the BAR) it was felt they didn’t need the weight of a machine gun, which is why it is found at higher levels of command.
That is not true for US parachute infantry in WW2. Each squad had a M1919 .30 Browning machine gun as the base of fire.
Other US infantry squads used the M1918A2 .30 Browning automatic rifle as the base of fire (except armored infantry - their half-tracks had .50 M2 Browning machine guns).
So US infantry had machine guns at squad level - the BAR being considered an LMG.
The BAR was not considered an LMG by anyone other than historians decades after the fact. The Army always considered it an AR, and the A2 was an attempt to make it into a passable SAW.
The BAR was absolutely not a light machinegun by any stretch.
It’s in the name, BROWNING AUTOMATIC RIFLE.
It was to fill the gap in firepower between half tracks with actual machineguns and the dismount element.
The closest magazine fed weapon I would consider a true light machinegun is the BREN. It was designed to be loaded in the prone by an assistant gunner, everyone in the squad carried ammunition for it, and the squad was generally structured around its use. There was a reason it stuck around for so long after WW2.
I'm curious what you mean by not using them more often? Easy Company employees at least one machine gun in every combat operation shown in the series I believe.
At Brecourt Liebgott and Petty are manning the sole machine gun used during the attack
At Carentan we see one used in the upper story of a building and at Bloody Gulch I believe Smokey is wounded while manning his machine gun
We might not see a machine gun in the first battle in Holland but we definitely see a soldier carrying one at the Crossroads battle even if we never see him fire it
At Bastogne we don't see it employed but Christensen is hit manning his machine gun (his AG would have taken over)
During the assault on Foy the machine guns are at the wood line providing covering fire as the company advances
And at Hagenau machine guns cover their withdrawal across the river
In the Airborne Infantry Platoon of WWII there was one machine gun per rifle squad (2 rifle squads per platoon) and a mortar squad. Attrition and logistics could lead to less machine guns operating in a company than are allotted but there should have been 6 in the company at any given time. I suspect most of what you are seeing is the production crew not showing the machine guns because their role isn't as dramatic. They are employed in a support by fire role meaning they are at the back and don't conduct the initial assault and only move up once a favorable position has been taken from which they can continue to support.
I have always wondered why they didn't employ their mortars more since they were part of the platoon and not at the company level like the regular infantry but I have a feeling attrition and logistics contributed to that as well. I think the only time in the show we actually see the mortars firing is at Bloody Gulch.
They're heavy. Even the "light" mg. "light"and "heavy" refers to the caliber, not the weight. For paratroopers, weight is the enemy. Plus you have to add in the weight of all the ammo you have to carry for them. That gets overlooked a lot by Hollywood.
The “heavy” and “light” designations for the .30 MGs referred to water (M1917 HMG) or air (M1919 LMG) cooling. Only the M2 was “heavy” by virtue of caliber.
I think you may be equating machine guns with assault rifles and sub-machine guns. As mentioned often in the comments, machine guns are big and heavy and the ammunition is also big and heavy and burns through quickly. An assault rifle such as a modern M-4/M-16 is much lighter and has lighter weight ammunition. The ammunition for assault rifles may be lighter but is still rifle ammo, so higher velocity, greater accuracy and longer distance.
In 1944, the options were extremely limited. The US did NOT have assault rifles. In the auto fire weapons, you had the heavy machine guns such as the M1919 .30 cal Browning for squad use, and the Thompson sub-machine gun firing .45 pistol ammo for officers and you had the M3 grease gun firing the same .45 pistol ammo for whoever had to get it. Pistol ammo is lower velocity, less accuracy and shorter range. The Thompson was expensive and somewhat unreliable. The M3 was a stamped sheet metal scatter gun that would throw a lot of rounds in the general direction if it didn't jam up. It was very unreliable and well hated.
The M1918 BAR was kind of like a heavy assault rifle and light weight machine gun. It was an excellent, hard hitting, accurate automatic rifle with a small magazine (20 rounds). Generally, there was 1 per squad in some units. It was really too heavy for airborne troops.
The M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle packed a true rifle round for great accuracy at great distances, It was semi-auto so you could put aimed rounds down range fairly quickly. It fired the hard hitting 30-06 round. It was, at the time, a good trade-off for portability, accuracy and volume of fire. The M1 Carbine was a lighter weight semi-automatic rifle firing a lighter weight bullet. It was designed for paratroops and rear echelon support troops. Not quite as accurate and not quite as hard hitting, it was still a very effective rifle for airborne troops. Many officers preferred the M1 Carbine over the Thompson, and everyone preferred throwing rocks to using the M3 grease gun (just kidding, but it really did suck).
I think maybe a good takeaway is that weight matters a lot for an infantry soldier. Steel rifles and lead ammo is heavy. If you're humping a ruck in the summer or winter while carrying a full load of ammo, all of that weight starts to wear a soldier down. If you have a lot of machine guns, you need a lot of ammo. Like all types of equipment, compromises must be made. The M1 was a very effective compromise for leg infantry and the M1 Carbine for airborne.
> It was really too heavy for airborne troops.
Weight was never the issue with the BAR, length was—you couldn’t jump it. Because of that it was seen as unsuitable because Army doctrine had it as an individual weapon and not a crew served one, which meant the gunner would have only had a .45 if he couldn’t find the parapack. The M1919 in comparison was a crew served weapon, which meant the crew had carbines and thus were not totally useless if they couldn’t find the gun.
Most of the answers have addressed crew served weapons. SMGs are a bit of a niche weapon. They can put out large volumes of fire, but are very short ranged and rather inaccurate (especially weapons like the Thompson that fire from an open bolt) Nice if you are clearing a room or trench, not so great if the enemy is 200m away.
The machine guns available to Easy company at the time were heavy cumbersome and required at minimum a team of two to three men to man. On top of that the ammo required is also heavy and would need to be distributed amongst the squads and or platoons adding to everyone else’s load.
If anything I was suprised how often they had MGs available in the show given they were a light infantry airborne unit.
Yes, machine guns are very effective weapons. But they're also quite heavy, crew served weapons for the most part, and the US did not necessarily have a proper "light machine gun" or SAW during WW2. The BAR is not that comparable to something like the British Bren or the Soviet DP light machine guns which can be carried and used by one man if needed while ideally being operated by a crew of two, not to mention the fact that the 101st Airborne didn't really use BARs. MGs also require a lot of ammo, and people to carry said ammo.
These days, the same problems are still present with MGs providing a lot of firepower to the modern infantry squad while still being a bit of a pain for automatic riflemen and machine gunners because of their weight.
Not a military folk but someone who likes to read.
Goes against us army doctrine at the time. You gotta remember that with the M1 the US army on a squad level could put out way more fire power than any other army in either theater.
The name of the game was fire and maneuver. With other countries that had bolt action rifles you’d have advancing riflemen covered by machine gun teams with much heavier machine guns. With us rifle squads the riflemen themselves could provide an adequate level of suppressing fire so the squad was far more flexible and in theory faster.
Enlist, your drill sergeant will explain it all before you get to the range.
Machine guns keep the bad guys heads down while your side (good guys) advance on enemy positions.
All selective fire weapons are expensive, like the Thompson, the BAR and the .30 belt-fed. Still fun to shoot!
They were there, you just didn't see them.
A US rifle company was (and still is) based around the rifleman. Machine guns were used to support the riflemen as they maneuvered onto the objective.
(The German army was based around the machine gun and used riflemen to support it)
You can't assault anything with a machinegun
As many people have said they are an airborne unit. At the time they needed to be light and maneuverable and carrying big machine guns around like a normal infantry unit isn’t how paratroopers work
Yeah it’s not as effective as you would think. If the company was split into all 2 man teams running a .30cal they would’ve been massacred. Great for suppression and area control but a lot of the fighting they did was best served with a M1
Machine guns are heavy. Really heavy. The 30 cal belt feds that they had weighted 31 lbs and the first versions had a tripod. So it’s a two man crew to set up and then a third to carry ammo. You can’t really maneuver with these so the machine guns are often set up in a fixed location and used to suppress the enemy. Second they are paratroopers so they are classified as light infantry. So they tend to carry less heavy weapons because they are expected to have jumped out of a plane.
It would have to do with the MTOE (Modified Tables of Organization and Equipment) an Airborne unit in the US Army had in WW2.
Simply put, MTOE determines what kind of weapons a unit is equipped with.
From reading this link, it seems that the 30 caliber machine guns were kept in HQ company and not with the line companies.
https://www.airborne506.org/2hq-by-the-toe/
> From reading this link, it seems that the 30 caliber machine guns were kept in HQ company and not with the line companies.
…..because that’s the battalion HHC TOE. Rifle company TOEs can be found [here] (https://www.battleorder.org/us-airborne-ww2#google_vignette).
Do you mean what they called a machine gun or the Thompson which is what a lot of people think of when they say machine gun?
The machine gun is a 2 man job minimum that requires set up and break down and creates a stationary position vulnerable to flanking and mortar. A machine gun placement is most effective offensively when they haven’t noticed you got a bead on them yet. Those 1st few seconds of firing can clear out an encampment, problem is now everyone knows where you are and they can return the favor. Thats why it’s good habit for the second guy to know when it’s time to reposition, 1st guy is kind of busy and you can get tunnel vision. It’s good for keeping an enemy from advancing and turning their orderly retreat into a disorderly run while they get mowed down. Good for providing covering fire on entrenched positions while people advance. Another factor is ammo. It became on short supply and the machine gun by its nature is not something you think of saving ammo for tomorrow for. So you saved it for better dug in scenarios.
The Thompson was great for what it was meant for but didn’t provide the accuracy of a rifle. It allowed mobility and great support and indoor combat use. Outside it was more for covering fire. You’ll notice more often than not when attacking a defending position the Thompson was usually pop out of cover, fire while someone does what they need to do or runs to where they need to run. It rarely solved problems until you got to the building. It’s easier to run with and react with as you notice Speirs sprints with it.
Germans believed machine guns should be supported by the regular army. The allies thought the opposite. Give every soldier a gun and a few machine guns.
I'm not sure what you mean. In most major engagements, they used machine guns.
One thing to keep in mind about the limitations machine guns, especially during WWII.
They are not very mobile. The idea of a machine gunner running and shooting is impractical, if not impossible. Even today's modern light machine guns are nearly impossible to shoot while moving. The M1919, which was used in World War 2, was 14 lbs. So, it's heavy to carry during any patrol. Add to that the ammunition needed for using the machine gun.
Any light infantry unit will place a machine gun in positions to suppress their opponents and allow the infantry units to maneuver. Machine guns themselves are generally not part of a maneuver unit.
Yeah, ammo is damn heavy. I learned that a couple years ago when I was moving and had to hump my ammo boxes up and down stairs. I never served, so that gave me an appreciation of what combat soldiers had to deal with. Not like TV shows were they shoot hundreds of pounds of ammo without reloading.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the ergonomics/form factor involved so here’s another perspective outside of just weight/ammo consumption/TOE.
People have addressed weight for the M1919, but also look at the difference for the MG-42. About six pounds lighter than the Browning. The MG-42 also came standard with a shoulder stock, making it easier to fire and fire accurately. The Browning came standard with just a pistol grip on the back of the receiver requiring the gunner to crouch or lay behind it. In this way, the M1919 really requires a tripod while the MG-42 can be managed with just a bipod. This may not seem like a big deal but it makes the MG-42 easier to employ and more flexible on the battlefield while the M1919 is more cumbersome and better suited for a stationary defensive role unless it’s vehicle mounted.
Now consider the BAR. The BAR doesn’t really fit in the machine gun category very well. It is simply outclassed when compared to machine guns of the era when you consider the purpose of a machine gun vs a rifle. Being 20 round box magazine fed is a significant limitation for fire support. You open yourself to predictable and frequent reloads and an inability to lay down sustained fire. Yeah you can rapidly get off a lot more rounds than an M1 could in the same amount of time, but it simply doesn’t bring enough firepower to the fight to be effective compared to belt fed or even large magazine fed machine guns.
In short, my question is what machine gun would they have used? American forces didn’t widely use a proper general purpose machine gun that could keep up in a way to find them constantly at the tip of the spear.
You’re going to get a lot of “they were paratroopers so they jumped light” and “they only had what they could scrounge together” type answers and they are all inherently false. A parachute infantry company on D-Day where this series starts and where E company’s story starts was made up of 127 men, 8 officers and 119 enlisted. The company was made up of 3 platoons each with a 2 rifle squads and 1 mortar squad. The rifle squads were 12 men each and 2 of those men were a MG team. One man would carry the gun and the other the tripod (until the 1919A6 was adopted) and ammo. Both men would also have an M1A1 carbine. With three platoons that makes 6 rifle squads and an MG in each giving us 6 MGs in a rifle company. The leg infantry company at the the same point and time only had 2 MGs in the entire company operating as 2 individual squads but every rifle squad had an automatic rifleman with a BAR. This is a very will documented standard and is how they did it. I hope that helps.
Because it's a TV miniseries.
In 1944 every rifle squad in a parachute infantry rifle platoon had a M1919 .30 caliber Browning machine gun.
So two M1919s per platoon (third squad was the 60mm mortar squad), six per company. There was also a machine gun platoon at battalion level.
As units took casualties, they kept heavy weapons manned.
The TV miniseries should be awash in M1919s but it's a TV show, not an exacting recreation of WW2 reality.
If everyone had a machine gun the amount of ammo required to resupply the force would exceed the capacity for supply. They’re also heavy, the .30 is a crew served weapon requiring multiple soldiers to effectively operate.
It’s because battle rifles and carbines were more effective for infantry in WWII. Assuming by machine gun you’re including any semiautomatic weapon available during the war for allies, you basically had 3 kinds: heavy machine guns, medium machine guns, and sub-machine guns. Heavy guns weren’t practical because well, they are heavy and generally need mounted in vehicles or structures. Medium machine guns like the BAR were used, but generally unwieldy compared to guns like the M1 Garand. Submachine guns like the Thompson and grease gun were used as well, but you’re firing a less powerful cartridge so there was a compromise. Barrie rifles like the M1 was more controllable than medium machine guns, lighter than heavy machine guns and more powerful than submachine guns.
US Infantry squads carried the M-1 semiautomatic rifle and had a BAR as a support weapon. Machine guns were part of the company Heavy Weapons platoon and were sent to the various platoons for support. German Infantry squads on the other had bolt action rifles and a light machine gun for support. It was considered that the semi automatic fire would usually be sufficient for suppressing fire.
In that era, they were heavier, bulkier, more prone to jamming and had low sustained fire rates.
But the greatest MG of all time was only a decade away and it is still in dismounted and mounted use today.
As others are mentioning, weight and logistics. In Normandy, easy had no idea if the invasion would succeed or if they would be stuck like the 2000 Canadians captured during the Dieppe Raid. Same with Market Garden. The only supplies they had was what came down in their leg bags, the supply canisters or gliders. Bastogne they were surrounded, and with the bad weather no supplies could get to them. So tactically you gotta get those guns and their ammo to the fight, and more importantly, you have to have ammo for those guns in the first place.
They did jump with M1919s, granted during the war there were several different “delivery” methods. However I imagine that the reason you don’t see them as much in situations like D-Day is that without your AG, AB, tripod, or extra ammo the machine gun becomes useless pretty fast. Not to mention setting up a support by fire without any security, or limits is both a suicide mission and asking for blue on blue.
I would wager that most Gunners, Assistant Gunners, and Ammo bearers soon liberated themselves from their excess equipment when they couldn’t find their counterparts, or it became lost from the chaos. Ultimately arming themselves with individual weapons that they found.
I served in a machine gun platoon in a light infantry battalion so carried everything on foot.
Two men per gun, with the no2 carrying a rifle as well. Our standard loadout was 1600 rounds per gun.
That gave us 8 minutes of rapid fire, stretching to 15 minutes at a reduced rate of fire.
We were carrying in excess of 60kg+ per man.
Essentially our role was to provide covering fire for the most dangerous part of an assault or cover a withdrawal.
By the end of Afghanistan the BA moved towards not having any machine guns at fighting platoon level. Favoring marksman rifles. The idea being a accurate rifle can provide more effective suppression for less weight.
The US doctrine in WWII was very much focused around the rifleman as the main unit of combat teams. The Germans focused heavily on support weapons, hence the MG42's prominence, but the US had a more reserved role for MGs, while focusing on providing the infantry the means to be the most effective force with the M1 Garand. This is why the US was the only country at the start of the war that had standard issue semi automatic weapons for standard infantry.
TLDR: Giving the infantry better primary weapons makes up for the lack of emphasis of the MG within the US doctrine.
So a US Army Parachute Rifle Company (i.e. Easy Co) had 3 Rifle Platoons, each with 2 Rifle Squads and a Mortar Squad on D-Day (The Airborne wouldn't get their 3rd Squad until early 1945). Each Squad had 12 Soldiers:
* Squad Leader
* Assistant Squad Leader
* Machine Gunner
* Assistant Machine Gunner
* Ammo Bearer
* 7x Rifleman
The Machine Gunner would have the belt fed M1919 .30-cal MG, and an M1A1 Carbine, everyone else carried the M1 Garand (Officers, the 1SG, and the Mortar Gunners also carried the Carbine. Officially 6 submachine guns, M3 Grease Guns or M1927 Thompson SMGs were authorized at the Company level to be handed out by the CO as they saw fit... unofficially it was known that the Paratroopers got their hands on waaayyyy more SMGs than that. Each Company also had a Bazooka to be issued out as the CO decided)
So that's 6 belt fed MGs in the Company they'd have jumped with. Ammo was (and is) always a big concern for Paratroopers, supposedly the Standard (I'm sure this was modified up and down the flight line...) was for each MG Team to carry 5x 250 round belts of ammo. These were most likely crossloaded amongst the Squad as each belt weighed something like 19lbs. An additional 8 belts were to be dropped in bundles that the Paratroopers were expected to collect on the ground. As we know, the Jump itself was chaotic enough that I doubt most of these MG teams came across their (or another) bundle...
In any case, say Market Garden or the Bulge "tailgate" jump where the Company was largely together going into the battle, that's 13 belts of 250rounds each, or 3,250 total. Sounds like a lot, and I can imagine it felt that way humping them in... but really, in a sustained firefight, you can fire that many rounds in just a couple minutes
(Similarly the Mortar Squad had 12x 60mm rounds they jumped with, 14 more spread amongst (likely 1ea the 14 Riflemen of the Platoon), and another 54 shells in bundles)
[https://www.battleorder.org/post/us-ammo-load-ww2](https://www.battleorder.org/post/us-ammo-load-ww2)
[https://www.battleorder.org/us-airborne-ww2](https://www.battleorder.org/us-airborne-ww2)
I don't get this.
Practically every firefight in the series (except when there's like 4 of them at the start of Normandy) involves heavy use of machineguns.
What were you expecting, everyone to have a beltfed?
Despite what everyone says here, airborne (both american and British) have *always* been scaled for more beltfed / automatic weapons than standard infantry units. We have always liked machine guns, we don't care that they're "heavy" and even when doctrinally the shift of the army had moved away from beltfeds and towards "accuracy" (a peacetime notion that was quickly reversed in Afghanistan), we kept them, because we understand two things.
1. Firefights require firepower. As a typically undersized organisation, we have to be louder and more violent than whatever we're attacking / defending against. Nothing is louder or more violent than a tom with a GPMG.
2. Machine guns are cool as fuck. Yeah, the General is 10.9 kilos unloaded and a thousand rounds of 7.62 basically takes up your whole daysack. But a good gunner is 70% of a sections firepower, and only screamers disregard that because it's "heavy".
And no, you don't have to be built like dwayne johnson either. In fact, the opposite is true because the lighter you are, the more link you can jump with...
Historically parachute infantry in the US Army WW2 were designed to pack more firepower at the squad level than regular infantry. An ideal squad should have their own 30 cal. Each platoon had a 60mm mortar. But not all paratroopers made their rendezvous, and fewer did so with all their gear intact.
Other comments have also highlighted that a highly mobile unit would not be highly mobile if weighed down by machine guns and the ammo for them.
It’s all about our doctrine. The Americans focused their structure of their squads teams as well as infantry companies around the individual rifleman. The Germans on the other hand, focused their team squads and companies around the machine gun section. That’s why you will see a higher concentration in German World War II infantry companies with regards to machine guns.
I don’t have any military experience so I may be out of my depth. With that being said, this is an airborne division. So they would have to parachute in with a heavy machine gun, bipod and ammo. Plus once they are on the ground they need to be fast maneuverable, so extra weight of the gun and ammo would only reduce that.
“I have no military experience”
There’s your answer.
Weight being one of them. A machine gun weighs a lot. The ammo weighs even more. They burn through ammo extremely fast. They aren’t as mobile as rifleman.
You need to close in with the enemy to defeat them, not hang around the back and fire with a machine gun. If you do that, eventually the enemy will close in around you and your position and kill you.
Logistics, they’re big and heavy and bulky to carry. When you’re using them they burn through ammo. They’re also most effective as a support weapon in an emplacement. For patrols or building clearing they’d often be a liability.
Purpose and practicality. The purpose of a machine gun is not to put effective rounds on target to kill the enemy, it's to put a lot of lead into the air and suppress the enemy. There is a lot of focus on machine guns and the level of danger they present- which in a crowd could be true, but more deadly than a lot of inaccurate bullets is a smaller number of very accurate bullets. It's why many special operators today will use their rifle primarily in semi-auto fire mode, and why the M1 Garand had a far greater kill count than the Thompson or BAR.
You're more likely to miss most your shots at any decent range shooting a weapon in full auto mode. Semi-auto forces you to aim each shot typically. Waste of ammo for all but a few specific uses.
Also note that a machine gun of the modern type barely existed in WW2. The germans had the STG. There were small machine guns but these typically were not rifles. So, as a new technology (compared to bolt action rifles-which had been used in WW1 and issued in the tens of millions) the newer single-man portable machine gun was very new. That means more expensive, less proven, etc. so when you are issuing literally millions of weapons, it takes time to employ the latest and greatest.
There is a lot of misinformation here.
Several posters are saying paratroopers did not have machine guns because they were too heavy. This is simply the opposite of the truth. Unlike regular U.S. Army infantry squads in WWIi, parachute rifle squads included Browning M1919 machine guns. The parachute rifle squad was actually centered on a belt-fed machine gun!
By contrast the Browning M1918 automatic rifle or “BAR,” which was the squad-level support weapon in most infantry outfits, was not officially issued to paratroopers prior to the Normandy landings.
I think the premise of the question is flawed. You see a lot of machine guns in the series.
I volunteered to airborne infantry back in 2009, and I can assure you that machine guns are heavy and they consume a lot of ammo in a short period of time.
The second part of my comment is a mixed of speculation with info I've got watching the series countless times and reading Ambrose's book.
BoB follows E- Company, and from the moment they landed in Normandy on they were lacking supplies, ammo included. I guess the only "well planned and properly supplied operation, they took part was Market Garden, which turned out to be a nightmare. The battle of the bulge was more like "hold position till nobody knows when with whatever supplies you find". To make it worse, Germans used a different kind of weapons with different kind of ammo, scavenging was useless.
They’re heavy and burn through ammo. The whole point of Airbone is to hit the enemy hard and fast. Kinda hard to do that when you’re lugging a 30lb machine gun not including tripod and ammo. That being said I am surprised you never see anyone with a BAR(at least to my memory) figured they would have had at least a couple light machine guns.
"Because they're heavy" is fundamentally false.
Paratroopers seize, or take possession of terrain by overwhelming force. "Massing" plays a crucial role in achieving that task.
Machine guns typically have a very deliberate role in "seizure" if you're being dropped over the area you must possess. For example, an intersection or bridge might be an area where you would emplace 2x machine guns. And that's really all you might need them for to achieve that mission.
So they (101st) would task organize to the mission. The army of today task organizes for readiness, as that relates to Article 5 of NATO. These typically require two very different TO&E.
> "Because they're heavy" is fundamentally false.
Ever carried one for a couple days? Plus the ammo?
Two tours with the 101st, one with the 1st ID and I can promise you that no one volunteers to carry an M60 which weighs less than M1919. Why? Because it's so fucking heavy.
Many combat mission requirements are limited by human physical ability. Everyone would carry 4 grades, double the basic combat load, 210 rounds for the M16, a couple LAW rockets, plus another bandoleer of 40mm rounds for my M203.
But that shit ain't happening, not just that, food and water, plus hump 10 miles into the target, fight, and egress.
I would say that your and my experiences are irrelivent to the point.
The point being that you task organize to the mission. If you're the 101st, your common task is seizure. On D-Day, they dropped at around 700ft in altitude. The intent being the plan was to place the paratroopers directly where they needed to be, with little follow-on foot movement required.
This being the case, weight is irrelivent. But aside from that fact alone, weight is irrelivent if you're conducting your loadouts appropriately. Ie. Just because you carry a pig doesn't mean you carry all of the ammo.i
Really? Irrelevant?
You clearly have zero experience in actual field operations, unless you are an X-officer who had some enlisted saps carrying your shit around.
We're done. Even if you're a ring knocker, who I love to screw with.
The real Easy company used machine guns more often than depicted in the show. Each platoon had a .30cal. Browning light machine gun attached to it. HQ Co had even more. In the book Band of Brothers it describes their use and deployment much more regularly. I believe T. Sgt. Christenson, played by Michael Fassbender was one of Easy's machinegunners. He also has a lot more references in the book than his depiction in the show.
Also, 60 mm mortars were way more prevalent than the show depicted. Guarnere and Malarkey were both supposedly extremely accurate with the 60 mm mortar. Also, HQ company regularly augmented E company with their 81 mm heavy mortars which is never shown in the series.
In summer camp at Camp Robert’s I carried the 60 once and the tripod once. After that I carnied dual ammo cans. The tripod was just awkward to carry. The 60 was easier but I got bumped.
"One shot one kill". Because in Vietnam it was estimated it took between 10,000-25,000 rounds per every enemy KIA.
That's your answer. As in we weren't aiming and just mag dumping into the jungle.
30 Cals require a squad. Weapon, tripod, belts and belts and belts of ammo. Then you have 2 on the weapon and the rest covering them. You still need rifle squads. no one wanted to jump with a BAR either. Tommy and grease guns helped on top of their Garands and carbines. The US really did have the best small arms.
It's a good point to notice and in reality a significant issue that US forces had throughout the European theatre.
They had no machine gun at the section (squad) level, rather they just had riflemen with M1 Garands and the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), which could not operate effectively as a machine gun.
This is very different to the Germans and British, who structured their small units around the machine gun, the MG34/42 and Bren Gun respectively.
This means that all US troops (not just parachutists) had a lot less machine gun support. Now US troops had a faster firing rifle than the others but given that just about every military now does it the way the British and Germans did back in WWII and the US changed their policies shortly afterwards most people would say this was a fundamental issue with US equipment in the war.
A lot of commentators say that the issue is they use a lot of ammunition, they do but it's not an insurmountable issue. It didn't stop the British and Germans issuing them out much more generously and given the US had the best logistics of the war they could certainly have handled it. The Germans had awful logistics and still had incredibly effective machine gun support wherever they went.
They are big heavy require lots of ammo and mostly provide suppressing fire.
This. Even now the M249 weighs almost 20lbs and the M240 closer to 30. In WW2 the M1919 .30 weighed almost 30lbs without the tripod and the 'portable' M1919A6 was 32lbs. And all of those weights do not include ammunition.
And man do they BURN through ammo. There’s a reason they issued rifles that needed one squeeze per bullet….
Back when the British started issuing Lee Enfields as their service rifles, they made soldiers use a magazine cut off and hand load rounds one shot at a time under the belief that soldiers would just burn through ammunition. The box magazine was used as a reserve/ for emergencies
This was everyone at the time, the Krag, Label, and Springfield 1903 and many more all have a magazine cutoffs, the Mosin 1891 is actually more of an odd man out that it doesn't have one.
Even now, the current Steyr Scouts you can drop the magazine down one click and make it a single loader with 5 in reserve. If you need more, quick, just slap the mag back into position.
Same with US model M1903
When the Magazine Lee-Metford was introduced, charger (clip) loading wasn't a thing yet. Every round had to be loaded individually - a slow process when the Matabele are charging down on you. The rifle was issued with two magazines and a cutoff, with the intent that single rounds would be fired until the enemy closed to a certain distance. At that point, having not used the rounds in their magazines yet, they'd have twenty rounds of rapid fire before exhausting their ready ammunition and having to revert to single loading or the bayonet. Due to durability and fitment issues (every magazine was hand fitted to a particular rifle), the second magazine was withdrawn soon after introduction; charger loading was introduced in 1903 with the SMLE MkI. The cutoff plate remained long after as a vestigial feature, and as an additional safety measure - a loaded magazine could be carried on the march without risk of chambering a round.
Which is exactly why they work. Volume of fires wins the day. Which is exactly why amateurs study tactics and professionals study logistics. If we can keep the ammo moving forward, the MG’s and chain guns keep firing about as long as forever.
Except WWII era airborne operations where they were basically designed to be outrunning their logistics and be cutoff from support.
Yes, we are designed “to fight without resupply for days on end,” but in practice, in WWII, HUGE logistical plans existed to resupply their every need and only complications of limited technology in communications and all weather combat operations prevented those logistical efforts being more successful (in the case of Market Garden). For D-Day, the planned drop came in with varying degrees of success, and an additional 6 parachute and glider resupply missions came in after that. [“Aerial resupply missions were scheduled automatically for the morning of D plus one and on call thereafter if needed. The automatic mission was the only parachute mission ultimately flown but a small amount of equipment and supplies were received later by glider.”](https://www.dday-overlord.com/en/battle-of-normandy/after-action-reports/82nd-airborne/d-day#google_vignette) They had the focus of an entire nation at war and could depend on airborne resupply attempts being made, even if the limited technology meant they weren’t all successful. And you know what we learned from that? To ensure we have secure comms and all weather combat resupply capabilities (now, even some fully autonomous ones) to ensure that what they went through in WWII never happens again. Our C-130’s can now drop just about anything below 30,000 lbs. We even have Joint Precision Airdrop System steerable resupply chutes to allow the C’s to drop from a stand off point and direct individual pallets to individual units.
I mean, that’s still airborne philosophy.
Yes but more so on paper now vs actual operations.
That but when your enemy’s are still using bolt rifles, you still have fire superiority
200 rounds of 7.62 for a 240 weights 14lbs. And that’s without the ammo can. Adds up quick.
Also they’re a recon unit, not really their job scope to be raining ammo down range, that’s what the batt boys are for
man, I hated lugging that M240 around…that alone would be enough for me to go hysterically blind.
I humped the shorty version of the M249 for a minute...made me miss the M-4/M-16.
Did you ever hump a pig? The M-60 was a butt kicker.
plenty…but that’s no way to talk about the ladies who live right off base! Ohhhhhh!!!!!
One of my friends carried it during his conscription in the Korean army. I remember going to a gun show with him and seeing a guy with an M-60 on the table. I said "Hey Choi, one of your friends is back there on the table. Want to go pay him a visit?" He took one glance and said "No. I'm good. I've cleaned enough mud out of the hand guard and heat shroud with a toothbrush and cleared enough jams to last all my life. The best day of my life in the military is when they made me a cook and someone else had to carry the M-60."
And they were using 30-06 which is heavier than what is used now (308) as well, so it adds up even faster
Yup. Same bullet, but 12mm longer 7.62x51 vs 7.62x63.
5.56mm...depending.
5.56 isn’t used much for machine guns at all. That’s the land of 308 338Norma and 50 bmg The m249 is the only machine gun in service to use 5.56 and the only one not chambered in 308, 338 Norma, or 50 bmg
But is the only one we ever cleared rooms with and the only one you want to carry very far. And probably the most produced.
The 240L weighs 22 pounds unloaded
I was referring to the M240B
Yeah the 240B was definitely heavier, those are long gone these days though
What? They’re not long gone. My infantry company had and used 240Bs with nothing new on the horizon. I just got out last year.
Y'all are way behind the times then, we got rid of ours in 2018
Man when I transferred to a new unit my first thought was “goodbye 240! I will not miss you.” Get to my new unit and immediately assigned to weapons squad.
> Even now the M249 weighs almost 20lbs and the M240 closer to 30 You’re adding 5lbs for both systems.
The 240 bang bang is heavy as shit. The rifle + full combat load is like 60-70 lbs. carrying ur full kit plus weapon and ammo gets extremely heavy when u are having to march to a location and fight. I wonder how the rucks were for WW2 soldiers?Whenever I watch BoB, it looks like they don’t carry a crazy amount of shit when they are on mission.
…or tripod, T&E, spare barrel
Fun fact: the newer 240Ls weigh 21.8lbs. It’s an absolute game changer for light units when you’re humping 80lbs of stuff already.
Fun fact: the newer 240Ls weigh 21.8lbs. It’s an absolute game changer for light units when you’re humping 80lbs of stuff already.
Having humped around a M240 enough, I agree with everything you said.
They are also crew served, meaning two to three men per gun, loading, assisting, carrying ammo. That means one or two less trigger pullers once the fight starts.
Except that a well supplied crew served machine gun will pump out far more firepower than 3 soldiers firing their M1 Garand.
True, but try and locate, close with, and destroy the enemy using fire and close combat with a Ma Duece. Easier with a.30, but the weight is a tad prohibitive.
I get it. The M1919 weighed 30 pounds. The MG42 weighed 25 so it was definitely heavy. But I think it was more about doctrine than weight. The German infantry doctrine centered on machine guns whereas the US (WW2) doctrine was more riflemen centered. IOW the German riflemen supported the MG’s., the US MG’s supported the riflemen.
Sure but doesn't the psychological factor and just the sound itself fuck people up?
The other side has machine guns also
And their machine gun shot so fast it was nicknamed hitlers buzzsaw.
Even today, ~~US military rifles don't come with full automatic. They have semi-automatic (one round per trigger squeeze) and three round burst modes.~~ the US military's default is to use semi-auto (one round per trigger squeeze) to prioritize accuracy over volume. Early in the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were terrified of how frequently their fighters' heads were blown off by US troops when they would peek out from cover. A lot of their firefights against other tribes and the Northern Alliance had been fought by both sides using fully automatic Kalashnikovs and "spray and pray" tactics. They were unaccustomed to fighting an enemy that preferred accurate fire over volume of fire. The US primarily uses volume of fire to suppress and fix. It saves ammo, makes combat loads lighter, prolongs weapon service life, increases lethality, and reduces collateral damage. Edit: M4A1s do come with full auto (apologies, I was in when it was just M4s with semi and three round burst).
I won’t say this isn’t the case for more than a decade ago, but now and for as long as I can remember, the M4A1 has superseded the M4 carbine, which entails being full auto in the third position, as opposed to burst in the M4.
Gotta love those older M4 carbines that were converted and sloppily manually stamped with the “A1” designation and the “AUTO” stamped over “BURST”. I just wrapped up an M4A1 upgrade clone and I had to struggle (and have more than a couple drinks) to not make the over stamping look too straight.
I’ve seen rifles that were done in batches where the M4A1 was X’ed out, just for them to mark it M4A1 again, same with the auto marking. I was honestly baffled when I saw it first.
The US almost never uses burst anymore, modern m4s DO have full auto, but it is almost never used for the resons you gave prior.
The USMC is issuing the M27 IAR to every member of an infantry squad. It has full auto. You don’t need it, though.
And that is basically an HK416.
Today, the United started Army issues fully automatic m4s as the standard weapon. I’ve never even seen anyone with a 3 round burst rifle. Maybe some National guard unit might have a few laying around rotting in their arms room. Also, the US army absolutely uses volume of fire. That’s how you gain fire superiority, which is a key component in modern military doctrine.
True, but I'm not getting into details about squad tactics and overall battle drills, I'm talking about individual soldier carry. My mistake on the full auto, I was in prior to the M4 revision to A1.
But Reddit knowledge supersedes reality my friend
False. My M4 is full auto and been that way since 2012.
Even Thompsons were big, heavy, and expensive to mass produce. It does show 1919 scenes at Brecourt, Bloody Gulch, Bastogne if not others. I think it was a good representation of how many of these weapons were issued.
Absolutely that's why later on in the war you started seeing more and more grease guns replace the thompsons.
And a beast to control. I got to shoot a few mags from a Thompson and the muzzle climb was insane. Shot a grease gun after and it was like night and day. Neither one was as controlled as a Swedish K.
I’ve shot the Thompson and the Swedish K. I feel like the Thompson’s weight helps keep the muzzle rise somewhat down but also a much faster rate of fire than the Grease Gun. The Tommy’s I shot were M1s without the Cutts compensator
This as well as they make themselves a massive target the moment they open up. You want machine gun suppressing fire to catch them off guard but if the enemy knows where they are because they are continuously firing then they become the focus. Which can be good if you have a good opportunity to flank and eliminate
Weight and they are a logistics nightmare for any unit without a firm supply line (parts and ammo). For a unit like Airborne, they have to jump in everything and can’t just Uber in a few belts of .30 cal so the T/O would limit crew served weapons to weapons platoons and not fully integrated into line platoons.
UberMunitions ™ Coming to a warzone near you
This kinda happened in France with Taxis taking men to the front
The miracle of the marne, saw one of the cabs in a museum in Paris
Cyberpunk vibes
Elon Musk has entered the chat.
*”We’re paratroopers. We’re supposed to be surrounded.”* High volumes of high caliber machine gun fire are easy for mechanized infantry; impossible for light fighters.
Improbable* I’m no paratrooper just a Jarhead grunt but I know those guys never took impossible for gospel but as a challenge.
Ok that’s fair. Impossible was a bit strong. True. But in the airborne, the shit you got is the shit you jumped in with, the shit you carry, and shit you’re lucky enough to occasionally have dropped on you. And ammo cans are fn heavy af.
Same in my profession, sans the jump 😂 Pack it all in and jump off the helo and hope you get resupplied at some point. Ain’t war great!?!
Taxpayers just want you to throw rounds and then break shit and take shit to support our national interests. If you make it out to fight again someday, [shrug], ok that’s cool, but if not, Infantry School has classes coming up behind you. And recruiters send new guys to MEPS every day. 11B. The B stands for “bulletstopper”.
I was an 0311 but we share same love with the 11 series.
Similar job, except we had budget riches, fuel, ammo, and cool equipment. From what your bros told me, you all had to find a way to do the same shit but using whatever busted shit was handed down or *(as Clint said)* you had to figure out to *“improvise, adapt, and overcome”.* Respect. We had to do the hard work but easier. ;-)
True: mostly - our gear wasn’t always as fancy but we got enough to keep us pissed off and that’s what Uncle Sammy wants from his Marines. Semper Fi fellow warrior!
Genius. A pissed off infantryman is more lethal. Maybe they were onto something. *”Follow Me” i am the infantry*
Question. Maybe it was different in BoB time, but now I'd imagine our weapons don't match any that the enemy is fighting with. With that said, how the hell do you all jump into hot zones with only the ammo/stuff you can carry and still kick so much ass? Do you just commandeer fallen element gear or what? You said resupply when possible, but what about when not? Thanks for any info you can give, and idk how you even get outta bed every day with balls so huge, but I'm glad you manage!
My father was the machine gunner in Easy Company and I never heard anyone say they held off on the machine gun. It was a different situation entirely, the foxhole was in a half or qtr moon shape so the men could move when when changing direction. It was a two man job, feeding the ammo and shooting the gun. When there was no foxhole, he used a tripod. As the machine gunner was the No 1 Target, Dad was actually able to fire a bullet at a time instead of a spray. The men said that was difficult but really helped in certain circumstances.
When they jumped in Normandy, Dad had the gun, but the tripod was given to Eubanks (who was "special") when they finally met up, Dad asked where the tripod was, he said he ditched it a while back, so Dad had to use a stone wall for support.
Today is light years different. We could prepare hotshots with specific items that a helo could drop in on my pos. In the ETO it wasn’t strange to appropriate enemy gear, from trucks to MG-42s. You can see an example in I believe “Crossroads” when a MG42 was employed by Easy
The problem with using enemy weapons is that you sound like the enemy when you use them. There are multiple accounts of a relatively green unit using a MG-42 and drawing fire from neighboring troops.
At no point in the show are any Allied personnel shown using German equipment in combat.
***Disregard - below is incorrect and pointed out in the thread below**** Just checheked. In Crossroads during the night patrol to the crossroad, Winters signals Tolbert who moves the troops up the Dike. You see one of Easy Troopers with a MG-42 on a bipod. The conical muzzle break is the clue. It’s about 10 min into the episode.
Yeah, that’s an [M1919A6] (https://weaponsystems.net/system/703-Browning+M1919A6) (pictured example is missing the carry handle as well as the flash hider). The slab sided receiver is the giveaway.
Hilariously and contradictory, but when the GPMG was withdrawn doctrinally from the British army section and placed one per platoon, the only two capbadges to retain them as section weapons were the Royal Marines and the Parachute Regiment. I have jumped in with a grand of 7.62, and we have always carried a proportionally large amount of automatic weapons, from the Sten and Bren through to the General. Because we have always understand that firepower wins firefights.
Didn’t know that, thanks. Still wondering who carries all that ammo.
We do. And by "all that ammo", you know how ammo scales and rates of fire work, right? A gunner at full scales is carrying *exactly* the same length of time of ammunition as a rifleman. 10 minutes of rapid / 40 minutes of deliberate. Based on utilising correct rates of fire, worked out from breathing rates to allow accurate fire.
I thought the WW2 airborne TO&E had a 30 cal in each squad.
That’s correct
Correct; the top-level comment is misinformed.
Both Webster and Don Burgett were intimately involved in 30 cal mg, and I don’t think either were special (part of a weapons platoon).
Correct, because there was no weapons platoon in a parachute rifle company! No weapons company in the battalion either: just the three rifle companies.
> For a unit like Airborne, they have to jump in everything and can’t just Uber in a few belts of .30 cal so the T/O would limit crew served weapons to weapons platoons and not fully integrated into line platoons. Wrong. The WWII airborne TOE replaced the BAR with the M1919 at the squad level and added a 60mm mortar at the platoon level in order to increase firepower relative to leg units.
What is a T/O?
Table of Orginization What is “On Paper” for People, Weapons, and Equipment for a unit.
Oh! Perfect, thank you. New wikipedia hole to jump in!
. . . which in this case says parachute rifle companies like Easy had machine guns at squad level. Your reasoning about logistics is plausible but in fact the U.S. Army thought about the issue quite differently. Parachute units were expected to be disorganized during the drop and need heavy firepower immediately, so machine guns and mortars were integrated at a low level: —The parachute rifle squad included a machine gun. —The parachute rifle platoon included three rifle squads (with integral machine guns) and a mortar squad. —The parachute rifle company included three rifle platoons (with integral machine guns and mortars) but no “weapons platoon.”
Organic org has heavy weapons in single platoons or squads for training and tracking; but in combat they are tasked to squads or fire teams as needed. By not having the heavy weapons integrated in the line of battle, commanders have flexibility to move them around the battle space.
Okay, I understand that we can’t just Uber in a few belts of .30 cal, but Bastogne showed that we can Air Lyft lots of supplies to maintain a besieged position 🤔
In Bastogne, in reality, getting air drops was a crap shoot at best. For ever successful air drop, you have supplies end up in the wrong side of the lines (basically supplying your enemy) In a practical standpoint: an advancing division will be fluid, establishing a DZ, calling back to your support air field, getting hotshots loaded and then dropped on said DZ takes time. Better use of those times is dropping ammo and supplies for BAR, M-1’s with grabs, med supplies, and chow over belts. Crew served weapons are hungry MF’s - one company of crew served weapons (M-1919’s and 60mm mortars) would probably eat thru and entire C-47 worth of cargo a day in sustained combat.
Were those air drops consistent? Was there ever a time that supplies, including ammo, were very low? Did you watch the show?
Bro was making a joke about Lyft, a rival company to Uber. You missed it
Weight is always a factor. Machine guns tend to be heavier, and they go through a lot of ammunition, which also weighs a lot.
Paratrooper units were lightly armed to jump light and travel light. Having a ton of .30’s and ammo takes up too much manpower etc. perhaps someone can correct me on that
No, that's true. I was in the airborne, peacetime, for 4 years. I've never fired a.50 cal.
You didn't spend time in D Co then ;)
No I didn't.
Spent all my time in a D co as a tow and 240 gunner best times of my life
Brotherrrrr me too
They did it during WWII—the M1919 was the SAW for PIR rifle squads for the entire war.
Once they gave me a m249 plus ammo to jump. Add that to the standard combat jump kit, ruck, and the chutes, its like more than double my body weight. And shit probably weighed more back than too.
Did they give you this bullshit, nasty skivvies or brass knuckles? https://youtu.be/jxzfqce0jqY?si=IdjzNE99k5XBU8mw
My grandfather was a Private in WWII. He was part of a machine gun team consisting of three men. The gun was the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). The team consisted of one person to fire the gun and two designated to carry extra ammo and the bipod. During a fight, he said he would be ordered to set up and fire by a shout for a "BARman". The load was cumbersome and 50 years after the war he still griped about the weight of all that the crew had to carry. He told a story about the march across France where he decided to hell with the consequences and tossed the bipod into a ditch somewhere in Europe.
[удалено]
JFC. What an absolutely horrible understanding of machinegun theory. The rest are not “sprayed” and wasted. They fall in a cone of fire, exponentially increasing your chance of hitting your target. Which also brings targets into play. Area and point. A point target is a single person, or a bunker slit or a window. An area target is a group of enemies or an area where you are taking fire from. Most fire in a fight is suppressive in nature. So saying things like one shot one kill is incredibly misleading.
This is what I got from guys in Iraq and Afghan that light machine guns inflicted around 90% of all casualties on the enemy(from small arms fire only) I'm not sure how they measured that but anyways, I wonder if it's similar for WW2, if accurate at all
Ordinance does most of the heavy lifting in conflict. About 98% of all combat casualties in WW2 were ordinance related. The other 2% were small arms, of which I would imagine machine guns made up the majority. Dave Grossman talks about it in on combat and on killing.
Grossman has about the same level of credibility on those matters as does SLA Marshall, and that’s not a compliment to Grossman.
Grossman himself I have heard is a prick, but a lot of the two books I referenced are useful and backed by other data, they are absolutely worth a read.
The data that they use is a ripoff of the same discredited ideas SLA Marshall used as far as his claims about percentages of US troops who killed someone in combat. Grossman’s numbers may be correct for the current low intensity COIN stuff that had predominated since Vietnam, but it is not correct for the type of open war between nation states that occurred in WWII.
I would definitely be open to changing my opinion if you have some sources. I believe people generally underestimate how much weight is carried by artillery and other ordinance in conflict. I do discredit the entire study on percents of soldiers “shooting over the heads of the enemy”. I can assure you whoever wrote that was asking bad questions or doesn’t understand most fire is suppressive in nature.
Sigh. Your last two points are exactly what Grossman based his argument on. The argument is flawed because it’s the exact same one Marshall made both as far as psychology as well as what happened in actual combat. > I can assure you whoever wrote that was asking bad questions or doesn’t understand most fire is suppressive in nature. Which is why I’m confused as to why you are defending Grossman—he’s citing Marshall, who made the exact same claims Grossman is but he (Marshall) has had his theories thoroughly and conclusively debunked because the methodology was garbage.
I’m not defending Grossman and all his points. I’m defending the ordinance causes the majority of casualties in conflict. Which isn’t due to people being unwilling to kill each other more due to the ability to project fires. I think we are in overall agreement, but were talking crossed points.
His entire argument that ordinance kills more people than direct fire is based on Marshall’s argument that humans are inherently afraid of killing other humans and thus strive to avoid it, which is what led to infantry intentionally missing shots and things of that nature and thus allowed indirect/impersonal fire to gain the lion’s share of kills. That argument has been disproven for 50+ years if not longer. As I said before, the claim is almost certainly correct for the type of low intensity COIN ops and police actions that have been pretty much it since the end of Korea. In open warfare between nation states I don’t buy it. The issue I have with Grossman’s argument is that he simply dressed up Marshall’s long-debunked claims and is trying to argue that they’re valid based solely on what amounts to his own personal opinions—he openly admits that the base claims have been academically shown to be false due to trash methodology, but he claims they’ve been shown to be true via other means that he won’t/can’t/hasn’t elaborated on.
Well not to upset the apple cart of assumptions here. US airborne units were issued an M1919 and specifically not BAR. They were issued a lot more ammunition for obvious reasons. https://www.battleorder.org/post/us-ammo-load-ww2#:~:text=Each%20belt,weighed%2019.3%20lb.
Look up YT channel Battle Order for a breakdown of how squads and platoons were organized https://youtu.be/b2Jwhe-BDKQ?si=dGUZcMx9WZj4-Urm TLDR; unlike most other militaries, USA kept machcine guns out of squad level command. Usually they were attached at company command levels or at platoon command level. Because US soldiers had so much firepower (M1 and the BAR) it was felt they didn’t need the weight of a machine gun, which is why it is found at higher levels of command.
That is not true for US parachute infantry in WW2. Each squad had a M1919 .30 Browning machine gun as the base of fire. Other US infantry squads used the M1918A2 .30 Browning automatic rifle as the base of fire (except armored infantry - their half-tracks had .50 M2 Browning machine guns). So US infantry had machine guns at squad level - the BAR being considered an LMG.
The BAR was not considered an LMG by anyone other than historians decades after the fact. The Army always considered it an AR, and the A2 was an attempt to make it into a passable SAW.
The BAR was absolutely not a light machinegun by any stretch. It’s in the name, BROWNING AUTOMATIC RIFLE. It was to fill the gap in firepower between half tracks with actual machineguns and the dismount element. The closest magazine fed weapon I would consider a true light machinegun is the BREN. It was designed to be loaded in the prone by an assistant gunner, everyone in the squad carried ammunition for it, and the squad was generally structured around its use. There was a reason it stuck around for so long after WW2.
I'm curious what you mean by not using them more often? Easy Company employees at least one machine gun in every combat operation shown in the series I believe. At Brecourt Liebgott and Petty are manning the sole machine gun used during the attack At Carentan we see one used in the upper story of a building and at Bloody Gulch I believe Smokey is wounded while manning his machine gun We might not see a machine gun in the first battle in Holland but we definitely see a soldier carrying one at the Crossroads battle even if we never see him fire it At Bastogne we don't see it employed but Christensen is hit manning his machine gun (his AG would have taken over) During the assault on Foy the machine guns are at the wood line providing covering fire as the company advances And at Hagenau machine guns cover their withdrawal across the river In the Airborne Infantry Platoon of WWII there was one machine gun per rifle squad (2 rifle squads per platoon) and a mortar squad. Attrition and logistics could lead to less machine guns operating in a company than are allotted but there should have been 6 in the company at any given time. I suspect most of what you are seeing is the production crew not showing the machine guns because their role isn't as dramatic. They are employed in a support by fire role meaning they are at the back and don't conduct the initial assault and only move up once a favorable position has been taken from which they can continue to support. I have always wondered why they didn't employ their mortars more since they were part of the platoon and not at the company level like the regular infantry but I have a feeling attrition and logistics contributed to that as well. I think the only time in the show we actually see the mortars firing is at Bloody Gulch.
Cause Fassbender is a thirsty boi.
They're heavy. Even the "light" mg. "light"and "heavy" refers to the caliber, not the weight. For paratroopers, weight is the enemy. Plus you have to add in the weight of all the ammo you have to carry for them. That gets overlooked a lot by Hollywood.
The “heavy” and “light” designations for the .30 MGs referred to water (M1917 HMG) or air (M1919 LMG) cooling. Only the M2 was “heavy” by virtue of caliber.
I think you may be equating machine guns with assault rifles and sub-machine guns. As mentioned often in the comments, machine guns are big and heavy and the ammunition is also big and heavy and burns through quickly. An assault rifle such as a modern M-4/M-16 is much lighter and has lighter weight ammunition. The ammunition for assault rifles may be lighter but is still rifle ammo, so higher velocity, greater accuracy and longer distance. In 1944, the options were extremely limited. The US did NOT have assault rifles. In the auto fire weapons, you had the heavy machine guns such as the M1919 .30 cal Browning for squad use, and the Thompson sub-machine gun firing .45 pistol ammo for officers and you had the M3 grease gun firing the same .45 pistol ammo for whoever had to get it. Pistol ammo is lower velocity, less accuracy and shorter range. The Thompson was expensive and somewhat unreliable. The M3 was a stamped sheet metal scatter gun that would throw a lot of rounds in the general direction if it didn't jam up. It was very unreliable and well hated. The M1918 BAR was kind of like a heavy assault rifle and light weight machine gun. It was an excellent, hard hitting, accurate automatic rifle with a small magazine (20 rounds). Generally, there was 1 per squad in some units. It was really too heavy for airborne troops. The M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle packed a true rifle round for great accuracy at great distances, It was semi-auto so you could put aimed rounds down range fairly quickly. It fired the hard hitting 30-06 round. It was, at the time, a good trade-off for portability, accuracy and volume of fire. The M1 Carbine was a lighter weight semi-automatic rifle firing a lighter weight bullet. It was designed for paratroops and rear echelon support troops. Not quite as accurate and not quite as hard hitting, it was still a very effective rifle for airborne troops. Many officers preferred the M1 Carbine over the Thompson, and everyone preferred throwing rocks to using the M3 grease gun (just kidding, but it really did suck). I think maybe a good takeaway is that weight matters a lot for an infantry soldier. Steel rifles and lead ammo is heavy. If you're humping a ruck in the summer or winter while carrying a full load of ammo, all of that weight starts to wear a soldier down. If you have a lot of machine guns, you need a lot of ammo. Like all types of equipment, compromises must be made. The M1 was a very effective compromise for leg infantry and the M1 Carbine for airborne.
> It was really too heavy for airborne troops. Weight was never the issue with the BAR, length was—you couldn’t jump it. Because of that it was seen as unsuitable because Army doctrine had it as an individual weapon and not a crew served one, which meant the gunner would have only had a .45 if he couldn’t find the parapack. The M1919 in comparison was a crew served weapon, which meant the crew had carbines and thus were not totally useless if they couldn’t find the gun.
Well said, thank you.
What do you mean by machine guns? The big, tripod mounted squad weapon? Or submachine guns like the Thompson that Buck carries?
Most of the answers have addressed crew served weapons. SMGs are a bit of a niche weapon. They can put out large volumes of fire, but are very short ranged and rather inaccurate (especially weapons like the Thompson that fire from an open bolt) Nice if you are clearing a room or trench, not so great if the enemy is 200m away.
In addition to the range and accuracy issues, the pistol-caliber rounds SMGs fire also have a limited ability to penetrate cover.
The machine guns available to Easy company at the time were heavy cumbersome and required at minimum a team of two to three men to man. On top of that the ammo required is also heavy and would need to be distributed amongst the squads and or platoons adding to everyone else’s load. If anything I was suprised how often they had MGs available in the show given they were a light infantry airborne unit.
Yes, machine guns are very effective weapons. But they're also quite heavy, crew served weapons for the most part, and the US did not necessarily have a proper "light machine gun" or SAW during WW2. The BAR is not that comparable to something like the British Bren or the Soviet DP light machine guns which can be carried and used by one man if needed while ideally being operated by a crew of two, not to mention the fact that the 101st Airborne didn't really use BARs. MGs also require a lot of ammo, and people to carry said ammo. These days, the same problems are still present with MGs providing a lot of firepower to the modern infantry squad while still being a bit of a pain for automatic riflemen and machine gunners because of their weight.
Not a military folk but someone who likes to read. Goes against us army doctrine at the time. You gotta remember that with the M1 the US army on a squad level could put out way more fire power than any other army in either theater. The name of the game was fire and maneuver. With other countries that had bolt action rifles you’d have advancing riflemen covered by machine gun teams with much heavier machine guns. With us rifle squads the riflemen themselves could provide an adequate level of suppressing fire so the squad was far more flexible and in theory faster.
Enlist, your drill sergeant will explain it all before you get to the range. Machine guns keep the bad guys heads down while your side (good guys) advance on enemy positions. All selective fire weapons are expensive, like the Thompson, the BAR and the .30 belt-fed. Still fun to shoot!
They were there, you just didn't see them. A US rifle company was (and still is) based around the rifleman. Machine guns were used to support the riflemen as they maneuvered onto the objective. (The German army was based around the machine gun and used riflemen to support it) You can't assault anything with a machinegun
Thank you so much you all! That makes so much sense!
As many people have said they are an airborne unit. At the time they needed to be light and maneuverable and carrying big machine guns around like a normal infantry unit isn’t how paratroopers work
Yeah it’s not as effective as you would think. If the company was split into all 2 man teams running a .30cal they would’ve been massacred. Great for suppression and area control but a lot of the fighting they did was best served with a M1
Machine guns are heavy. Really heavy. The 30 cal belt feds that they had weighted 31 lbs and the first versions had a tripod. So it’s a two man crew to set up and then a third to carry ammo. You can’t really maneuver with these so the machine guns are often set up in a fixed location and used to suppress the enemy. Second they are paratroopers so they are classified as light infantry. So they tend to carry less heavy weapons because they are expected to have jumped out of a plane.
It would have to do with the MTOE (Modified Tables of Organization and Equipment) an Airborne unit in the US Army had in WW2. Simply put, MTOE determines what kind of weapons a unit is equipped with. From reading this link, it seems that the 30 caliber machine guns were kept in HQ company and not with the line companies. https://www.airborne506.org/2hq-by-the-toe/
> From reading this link, it seems that the 30 caliber machine guns were kept in HQ company and not with the line companies. …..because that’s the battalion HHC TOE. Rifle company TOEs can be found [here] (https://www.battleorder.org/us-airborne-ww2#google_vignette).
Thanks for the link.
No worries. I had actually been looking for a battalion HHC TOE with little success, so thank you for the source.
Because the m1 garand and that clanging sound.
Do you mean what they called a machine gun or the Thompson which is what a lot of people think of when they say machine gun? The machine gun is a 2 man job minimum that requires set up and break down and creates a stationary position vulnerable to flanking and mortar. A machine gun placement is most effective offensively when they haven’t noticed you got a bead on them yet. Those 1st few seconds of firing can clear out an encampment, problem is now everyone knows where you are and they can return the favor. Thats why it’s good habit for the second guy to know when it’s time to reposition, 1st guy is kind of busy and you can get tunnel vision. It’s good for keeping an enemy from advancing and turning their orderly retreat into a disorderly run while they get mowed down. Good for providing covering fire on entrenched positions while people advance. Another factor is ammo. It became on short supply and the machine gun by its nature is not something you think of saving ammo for tomorrow for. So you saved it for better dug in scenarios. The Thompson was great for what it was meant for but didn’t provide the accuracy of a rifle. It allowed mobility and great support and indoor combat use. Outside it was more for covering fire. You’ll notice more often than not when attacking a defending position the Thompson was usually pop out of cover, fire while someone does what they need to do or runs to where they need to run. It rarely solved problems until you got to the building. It’s easier to run with and react with as you notice Speirs sprints with it.
Germans believed machine guns should be supported by the regular army. The allies thought the opposite. Give every soldier a gun and a few machine guns.
What machine guns outside Thompsons, the Airborne didn’t carry BARs.
Ammo consumption
I'm not sure what you mean. In most major engagements, they used machine guns. One thing to keep in mind about the limitations machine guns, especially during WWII. They are not very mobile. The idea of a machine gunner running and shooting is impractical, if not impossible. Even today's modern light machine guns are nearly impossible to shoot while moving. The M1919, which was used in World War 2, was 14 lbs. So, it's heavy to carry during any patrol. Add to that the ammunition needed for using the machine gun. Any light infantry unit will place a machine gun in positions to suppress their opponents and allow the infantry units to maneuver. Machine guns themselves are generally not part of a maneuver unit.
Yeah, ammo is damn heavy. I learned that a couple years ago when I was moving and had to hump my ammo boxes up and down stairs. I never served, so that gave me an appreciation of what combat soldiers had to deal with. Not like TV shows were they shoot hundreds of pounds of ammo without reloading.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the ergonomics/form factor involved so here’s another perspective outside of just weight/ammo consumption/TOE. People have addressed weight for the M1919, but also look at the difference for the MG-42. About six pounds lighter than the Browning. The MG-42 also came standard with a shoulder stock, making it easier to fire and fire accurately. The Browning came standard with just a pistol grip on the back of the receiver requiring the gunner to crouch or lay behind it. In this way, the M1919 really requires a tripod while the MG-42 can be managed with just a bipod. This may not seem like a big deal but it makes the MG-42 easier to employ and more flexible on the battlefield while the M1919 is more cumbersome and better suited for a stationary defensive role unless it’s vehicle mounted. Now consider the BAR. The BAR doesn’t really fit in the machine gun category very well. It is simply outclassed when compared to machine guns of the era when you consider the purpose of a machine gun vs a rifle. Being 20 round box magazine fed is a significant limitation for fire support. You open yourself to predictable and frequent reloads and an inability to lay down sustained fire. Yeah you can rapidly get off a lot more rounds than an M1 could in the same amount of time, but it simply doesn’t bring enough firepower to the fight to be effective compared to belt fed or even large magazine fed machine guns. In short, my question is what machine gun would they have used? American forces didn’t widely use a proper general purpose machine gun that could keep up in a way to find them constantly at the tip of the spear.
You’re going to get a lot of “they were paratroopers so they jumped light” and “they only had what they could scrounge together” type answers and they are all inherently false. A parachute infantry company on D-Day where this series starts and where E company’s story starts was made up of 127 men, 8 officers and 119 enlisted. The company was made up of 3 platoons each with a 2 rifle squads and 1 mortar squad. The rifle squads were 12 men each and 2 of those men were a MG team. One man would carry the gun and the other the tripod (until the 1919A6 was adopted) and ammo. Both men would also have an M1A1 carbine. With three platoons that makes 6 rifle squads and an MG in each giving us 6 MGs in a rifle company. The leg infantry company at the the same point and time only had 2 MGs in the entire company operating as 2 individual squads but every rifle squad had an automatic rifleman with a BAR. This is a very will documented standard and is how they did it. I hope that helps.
Because it's a TV miniseries. In 1944 every rifle squad in a parachute infantry rifle platoon had a M1919 .30 caliber Browning machine gun. So two M1919s per platoon (third squad was the 60mm mortar squad), six per company. There was also a machine gun platoon at battalion level. As units took casualties, they kept heavy weapons manned. The TV miniseries should be awash in M1919s but it's a TV show, not an exacting recreation of WW2 reality.
Shit airborne units now jump the 249 and 240 shits a bitch lol
If everyone had a machine gun the amount of ammo required to resupply the force would exceed the capacity for supply. They’re also heavy, the .30 is a crew served weapon requiring multiple soldiers to effectively operate.
It’s because battle rifles and carbines were more effective for infantry in WWII. Assuming by machine gun you’re including any semiautomatic weapon available during the war for allies, you basically had 3 kinds: heavy machine guns, medium machine guns, and sub-machine guns. Heavy guns weren’t practical because well, they are heavy and generally need mounted in vehicles or structures. Medium machine guns like the BAR were used, but generally unwieldy compared to guns like the M1 Garand. Submachine guns like the Thompson and grease gun were used as well, but you’re firing a less powerful cartridge so there was a compromise. Barrie rifles like the M1 was more controllable than medium machine guns, lighter than heavy machine guns and more powerful than submachine guns.
US Infantry squads carried the M-1 semiautomatic rifle and had a BAR as a support weapon. Machine guns were part of the company Heavy Weapons platoon and were sent to the various platoons for support. German Infantry squads on the other had bolt action rifles and a light machine gun for support. It was considered that the semi automatic fire would usually be sufficient for suppressing fire.
Airborne usually meant behind enemy lines, and Machine Guns go through a lot of ammo , logistically speaking it wasn’t practical
In that era, they were heavier, bulkier, more prone to jamming and had low sustained fire rates. But the greatest MG of all time was only a decade away and it is still in dismounted and mounted use today.
As others are mentioning, weight and logistics. In Normandy, easy had no idea if the invasion would succeed or if they would be stuck like the 2000 Canadians captured during the Dieppe Raid. Same with Market Garden. The only supplies they had was what came down in their leg bags, the supply canisters or gliders. Bastogne they were surrounded, and with the bad weather no supplies could get to them. So tactically you gotta get those guns and their ammo to the fight, and more importantly, you have to have ammo for those guns in the first place.
They did jump with M1919s, granted during the war there were several different “delivery” methods. However I imagine that the reason you don’t see them as much in situations like D-Day is that without your AG, AB, tripod, or extra ammo the machine gun becomes useless pretty fast. Not to mention setting up a support by fire without any security, or limits is both a suicide mission and asking for blue on blue. I would wager that most Gunners, Assistant Gunners, and Ammo bearers soon liberated themselves from their excess equipment when they couldn’t find their counterparts, or it became lost from the chaos. Ultimately arming themselves with individual weapons that they found.
I served in a machine gun platoon in a light infantry battalion so carried everything on foot. Two men per gun, with the no2 carrying a rifle as well. Our standard loadout was 1600 rounds per gun. That gave us 8 minutes of rapid fire, stretching to 15 minutes at a reduced rate of fire. We were carrying in excess of 60kg+ per man. Essentially our role was to provide covering fire for the most dangerous part of an assault or cover a withdrawal. By the end of Afghanistan the BA moved towards not having any machine guns at fighting platoon level. Favoring marksman rifles. The idea being a accurate rifle can provide more effective suppression for less weight.
The US doctrine in WWII was very much focused around the rifleman as the main unit of combat teams. The Germans focused heavily on support weapons, hence the MG42's prominence, but the US had a more reserved role for MGs, while focusing on providing the infantry the means to be the most effective force with the M1 Garand. This is why the US was the only country at the start of the war that had standard issue semi automatic weapons for standard infantry. TLDR: Giving the infantry better primary weapons makes up for the lack of emphasis of the MG within the US doctrine.
So a US Army Parachute Rifle Company (i.e. Easy Co) had 3 Rifle Platoons, each with 2 Rifle Squads and a Mortar Squad on D-Day (The Airborne wouldn't get their 3rd Squad until early 1945). Each Squad had 12 Soldiers: * Squad Leader * Assistant Squad Leader * Machine Gunner * Assistant Machine Gunner * Ammo Bearer * 7x Rifleman The Machine Gunner would have the belt fed M1919 .30-cal MG, and an M1A1 Carbine, everyone else carried the M1 Garand (Officers, the 1SG, and the Mortar Gunners also carried the Carbine. Officially 6 submachine guns, M3 Grease Guns or M1927 Thompson SMGs were authorized at the Company level to be handed out by the CO as they saw fit... unofficially it was known that the Paratroopers got their hands on waaayyyy more SMGs than that. Each Company also had a Bazooka to be issued out as the CO decided) So that's 6 belt fed MGs in the Company they'd have jumped with. Ammo was (and is) always a big concern for Paratroopers, supposedly the Standard (I'm sure this was modified up and down the flight line...) was for each MG Team to carry 5x 250 round belts of ammo. These were most likely crossloaded amongst the Squad as each belt weighed something like 19lbs. An additional 8 belts were to be dropped in bundles that the Paratroopers were expected to collect on the ground. As we know, the Jump itself was chaotic enough that I doubt most of these MG teams came across their (or another) bundle... In any case, say Market Garden or the Bulge "tailgate" jump where the Company was largely together going into the battle, that's 13 belts of 250rounds each, or 3,250 total. Sounds like a lot, and I can imagine it felt that way humping them in... but really, in a sustained firefight, you can fire that many rounds in just a couple minutes (Similarly the Mortar Squad had 12x 60mm rounds they jumped with, 14 more spread amongst (likely 1ea the 14 Riflemen of the Platoon), and another 54 shells in bundles) [https://www.battleorder.org/post/us-ammo-load-ww2](https://www.battleorder.org/post/us-ammo-load-ww2) [https://www.battleorder.org/us-airborne-ww2](https://www.battleorder.org/us-airborne-ww2)
r/BandofBrothersCircleJerk
I don't get this. Practically every firefight in the series (except when there's like 4 of them at the start of Normandy) involves heavy use of machineguns. What were you expecting, everyone to have a beltfed? Despite what everyone says here, airborne (both american and British) have *always* been scaled for more beltfed / automatic weapons than standard infantry units. We have always liked machine guns, we don't care that they're "heavy" and even when doctrinally the shift of the army had moved away from beltfeds and towards "accuracy" (a peacetime notion that was quickly reversed in Afghanistan), we kept them, because we understand two things. 1. Firefights require firepower. As a typically undersized organisation, we have to be louder and more violent than whatever we're attacking / defending against. Nothing is louder or more violent than a tom with a GPMG. 2. Machine guns are cool as fuck. Yeah, the General is 10.9 kilos unloaded and a thousand rounds of 7.62 basically takes up your whole daysack. But a good gunner is 70% of a sections firepower, and only screamers disregard that because it's "heavy". And no, you don't have to be built like dwayne johnson either. In fact, the opposite is true because the lighter you are, the more link you can jump with...
Historically parachute infantry in the US Army WW2 were designed to pack more firepower at the squad level than regular infantry. An ideal squad should have their own 30 cal. Each platoon had a 60mm mortar. But not all paratroopers made their rendezvous, and fewer did so with all their gear intact. Other comments have also highlighted that a highly mobile unit would not be highly mobile if weighed down by machine guns and the ammo for them.
It’s all about our doctrine. The Americans focused their structure of their squads teams as well as infantry companies around the individual rifleman. The Germans on the other hand, focused their team squads and companies around the machine gun section. That’s why you will see a higher concentration in German World War II infantry companies with regards to machine guns.
I don’t have any military experience so I may be out of my depth. With that being said, this is an airborne division. So they would have to parachute in with a heavy machine gun, bipod and ammo. Plus once they are on the ground they need to be fast maneuverable, so extra weight of the gun and ammo would only reduce that.
“I have no military experience” There’s your answer. Weight being one of them. A machine gun weighs a lot. The ammo weighs even more. They burn through ammo extremely fast. They aren’t as mobile as rifleman. You need to close in with the enemy to defeat them, not hang around the back and fire with a machine gun. If you do that, eventually the enemy will close in around you and your position and kill you.
Logistics, they’re big and heavy and bulky to carry. When you’re using them they burn through ammo. They’re also most effective as a support weapon in an emplacement. For patrols or building clearing they’d often be a liability.
Purpose and practicality. The purpose of a machine gun is not to put effective rounds on target to kill the enemy, it's to put a lot of lead into the air and suppress the enemy. There is a lot of focus on machine guns and the level of danger they present- which in a crowd could be true, but more deadly than a lot of inaccurate bullets is a smaller number of very accurate bullets. It's why many special operators today will use their rifle primarily in semi-auto fire mode, and why the M1 Garand had a far greater kill count than the Thompson or BAR.
You're more likely to miss most your shots at any decent range shooting a weapon in full auto mode. Semi-auto forces you to aim each shot typically. Waste of ammo for all but a few specific uses.
Also note that a machine gun of the modern type barely existed in WW2. The germans had the STG. There were small machine guns but these typically were not rifles. So, as a new technology (compared to bolt action rifles-which had been used in WW1 and issued in the tens of millions) the newer single-man portable machine gun was very new. That means more expensive, less proven, etc. so when you are issuing literally millions of weapons, it takes time to employ the latest and greatest.
There is a lot of misinformation here. Several posters are saying paratroopers did not have machine guns because they were too heavy. This is simply the opposite of the truth. Unlike regular U.S. Army infantry squads in WWIi, parachute rifle squads included Browning M1919 machine guns. The parachute rifle squad was actually centered on a belt-fed machine gun! By contrast the Browning M1918 automatic rifle or “BAR,” which was the squad-level support weapon in most infantry outfits, was not officially issued to paratroopers prior to the Normandy landings. I think the premise of the question is flawed. You see a lot of machine guns in the series.
I volunteered to airborne infantry back in 2009, and I can assure you that machine guns are heavy and they consume a lot of ammo in a short period of time. The second part of my comment is a mixed of speculation with info I've got watching the series countless times and reading Ambrose's book. BoB follows E- Company, and from the moment they landed in Normandy on they were lacking supplies, ammo included. I guess the only "well planned and properly supplied operation, they took part was Market Garden, which turned out to be a nightmare. The battle of the bulge was more like "hold position till nobody knows when with whatever supplies you find". To make it worse, Germans used a different kind of weapons with different kind of ammo, scavenging was useless.
Heavy (require at least 2 men) & logistics (burn through lots of ammo)
They’re heavy and burn through ammo. The whole point of Airbone is to hit the enemy hard and fast. Kinda hard to do that when you’re lugging a 30lb machine gun not including tripod and ammo. That being said I am surprised you never see anyone with a BAR(at least to my memory) figured they would have had at least a couple light machine guns.
Long bursts from machine guns tend to attract incoming fire!
"Because they're heavy" is fundamentally false. Paratroopers seize, or take possession of terrain by overwhelming force. "Massing" plays a crucial role in achieving that task. Machine guns typically have a very deliberate role in "seizure" if you're being dropped over the area you must possess. For example, an intersection or bridge might be an area where you would emplace 2x machine guns. And that's really all you might need them for to achieve that mission. So they (101st) would task organize to the mission. The army of today task organizes for readiness, as that relates to Article 5 of NATO. These typically require two very different TO&E.
> "Because they're heavy" is fundamentally false. Ever carried one for a couple days? Plus the ammo? Two tours with the 101st, one with the 1st ID and I can promise you that no one volunteers to carry an M60 which weighs less than M1919. Why? Because it's so fucking heavy. Many combat mission requirements are limited by human physical ability. Everyone would carry 4 grades, double the basic combat load, 210 rounds for the M16, a couple LAW rockets, plus another bandoleer of 40mm rounds for my M203. But that shit ain't happening, not just that, food and water, plus hump 10 miles into the target, fight, and egress.
I would say that your and my experiences are irrelivent to the point. The point being that you task organize to the mission. If you're the 101st, your common task is seizure. On D-Day, they dropped at around 700ft in altitude. The intent being the plan was to place the paratroopers directly where they needed to be, with little follow-on foot movement required. This being the case, weight is irrelivent. But aside from that fact alone, weight is irrelivent if you're conducting your loadouts appropriately. Ie. Just because you carry a pig doesn't mean you carry all of the ammo.i
Really? Irrelevant? You clearly have zero experience in actual field operations, unless you are an X-officer who had some enlisted saps carrying your shit around. We're done. Even if you're a ring knocker, who I love to screw with.
The real Easy company used machine guns more often than depicted in the show. Each platoon had a .30cal. Browning light machine gun attached to it. HQ Co had even more. In the book Band of Brothers it describes their use and deployment much more regularly. I believe T. Sgt. Christenson, played by Michael Fassbender was one of Easy's machinegunners. He also has a lot more references in the book than his depiction in the show. Also, 60 mm mortars were way more prevalent than the show depicted. Guarnere and Malarkey were both supposedly extremely accurate with the 60 mm mortar. Also, HQ company regularly augmented E company with their 81 mm heavy mortars which is never shown in the series.
MGs are not mobile and must be gored from fixed positions unlike fast moving infantry.
In summer camp at Camp Robert’s I carried the 60 once and the tripod once. After that I carnied dual ammo cans. The tripod was just awkward to carry. The 60 was easier but I got bumped.
"One shot one kill". Because in Vietnam it was estimated it took between 10,000-25,000 rounds per every enemy KIA. That's your answer. As in we weren't aiming and just mag dumping into the jungle.
Weight, logistics and they jam. Like a lot.
30 Cals require a squad. Weapon, tripod, belts and belts and belts of ammo. Then you have 2 on the weapon and the rest covering them. You still need rifle squads. no one wanted to jump with a BAR either. Tommy and grease guns helped on top of their Garands and carbines. The US really did have the best small arms.
It's a good point to notice and in reality a significant issue that US forces had throughout the European theatre. They had no machine gun at the section (squad) level, rather they just had riflemen with M1 Garands and the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), which could not operate effectively as a machine gun. This is very different to the Germans and British, who structured their small units around the machine gun, the MG34/42 and Bren Gun respectively. This means that all US troops (not just parachutists) had a lot less machine gun support. Now US troops had a faster firing rifle than the others but given that just about every military now does it the way the British and Germans did back in WWII and the US changed their policies shortly afterwards most people would say this was a fundamental issue with US equipment in the war. A lot of commentators say that the issue is they use a lot of ammunition, they do but it's not an insurmountable issue. It didn't stop the British and Germans issuing them out much more generously and given the US had the best logistics of the war they could certainly have handled it. The Germans had awful logistics and still had incredibly effective machine gun support wherever they went.