>by then, why didn't they just make every component bigger/beefier to accomodate rifle rounds
German doctrine would built around the infantry serving the machine gun and at the time did not see a reason to develop a semi auto rifle with the constraints of the scarce German industry pre WW2 during rearmament
Soviets had the SVT38/SVT40 which large swathes of were captured during the first year of operation barb. Soviets just sticked to producing Mosins due to the factories already producing them
Most handguns and submachine guns of WW2 were simple blowback where you are only holding the bolt closed with spring pressure and the inertia of the bolt. To do the same with a .308 would mean an over 10 pound bolt which is why you have to use a more complicated operation to make a rifle semi auto which means more engineering and more complicated manufacturing which means when countries made designs they were never produced in number to be widely distributed. The US just so happened to have very good industrial organization and capacity to be the outlier.
Closest thing would probably be recoil (long or short) operated rifles like the Remington model 8 or the Johnson m1941. These didn’t use a slide or tilting barrel like a 1911 though, just a barrel that moves straight back to unlock the bolt after the bullet passes and pressure has decreased enough. Seeing one fired in slow motion is pretty cool because you can see the barrel move.
Cost and time of manufacture.
The M1928 Thompson at the beginning of the war was like $70 a gun. The M1 Grand got as low as $12 a gun. Other nations didn't have the industry to make the change.
Soviets adopted first selfloader in 1936, with new models coming in 1938, 1940 and 1945.
Czechs made proper rifle in 1929 but they weren't good enough to impress Czech governent. Good enough to impress China and some minor nations.
Poles got one rifle too.
Yes, the problem was to made a gun that would feed full power rifle rounds reliably, reload from both detachable magazines and stripper clips, would reliably extract rounds, be easy to clean, affordable to make. And some nations also wanted it to be capable of full-auto fire and/or be precise enough for proper marksmanship
The coming of intermediate cartridge was the blessing.
https://i.imgur.com/t4ZgVDX.jpg
Even Che admired the M1. Similarly, Mao admired George Washington and didn't care for Confucious strangely enough. I don't care for their godless communism to be honest.
IIRC his favourite gun during cuban revolution was Cristobal M2 in .30 Carbine.
A semi auto battle rifle had to meet several competing requirements to be viable. And they weren't really solved by existing designs. You'd think it would be easy because machine guns and semi auto pistols exist. But most of those were recoil operated actions. And those dont lend themselves to accuracy. A battle rifle doesn't need to be a sniper rifle but it needs to be accurate enough to hit a man sized target at combat ranges reliably. MG's dont have to be very accurate, they are mostly about suppression. And pistols are short ranged by their nature. Blowback wont work because it doesn't scale well. So you need a gas operated rifle. And gas systems were the last to get developed. And of the rifles developed in WW2, the M1 wasn't just the only successful one. But its also the only one that has a system that lived on. The M1 begot the AK. And the AK is still around and getting active development. We even went full circle with the PSA Jakl, its come home to the US.
Why was gas the last? Well it wasn't that much later. Commercial gas operated guns existed even back in WW1. But the difference between a commercial gun and a military one is pretty big. Militaries demand a lot of reliability. Especially the ability to perform in stupid conditions. Like after being exposed to nature for awhile. Or firing after being completely submerged in water. Or firing overcharged ammo without failing. Gas operated rifles suffered problems with fouling, parts breakage and tuning the gas system for years. Garand spent a long time getting the M1 reliable enough. In comparison blowback and recoil operation are really simple and forgiving.
The Garand has as much influence on the AK-47 as the Chauchat does. Which is to say not much at all.
... but Americans love nothing more than to take something prolific and claim they actually invented it because convoluted reasons.
Kalashnikov making a failed prototype with inspiration from the Garand, losing to the SKS, and then having to go back to the drawing board to design a new and actually functional rifle (and based on the STG 44) doesn't mean the AK-47 is a fricking Garand derivative lol
The ak op has system design design is a lot closer to the mp44 than the garand. With both having a stamped tube above the barrel mounted around the same position on the barrel and op rod/piston and charging handle having a similar layout
100+ million people means you have a better chance of a good engineers popping up that can do a good design and have the industrial capability to actually make it.
Soviets also had great engineers for the same reason, but were greatly hampered by the whole "Stalin likes executing huge swathes of his people arbitrarily", and still they had the SVT-40
Although they were the leaders in arming troops with repeating arms saying they adopted pre war is a stretch. Nearly all troops were still using 1903 rifles at the kick off in '41
Even Che admired the M1. Similarly, Mao admired George Washington and didn't care for Confucious strangely enough. I don't care for their godless communism to be honest.
Communists don't like Confucious because confucianism and classical imperial chinese legalism do NOT mix. Maoism is basically communism blended with the logical end conclusion of imperial legalism, where the state has absolute death-grip on the neck of Chinese people, and uses communism as a cudgel to control the economy far more than ever was possible during the 891st Xing Li Dragon Rebellion of 1321, casualties 8,307,653, as reported by historian Lo Pan.
Well, i should say Maoism is a rural-based communism. But the CCP moved on after him away from the rural aspect, but it kept the "we can nationalize anyone, at any time, anywhere, and you can't do a damn thing about it, and also you don't own anything you just lease it for several generations"
The US was the only ones to seriously pursue giving every man a semi-auto in the 30s so they already had adopted a fantastic semi-auto design in 1934 with the Garand. By their entry into the war they had already perfected the manufacturing so they could crank out millions of them.
Soviets had a good design with the SVT at the start of the war, and aimed for it to be the standard infantry arm, but it was too complicated and the demand for rifles was too high so they focused on the Mosin.
Nazis were way behind with semi-autos due to their focus on the MG34 so they only started seriously pursing a semi-auto in 41 and their designs were pretty average overall. They made up for it by having the best weapon of the war in the StG-44 though.
>Soviets had a good design with the SVT at the start of the war,
No. SVT is inherently flawed design down to the principle of he operation. There is good Russian book on SVT with graphs ofntime velocity of moving parts. SVT bolt opened and started moving backwards when bullet was still in barrel and where was full pressure in barrel, it was case splitting machine. Tokarev thought it was clever trick that allows to lighten up moveling parts (because now you don't need relatively heavier bolt carrier that has enough inertia for all stages of operation because bolt gets addition kick of speed by case pushed out from the barrel by pressure). In some way he was right it was only way to fit rifle into weight requirements there was no weight budget for heavy AK style bolt carrier group. But rifle ended inherently finicky and unreliable, too little gas and its short stroke malfunction just too much and it splits case.
Remember Soveits never ever returned back to SVT operation principals. And AK-47 was heavier than SVT but they reavulated priorities after SVT fiasco and put realibility ahead of the weight. And accepted heavier rifle firing weak and short round over lighter real battle rifle.
Danes had a semi auto rifle adopted in the 1890s. Same with the Italians with the Cei rigotti .But the French were the first to actually implement several thousand for infantry use with the rsc 1917
Lack of engineering experience and production capabilities. I mean if you teleport AK-47 in the year 1930 people would be able to figure out trick. But do two things at once was impossible that earlier. Remember everything you use didn't exist and someone invented it first.
It’s cheaper to mass produce bolties and they are accurate and effective
Riflemen are just there to hold the enemy in place while combined arms kill them no?
Germans went all in on universal MG development interwar and their firepower being primary, no the riflemen. The semiauto was gimped at design inception with bullshit requirements (like the back up bolt and over gassing for fear of icing up), and doctrinally intended just for DMR use.
Soviets were working on it but with all the internal democide going on wasn't mature once Barbarossa gets started.
British weren't anywhere close and could never retool under needing Lend Lease handouts conditions, and why bother when Yanks are just going to cheese the Garand into existence anyways.
French political bullshit was a problem. Finns & Swiss were just small.
Because
Armies went from flintlocks to cap n' ball in the 1830's
From cap and ball to single shot, black powder cartridge rifles in the 1860's-1870's
(Some from single shot, black powder cartridge rifles to black powder cartridge repeaters during the early 1880's)
From black powder cartridge single shot rifles to smokeless powder repeaters in the 1880's-1890's.
Rapid firearms development and the advent of mass produciton was costing governments shit tons of money during that time, and once they had bolt action rifle production lines set up and running WW1 came around. Everyone believed this to be 'the War to End all Wars', so even though reliable semiauto's were around during the interwar years, for any country who wasn't able to get rich off WW1 paying for new machines, production lines, engineers and/or patents to manufacture guns that shoot a little bit faster, in a time during which no one was anticipating war, was just a needless expense.
Once the mid thirties rolled around and intel was gathered about the Germans re-arming, several countries started hastily develloping semi-auto rifles, like the Soviet Union (SVT-38), France (MAS-40) and Belgium (FN Model 1937), but in most cases the War came faster than the rifles could be developped.
On another note, most armies were still based around individual marksmanship, and in a lot of minds at the time this could better be achieved with a bolt action rifle because new = bad.
Even 1.5 to 2 is a stretch: The British Army evaluated the Garand after the war and found that rifle sections with Enfields had the same rate of fire, but were more accurate.
Even "rapid fire" in the US Army doctrine was only 12 shots per minute - the rifle can fire faster, but you can't reliably and accurately acquire and engage targets with a .30 caliber rifle faster than that.
1- Cost
The fact was SMGs were far cheaper, so if you were thinking you wanted a rapid fire weapon... why not just go with SMGs? The Brits leaned real hard into the Sten, for instance. Blowback was impractical for full-powered rifle rounds of the era. Look at the British prototype blowback 7.62x51 nato "emergency" production rifle during the coldwar, and you'll see an xbox hueg stupid rifle that is full power blowback. Is it cheap? Probably. Is it stupid? Absolutely.
2- Magazines.
You live in an era of cheap magazines that are universally interchangeable for a given gun model. You can expect 99.9% of glock 19 magazines to fit all other glock 19s in a police department, and 99.9% of AR pmags should run flawlessly in any production AR made probably ever. This was not the case in the first half of the 20th century. Magazines from that era, and even after in commie countries, were often etched with a serial number matching that gun. Each magazine was carefully checked to ensure it would fit that gun properly. Now by ww2 this was much better, but if you were buying some gun from 1910-20, you best keep VERY close track of your mags. For that matter, it was expected soldiers would just lose them, which is why they came up with the M1 garand clips or stripper clips as an alternative. Cheap, disposable, works. The SKS is the stripper clip semi auto thought train taken to its logical conclusion and would have fit in ww2 well. Among the semi-autos that WERE used in WW2 by non-US countries, mags were usually in far shorter supply than we'd expect to be issued today. Got a SVT40? Great, here's your whopping 2 magazines, comrade, don't lose them..
This btw is partly why revolvers persisted in the police force too, you can't really lose a revolver cylinder the same way you can a magazine.
3- People more or less started with ww1 gear, and bombing meant you couldn't get new stuff regularly unless you were the Americans.
Germany didn't have the industrial capacity as well as the necessity since infantry units were centered around the MG. Speciality weapons like the G41/G43 and FG-42 did exist, but we're neither cost efficient or reliable (in the case of the G41 and 43)
The Soviets tried but the fact that they insisted on using the rimmed 7.62x54R caused many issues according to Tokarev and Simonov, which wasn't fixed until the Soviets adapted the SKS and 7.62x39. If the war lasted a year or so longer we could have seen the Soviets adapt the SKS as their main rifle.
The Brits and Japanese were too industrially fricked to even try honestly.
Because the doctrine in other nations revolved around the machine gun, not the rifleman.
... and even then it's a stretch to say the US adopted it: Even with the benefit of joining late and two years after the start of WWII, the vast majority of the US armed forced was still using 1903 Springfields.
What was so hard anyway? All the powers had semi pistols by then, why didn't they just make every component bigger/beefier to accomodate rifle rounds?
>by then, why didn't they just make every component bigger/beefier to accomodate rifle rounds
German doctrine would built around the infantry serving the machine gun and at the time did not see a reason to develop a semi auto rifle with the constraints of the scarce German industry pre WW2 during rearmament
Soviets had the SVT38/SVT40 which large swathes of were captured during the first year of operation barb. Soviets just sticked to producing Mosins due to the factories already producing them
ywnbaw
Most handguns and submachine guns of WW2 were simple blowback where you are only holding the bolt closed with spring pressure and the inertia of the bolt. To do the same with a .308 would mean an over 10 pound bolt which is why you have to use a more complicated operation to make a rifle semi auto which means more engineering and more complicated manufacturing which means when countries made designs they were never produced in number to be widely distributed. The US just so happened to have very good industrial organization and capacity to be the outlier.
What the hell would a 1911 style action rifle look like?
I don't see why it wouldn't work, though there's probably a reason no-ones tried it.
Closest thing would probably be recoil (long or short) operated rifles like the Remington model 8 or the Johnson m1941. These didn’t use a slide or tilting barrel like a 1911 though, just a barrel that moves straight back to unlock the bolt after the bullet passes and pressure has decreased enough. Seeing one fired in slow motion is pretty cool because you can see the barrel move.
Very good point someone pointed out a Thompson weighed 10lbs empty compared to the 30 carbine at only 5lbs loaded
>why didn't those stoopid adultz just do what I would've done?
you need to be 18 or older to post here
>why didn't people with old technology just make modern technology
That is not how any of it works
Two completely different designs are needed
With the only common thing being that they are semi auto
Cost and time of manufacture.
The M1928 Thompson at the beginning of the war was like $70 a gun. The M1 Grand got as low as $12 a gun. Other nations didn't have the industry to make the change.
>why didn't they just make every component bigger/beefier to accomodate rifle rounds?
i srsly hope this is bait
Soviets adopted first selfloader in 1936, with new models coming in 1938, 1940 and 1945.
Czechs made proper rifle in 1929 but they weren't good enough to impress Czech governent. Good enough to impress China and some minor nations.
Poles got one rifle too.
Yes, the problem was to made a gun that would feed full power rifle rounds reliably, reload from both detachable magazines and stripper clips, would reliably extract rounds, be easy to clean, affordable to make. And some nations also wanted it to be capable of full-auto fire and/or be precise enough for proper marksmanship
The coming of intermediate cartridge was the blessing.
IIRC his favourite gun during cuban revolution was Cristobal M2 in .30 Carbine.
A semi auto battle rifle had to meet several competing requirements to be viable. And they weren't really solved by existing designs. You'd think it would be easy because machine guns and semi auto pistols exist. But most of those were recoil operated actions. And those dont lend themselves to accuracy. A battle rifle doesn't need to be a sniper rifle but it needs to be accurate enough to hit a man sized target at combat ranges reliably. MG's dont have to be very accurate, they are mostly about suppression. And pistols are short ranged by their nature. Blowback wont work because it doesn't scale well. So you need a gas operated rifle. And gas systems were the last to get developed. And of the rifles developed in WW2, the M1 wasn't just the only successful one. But its also the only one that has a system that lived on. The M1 begot the AK. And the AK is still around and getting active development. We even went full circle with the PSA Jakl, its come home to the US.
Why was gas the last? Well it wasn't that much later. Commercial gas operated guns existed even back in WW1. But the difference between a commercial gun and a military one is pretty big. Militaries demand a lot of reliability. Especially the ability to perform in stupid conditions. Like after being exposed to nature for awhile. Or firing after being completely submerged in water. Or firing overcharged ammo without failing. Gas operated rifles suffered problems with fouling, parts breakage and tuning the gas system for years. Garand spent a long time getting the M1 reliable enough. In comparison blowback and recoil operation are really simple and forgiving.
>The M1 begot the AK
You spend too much time on Wikipedia.
The Garand has as much influence on the AK-47 as the Chauchat does. Which is to say not much at all.
... but Americans love nothing more than to take something prolific and claim they actually invented it because convoluted reasons.
Kalashnikov making a failed prototype with inspiration from the Garand, losing to the SKS, and then having to go back to the drawing board to design a new and actually functional rifle (and based on the STG 44) doesn't mean the AK-47 is a fricking Garand derivative lol
The AK gas system is the Garand's but upside down. The AK action has almost nothing in common with the tilting-bolt MP44.
The ak op has system design design is a lot closer to the mp44 than the garand. With both having a stamped tube above the barrel mounted around the same position on the barrel and op rod/piston and charging handle having a similar layout
100+ million people means you have a better chance of a good engineers popping up that can do a good design and have the industrial capability to actually make it.
Soviets also had great engineers for the same reason, but were greatly hampered by the whole "Stalin likes executing huge swathes of his people arbitrarily", and still they had the SVT-40
Because the US was bombing Germany and the Soviets were gay morons and just dumped the SVT 40
Although they were the leaders in arming troops with repeating arms saying they adopted pre war is a stretch. Nearly all troops were still using 1903 rifles at the kick off in '41
luv me FN49
Junk
compared to what? the garand? nothing beats that.
Even Che admired the M1. Similarly, Mao admired George Washington and didn't care for Confucious strangely enough. I don't care for their godless communism to be honest.
Communists don't like Confucious because confucianism and classical imperial chinese legalism do NOT mix. Maoism is basically communism blended with the logical end conclusion of imperial legalism, where the state has absolute death-grip on the neck of Chinese people, and uses communism as a cudgel to control the economy far more than ever was possible during the 891st Xing Li Dragon Rebellion of 1321, casualties 8,307,653, as reported by historian Lo Pan.
Well, i should say Maoism is a rural-based communism. But the CCP moved on after him away from the rural aspect, but it kept the "we can nationalize anyone, at any time, anywhere, and you can't do a damn thing about it, and also you don't own anything you just lease it for several generations"
Laughs in SVT38
The US was the only ones to seriously pursue giving every man a semi-auto in the 30s so they already had adopted a fantastic semi-auto design in 1934 with the Garand. By their entry into the war they had already perfected the manufacturing so they could crank out millions of them.
Soviets had a good design with the SVT at the start of the war, and aimed for it to be the standard infantry arm, but it was too complicated and the demand for rifles was too high so they focused on the Mosin.
Nazis were way behind with semi-autos due to their focus on the MG34 so they only started seriously pursing a semi-auto in 41 and their designs were pretty average overall. They made up for it by having the best weapon of the war in the StG-44 though.
>Soviets had a good design with the SVT at the start of the war,
No. SVT is inherently flawed design down to the principle of he operation. There is good Russian book on SVT with graphs ofntime velocity of moving parts. SVT bolt opened and started moving backwards when bullet was still in barrel and where was full pressure in barrel, it was case splitting machine. Tokarev thought it was clever trick that allows to lighten up moveling parts (because now you don't need relatively heavier bolt carrier that has enough inertia for all stages of operation because bolt gets addition kick of speed by case pushed out from the barrel by pressure). In some way he was right it was only way to fit rifle into weight requirements there was no weight budget for heavy AK style bolt carrier group. But rifle ended inherently finicky and unreliable, too little gas and its short stroke malfunction just too much and it splits case.
Remember Soveits never ever returned back to SVT operation principals. And AK-47 was heavier than SVT but they reavulated priorities after SVT fiasco and put realibility ahead of the weight. And accepted heavier rifle firing weak and short round over lighter real battle rifle.
Mexico had one pre-WWI.
Danes had a semi auto rifle adopted in the 1890s. Same with the Italians with the Cei rigotti .But the French were the first to actually implement several thousand for infantry use with the rsc 1917
The soviets had one and were getting set to standardize on it.
Then the Germans invaded and took them all.
never underestimate the sheer tenacity of old fricks in charge of military procurement to resist deviating from convention
>*frog noices*
Lack of engineering experience and production capabilities. I mean if you teleport AK-47 in the year 1930 people would be able to figure out trick. But do two things at once was impossible that earlier. Remember everything you use didn't exist and someone invented it first.
Took the Soviets 10 years to even get the stamping right.
It’s cheaper to mass produce bolties and they are accurate and effective
Riflemen are just there to hold the enemy in place while combined arms kill them no?
Because their army was tiny, literally not even in the top 50 in the 1930's
The Soviet Union also did
They just had like 10x more troops
>Why was the US the only one to adopt a semi auto rifle pre WW2?
Germans went all in on universal MG development interwar and their firepower being primary, no the riflemen. The semiauto was gimped at design inception with bullshit requirements (like the back up bolt and over gassing for fear of icing up), and doctrinally intended just for DMR use.
Soviets were working on it but with all the internal democide going on wasn't mature once Barbarossa gets started.
British weren't anywhere close and could never retool under needing Lend Lease handouts conditions, and why bother when Yanks are just going to cheese the Garand into existence anyways.
French political bullshit was a problem. Finns & Swiss were just small.
Because
Armies went from flintlocks to cap n' ball in the 1830's
From cap and ball to single shot, black powder cartridge rifles in the 1860's-1870's
(Some from single shot, black powder cartridge rifles to black powder cartridge repeaters during the early 1880's)
From black powder cartridge single shot rifles to smokeless powder repeaters in the 1880's-1890's.
Rapid firearms development and the advent of mass produciton was costing governments shit tons of money during that time, and once they had bolt action rifle production lines set up and running WW1 came around. Everyone believed this to be 'the War to End all Wars', so even though reliable semiauto's were around during the interwar years, for any country who wasn't able to get rich off WW1 paying for new machines, production lines, engineers and/or patents to manufacture guns that shoot a little bit faster, in a time during which no one was anticipating war, was just a needless expense.
Once the mid thirties rolled around and intel was gathered about the Germans re-arming, several countries started hastily develloping semi-auto rifles, like the Soviet Union (SVT-38), France (MAS-40) and Belgium (FN Model 1937), but in most cases the War came faster than the rifles could be developped.
On another note, most armies were still based around individual marksmanship, and in a lot of minds at the time this could better be achieved with a bolt action rifle because new = bad.
The benefit of increasing individual rifleman RoF by 1.5-2x was not seen as a worthwhile investment
Even 1.5 to 2 is a stretch: The British Army evaluated the Garand after the war and found that rifle sections with Enfields had the same rate of fire, but were more accurate.
Even "rapid fire" in the US Army doctrine was only 12 shots per minute - the rifle can fire faster, but you can't reliably and accurately acquire and engage targets with a .30 caliber rifle faster than that.
bull fricking shit
Brits will say anything than admit they were a drag for most of the war and Singapore was the worst disaster in their Empire history
america was 99% unaffected by bombings or attacks, they had a completely secure manufacturing base.
Several reasons.
1- Cost
The fact was SMGs were far cheaper, so if you were thinking you wanted a rapid fire weapon... why not just go with SMGs? The Brits leaned real hard into the Sten, for instance. Blowback was impractical for full-powered rifle rounds of the era. Look at the British prototype blowback 7.62x51 nato "emergency" production rifle during the coldwar, and you'll see an xbox hueg stupid rifle that is full power blowback. Is it cheap? Probably. Is it stupid? Absolutely.
2- Magazines.
You live in an era of cheap magazines that are universally interchangeable for a given gun model. You can expect 99.9% of glock 19 magazines to fit all other glock 19s in a police department, and 99.9% of AR pmags should run flawlessly in any production AR made probably ever. This was not the case in the first half of the 20th century. Magazines from that era, and even after in commie countries, were often etched with a serial number matching that gun. Each magazine was carefully checked to ensure it would fit that gun properly. Now by ww2 this was much better, but if you were buying some gun from 1910-20, you best keep VERY close track of your mags. For that matter, it was expected soldiers would just lose them, which is why they came up with the M1 garand clips or stripper clips as an alternative. Cheap, disposable, works. The SKS is the stripper clip semi auto thought train taken to its logical conclusion and would have fit in ww2 well. Among the semi-autos that WERE used in WW2 by non-US countries, mags were usually in far shorter supply than we'd expect to be issued today. Got a SVT40? Great, here's your whopping 2 magazines, comrade, don't lose them..
This btw is partly why revolvers persisted in the police force too, you can't really lose a revolver cylinder the same way you can a magazine.
3- People more or less started with ww1 gear, and bombing meant you couldn't get new stuff regularly unless you were the Americans.
Germany didn't have the industrial capacity as well as the necessity since infantry units were centered around the MG. Speciality weapons like the G41/G43 and FG-42 did exist, but we're neither cost efficient or reliable (in the case of the G41 and 43)
The Soviets tried but the fact that they insisted on using the rimmed 7.62x54R caused many issues according to Tokarev and Simonov, which wasn't fixed until the Soviets adapted the SKS and 7.62x39. If the war lasted a year or so longer we could have seen the Soviets adapt the SKS as their main rifle.
The Brits and Japanese were too industrially fricked to even try honestly.
Because the doctrine in other nations revolved around the machine gun, not the rifleman.
... and even then it's a stretch to say the US adopted it: Even with the benefit of joining late and two years after the start of WWII, the vast majority of the US armed forced was still using 1903 Springfields.
because we're better