Rifleman accuracy standards in WW2

might be mentioned here:

http://www.archive.org/details/Rifle_Marksmanship_with_M1_Rifle_Part_1

mshootnit, I was going to post the same video ... there's a part @ also, watch it all when you have the time, folks.

Luckily there are still two WWII veterans that I have talked to about the extent and duration of their firearms training.

The first is the Pot Shots Chairman for my Gun Club. Sammy volunteered and was accepted into the Navy. He was a communications specialist; his job was to relay the communications between the Command Ship and the Ground Commanders. That meant he was landed second wave on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. If you don’t know, to be on an early wave was tantamount to a death sentence.

Sammy got exactly twenty shots of familiarization before he shipped to a combat zone. Ten shots at 200 yards one day, ten shots at 200 yards another day. Each time at the range he was issued a different carbine. One of these carbines, with the L left on the highest elevation, aiming at the top of the target, he was able to hit the middle!

Sammy teaches Pot Shots because he is certain that if his Dad had not taught him how to shoot he would be dead now. Sammy does not like to talk about it, still has nightmares. He has referred to the soldiers of that era as “cannon fodder”.

The second is my Uncle. Still alive and was 101 Airborne. Dropped Normandy, Market Garden, captured Bastogne.

He had exactly nine rounds of familiarization with his M1919 before he dropped over Normandy. He, and his assistant gunner, were so unfamiliar with the mechanism that they did not know it was unsafe to have a round chambered: he assumed there was some sort of a safety. As they were setting up the M1919, his bud had his finger over the muzzle. They managed to bump the trigger mechanism on the ground and his Bud lost that finger.

Prior to the war he lived on a farm and ran a Trap Line and hunted small game for food. The family were so broke that he only wore shoes in the winter. I am certain that his early exposure to firearms helped him shoot straight.

Their experiences are consistent with what I have read in print, the US military was just shoveling people out to the front. If you had not learned marksmanship before you got out there, you had to learn on the job. Life expectancy for a front line Dogface was in weeks, not months. So, you were probably dead before you got a good weapons zero. The American Rifleman ran a series during the war about marksmanship and the services. I forget the author. By the time you get to 1944 Officers were forbidding their men to shoot at targets 300 yards or greater. The hit probability was zero and it just got the enemy mad.

And guess what, this low standard of marksmanship is with us all the way up to our invasion of Iraq. Private Jessica Lynch had so little weapons training that she did not know how to clear a jam in her M16. She said on 60 minutes “it jammed”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lynch She had not cleaned the thing since the invasion and when it stopped functioning, she had no idea how to make it work again.

I'm not sure what the actual MOA standard for training was, but my father was a WWII vet who joined the army in 1939 when they still trained on Springfields. He taught all his sons to shoot the "army" way. A couple of those lessons are worth passing on, because it's being lost to modern shooters.

I can't say how much training might have dropped during the emergency after we actually went to war.

The primary purpose of a sling is not to dangle a rifle from your shoulder, but as a shooting aid. You cinch the sling up fairly short, pop your left elbow through and wrap a length around your wrist before grabbing the forearm, then extend the elbow until the sling is rigid. It becomes automatic after you practice and makes field shooting much easier, yet I see fairly few people who know how to do this today.

The other thing (and this really set the old man off!) was seeing people break their sight picture between shots. You do not have to take your cheek off the stock when cycling the bolt. Simply stay welded to the stock while you cycle your bolt. Today, not 1 in a 100 does it this way - they lift their head and sometimes even take the stock off the shoulder while cycling the bolt, then reacquire the sight picture for the next shot. This slows your shooting down to no purpose.

Those old guys could shoot, but those very fundamental lessons are being lost to modern shooters.

From what I've read and heard about the various military forces, our guys got a lot more training than most. The Marines going into Iwo trained for months, as detailed in "Flags of Our Fathers." That doesn't mean everyone who got caught up in the fighting had that level of training, though. And in a lot of cases the training ended up being for the wrong front or the wrong theater. The 7th ID that liberated Attu trained for desert combat for months in expectation of going to North Africa. So much for that. It was a really huge war--way beyond anything we have since seen--and anything could happen. Some units got sent with virtually no training, other units did nothing *BUT* train for year after year getting circulated around far from combat.

Still, it was far better to be in the US military than any other. The French had archaic communications and terrible leadership, the British had very meager resources, the Germans had enemies on all sides, the Red Army men were true cannon fodder, and the Japanese were expected to die rather than surrender. Very few paid much attention to marksmanship for ordinary infantry soldiers, apart from our forces and maybe the Finns.

might be mentioned here:

http://www.archive.org/details/Rifle...1_Rifle_Part_1

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. From my understanding, the standard was 4 MOA.

4MOA. Hmmmmm.......about the capability of the AK47.................

From my understanding, the standard was 4 MOA.

Click to expand...

I believe that is correct, because the average M1 Garand requirement was 3-4 MOA with ball ammo.



NCsmitty

The accuracy standard for a rifle was 4 MOA, in terms of military acceptance and quality control. I don't believe that was an accuracy standard for the shooters though.

It's kind of a weird question, anyway, since minute of man against elusive and fleeting targets is the real goal of combat shooting. WW2 era training, even for guys who got lots of it, did not get very good training for real world shooting. Even the aforementioned Jessica Lynch got better training for combat marksmanship than a guy going into a WW2 era leg infantry division as a rifleman.

I've seen accounts from WW2 that vary wildly. From Lt. John George, a NRA high power rifle shooter before the war who took his own custom Springfield ’03 and Winchester to war for sniping (and he did such on Guadalcanal and in Burma as part of the 5307th) and Audie Murphy, who learned to shoot as a boy to bring back food for his family (he was sixth of 12 children and both parents were dead while he was still a teenager.)

Others who were drafted but never seen a gun in their lives had just basic training to learn to shoot, and we all here know to really SHOOT you need far far more than that! Hence the wide use of ACOG, EOT, Aimpoint, and other sights now on the M16 and M4!

Combat accuracy during WW2? I’d suspect at the very first of the war most of the U.S. soldiers had been in the service a while and could shoot fairly well. THESE WERE NOT DRAFTIES! And since the Springfield ‘03 was actually still used a lot (don’t believe me? Look at the films of the invasion of North Africa and the Marines on Guadalcanal, they used ‘03s!)

I’d expect an American GI rifleman at the first of the war to make hits out to 300 yards, no problem, as long as it wasn’t a running shot. Later, after a lot of city kids were drafted, I suspect seeing them hit a man at 100 yards to be a good shot.

Deaf

Greetings,

I read years ago the memoirs of a Canadian Veteran who did Dieppe up to the end of the war. He talked about the training he got. As far as I remember, they had to qualify with their Enfield, grenade throwing and bayonet/knife handling.

Am I wrong but the British Marines had to put 20 aimed shots in 20 seconds at 100 yards?

Thank you

One problem with expecting high marksmanship standards from U.S. soldiers in WWII was after they were trained to identify and shoot at specific targets they would tend to default to ONLY shooting at specific targets.

I've read accounts of more experienced combat troops having to get the replacements to break out of that habit and teaching them to shoot anywhere where there "might be" a German, even if they didn't have a specific target spotted.

If you shoot at a likely place where the enemy might be, even if you don't see him, you might hit him or force him down. If you only shoot when you have a specific enemy soldier in your sights, you aren't shooting enough. At least that was the idea in WWII.

It's not a bad way of doing business -- the Rhodesians racked up an incredibly lop sided kill ratio against the guerrillas during their war, and one technique they relied heavily on was during contact putting pairs of rounds into anything that looked like it might be hiding a bad guy. It's not the most ammo-thrifty approach, but at close range, especially if the other side got off the first volley, conservation of ammunition isn't really the first priority that comes to mind.

I don't know about the Army, however for a Marine in the WWII time peroid the rifle range and the requirements of it were very similar to what it is today.

Down near the bottom of the page he describes it.

http://www.ww2gyrene.org/boot_camp.htm

305 out of 350 (possible) points was an Expert rifleman. That is the best you can do. They qualified at 200, 300 and 500yrds just like the Known Distance range of a few years ago(KD), USMC boot camp still uses this range. He says 66 shots but I think he is counting the "sighters" and "field fire" - as the KD range used a 50 rnd course for score.

As for the other discussion brewing in this thread.... You can not even begin to compare non combat arms MOS weapons training and combat arms MOS's... Even in the Marine Corps where we place a high value on weapons training for everybody. I'll just leave it at that.
Will

Training is expensive and time consuming. Which is why it is always the first thing that gets cuts when a war is declared. Get a body on the line and worry about the details later.

The smartest thing the DOD has done in the last 45 years is to stick with the M16. Love it or hate it, it is very easy shoot. It is also a rifle that is very easy to teach a novice to shoot well. With the newer optic it is even easier to engage the enemy with.

Like any large war training in the early part in all the army's was quite good. As the war went on and losses at the front needed to be made up faster and faster training was shortened than skipped. In Russia for the most part their was zero training.

Our army was the best trained because we didn't really incur the losses that everyone else did and didn't get into it until much later.

I remember reading that one problem our soldiers had with their stateside training is that they were taught to only shoot at what they could see. In combat this isn't possible. Its all about laying a mass of fire to keep the other guys heads down so you can move against them.

The thought provoking (and thoughtful) post by SlamFire1 tacit raises two points:

There is a reason that we have a Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP). In an emergency, you don't have time to train.

The lack of training (and general lack of familiarity) with weapons by many of the draftees was one of the major reasons for the move from battle weapons to assault weapons. The lower recoil and high rate of fire are just as much, if not more, effective in the hands of soldiers with little training. While I would not like to use an SKS, AK-47, or AR-15 as a deer rifle, in a situation with lots of loud noises, flying lead, and people shooting back where I was exposed, I could probably shoot it just as well as my Sako TRG.

In battle, few bullets of the bullets fired actually hit a human target. It has been noted elsewhere that the American forces have historically (since the Revolutionary War) tended to hit their targets more often.

I learned long ago that there is no such thing as a bad technology. It is just that some technologies are better than others for certain applications. This applies to guns just as it does to electronics.

I'm sure the training wasn't as bad as all that for most soldiers, at least in the European theater. Most of them sat in England for a year or 18 months before the landings. They did nothing but train and ran through the Germany army fairly easily once the invasion began.
The later replacements that came in directly from the states didn't fare so well.

I had Army BT in 1969 with the M14. We shot on the 25 yard range until we could get a dime sized group. Then on to the E-type plastic dropping targets. I had one Sarge that fired his first round in combat. They handed him an M1, showed him how to load it and put him on the line. That was Korea. Not sure about WWII but have seen photos of target traps. They were using round targets at different ranges.

how far did they teach our soldiers to shoot?

4 moa was considered the shooters standard. This has to do with the ability to hit a man sized target at up to 500 yards.

Average size, shoulder to shoulder and waist to shoulders being considered 20 inches each way. You may not kill them, but you will put them out of action.

As for expert requiring 305, there's a big difference between qualifying as a rifleman and qualifying as an expert. Always has been, and is why earning Expert is considered something special.

My Dad joined the Navy in the middle of 1944. He volunteered for the Silent Service. Even though there was little chance he would use a rifle on a submarine, they taught him to use an M1 Carbine. I don't know everything about his training, but he shot more than 20 rounds.

However, I'm pretty sure hunting rabbits with his .22 pump taught him a lot more.

My father evidently signed up before Pearl Harbor "for the duration" and had extensive opportunity for training before being a squad automatic rifleman (BAR) in New Guinea and the Phillipines 1944-1945, ending the war in hospital. There are old 1940s family pictures of him on leave posing in uniform with the family .22 Marlin bolt action squirrel rifle. I suspect the civilian marksmenship experience in his youth (squirrel hunting) helped. Especially in the early days when they drilled with wooden rifles. And cars labelled "tank".

lefteyedom said:

Training is expensive and time consuming. Which is why it is always the first thing that gets cuts when a war is declared. Get a body on the line and worry about the details later.

Click to expand...

I served in the 80s and 90s and my impression over 10 years or so was that individual weapons training was somewhere between severely lacking and absolutely horrible.

When there was no active war there was little money being spent to train... not enough bullets, ordnance, fuel, etc.

As an outsider now, my impression is that beginning about 2001 training has been given a massively increased priority.