Can't resist bringing this old thread back to life!
In no particular [but most likely reverse chrono order]:
VH said:
That was a small clique of Ordnance types -- motivated by the fact that their favorite, the Pedersen rifle, couldn't handle the more powerful .30 round.
Small clique of Ordnance types = various boards of varying personnel established from ca. 1921-29, none of whom liked the fact that Pedersen's rifle required lubed ammo, but all of whom had to respect his credentials from his years working for Remington and J.M. Browning's acknowledgment of his ability.
Yep, that's a "clique" for you!
Re: "Pinefield" rifles & trucks marked "tank", etc. for training maneuvers: completely fails to refute the "virtually unlimited resources" statement. Mobilizing bodies for training occurred much faster than production of the arms with which to arm them could. Once the "machinery of industry" came up to speed, it was able to provide more materiel than the mobilized force of bodies was able to use.
Re: poor tank designs -
At the start of the war, the most advanced heavy tank fielded was done so by the French [Char. 35bis I think it was?]; it didn't prevent them from being chewed up by the Wehrmacht by virtue of superior fieldcraft. The Grant was of similar design: main gun in hull, smaller gun in turret. The fact that they saw use in the field at all was because
they were already in inventory and able to be produced in numbers to get them in allied hands via Lend-Lease. Better designs (like the Sherman) soon followed.
The Sherman started life w/ a 3" 15?-caliber main gun because that was pretty much standard for medium tanks at the time [it was the same as the 3" field "anti tank" gun of the same period.] The fact that it was inadequate by the time it made it to the field is more due to A) the lack of imagination of the personnel responsible for establishing the design standard & B) the rapid evolution in tank design with the advent of WWII. Don't forget, the tank designs fielded up to 1940 weren't significantly better than anything that had already been on the drawing boards at the end of WW1, w/ the exception of advances to suspension and motors made during the 20s & 30s due to the growth of the automotive industry worldwide.
btw, Guderian's play book was cribbed from a British author. The reason U.S. tanks were so superior to British ones of the same period is that the advanced thinkers (junior officers) in the U.S. military actually read his book and started designing tanks around the principles he expounded, whereas he was pretty much ignored by his own countrymen, leading to such fiascoes as the Matilda. Just nobody but the Germans & Russians
built any of them during the 30s due to the Depression...
Re: "Ronsons" -
The U.S. built tanks w/ gasoline engines because that was the fuel being used in the field; it didn't make the transition to diesel until after WWII [from lessons learned the hard way.] Part of this was due to lack of a native diesel prime mover industry: diesels were mostly for stationary power generators up to that point, stateside. And you can't fit a locomotive engine in a tank. So what do you do? You use airplane powerplants! Those all burnt gasoline up to that point [barring the German's Jumo diesel aero engine.]
Whaddaya gonna do? The Nazis had the home field advantage when it came to Otto Diesel's brainchild... What do tanks use today? Turbines, aka aero powerplants! Nothing's changed...
Re: Italian & Japanese changes to ammunition -
This wasn't as much due to latent incapacity of their 6.5mm ammunition as it was to a dearth of reliable & effective small arms in which to use them. Think machine guns, specifically heavy machine guns. Both these militaries were still fighting the last war, and moreover desperately casting about for solutions to their reverses in WWII, so you can't justify the passing over of the (then) modern .276 Pedersen on the apparent shortcomings of the Italian & Japanese rounds designed at the outset of the advent of smokeless powder and small caliber metal-patch bullets... BTW, it's a huge error to confuse the .276 Pedersen [loaded w/ 125gr spitzer or boat-tail bullets at 2700fps] with the 6.5mm Carcano [162gr round nose @ 2300fps] or 6.5mm Arisaka [originally similar to the Carcano, but changed to 139gr spitzer @ 2500fps w/ the type 38 ammunition, but still using a rimmed case! Also, they had to supply a
reduced load for their POS machine guns!] The Frankford Arsenal 1929 standard for the .276 experimental cartridge spec'd. 140gr bullet at 2600 fps, so in the roughly 10 years from Pedersen's 1st proposal for the new cartridge, it's clear there had been some advances in powder technology, along with the advances in metallurgy known to have taken place concurrently.
Don't ever make the mistake of comparing the .276 cartridge finally turned down in 1932 by MacArthur with the Italian or Japanese chamberings again, mmm.K?
Re: why the "clique" favored the .276 caliber -
Because they recognized it's single greatest advantage was that it was 1/2"
shorter than the existing service round! Don't forget, they were all charged with arriving at a semi-automatic service rifle. That service rifle had to "make weight," which was looking impossible with the added weight of mechanism. If the round chosen was 1/2" shorter, then the receiver would be 1" shorter, and a 1" chunk of steel is a significant wt savings! It's interesting to examine what happened
after WW2: the U.S. (and ipso facto NATO) adopted a new round that was... ta da!... 1/2" shorter than the prior service round! Surprise, surprise... still fighting the last war. It didn't matter that the Brits proposed the 280 Enfield [not too different from the .276 Pedersen, really, despite the lower power "intermediate" status.]
The Army Chief of Staff made the correct fiscal choice at the time: there's no way that the Army [remember, the Army, Navy & Marine Corps were very much independent creatures still, even as late as the 30s] could turn its back on the stockpile of a billion rounds of ammunition at the height of a worldwide depression. Roosevelt was still setting up the alphabet agencies, and Keynesian economics hadn't begun to have any f/x on the overwhelming bitterness of the Great Depression. What few career officers there were at that time were glad to have any kind of regular job, and as Chief of Staff, MacArthur would have been roasted over a very slow fire by Congress if he had signed off on a plan to obsolete all the small arms then in hand. We can only conjecture what might have been had the proposal to switch to a 7mm round had been acted upon in 1920 when it was 1st raised and had the entire decade in which to rebarrel existing stocks of 1906 Springfields and P17 Enfields, let alone BARs, etc...
In summary:
If the U.S. had adopted the .276 Pedersen [actually, the .276 FA experimental by the time 3 different Ordnance review boards had gotten done with it after a decade of wrangling], then gun cranks would have had the entirety of the 30s to play with it, and we'd have the 276 Pedersen Ackley Improved (or the equivalent) by the time the war began, which means that as soon as the war ended, we'd have a near twin to the 7mm-08 about 3 years before the 7.62x51 was actually adopted! Just a few years past that, & we could have had a twin to the 260 Remington, the near perfect all around cartridge, 3
decades sooner! Think of it! Harry Turtledove, where are you when we need you!
Lots of fun reading this thread, thanks all for the entertainment!
