Automatic rifle used as infantry rifle ?

[Undeadmuffin]

I wonder why army (especially during WW1, inter-war and WW2) never converted automatic rifle (like the Chauchat, Browing, Huot or Fg-42) into semi-auto rifle and issued it as standart infantry rifle.

Was it the cost ?
The mechanic ?
Or politic/ideology ?

Asking help from more knowledgeable peoples !

 

[Peg Leg Pom]

For 1 thing they were generally too heavy to be used as a rifle by the average infantryman. They were also generally more expensive than a normal rifle.

 

[Undeadmuffin]

For 1 thing they were generally too heavy to be used as a rifle by the average infantryman. They were also generally more expensive than a normal rifle.

Couldn't they be modified ?

 

[Admiral Beez]

I wonder why army (especially during WW1, inter-war and WW2) never converted automatic rifle (like the Chauchat, Browing, Huot or Fg-42) into semi-auto rifle !

There were semi-auto rifles, designed as such instead of backwards engineered from machine guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_II_semi-automatic_rifles

What benefit is there to taking a machine gun, removing its key feature (auto fire) and rendering it equal in capability to standard issue semi-auto rifles already issued?

Am I missing something here?

 

[pdf27]

The root cause of the whole problem is horses. Seriously.
A .30" calibre round is simply too powerful to fire in an automatic rifle from the shoulder, limiting it to crew-served weapons, and the amount of heating the round puts into the weapon is also pretty huge, meaning that you really also need a water-cooled or quick-change barrel to take advantage of it.
That means for an automatic rifle to work in real life, you need to use a smaller ("intermediate") round which has less muzzle energy and uses a lot less propellant to keep a lid on the heating problems. The problem is that these rounds are much less powerful than standard .30" rounds - and don't have enough energy to reliably kill a horse. That was a major consideration when the rounds were designed, since infantry were still expecting to deal with cavalry charges. It wasn't until WW2 that the advantages of a smaller round became apparent, at the same time as horses were finally replaced wholesale by machines.

So the fundamental problem is that the standard rounds available until the German 7.92mm Kurtz round came out are just too powerful for an automatic rifle to make sense.

 

[NoMommsen]

@pdf27
Quite contradicts the development of WW II (see the link ind @Admiral Beez post)

And though I repeat myself : semi-automatic and automatic rifles were in the works since the 80ies of the 19th century.
But ...
The generals generally refused them as "cowards" weapons, killing discipline on marksmanship and ... teasing for unnecessary ammo-spending.
(That at least I know of the Reichswehr and Wehrmachts Generals)

 

[Deleted member 94680]

There was a general feeling that issuing full auto weapons to rank and file would result in ammo wastage, the belief that firing off everything would be too great a possibility in the early stages of any action. I don't know if it was so much a cowards weapon thing (if he has no ammo, a soldier can retreat) or a belief the common man wouldn't be unable to resist the temptation.

Obviously, the only way to disprove this assumption was to issue auto weapons to troops and see what happened. This came about through the proliferation of SMGs and the like in WWII and disabused General Staffs that grunts would fire off everything the second they could. Once that bias was removed, the logical step was the Assault Rifle...

 

[MattII]

IIRC there was also technical issues, early MGs, being automatic tended to clog up much more easily than simple bolt-action rifles (which weren't themselves immune), so in the field they'd be far from ideal.

 

[NoMommsen]

@MattII ... as we are in a field of pure mechanics, no electronics and the like, ... no problems that counldn't have been overcome after 30 years of serious, and officially supported development in 1914 ...
IF
... there would have been the will to get such weapons into service

 

[MattII]

Electronics are less likely to be affected by dirt than complex machine parts. The M16 was bad enough in Vietnam, in WW1-WW2 I can just imagine how bad it would have been.

 

[Dan]

There was a general feeling that issuing full auto weapons to rank and file would result in ammo wastage, the belief that firing off everything would be too great a possibility in the early stages of any action. I don't know if it was so much a cowards weapon thing (if he has no ammo, a soldier can retreat) or a belief the common man wouldn't be unable to resist the temptation.

Obviously, the only way to disprove this assumption was to issue auto weapons to troops and see what happened. This came about through the proliferation of SMGs and the like in WWII and disabused General Staffs that grunts would fire off everything the second they could. Once that bias was removed, the logical step was the Assault Rifle...

Of course it still too the British army until the 1980's to adopt their first assault rifle for general use.

 

[yulzari]

These weapons were necessarily too heavy for infantry to carry. The LMG needs crew support if only to carry the ammunition which spreads the weight around.

Since armies began infantry soldiers have been carrying about the same weight whether in armour, weapons and shield or in ammunition and gun etc. Add anything to the weight and something has to be left behind. If anything today we are asking troops to carry over that historical limit. In well trained professional troops the AK series has an automatic fire option (beloved of the ill trained) which is best used like the old magazine rifle cut out as an emergency close range hail of undirected fire leaving normal use in semi automatic mode that you can control and aim. How fast can you move your finger on the trigger?

The old 8ishmm rifles were asked to both kill a man in aimed fire at over a mile away and stop a charging horse close up. It was the drive for a semi automatic rifle for up to 300 metres (more like 200) that drove the introduction of short rifle rounds that let a rifle carry and use repeated rapid fire. The SMG was different as it is for 50 metres (yes I know the L1A1 is sighted to 100 and 200) and needs automatic fire to make up for the pistol cartridges and they are weak enough to control in automatic fire. Even then aimed burst fire in @5 round sets is more likely to hit something than Hollywood magazine emptying spraying which is a tactic to make the enemy hide until you can run away. I like SMGs and would be happy with one in a 9mm round a touch longer than the 9mm Parabellum and a modern (lightweight) sight. I used to think them a good balance combined with the L7 LMG but I wander OT.

The automatic FAL is ideal for demonstrating why the OP options would not work. Too light to hold on aim in full auto and unnecessarily heavy for the lightweight short rounds.The barrel becomes too hot very quickly

First choose the ammunition then the gun to use it.

 

[yulzari]

There was a general feeling that issuing full auto weapons to rank and file would result in ammo wastage, the belief that firing off everything would be too great a possibility in the early stages of any action. I don't know if it was so much a cowards weapon thing (if he has no ammo, a soldier can retreat) or a belief the common man wouldn't be unable to resist the temptation.

They said that about the breech loader, the magazine rifle, the box magazine rifle, the machine gun and the SMG. What they forgot is that trained squaddies fear being left with no ammunition and tend to have rounds left even after a long fire fight. It was for the Generals duty to come up with a logistics train that could supply the ammunition that the automatic weapons could use.

 

[tomo pauk]

...
So the fundamental problem is that the standard rounds available until the German 7.92mm Kurtz round came out are just too powerful for an automatic rifle to make sense.

I'm afraid that would ot be the case. Russians used and off-the-shelf round, the 6.5mm Arisaka, when developing the Avtomat Fedorova back in ww-one.

...
First choose the ammunition then the gun to use it.

Very true.

 

[pdf27]

I'm afraid that would ot be the case. Russians used and off-the-shelf round, the 6.5mm Arisaka, when developing the Avtomat Fedorova back in ww-one.

The various 6.5mm round families are an odd one - you actually can use them in modern-style assault rifles (the various 6.5mm rounds actually have pretty similar muzzle energy and recoil to the famous/infamous .280 British). The problem is though that they really aren't full power rifle rounds and never were - essentially when smokeless powders came in most countries just took the additional power to give them a very powerful rifle round suitable for machine guns, but some essentially necked the round down to keep the muzzle energy the same in order to take the benefit in reduced weight rather than increased power. The important point to note however is that these tended to be the minor armies (Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, with the biggest being Japan) and that those with the money replaced these rounds with an ~8mm one as soon as they could afford to, usually between WW1 and WW2.

 

[Cryhavoc101]

The 'Automatic rifles' of the day paid a premium with regards to Reliability and weight (and cost)

A K98 bolt action rifle weighs just under 4 KGs - lets use as a bench mark

FG42 = 5 kgs is probably the first such suitable weapon but it was very expensive to make and its intention was to give the paratrooper a 'machine gun' upon landing

The Johnson LMG = 6 kgs same as above

BAR = 8 KGs



Coming from the other direction ZH29, Garand, Pederson, G41, SVT-38 etc were all in the 4 KG range - with varying costs and reliability issues - with the m1 acing it and the others not so much - but these weapon would have been and where better solutions

 

[fastmongrel]

BSA tried to make a self loading rifle out of the Lewis machine gun. iirc they managed to get the weight down to about 10 pounds but after they had lightened it enough to be a rifle they then had to strengthen all the parts they had just lightened and ended up about as heavy as a BAR. Its probably easier to beef up a light weapon than it is to lighten a heavy weapon.

 

[marathag]

A .30" calibre round is simply too powerful to fire in an automatic rifle from the shoulder

caliber doesn't matter, its the energy.
compare .30-30, .308 Nato and .30-06

.30-30 has the ME of the 7.62x39, easy for shoulder fire as proved by the AK. It's just rougher as ME goes up.

 

[marathag]

BSA tried to make a self loading rifle out of the Lewis machine gun. iirc they managed to get the weight down to about 10 pounds but after they had lightened it enough to be a rifle they then had to strengthen all the parts they had just lightened and ended up about as heavy as a BAR. Its probably easier to beef up a light weapon than it is to lighten a heavy weapon.

Look real close at the FG-42 operating system. It's pretty much a Lewis without the clockspring recoil

 

[CalBear]

I wonder why army (especially during WW1, inter-war and WW2) never converted automatic rifle (like the Chauchat, Browing, Huot or Fg-42) into semi-auto rifle and issued it as standart infantry rifle.

Was it the cost ?
The mechanic ?
Or politic/ideology ?

Asking help from more knowledgeable peoples !

BAR (unloaded) was, in the lightest version (the one issued to Prisons and LEO in the 1930s), 13.4 pounds. Military versions came in at 19 pounds.

M1 Garand (unloaded) was 9.7 pounds (with sniper versions up to 11.7#) Four pounds is three grenades or two full canteens or a M3 gas mask, etc. Weight is the enemy of every infantryman (which is why the gas mask was the first thing they dumped).