The History Buff's Guide to World War II (15 page)

WEAPONS

In terms of weapons, the war appeared both astounding and ridiculous. Combatants moved by jet and mule, battled from hundreds of feet beneath the waves to thirty thousand feet above the ground, and killed with atomic radiation and sharpened sticks. The volume of ordnance was, in a word, unreal. For each citizen of the Axis, the United States had three artillery shells. There were enough bullets made worldwide to shoot every living person on the planet forty times.
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One consistency: it was a war in motion. Where its predecessor involved armies trying not to budge, the Second World War involved forces trying to move the fastest. The primary cause of this revolutionary change in the nature of warfare was the perfection of the internal combustion engine. When asked his opinion on the most effective weapons of the war, Gen. D
WIGHT
E
ISENHOWER
cited the Jeep, the C-47 transport aircraft, the bazooka, and the atomic bomb. Fittingly, two of his responses were motorized, and the bomb required a four-engine plane for delivery.
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Excluding rockets (see Firsts), below is a roster of the prominent weapon types listed by amount procured. Note that the majority were essentially delivery systems exhibiting the changing nature of war, in which mobility equaled power.

1
. MINES (600 MILLION)

With speed a decisive factor in fighting, mines were a cheap and easy way to slow down opponents. Categorized as naval, antitank, and antipersonnel, mines appeared in all theaters, destroying bodies and equipment alike.

Most complex and explosive were naval mines, numbering five hundred thousand total. Detonation occurred by contact, magnetic impulse, or sound waves. Planted by ships, submarines, and aircraft, mines were only practical in high-traffic shallow waters such as harbors and bays. To combat them, minesweepers cut cables, noise-making devices burst acoustic mines, and electric currents counterattacked magnetic detonators. Although these mines accounted for a tiny fraction of all ship losses, they were the most effective way to close ports and sea lanes for days at a time.

Land mines were most prominent in the Soviet Union and North Africa, where large areas were void of natural defenses. Some were rudimentary booby traps of grenades or other small explosives. In many instances, artillery shells were simply buried with nose fuses flush to the surface. Mass production allowed for standardized versions to be made in phenomenal quantities. The Soviets claimed to have planted more than two hundred million in their soil. The king of Egypt complained that the Allies left some forty million devices in his country. His estimates were probably not far off. The United States procured more than twenty-four million land mines during the war.
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Demolition engineers were usually charged with removal, in many cases while under hostile fire. Detectors were not available until 1942. Most were unreliable because many explosives’ casings were made of wood and plastic. The alternatives were to set mines off with airbursts, with tanks fitted with flailing chains, or more often than not, by getting down on hands and knees and prodding the soil with an angled knife or wire.

In Eastern Europe and North Africa, unexploded land mines from World War II were still killing scores of people and animals annually into the 1980s.

2
. SMALL ARMS (300 MILLION)

World War II marked a fundamental change in the arming of combat infantry. In the nineteenth century the ideal was to have an entire regiment fitted with one type of musket or rifle. By 1940 units worked best when they had a variety of tools. It was not uncommon for a regiment to have twenty or more kinds of weapons, allowing soldiers to fight effectively in different environments and situations.

Bullets could not drop into trenches or lob over walls, but grenades could. Respected were the German “potato mashers” and American “pineapples,” but the petrol-filled bottles of “Molotov cocktails” often proved just as effective. In various forms the United States made more than eighty-seven million grenades.

The arrival of tanks required something beefier than a handgun. Most effective were grenade launchers, bazookas, and their German cousins, the Panzerfaust and Panzerschrek. Such devices could save a squad from annihilation, but there were drawbacks. Firing usually gave away a soldier’s position, so the first shot had to count.
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From left to right, U.S. Marines utilize a Thompson submachine gun, a .30 caliber machine gun, and an M-1 carbine during a standoff at Cape Gloucester in the Solomons.

Submachine guns were popular among airborne and special ops groups. Light and inexpensive, they laid down a menacing rate of fire but also ate ammunition quickly. More effective, though bulkier, were machine guns. The British Bren and U.S. Browning (or BAR) were valuable in offensive and defensive actions. Among the most revered and dependable were German MG-42s. One soldier described its use against a Red Army charge: “swinging backwards and forwards along the brown-coated files, smashing the cohesion of the attack… [T]he killing was prodigious.” Indeed, machine-gun fire of all forms accounted for 10 percent of all combat deaths.
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Pistols were largely useless. Adored by souvenir hunters, the German Luger would be hard pressed to stop a charging badger.

The anchor of the infantry was still the rifle, and for nearly every army, it was an archaic bolt-action, single-shot weapon of pre-1914 design. The exception was the semiautomatic U.S. M-1 Garand, the most effective rifle of the war. More than four million were made. Reliable, accurate, just shy of ten pounds, it shot an eight-round magazine using a gas-powered piston. If soldiers had a common complaint, it was the M-1’s voice. With a full clip, the rifle spoke with an authoritative and intense “kow kow.” But on its final shot, it uttered a distinctive “clank” as it coughed out its empty clip. The sound told the owner to reload, but it also told the enemy that the rifleman was temporarily defenseless.
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A deadly small-arms innovation was the German SG-44, a fully automatic rifle. Issued too late to change the course of the war, it was the forefather of the Russian AK-47, the most heavily produced gun of all time.

3
. ARTILLERY (2 MILLION)

The Russians had a saying: “The artillery is for killing, the infantry for dying.” At S
ECOND
E
L
A
LAMEIN
, a British tank brigade lost seventy of its ninety-four tanks to field guns. At Kursk, the biggest tank battle in history, there were a total of seven thousand tanks and thirty thousand artillery pieces. British medics calculated that 70 percent of all deaths and injuries in N
ORMANDY
came from mortars. Approximately half of all battle wounds came not from bombs or tanks but from artillery.
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Including massive coastal guns, rail guns, antitank guns, mortars, howitzers, assault guns, and recoilless cannon, artillery was the most adaptable and damaging weaponry in World War II. Most numerous and effective were the portable field pieces.

The Soviets depended heavily on their long-barreled 76mm guns. Americans and British produced dual-purpose artillery, capable of lobbing shells like a howitzer and launching straight shots like a cannon.

The most famous, or infamous, gun of the war was the German 88mm Flieger Abwehr Kanone (flak). Introduced in 1934 as an antiaircraft gun, the 88 was clearly ineffective in its intended role, requiring thousands of rounds just to score a single hit. But in the Spanish C
IVIL
W
AR
, crews aimed the barrel at ground targets and discovered it was a viciously effective tank killer. Intended to hurl projectiles twenty thousand feet into the sky, its muzzle velocity was two times faster than many ground guns, allowing its sixteen-pound shell to crack pillboxes, tanks, bunkers, and vehicles with ease. One trooper calculated that an 88 shell flew three hundred yards ahead of its sound, producing an eerie effect of a cataclysmic explosion followed by the scream of the approaching shell. A wary British soldier said of the 88, “That’s the deadliest bastard that’s come out of this war so far.”
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Of the war’s artillery, American field gun versions may have rated highest in versatility. Most models could fire more than a dozen different kinds of shells, including armor-piercing, smoke, incendiary, and poison-gas.

4
. FIGHTER-BOMBERS (450,000)

Single-engine combat aircraft served as metaphors for the war as a whole. Initially, the Axis aircraft were more agile and powerful, but Allied planes caught and passed their adversaries with greater numbers and technology.

Among the hundreds of aircraft makes and versions were several standouts, including the dominant Messerschmitt 109, the most produced German aircraft and chariot of the most prolific aces of the entire war. Not until the British put a Merlin engine in the American P-51 Mustang were Me-109s summarily tamed. The Mustang was nearly a hundred mph faster and had a range five times that of the German fighter. Mustangs also enabled Allied bomber command to bomb Germany almost at will, having the unmatched ability to escort bomber formations all the way from England to Czechoslovakia and back, whereas the Messerschmitt could barely make a round trip from N
ORMANDY
to London.
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In the Pacific, the Mitsubishi Zero, with its featherweight body and ample wings, could outsprint and outturn all of its early adversaries, especially at low altitude. But when a downed Zero was discovered intact in the Aleutians and brought to the United States for study, its innovations helped create the F6F Hellcat. Ultimately faster and more resilient than the Zero, the Hellcat accounted for more air-to-air kills in the Pacific than all other U.S. aircraft combined, although it served for only the last two years of the war.
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Altogether, fighters may have been the most adaptable weapons, performing as interceptors, dive bombers, rocket launchers, torpedo launchers, escorts, tank busters, sub hunters, radar and reconnaissance platforms, artillery spotters, and kamikazes. Yet all the adaptability in the world would not help the Axis, who lacked the pilots and planes to stay even with the Allies. For every fighter the Axis produced, the Allies manufactured five.

The top 108 fighter aces in World War II were all German or Austrian.

5
. TANKS (300,000)

Except in areas of dense jungle, land combat revolved around tanks. By 1940 every country knew the importance of the relatively new weapon. The question was how to use it. Conventional thinking viewed tanks as infantry support to be deployed piecemeal among slow-moving foot soldiers. German blitzkrieg tactics dismantled this logic by massing armored vehicles together and smashing through lines.

Tanks were generally classified as light, medium, and heavy. Light tanks were little more than armored cars, useful for reconnaissance or against poorly armored foes. Most Japanese and Italian tanks were of the light variety, the latter frequently called “self-propelled coffins.” Heavies were meant to be indestructible land cruisers, but most were too heavy and came too late to change the war’s outcome, the exception being the Russian KV-1. The Third Reich’s much celebrated King Tiger was a beast. More than thirty feet long and twelve feet wide, it had frontal armor nearly one foot thick. Unfortunately for the Germans, it drank two gallons a mile and sank in soft ground.
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