Use of Lee Enfield after 1945

[Shortround6]

Oddly the Soviets did not make a SLR equivalent.

They did, it was called the SVT-40. Which tended to show them they wanted to go in a different direction.
However it was followed in the late early 60s by the Dragunov SVD as a squad support weapon.

 

[The Basket]

The SVT was pre war not post war and the Dragonuv is not a mass produced general issue rifle.

In my view the SLR is not equivalent to either the SKS or AK.

Inch to centimetres is actually an intriguing engineering conundrum. Not straight forward because if you buy steel in inches and convert to mm it will either be too thick or too thin.

Good example of this is when the Soviets copied the B-29 and had to convert everything to mm and find steeel which matches the original American inches.

 

[Shortround6]

The SVT was pre war not post war and the Dragonuv is not a mass produced general issue rifle.

In my view the SLR is not equivalent to either the SKS or AK.

The SVT was built to the tune of 1 to 1.6 million rifles and didn't stop production until around 1945-46. Yes it was pre-war but it was a semi-auto rifle (a few full auto) with a detachable box magazine and firing a full power round and it weighs within a pound of the SLR.
The Soviets didn't need to adopt and run extended troop trials on an SLR clone. They could pull them out of storage. From any practical stand point the Soviets had an equivalent to the SLR or could have made new magazines to bring the capacity up to 20 rounds.
They chose not to which is a different thing.

Please define "general issue" or mass production as the Dragonuv was issued in much larger numbers than any western "sniper" rifle. Issued at the rate of at least one per platoon and sometimes higher it was built in large numbers. And could have been even higher if the Soviets had wished to go in that direction. It certainly has few, if any, of the hand fitting or careful machining of true "sniper" rifles.

You are correct in that the SLR was not equivalent to either the SKS or AK but that was a difference in tactical doctrine. The doctrine dictated the choice of weapons. The weapons did not dictate doctrine.

 

[stona]

Here's some depressing reading for we Brits.

SA80 (Small Arms for the 1980s): The Sorry Saga of the British Bulldog's Bullpup

We are not alone in having various armament procurement programmes run amok, but this is really appalling

Cheers

Steve

 

[The Basket]

I was talking post war and the difference between the. West and the Easf.
The SVT is similar to the Garand and a modernised SVT would be similar to M-14. I guess
The Dragonuv is not a 'every soldier has one' type of rifle like the SLR or AK. I can't find production numbers although depends if you include Chinese and WarPac clones. The SLR and Dragonuv are simply different. If your in a firefight with a Dragonuv then you need a SLR and if your hitting target 600 metres away with your SLR then you need the Dragonuv. Very different strokes.

 

[Shortround6]

The SLR and Dragonuv are simply different. If your in a firefight with a Dragonuv then you need a SLR and if your hitting target 600 metres away with your SLR then you need the Dragonuv. Very different strokes.

Not really, the difference is in ammunition (quality not bullet weight/velocity) and sighting equipment, which was more varied over the years on the SLR.
Problems with the Dragonuv in a firefight are the 10 round magazines although that may be minor and the light barrel overheating. But then in close range firefight a small change in point of impact isn't that important.
The 7.62 Nato round is every bit as good at 600meters as the 7.62X54R round from a ballistic standpoint.
The SLR in British (or commonwealth service, they differed a bit) had better iron sights and the British did have an optical sight for designated marksmen which would bring the SLR very close to the Dragonuv in actual hit percentages. The Dragonuv has a couple of foibles when trying to use it as a real sniper rifle (very precision work) that come into play as ergonomics. That is usable/deliverable accuracy vs test accuracy.
Had the Soviets felt the need for/desired a longer range rifle than the AK the Dragonuv could have been fitted with a slightly heavier barrel and a longer magazine. At least until they came up with a new rifle.

 

[The Basket]

During my military time the old guys who used the SLR called it an elephant gun. Vastly powerful big and heavy. Over powered. That round is going a long way with plenty of punch and if your on guard duty or on the streets of Belfast that's the absolute last thing you want!
As you mentioned before, Soviet army is a conscript army and I don't know the unit price of a Dragonuv over a AKM but i bet the AK is cheaper and more throwaway. The Dragonuv is a designated marksman rifle so 100℅ accuracy is not important. Interesting that I think it's was Yugoslavia made their Dragonuv clone from the AK design. Because the AK and Dragonuv look very similar it's easy to confuse them for the same design. Something of course wouldn't happen on this forum!

 

[dogsbody]

They did, it was called the SVT-40. Which tended to show them they wanted to go in a different direction.
However it was followed in the late early 60s by the Dragunov SVD as a squad support weapon.

Like mine?


Chris

 

[Shortround6]

The thing with conscript armies isn't so much the cost of the weapons to equip them but the limited amount of training time.
Some people learn to shoot quicker than others and some never seem to learn. So it may make sense to take 100 troops to the range and after a couple of days take the 5-10 best (or whatever percentage works) and make them designated marksmen and give them the high power rifle that will work at 6-800 meters and give the 3-400 meter weapons to the other 90 troops (minus machine gunners and mortar men, etc).
The Soviets had experience with the SVT-40 and variations, like Dogsbody's rifle. This included a few (like maybe 50,000?) that fired full automatic which convinced the Soviets that 9-10lb rifles firing full power ammo on automatic was NOT a good idea. The AK-47 made sense in that it would cover the ranges most combat took place at. There was one study that claimed 98% of all rifle fire was at under 400 meters and 50% of it was under 200yds. The problem for squads comes in that 50% of use of MG fire was at over 400meters.
The Russians tried a belt fed LMG using the 7.62x39 cartridge as a squad weapon but it lacked range and power. The squad/platoon needed some sort of weapon that could engage, even in a limited way at 600-800 meters. Either designated marksmen or LMGs using 7.62x54R or both.

NATO had gone for the 7.62X51 which was ballisticly identical to the 30-06M2 load no matter what rifle used it, M-14, SLR, Cemte or German G3. None were going to work on full auto and with most troops not having either the ability or training to make use of them at long ranges (3-400 meters and longer) NATO had a lot of range capability they couldn't use.
Different rifles had different abilities to function in lousy conditions but from a ballistic point of view they were pretty much interchangeable with the main difference being the sights. SImple sights require less training and may be less confusing when under fire in combat but don't have the flexibility of more complicated sights that allow the better marksmen to achieve more hits at longer range.

There is a lot of doctrine going into the choices that were made, rightly or wrongly, but the doctrine has to be taken into account when evaluating the weapons and while NATO may have standardized ammo they were far from standardized on tactics/doctrine and so the weapons varied from country to country.

 

[parsifal]

SRs explanations make a lot of sense to me. However, I cant help but make the observation that a force in which accuracy is embedded into the training of its forces, and emphasised in its engagement doctrine, IS going to derive a lot of benefit from weapons that allow that accuracy training to be utilised. And personal observation shows that to be the case....a man with an accurate rifle, and trained in a manner to exploit that ability, is a dangerous asset on the squad level battlefield. Both the enfield and the SLR were weapons of that ilk. They were inherently more accurate than the "spray fire allover the place" weapons like the AK-47. or dare I say it, the M-16. You can get accurate fire out of an AK or an M-16, but inevitably, the army that relies on these mass fire weapons is not going to put a premium on accuracy. The Australian army, and most all volunteer outfits like it....the so called "professional army" camp will always place a premium on accurate fire. In the end, man for man, these armies are better than the mass fire power rabbles that weapons like the AK-47 tend to encourage. The problem is that the training and experience needed for a professional able to hit a man target at 600 yards is exponentially greater than a man able to fire a great deal of lead in the general direction of the enemy and hit something at say 150 yds. The 5 bob a day murderers are better value from that perspective than the latter day jousters the modern day professionals tend to mimic.

 

[Shortround6]

Accuracy is always an advantage, the question is wither the people making the decisions are willing to pay for it. More ammo for training, more time spent training, more frequent replacement of weapons (or rebuilding/re-barreling) perhaps more ranges (land and facilities) and so on.
Troops that have a higher confidence in their weapons and their ability to use them will be more aggressive or have higher morale.
Although some troops have false confidence which can lead to some major screw-ups.
Given the historical data on which weapons actually cause the the causalities,like artillery causing something like 50% or more of causalities on the battlefield (in general) and some armies find it hard to justify large expenditures on rifle marksmanship.

I have been a target shooter for a large part of my life and may have a slightly warped idea of what constitutes "accuracy" which I may try to over compensate for in some of these discussions. However that comes from tradition. When I was ten years old I asked my father for a BB gun for Christmas. He told me a BB gun wasn't accurate enough to be worth spending money on. On Christmas there was a long box under the tree. It held a Winchester .22 bolt action rifle with target sights front and back and a target sling. Cost about 8 times what the BB would have cost. Twice monthly practice sessions at the local armory followed. My Father worked at Winchester at the time and shot for the Winchester Factory team.
However target shooting on the range is not combat shooting and in many cases target equipment is not rugged enough for combat use. I have also spent over ten years helping coaching junior teams, ages 10 through high school with well over 100 kids in the program in any given year so I think I have some idea of teaching basic marksmanship.
I have never been overly impressed with the US Army's standard of shooting no matter what kind of lip service they may have given it at certain points in time.

But given the restraints on training an easy to use rifle (with easy to use sights in varied light conditions) will be a better bet than a more accurate rifle that is harder to use or is only more accurate in certain conditions (good daylight but without strong shadows?).

 

[The Basket]

The value of being stationary hitting a stationary target in your own time is good for general gun drills.
Problem is stress and pressure is not there. The 2 gun matches which are against the clock which involve physical exertion and making mistakes that stress and time pressure creates is far more useful in a combat setting. People lose magazines, people accidentally press the mag release, the heart rate is up and the clock is ticking.
Obviously not combat but stress has to be involved. Under stress mistakes happen and only training under stress can lessen them.
A soldier has to fire a rifle in snow, in NBC suit, when he is exhausted thirsty and hungry, when he is terrified and when he is moments away from certain death. So the more basic and simple and robust and reliable the rifle is the better. Thats why the AK is such a fantastic weapon. It was designed by a soldier, not a watch maker, for soldiers. Accuracy means zip when the Banzai charge is on.
That is why I question loading using stripper clips. If your hands are shaking wearing gloves in -20 and the Zulus are running at you then that's where the excrement hits the apparatus with rotating blades.

 

[Shortround6]

The value of being stationary hitting a stationary target in your own time is good for general gun drills.

Yes, and if the recruit/soldier can't do that to a certain minimum standard then all the rapid fire drills and changing magazines stages and firing while wearing gas masks are going to have very predictable results. Uniformly bad if not approaching dangerous to his own side.
For a number of years (over 30) I belonged to a marching and drinking society (and not necessarily in that order) that was actually an official state militia. You could not belong to one of these units (there were four) and be a member of the national guard at the same time Because if the Governor went completely off his/her nut they could activate these units (last time was in 1941).
Every so often there would be a "shoot off" between the National Guard and this Militia. The 4 militia units would compete against each other and the winning team would then compete against several national guard teams. The Militia team I was on was a bunch of ringers. A group of target shooters who had been recruited into the unit to be it's rifle team. 2nd generation, one indoor .22 match had 3 father-son pairs.
Point of this is we only "lost" once and even loosing meant 2nd place. And that was when 3 out of our 4 team members were in their 60s and wearing bi-focals. And I refused to fire a shot during the gas mask drill because the mask didn't fit right on my beard and lenses fogged so bad I couldn't see the front sight let alone the target. We were in an indoor range with concrete floor/walls and ceiling. The NG solider monitoring me was urging me to shoot to get some sort of score despite me telling him I couldn't see which doesn't impress me much with their safety standards. It wasn't life or death and a few points of score wasn't worth a dangerous situation.
Several years previous I had qualified "expert" during one of these matches with the M9 Beretta pistol. First time in my life I had ever fired one. I was wearing bi-focals at the time and didn't fire 14 rounds out of the allotted 82 or so. I manipulated the safety wrong and rather than wave the pistol around in an unsafe manner I didn't fire or attempt to clear it (it was a rapid fire stage).
Qualifying expert with 14 rounds saved indicates to me a rather low standard of marksmanship. The course of fire during these matches changed considerably over the years. One might qualify as a sharpshooter if you didn't shoot the range officer.
In matches going back to the 80s and 90s we often wound up coaching our "opponents" and giving them all the aid we could (loaning shooting coats, spotting scopes, gloves, assisting in sighting in, etc) instead of simply writing down their scores. In some cases they showed up with rifles that weren't even hitting the paper at 200 yds (paper being over 4 ft wide and 5-6feet tall) so giving all possible aid wasn't going to affect the outcome. If your rifle is off by 2-3 feet at 200yds all the fancy drills in the world aren't going to do you much good in combat.
I could go on for several more pages but basically the US army didn't follow through with proper training for many, many years despite building/buying rifles that had the capability to do much better than most of it's soldiers were capable of due to the training. Things seemed to be getting better the last few times but then some of the other teams were mid-east veterans.
I was a firefighter of 33 years, if you can't do it on the training ground you can't do it on the fire ground. There is little sense in running a complicated multi-part drill if many of your unit don't have the basics down.

 

[The Basket]

The major problem with today's military is political correctness and poor retention/ poor recruitment. So it's a one size fits all nonsense where it's ok if you can't shoot.

 

[Token]

The major problem with today's military is political correctness and poor retention/ poor recruitment. So it's a one size fits all nonsense where it's ok if you can't shoot.

Poor retention is by choice in some services. In many ways the military today does not want second enlistment folks. They want first enlistment warm bodies, and a few dedicated career NCO's. Today it is increasingly hard to reenlist for the first or second time unless you are well up on the scale of performance. They want either motivated E-4/5 or no E-4/5, the day of the career E-5 is gone. If you want to make E-7 you better have at least an associates degree.


Part of the issue is lack of ability at the NCO level to discipline soldiers under them. Back in the day if you were an E-1 to E-3 messing up your E-4 to E-7 had many options to "educate" or "counsel" you. At the end of the day when everyone else in the shop was leaving you might find yourself hanging around and finishing up tasks. If your Chief said you lost your civilian apparel privileges for a month you did. Today NCO's targeting specific juniors in such a way may face charges when the junior complains. I have seen it happen.


The options have become NJP or nothing, kind of like using a hammer to swat a fly. And today an NJP is a career ender. Back in the day you would find many E-7 to E-9 that had prior NJPs, shoot, in some rates it was a badge of honor and in the Goat Locker they may not want to share berthing with you if you were a goody two shoes and had never had a Mast. Today you won't make E-7 with a Mast / NJP / Article 15.


I hear these issues often, I have three kids in the Army, two are career and one will be getting out this year after her third enlistment. Further, our house was the watering hole (literally, our pool) for the kids in the neighborhood over the years, and several of them are enlisted or commissioned in various branches, the regulars who still stop by the house when on leave range from E-5 to O-4. We do a lot of setting around and shooting the bull over beer. And I work around and with active duty mil every day.


A story, this was 20+ years after I left active duty. Some years ago I walked into an Avionics shop in a hanger. An E-5 was sweeping the deck out in the hanger. Walking into the shop I see there is an E-3 with his feet up, reading a book. I turned around and went out to ask the E-5 why he was sweeping the deck while an E-3 was feet up, skylarking. I figured the E-3 must be on light duty or something. The E-5 said nope, the E-3 did not want to sweep the deck, and short of taking it up the chain and writing paper the E-5 had no way to make the E-3 do what was asked. It was easier for the E-5 to do the work himself than to do the paperwork required. I was, literally, shocked.


The US Navy is having a hard enough time making senior NCOs that they are expanding a program that takes civilian middle managers, puts them through a short training cycle, and brings them into the service as a Chief Petty Officer.


However, depending on your job, it is NOT OK if you can't shoot. I know soldiers and sailors who have been removed from certain status's or ratings because they failed weapons qualifications. If your MOS / Rate requires the qualification, and you are incapable, then you are not promotable, and if you are not promotable then you cannot reenlist.


T!

 

[The Basket]

The mondragon was a Mexican rifle in service before ww1 so having a bolt action rifle in the 1950s is pretty lame.
There was a rifle called the Farquhar Hill which was pretty good.
The Garand wasn't the first or the best but was the first to follow through with replacing bolt action with semi auto. Amazing number of semi autos were around and about pre ww1 and 1920s that it was lack of money and general apathy that stopped the greater spread of semi autos.
The French example of the RSC m1917 and somehow ended up with the MAS36 20 years later is like building a biplane after designing a monoplane.
The uk tested a bewildering number of semi autos from Pedersen to the prototype FN-49 and didn't go far.

 

[parsifal]

The value of being stationary hitting a stationary target in your own time is good for general gun drills.
Problem is stress and pressure is not there. The 2 gun matches which are against the clock which involve physical exertion and making mistakes that stress and time pressure creates is far more useful in a combat setting. People lose magazines, people accidentally press the mag release, the heart rate is up and the clock is ticking.
Obviously not combat but stress has to be involved. Under stress mistakes happen and only training under stress can lessen them.
A soldier has to fire a rifle in snow, in NBC suit, when he is exhausted thirsty and hungry, when he is terrified and when he is moments away from certain death. So the more basic and simple and robust and reliable the rifle is the better. Thats why the AK is such a fantastic weapon. It was designed by a soldier, not a watch maker, for soldiers. Accuracy means zip when the Banzai charge is on.
That is why I question loading using stripper clips. If your hands are shaking wearing gloves in -20 and the Zulus are running at you then that's where the excrement hits the apparatus with rotating blades.

I agree with most of this, but will raise one point that might be viewed as somewhat tangential. the Australian army trains to a fairly standard doctrine known as "fire and movement". That really should read as 'fire or movement". A squad when engaged will under theoretical conditions, break into threes. On contact, every man will pass the excess ammunition for the support gun to the gun crews. first priority is to secure this gun and commence suppressive fire which works out the fire support mission on the basis of available ammunition mostly. almost always short controlled bursts and aimed fire. if there is an APC in support, this AFV can usually take the place of fire support team.

Once the fire support is set up and doing its job, the two other teams can start their job. You are either firing, or moving, but not both at the same time. You are either in cover and firing, or moving forward, preferably unseen, to your next firing position. The group in cover and engaging is a hard target, the group moving is somewhat vulnerable and you don't want to attract attention to that group by firing wildly with un-aimed fire. Once the moving group has made it to the new interim position, it makes or seeks cover, starts firing to allow the other group that has just given its support, to move forward to its new cover position.

If there is no or inadequate cover, the fire teams will use speed or darkness or smoke to put into effect their advance. Infiltration is still the preferred method however.

By remaining stationary when you fire, rather than firing from the hip, accuracy of fire is maximised. Its an exceptional soldier that can fire accurately whilst he is also moving. Most soldiers with some basic rifle skills can do better if they are not moving.

There are many, many occasions that this formula will vary. It's the theory, not the rule.

 

[stona]

This bloke gives a clear and reasonably concise explanation of why the Lee Enfield action was so fast.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-EdQuAxAII


Cheers

Steve

 

[Old Wizard]