The Winchester 1912. I personally love this gun and have all my assault units equipped with it, I wish more units could get it. It is devastating under 50m.
dont like it, its too much rng based.
sometimes it does 1 hit kills and other you need 3 shot to kill someone, better use a thompson/m2 carabine to get the same or even better results.
I find its greatest effect is the stagger it causes when hit with it. Even if you dont one shot someone which I rare do, it causes the hit stagger effect and they have a really hard time hitting you when you are following up with more shots.
And that slam firing from the hip to clear a room is just cake
I agree other classes should have access to it, such as the demo man and the engineer at least…
They’re fun to use. But as assaulters only, will inevitably get replaced by a tommy gun…
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I get it for “balance” reasons why they limit certain guns to classes but the Thomson was used by a lot of section leaders in multiple roles like engineers and riflemen.
Problem is the American doctrine allowed pretty much everyone to use anything so long as you pestered your CO enough, which would be catastrophic for game balance so American weapons are locked to arbitrary classes.
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I was wondering why they didn’t go with the browning auto five, a truly semiautomatic shotgun of which thousands were used by the US military, of course like all shotguns they weren’t really combat weapons per se more use for training or keeping bird populations under control near airfields.
I do believe some are used in action in the Pacific in the jungles but beyond that shotguns weren’t really a thing during the war.
Their inclusion in game is one of the more fanciful of their choices.
US Rifle Squad, 1943-45
Sergeant (later Staff Sergeant) (M1 rifle); 7 riflemen (two designated as scout, all with M1 rifle); Corporal (later Sergeant) (M1 rifle); BAR group (Automatic rifleman with BAR, assistant AR man and ammunition bearer, both with M1 carbine rifles).
Thompson submachine guns were something of a rarity, they had a handful of them that were doled out on an as needed basis at battalion.
US Para Squads also followed their standard Rifle Squad equivalent. The key difference was that they were authorised the M1919 for the Squad rather than the BAR. Individual weapon issue for the US Paras is largely unfathomable courtesy of the mix of SMGs, Carbines and M1 rifles known to have been used, and the question of which units carried BARS they weren’t officially entitled to can cause (bar)fights.
Usually you have one guy with a grenade launcher per squad.
Nobody really had a pistol that was official issued to them in NW Europe, apart from tankers and the odd officer, M1 carbines largely replaced them in use from 44 on.
Well that was the official doctrine, but there are recorded instances of units going into battles with everyone having a BAR, or a mix of Carbines, Thompsons, Grease Guns and Browning’s with no Garand in sight. These weren’t even particularly specialized units either, they were average units.
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Well that’s kind of the thing I think that there’s a lot of myth versus reality going on with things like that, one of the main arguments aganstbthat kind of thing is the fact that those extra weapons would’ve had to come from somewhere and there really wasn’t any extra weapons to be had given there was a shortage of a lot of things, it’s not to say that it didn’t happen but I think most people would be kind of surprised to find that most US rifle squads were rather boring, they being largely equipped with M1 Garand rifles and a couple of M1 carbines’s and one BAR.
But in this game none of that is a consideration, I’m only mentioning it because it’s interesting.
Well I have several book references that would support the above information, a lot of information can be gleaned from the following:
https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=234261&start=45
I actually own a Browning A5, excellent shotgun. A tad complex recoil ring system for high or lower powered shells.
I can attest to this personally in current army practice. In 2010 we deployed to Afghanistan. My unit almost entirely consisted of original full length M16A2s from the 90s with some full length M249s and rusted M9 pistols. We were an active duty aviation unit, not reserve or guard. At the same time, some infantry units were getting SCAR rifles and the new M230 grenade launchers.
After that deployment, we finally replaced all our M16s with M4s in 2012. When I reclassed infantry in 2014, I was originally a rifleman with just an M4. But about a month later got redesignated a breacher and got issued a breach kit and a Mossberg 500 shotgun on top of my M4, no pistol. The only folks who had pistols were officers and platoon sgts, platoon leaders, and machine gunners.
Yes it was uncommon, but that was more due to the barrier of entry of having to convince your CO that you needed it, so if your CO was stubborn or you were too nervous, it wouldn’t happen. Furthermore, many troops didn’t know that they could do that, leading to even more troops just going into battle with the standard issue equipment. Finally, every piece of equipment had their ups and downs, and even if the troops knew they could, they wouldn’t always exercise that option as the Garand was already an excellent weapon. These factors combined, the quantity of non standard issue weapons makes sense. However, every trooper did have the option, whether they could or chose to exercise it or not.
I remember hearing stories from the old guys who were in Desert Storm talking about how some units would allow use of certain personal weapons like shotguns. Although I don’t know the validity of those stories. All the units I was in from 07 to 18 didn’t allow such things for deployment save for personal knives or hatchets and the like.
All I got are annecdotes from personal records as well, but the fact that the Americans even have this policy to any noticeable degree is pretty well established.