A Few Thoughts on the British and German Rifles and Riflemen, WWII

[Art]

In the past few years I've had some revelations on the tactical doctrines of the British and German infantry in WWII.

In WWI riflemen were primarily, well, riflemen. A Brit rifleman carried his ammo in easy to access pouches on his web gear and he had lots of them. The German was similar. This meant that the primary function of the rifleman in a tactical unit in both armies was the efficient use of the rifle.

The light and general purpose machine gun changed everything. In both armies the purpose of the rifleman was no longer primarily his rifle but supporting the squad automatic weapon. I often thought the big old pouches on the Pattern 37 web gear couldn't have been efficient for carrying clipped ammo. Well it wasn't. A Brit rifleman carried two loaded magazines for the Bren gun in one pouch and in the other one bandoleer of ammo and a couple of grenades. Loading from a bandoleer is a lot slower than loading from those quick opening pouches which deprived the No 4 rifle of one of its great advantages, rate of fire. In addition the poor Tommy might be required to start reloading magazines with clips from the bandoleer if the Bren started to run too low on ammo. That would give me a certain amount of ammo insecurity .

The NAZI soldier didn't see his rifle ammo supply diminished that much but every one of them was supposed to carry a can of ammo for the MG 34 or 42 whichever his squad had. That's a whopping 250 rounds . This was a heavier load than the Brit soldier carried but the German guns were a lot more ammo greedy. I think I'd use the option of draping the belts around my neck and shoulders as many NAZI soldiers are shown doing and a lot of GI's did in Vietnam. If I was in the Heer I'd definitely want my can used first.

We of course had a different doctrine but we had the Garand.