Rifle a us World War 2 soilder carry?

Answer 1

The standard US rifle of WWII was the M-1 "Garand" rifle. Garand was one of the designers. This was a semi-automatic rifle, fed by eight-shot clips of cartridges. It could fire eight times as fast as the trigger could be pulled. After the last shot, the rifle automatically ejected the empty clip, and the bolt remained open so a new clip could be inserted. Once the soldier inserted the fresh clip he had to get his thumb out of the way, because the bolt would automatically travel forward and pick up and chamber the first round of the new clip, so he was ready to start shooting again immediately.

This was a far better rifle than that of any other combatant nation. All other nations fought WWII with the same rifle they had used to fight WWI. Most of these were five-shot, bolt action rifles, loaded with stripper clips. This loading process took much longer, and the bolt had to be worked manually, by hand, in between each shot to eject the empty cartridge and chamber the next one. This caused the soldier to lose his point of aim, a problem solved by the M-1. The M-1 was simple, rugged and reliable and fired a very high-powered round. It could be disassembled for cleaning very easily with the one thing a rifleman was likely to have - the point of one of its own cartridges.

The US worked for twenty years between the world wars to develop the M-1. The Germans had far better machine guns, but the average American soldier had the best rifle. The Germans did develop the Sturm Gewehr 43, the world's first assault rifle and the father of the Russian AK-47, but relatively few of their troops were ever equipped with this excellent weapon.