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At full strength, usually eight. There were seven squads to a German platoon, and each had a machine gun, normally the MG 42. This was such an excellent machine gun that the US basically copied it after the war, as the M 60, and used it until very recently. The average German soldier was still armed with a Model 1898 Mauser rifle, but he was also carrying belts of ammo for his squad's machine gun.

A US platoon had four twelve man squads, and only two machine guns, which were nowhere near as good. The only edge the average US foot soldier had was his semi-automatic M1 rifle, which could fire eight shots as fast as he could pull the trigger.

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15y ago

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