Was the STG-44 the best infantryman's rifle of the war?

One thing I forgot to state in the above post, the reason I mentioned the tags in the Body Armor is because they were a direct result of the project Proeliator mentioned. The Operations Research Office, Project ALCLAD, was the study to create improved body armor. Thier findings led directly to the development of practical military body armor.

 

double post

 

AFAIK The AK 47's bullet is a inspired by the Kurtz round but the AK-47 simililarity to the the StG is less marked. Kalashnikov's brilliant design was original and probably a marked improvement on the StG.

IMO there are two families of early assault rifles, besides the short ammo ones (StG, AK and derivatives) there were the full power ones (M-14, G-3, FN, BM-59) that are logical heirs to the FG-42 and BAR, and for the BM-59 and M-14, technical heirs of the M1 Garrand (a lot of the BM-59 were actually reworked Garrands), while the FN and G3 were new more modern designs.

The choice of a full power round is now considered a mistake, it made for heavier weapon and ammo than needed in most combat situation and all of them had control problems on full auto, AFAIK only the BM-59 had a bipod as standard issue turning it into something like a "lightweigh BAR".

Many experts believe that the ideal infantry round would be around 6.5 and the FN was acually originally designed around that caliber, but the Kurtz approach allowed quick retooling of existing production machinery for a nearly as good result.

The "second generation" assault rifles, designed around a high velocity 5.56 round came to be trough a series of non technical decisions, IIRC the M-16 was initially issued only to selected units, then when the M-14 proved unsuitable for Vietnam battlefield conditions it was the best more or less tried design available and was put into mass production. The original 5.56 round had problems so the Belgian SS109, with a differeny grooving was adopted for M16A1.

All attempts to replace the 5.56 with a better round have so far proved unsuccessful, the cost was deemed excessive for the marginal improvement achievable over the 5.56. A solution (of doubtful legality as it looks very much like a dum-dum) is now being introduced to solve the problem the problem of the lack of stopping power of the high velocity small caliber ammo.

One mistery is why the Soviets that were not under pressure to replace the mostly satisfactory AKM decided to "go copy cat" with the AK-74.

Another is why the Japanese that had in the Arisaka 6.5 a standard round that was actually used for a number of between the wars full auto rifle prototypes decided to retool for 7.7. IMO a much better "what if" would be the Japanese adopting a derivative of the Fedorov design, due to greater relative importance of rifles in jungle warfare that could actually have made a difference and actually simplified their logistics !!!.

 

The STG44 seems, by most accounts, to have been an excellent battle rifle for its era. And it appears that a strong argument can be made that it may have indeed been the best battle rifle of the war. But even if every K98-armed German soldier were to have been re-equipped with the Stg44 by 1942, I really have my doubts that this would have altered the final outcome of the war.

Were there any battles of World War 2 (of significant size) where the outcome of that battle was decided by one side possessing superior small arms? I honestly don't know, so I am posing this question to those more knowledgeable than myself.

 

You said Goddard was reluctant to share information. Do you have anything to back it up? The fact that he engaged in extensive correspondence with others in the field is evidence to the contrary.

And how much different was the technology for this from other analog computers of the time?

 

Actually, Proeliator is right for once. Goddard was rather secretive with much of his work. It is one reason the US military relegated much of his wartime effort to "second teir" status. Goddard was prolific with patents and guarded them jealously prior to the war. The Germans, of course, simply ignored US patent laws and used his work freely.
Other major US players were Theodore von Karman of the California Institute of Technology at the Guggenheim Aeronautics Laborotory (GALCIT) and Frank Malina one of his graduate students.

During the war the US came up with essentially all the same reserach the Germans did in terms of things like guidance systems (easily surpassed German work in this field), rocket fuels (including several like GALCIT 53 that the Geramsn didn't invent), in many other areas of this field. But, unlike the Germans, the US persued several tracks of development working in parallel and sharing ideas.
There was GALCIT (JPL postwar), ORDCIT at Ft. Bliss (Became Redstone arsenal post war), Wright Field Ohio, Paxiuent River Maryland (Navy), Muroc Dry lake (became Edwards AFB and NAS China Lake postwar). The US program in missiles and rockets was much larger in terms of manpower and facilities but, it was generally more restricted to practical applications that could be applied to winning the war rather than simply developing systems on the basis of egos managing the programs.
Postwar, the wartime German efforts were almost immediately surpassed and the contribuiton of the Paper Clip scientists like Von Braun, beyond a few publicity items, was really pretty minimal.

In point of fact, had the war continued into late 1945 the entire German rocketry program would have been easily surpassed in technical complexity and capacity by the US who was rapidly developing their own programs based in small part on intelligence on German capacity. It is interesting to note that much of the German physical technology in this field by 1945 had been largely rejected as simply too crude by the various US rocketry programs.

Now, while this goes a bit far afield, it does demonstrate that the Germans were limited too in what they could accomplish. It also shows that a secretive, closed and, single line of development program system like the Peenemünde site the Germans used resulted in a few useful systems that had limited development potential rather than actual breakthroughs that a more open parallel development system like the US had would. But, that's for another thread.

 

Sorry mate, it was the other way around. Ask the guys who worked on the sidewinder missil.

When it comes to guidance systems the Germans were many years ahead of the US.

 

It should be important to note that the Enzian missle was a surface to air ground controlled rocket whereas the AIM-9 Sidewinder is an Air-to-Air Infared Heat Seeking Rocket.
The Enzian was just another product of Hitler's "Nächtlicher Samenerguß Fabrik"

The really interesting thing is that neither missle has anyting to do with the StG-44 nor it's employment by German ground forces during WW2

 

I know some of the guys that worked on the Sidewinder at China Lake. Nothing in that missile came from German technology. In fact, the closest US project to anything the wartime Germans were doing was Convair's MX 774 project.
That one initially derived from captured German V-2 technology prior to the war's end. Convair's lead engineer on the project rejected out-of-hand the German missile airframe as far to heavy and crude coming up with a new design about the same overall size. Charle Bossart in a moment of genus made the fuel tanks and skin integral, eliminated virtually all of the internal seperate conventiona airframe the Germans used and then used nitrogen pressurization to give the missile rigidity. That design is still the standard today. He also dumped their lack of a detachable payload nose cone. On the MX 774 that was the only portion of the missile that reentered in the terminal phase of flight.
Hughes simply didn't even bother with the German guidance system already having better. In fact, Bossart was going to dump the tail fins the V-2 had because the guidance was enough better to not need them but retained them on his design as an "insurance policy."
Convair also started work on a vastly improved guidance system called Azusa using ground station telemetry and course guidance that was fed through a computer to maintain an ideal trajectory.
Reaction Motors Inc. (RMI later Rocketdyne) developed the engine from a combination of German and Bell Labs technology. They incorporated a swivelling nozzle, something the Germans couldn't get to work due to their poorer electronics technology, dispensing with the graphite control veins the Germans used. The overall result of their improvement in engine design led to a nearly 25% increase in thrust. They also planned to shift fuel from LOX-alcohol to LOX-Gasoline for another large improvement after the first missiles flew. The result was MX 774 flew twice as far and carried three times the payload with much greater accuracy giving it the capacity for nuclear bomb delivery.

As for sidewinder, it originally largely used "off-the-shelf" technology that was already extent. The original missile was both cheap and simple. What made it so successful was that it had plenty of room for improvement on a very sound initial design.

Why not put a few of incredible German systems up? They had nothing to match the gunnery system in a B-29. They had nothing to match the EHB (Every House in Berlin later APS 7) radar blind bombing system.
Their aircraft navigation systems like Lorentz, Knickbein, or X-Gerät were criude compared to even such systems as Oboe and Rebecca-Eureka let alone the late war Tacan and Loran that the US and British adopted.

Even the existing German systems beyond the V-1 and 2 were quickly surpassed once the war ended. Wasserfall was essentially completely ignored. The US came up with the Nike Ajax totally on their own using no German technology. Even as a reserach missile Wasserfall was ignored.

Basically, the Germans went with what they had and could manage. Unfortunately for them the Nazi political and industrial system worked against them as well as simply facing a situation where they had less of everything to work with. Hell, even the Japanese beat the Germans to millimeter radar development.

 

Haha, priceless once more. Dropping the tail fins you say? My god, you've got no clue where you're heading with this. I really wont bother explaining to you why that's a crazy thing to claim.

Wrong, take a peak at some of the larger German a/c made during the war please. The Germans had that one bagged long before the B-29.

Wrong again. You really need to read up on German projects mate.

Really? Care to elaborate on that with direct comparisons?

I'm looking forward to this as Lorenz had been extensively used by the Germans since 1934.

Ignored? Haha, you make up funny stuff. You have no clue how intrumental German research was not only to the development of the sidewinder missile but to US & British guidance technology as a whole.

This is getting weirder and weirder... Someone obviously has never heard of the Würzburg gun laying radar, I'd like to see any Allied radar system come close to this.

 

Lorenz & Knickebein

In November 1939, a civilian technical expert in the employ of the British Air Ministry named Reginald Victor Jones was given a package.


Dr. R.V. Jones was another of the significant players in the Wizard War. He was a tall, athletic Scotsman with a physics doctorate from Balliol College at Oxford, where he had been a protege of Professor Lindemann. Jones had a sharp sense of humor, and the deductive ability of a technical Sherlock Holmes. He had turned down a job offer at Mount Wilson Observatory in California to sign on with the Air Ministry's "Scientific Information Branch (SIB)". When offered the SIB job, he replied: "A man in that position could lose the war. I'll take it."

At the time, he essentially was the SIB, since he was the only RAF official working on technical intelligence, and indeed some claim he all but invented the field. In time, he would become "Assistant Director of Intelligence (Science)", making him the highest ranking civilian on the Air Staff.

His first major assignment was to inspect a set of papers on German technology. The package of papers included seven pages of text in German, along with English translation. They had been passed on from the British embassy in Oslo, Norway, which had been given them anonymously. If taken at face value, the papers seemed to be a treasure chest of information on secret German weapons development efforts. The "Oslo Report" talked about many things, including guided bombs, rocket-propelled aircraft, and particularly radio navigation schemes. The papers had been provided by an anti-Nazi German researcher named Hans Ferdinand Mayer, but his identity did not become known until well after the war, and even then his identity was kept quiet to prevent him from being harassed as a traitor by other Germans. Mayer was imprisoned for a time during the war for speaking his mind too freely. Clearly nobody really suspected he had been giving away secrets as well, since he would have been executed, probably after the Gestapo got bored of torturing him.

Many British officials thought the Oslo Report was a ruse, as it contained implausible statements, such as claiming that 5,000 Junkers Ju-88 bombers were being produced a month. R.V. Jones thought it was for real, since it gave up too much verifiable and valuable technical information. He judged the implausible statements to be merely errors.

The Oslo Report mentioned in a vague way what seemed to be German radar and a radio navigation system. The war was quiet at the time, and nothing more came of the leads for the moment. Jones didn't forget about it, however.

* In March 1940, Jones received information obtained from German prisoners and a scrap of paper found in a downed German bomber that hinted at the existence of two German radio-navigation systems. Oddly, from what Jones could make of these two systems, they didn't match anything in the Oslo Report. Some of the German prisoners had mentioned an electronic system named "X-Geraet (X-Device)", but gave no details.

On 5 June 1940, the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in France was completed. On that same day, an RAF signals intercept station picked up a coded German radio transmission. The message was passed to the British cipher-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park in the English Midlands. The Germans had developed a machine called "Enigma" to encipher their messages. The Germans believed Enigma messages were absolutely secure, but the British codebreakers had cracked the cipher. The Enigma-encrypted message of 5 June was from Luftwaffe headquarters. The message was passed on to Jones and mentioned three things:

• The word "Knickebein", which translated as "crooked leg".
• The town of Kleve, in Germany near Essen.
• A set of compass bearings.

This was the first significant clue on the mystery of the German radio navigation systems. Jones felt increasingly certain that the Germans did in fact have one or more radio navigation systems that could be used for night or foul-weather bombing.
* Jones focused on the possibility of a radio navigation system that involved narrow radio beams sent out from two widely separated locations. The two beams would intersect over a target city, marking it for bombing. Jones further concluded that Knickebein was a receiver installed in a bomber that allowed the aircraft to use such a radio navigation system.

He then performed a careful inspection of a Luftwaffe Heinkel He-111 bomber that had been forced down in Scotland in October 1939. The He-111 was fitted with a "Lorenz" blind-landing set, an electronic landing aid to help bring the aircraft back to ground safely at night or in bad weather.
Lorenz, named for its manufacturer, the Lorenz company, had been initially put into service for Lufthansa in 1934 and was adopted in many other countries. It was an elegantly simple scheme. It sent out a directional signal with an audio tone on a carrier in a range of wavelengths near 10 meters (30 MHz), using an antenna that switched back and forth to send out two transmission lobes, skewed on alternating sides of the antenna's centerline. The switching was performed by a mechanically driven cam that ensured that the signal was activated for short time in one lobe and for a long time in the second.

The signal from the first lobe would be received as a series of Morse code "dots", while the signal from the second lobe would be received as a series of "dashes". If an aircraft was on the centerline between the two lobes, the receiver would effectively get a continuous tone, with the dots filling in the dashes. If the aircraft drifted off the centerline in the direction of the first lobe, dots would gradually emerge from the continuous tone, and if it drifted off in the other direction, dashes would emerge.

Lorenz had been in common use since the mid-1930s and nobody thought it anything out of the ordinary. Having been designed as an airport approach aid, it wasn't useful for long-range air navigation, with an error of about 8 kilometers at a distance of 100 kilometers. On reexamination, the Lorenz set on the He-111 proved to be unusually sensitive, and it appeared that it was being used as a long-range radio navigation device. Armed with this clue, British interrogators managed to pry information from a captured Luftwaffe airman that confirmed that suspicion.
Knickebein did use two transmitters, both essentially refined versions of Lorenz with much greater accuracy, a few hundred meters at the maximum range of the system, which was limited by the line of sight. Like Lorenz, Knickebein operated around 10 meters (30 MHz), which allowed enhanced Lorenz receivers as discovered by the British to track the beams.

The two transmitters were set up at separate locations, with both focused on the target. A bomber would fly up one beam staying on track by listening for dots or dashes emerging from the continuous tone, and drop bombs when the second beam was detected, which was apparently transmitted on a different frequency within the operating band. The system, which had been initially demonstrated in 1937, was actually known to the Germans officially as "X-Leitstrahlbake (Direction Beacon)", and had been given the nickname "Knickebein" due to the bent appearance of the primary transmitting antenna.

* On 21 June, much to his surprise, Jones was called to a meeting of Churchill's cabinet at 10 Downing Street. The invitation was at the suggestion of Lord Cherwell, Jones' mentor at Balliol College. The meeting concerned the possibility that the Luftwaffe did in fact have radio navigation systems. Churchill was extremely worried that such systems would allow the Germans to perform accurate attacks at night, overstraining Britain's air defenses.

Not everyone at the meeting believed that such radio navigation systems were possible, and the group had been arguing the matter before Jones arrived. When Churchill asked Jones a question, Jones tactfully offered to outline what he knew about German radio navigation systems. Churchill agreed, and Jones spent twenty minutes describing the intelligence he had received, and his deductions. Jones told the group that he did believe that the Luftwaffe had radio navigation systems, and suggested that they could be disrupted. Churchill was impressed by Jones, always liked the idea of fighting back, and gave him the authority to investigate further.

* First, Jones needed to obtain solid proof of his suspicions. Three Avro Anson utility aircraft were fitted with American Halicrafters S-27 wideband radio receivers, used by radio amateurs, with operators tuning the receivers to possible Knickebein transmission frequencies. Although the receivers found nothing of interest at first, greatly worrying Jones, one of the Ansons finally picked up a Knickebein transmission, and the flight crew flew down the beam of the signal until they received the second signal at the intersection point of the two beams.

With this proof in hand, Jones went to the TRE to devise countermeasures, working with the TRE's Robert Cockburn, a former master of a municipal college. Electrodiathermy sets, used in hospitals to electrically cauterize wounds were pressed into service as "broadband jammers", throwing out radio noise over a wide range of frequencies to disrupt Knickebein transmissions. RAF Lorenz transmitters were also modified to produce false Knickebein signals in hopes of confusing Luftwaffe bombers.

By September 1940, when the Luftwaffe turned to night raids, countermeasures against Knickebein had been refined. The British were operating more powerful anti-Knickebein transmitters that degraded Knickebein signals by injecting them with Morse code patterns. Since the beams were codenamed "Headaches", the transmitters were named "Aspirins".
Knickebein had been neutralized. Without direction, German bombers sometimes got lost in the dark, and at least one crashed because the pilot became completely disoriented, losing control of his aircraft and causing his crew to bail out before the bomber slammed into the ground. Cockburn and his team at the TRE had achieved their success in the jamming business, and would continue successfully in the trade for the rest of the war.

 

German radars had become arguably the most sophisticated of their generation, with the Freya much more the shape of things to come than the British Chain Home, and the Wuerzburg clearly superior to any other gun-laying radar before the SCR-584. However, characteristically, while the Germans had been technically clever, they were slow to match the insight of the British in setting up the well-organized filter room system.

 

You obviously know little or nothing of the B-29 defensive fire control system. It consists of a number of stations each equipped with a lead computing gyroscopic gunsight. These are connected to a central fire control computer (much like you might find on a ship) that then calculates the target position, corrects the turret aim for parallax errors and continues to do so as the gunner engages a target. Any gunner on a B-29 could select and control any of several turrets singly or in a group.
What you are showing is a simple direct linked remote control turret on one of several German aircraft like the Ar 240 or Ju 288. These never did work well for the Germans and most of these systems were abandoned by them as unworkable. The operational aircraft ended up with manned guns instead.

(with respect to the EHIB / APQ 7 radar)

Here's a basic link:
[6.0] Microwave Radar At War (3)

The Germans had nothing in service to match the US SCR 584 radar and fire control system. They had nothing in serivce to match the APQ 7. They couldn't even match the earlier H2X and H2S bombing radars in service.
If you go down the link a bit further it discusses the APS 20 Project Cadillac I and II. The Germans didn't even have anything on the drawing board to match that.

Sure. All of the German systems relied on a directional radio beam or beams that the aircraft followed to the target. They were neither omnidirectional nor were they resistant to countermeasures. That is why the German devices were quickly discovered and countered during the Battle of Britain.
The Allies, first the British then the US with them, went to omni directional navigation aids like GEE, TACAN, and LORAN that covered broad areas. As the signals were omnidirectional it made jamming them difficult and it also made detection and decerning their purpose more difficult too.
OBOE made use of a coded intermittent signal that was put on a very tight beam at higher altitudes for precise targetting. You might read OBOE a precision ground controlled blind bombing system by Dr. F E Jones in Journal of the Imperial Electrical Engineers Association No 2, 1946, among other references.

Ignored for the most part. The US did use German high speed aerodynamics research fairly extensively. But, most of their stuff was quickly surpassed post war. As for the AIM 9:

Raytheon AIM-9 Sidewinder

A short history. The other missile mentioned here, the GAR 2 / AIM 4 Falcon started development during WW 2 as the JB 3 Tiamat. It too owes nothing, nada, zip to wartime German development of anything.
Now, the US did copy the German idea of the R4M in the late 40's as the FFAR (Free Flight Attack Rocket) but, this is hardly some new or previously non-existant technology in that it is a simple unguided rocket.

Würtzburg operates at 50 cm and considered a decimetric radar. Without cavity magnetron or travelling wave tube technology you cannot produce very short wave radar signals in the millimeter range. The Japanese did it first. The Britsh second. Both did it independently. The British then gave the technology to the US and between the two produced a wide range of X and Ka Ku band 10 and 3 cm radars.
These by 1944 were nearly completely replacing earlier sets that ran on frequencies similar to those the Germans were using. Germany came into the race late in early 1944 only after having captured and repaired a British 10 cm set coded by them Rotterdam. By the end of the war they had a handful of prototype 10 cm sets like Berlin produced. These didn't see any real operational service however.
Here's a US antiaircraft system that the Germans had nothing close to:

The SCR-584 Radar Tribute Page de KA9MVA

This system used with the M2 90mm gun and VT fuzes (another thing the Germans didn't develop operationally) was the tour de force in antiaircraft heavy artillery. The M2 gun had a powered mount that when tied to the SCR 584 fire control system allowed the entire battery to be remotely controlled from the fire control station. The guns incorporated power ramming and had automatic fuze setting when time fuzes were used. The whole thing was so effective that the US in late 1944 reduced the size of a 90mm AA battery from 6 to 4 guns but actually increased its effectiveness.
The Gernans had nothing close to it in service.

When it comes to technology the Germans had a few neat things that were worth copying but, not much.

 

You know what, judging by how much you've simply made up in some of your last few posts I am not at all surprised that you're one those individuals who actually believe that to be the case. I have come a little further than that however.

You see I know that scientists, engineers & inventors from every side during the war demonstrated extreme enginuity, creativity & skill, as evidenced by their fantastic work & achievements. I also know that no side was inherently more advanced than the other, and progress in any area came first as a result of need, next proper funding, time & finally leadership interest.

Getting back to radar, the Germans were right up there with the Allies with their Wuerzburg gun laying radar, which had both its advantage & disadvantages over the best Allied radar equipment developed during the war.

Wuerzburg-Riese FuSE 65 vs SCR-584:
Range: 80 km vs 64 km
Range error: +/-15m vs +/-23m
Azimuth error: 0.2 - 0.1 deg vs 0.06 - 0.06 deg

The Germans were however more interested in detecting Allied radar than developing their own, and so put more work into radar countermeasures and detection devices. This resulted in detection devices such as the passive homing FuG 350 Naxos and later Korfu, designed to detect the latest Allied radar. These devices were state of the art at the time, and very effective, but in the end Allied aircraft were appearing in such overwhelming numbers over Germany that German nightfighters always had to watch their own backs as-well when attacking to look out for Mossie nightfighter escorts.

In late 1944 to 45 the Germans also turned to infrared imaging as a means of aiding the detection of Allied a/c during the nighttime amongst other uses. Fortunately for the Germans they were, unlike with radar, well ahead with infrared technology compared to the Allies, mostly thanks to their lead in chemistry & optics. German development in this area would result in devices such as the FuG280 Kiel, a passive infrared vision detector which had a visual range of 4km, as-well as the Spanner II passive infrared vision device with a visual range of up to 5km in its last versions.

Development didn’t stop there however, infrared was used on the ground by the Germans as-well, using devices such as the FG-1250 infrared vision detector for use on tanks & halftracks which provided a clear visibility range of 600 meters using a 20cm 200 watt infrared searchlight, and up to 2,500 meters in cooperation with a 60cm 8 kilowatt infrared searchlight mounted on separate halftrack. Also developed was the ZG 1229 “Vampir” infrared rifle scope, which had a clear visibility range of 300 meters.

Now the Allies weren’t unaware of infrared technology, and sure enough also developed their own devices within this field, but this was limited to only rather crude IR vision detectors, such as the M1 infrared rifle scope system which only had a range of approx. 70 yards, and lacked the clear imaging of the German systems. The Germans were ahead in this area mainly because of their electron multiplier design which was used to increase the sensitivity of their IR detectors to an unprecedented level that the Allies never even came anywhere close to during the war. So sensitive were these devices that they were directly copied by the British & US right after the war for use in their future infrared devices.

 

Keep on track gentlemen, if you wish to discuss the ww2 Radar, or what side got what bit of technology first or who had the smartest scientist then take it to another thread and keep this one relevant to the STG or other similar related topics.

 

Proliator,
1. Better German radars? Not without a cavity magnetron they weren't.
2. On rockets well how far would Dr. Braun had gotten if not for Goddard's pioneering work?

Now as to how far the Stg 44 could have altered the course of the war well even if it had enabled the Germans to drive the Soviets out of Stalingrad and get the Caucasus oilfields that in and of itself doesn't drive the Soviets out of the war ,the Soviets had pretty much seen by Nazi attrocities or rather treatment of the Soviet people that there wasn't really no surrendering to them. For one thing when does Germany get all of this production? Seems to me logistics were horrible on that front and it will take some considerable effort to put proper infrastructure in place to get the oil back to Germany.

Now you seem to be arguing that the Stg44 was the best infantry rifle in the war it may have been but a war winner in & of itself no. If you want to argue "what-ifs" about how Germany could have won well that works two ways and I'm sure there are things the Pro-Allied ones of us could bring up to counteract whatever "what if" favors the Germans.

edit...
Tomcat,sorry didn't see your warning.

 

Ok getting back on topic.

icky, again I never claimed that the StG would turn the tide by itself, it could however have provided that last push needed to turn it. No single weapon wins wars, but they can have a major impact nonetheless.

It is my opinion that if it was introduced in 1942, then the StG could've helped the Germans win at Stalingrad and in doing so enabled the Germans to march with their backs secure towards the caucasus. It would've been a major blow to the Soviets who would've seen their supply routes to the north completely cut off, and the caucasus would be as good as lost when the Germans could bring over double the amount of manpower at first available because of the great drain on German manpower stalingrad historically became. With the 6th army escaping encirclement and capture, the Germans would have a lot more men at their disposal, and very experienced battlehardened men at that.

In short, the addition of the StG was one way the Germans could've won the battle for Stalingrad without any need for a change in tactics. The other way was simply to bypass the city and encircle it, sticking to the open terrain fighting which the German were so good at, and avoiding the nasty close up city fighting which negated the clear German advantage in long range fighting.

 

The Germans weren't winning at Stalingrad because their supply and engineering systems were thoroughly wacked. All the SG 43 would have done is excerbate an already massive supply problem. The Germans at Stalingrad were operating nearly 300 miles from the nearest rail head. They were totally dependent on trucks and wagons to bring supplies forward.
But, there was a massive shortage of both trucks and wagons available and the situation was getting worse due to the abyssimal condition of the "roads" available. I use the word road advisedly as these were little more than unmaintained dirt tracks across the steppe.
The Luftwaffe was drawn more and more into flying supply missions to Stalingrad rather than air support. This was well before the Soviet counter offensive and months before 6th Army was cutoff. Lack of motor transport was nearly universal at the front since all of it had been stripped to haul supplies. 6th Army was basically immobile at Stalingrad.
With the severe shortage of ammunition for heavier weapons, a shortage of just about everything else, how does throwing in an assault rifle change anything?
The Germans can't take the city with small arms alone. Without artillery support, with a shortage of mortar bombs, with a lack of explosives and flamethrowers for their pioneers, with shortages of everything else it was just a matter of time until 6th Army was ground up and destroyed.

What the Germans needed at Stalingrad wasn't a better rifle. It was dump trucks and bulldozers to build a better road and to install a rail line forward in a timely fashion.

 

Gardner, contrary to what you're saying the Germans were actually winning at Stalingrad, they had 90% of the city at one point. The advance had however ground to a halt by then. It had taken too long fighting in Stalingrad. The German soldiers there lacked enough effective close combat weapons, the K98k wasn't suited for city fighting, and the MP40 was supplied in too few numbers, and like any SMG it lacked effectiveness at ranges beyond 100m. This coupled with the eventual lack of all the basic supplies halted the German advance.

Going into Stalingrad with an army which wasn't equipped for fighting in cities was a big mistake. It cost the Germans more men, materials and most importantly time than was ever needed. Giving the troops a weapon which was perfect for the environment from the beginning, with its much superior firepower, would've shortened the struggle considerably and made sure the advance wouldn't have stopped at the Volga.

As for the supply situation, it wouldn't have turned as bad as it did had the city been taken more quickly. Also a box of 7.92mm Kurz wouldn't be any harder to transport than a box of 7.92x57mm. So while the logistics weren't great in stalingrad they wouldn't have been worse with a weapon like the StG, esp. not seeing as clearing the city would've been done much more swiftly with such weapons available.

 

It wouldn't have mattered had they actually taken it. 6th Army was doomed and AGS was going to end up losing their campaign because of the logistics situation. A different rifle in the hands of German soldiers doesn't change that.
Why would the SG 43 make a difference in logistics? Because it is a virtual certainty that ammunition expendature among troops armed with that weapon would skyrocket. Even on semi-automatic it will use more ammunition than a K 98.
There is massive evidence right from the invention of repeating fire arms to show this is the case. More ammunition use means a need for more ammunition. In fact, given the overall situation for supplies the Germans faced the SG 43 would probably have increased the reliance on captured weapons and ammunition as well.