How useful exactly are submachineguns in combat?

The common perception is that they're generally useless in most situations as they only have a 50 meter or so effective range. Yet the Soviets used such enormous numbers as did the Germans (in late war).

American/British infantry didn't use them much and the Germans always had 1 to 4 of them in every section. The Soviets deployed entire companies armed solely with automatic weapons.

It seems to me that attacks, (especially in urban/town environments) would inevitably end in close quarters. Having a bolt action rifle or even a semi-auto may be unsafe.

 

yeah I agree with you,it's better to have a Sub machine gun than a rifle when battling in close quarters,especially in cities.

 

Submachine guns might also be useful in jungle warfare, where visibility can be restricted to a few metres.

 

After WWII studies (eg SLA Marshall) found a lot of combat came at close range and was over quickly, so making SMGs an ideal weapon for such encounters. Note the Germans were switching over to automatic weapons, Stg44, in the final months of the war. It has also been said the Soviets liked SMGs because their troops were not very well trained and equiping them with automatic weapons increased the chance they might actually hit somebody when they fired. The downside of SMGs is the limited range and accuracy.

 

I think, like anything in life, after using it for a while you learn it's negatives and positives quickly! I've read accounts of guys that were very accurate with a weapon that may not have had accuracy in mind when it was designed!

 

Has it? By whom? Or is this a SWAGPOOYA?

 

Very usefull but no replacement for a rifle. When the fighting gets up close and personel the ability to put a lot of rounds down range becomes critical.

In urban enviornments they take the lead over the rifle. The same can be said in densely forrested or jungle areas in which a smaller more manoverable weapon is an advantage...escpecialy when coupled with a high rate of fire.

The assault rifle blends these 2 together into an efficient compramise. In Canada we used the Sterling SMG up until the late 80's along wih the FN rifle. Using these 2 as a example you can readily see the size difference between then.

The sites on the Sterling I carried were graduated out to 2 hundered meters (I think that may have been more to do with morale than any tactical consideration). We trained with them out to 75 meters and at that range groupings were quite large across the board. Not a bad side effect if your shooting into massed ranks of charging troops but that kind of thing went out with WW1 (In most cases). If your trying to hit anything else let the guy with the rifle deal with. You can infer from this last sentence the reason why we "finaly" got rid of them.

Ergonomicly I didn't like the Sterling...another SMG for sure. Getting in and out of armored vehicles with a full size rifle would be a pain. Fairly easy with a smg. All in all I'd take an assault rifle over an SMG...though I did appreciate the power of the FN...but that's outside this topic (And before anyone jumps on me I consider the FN to be an old school rifle as the ones we had were semi automatic only...when I say assault rifle I mean somthing that can fire on full auto)

In that era the SMG definately had a role to play on the battlefield. Hope that helps anser your question.

 

It is useful and has its place in warfare but should not be made the sole arms for the common soldier. That is why there are assault rifles. Some better and more accurate than others. While the AK-47 is easy to manufacture and maintain, it is not accurate in the rifle mode whereas the M-16 is. But in Vietnam, it was found that the AK-47 was in its environment with most actions being close action and with its larger caliber rounds, caused more damage than did the M-16.

I believe the Germans and Soviets had a better conceptual use for the submachine guns and therefore designed their units differently compared to the Americans. Which is better? Depends on the combat environment. I do know that my grandfather did carry the ppsh around with him. I also have found that many of the Spanish Blue Divison members also favored the ppsh.

 

Since PzJgr mentioned it just a quick word on the type op damage caused by these weapons. In addition to being in the armored I was also a medic in my countries military and a EMT for 5 years on top of that so have some knowledge of what I speak.

Rifles from the WW2 era fired heavy rounds compared to toadys weapons. Generaly they were slower in velocity and if you follow the rules of kinetics "Mass times velocity squared" will give you the kinetic energy imparted from the round fired. In this model it is easy to see that the more critical of the considerations is velovity as it greatly magnifyies the kinetic energy.

For a SMG they fire a comparively (In accordance to their size) heavy round that moves at a slower velocity. The effect on the target is that the bullet will remain inside and not go through as would a bullet from a Lee Enfield (Or my dear departed FN).

From a logistical point of view this is a real pain (No pun intended) as it takes more time to remove and therefore taxes they system to a much greater extent.

In most cases a rifle like the Enfield, M1 or FN will simply blast a hole clean through the target. To be sure there will be a lot of damage and the wound will be contaminated as the vacum drawn foreign debis into the wound but you won't have to do as much probing around to find the bullet...hence you can move on to helping the next fella.

Todays rifles use hyper-velocity rounds. They are misserable little bastards to deal with. Take the AK-74 as an example. It fires a 5.45mm bullet that is made up of a steel projectile. The center of the projectile is hollow and contains a drop of lead at the rear. The process of firing the round and the friction with the air while in flight melts the lead. Once it hits a soft (Human) target the lead flies forward sending the bullet into an uncontroled spin inside the body, shreding everything in it's path. (Don't know how common this round was in the Soviet military but I do know it was developed and put into service)

Now let's go back to the SMG. In addition to the reasons noted in the first post I made you can see what the effect that having a few of these in a infantry section can do to the enemy beyond the battlefield. Tie up as many men and take them out of the fight is almost as good as making them into casualties...you might even make the arguement that you are doing psychological damage in the process.

You can also infer that from a evolutionary point of view more was taken from the SMG than just it's high rate of fire and ergonomic efficiency as armies moved towards the Assualt Rifle.

 

I agree with what most people are saying here; the use of te submachine gun has been overexaggerated by hollywood. For an example, the records of the 45th Infantry Division in Italy list 90 Submachine guns in the entire division ("WWII Infantry Tactics: Squad and Platoon").

A common joke among the 29th Infantry Division in Normandy was that "the Grease Gun was only useful if you happened to find a Kraut in a closet."

I once asked my Grandfather, a former policeman, about the use of submachine guns, and he said that the Thompson was much better than the Grease Gun back in the 1950's, but that you could fire the Grease Gun much longer than the Thompson without it jamming.

 

Now that most of our infantry have been issued M4 carbines for city fighting in Iraq, they will be sent to Afghanistan where an M14 would be more effective, assuming the soldier has good shooting skills.

 

I am buying a DPMS panther lite 16 which is the civilian model of the M4 Carbine but everyone calls it the AR 15. Its a pretty sweet gun, All this talk about submachine guns not being much use all depends. If you in a small town fighting I think the Mp40 would help alot. Out in the country in the fields a bolt action would be nice =)

I think it also depends also on how many people you are fending off. For instance if your a German in Berlin fighting on the streets and you see a couple of Russians running down the road what gun would you want at the time?? This question goes out to the next posters....

 

The submachine gun is basically an oversize pistol. It had its origins in the trench warfare of ww1 where they saw some use late in the war. In those days you got a choice of either full size rifle ammo or low powered pistol ammo because not much else in between had been invented yet. The full size rifle round made a swell machine gun round as the machine gun was meant for use on a bipod or tripod and served by a crew of two or three men. So you had several people to carry around the heavy machine gun and its ammo and the gun would fire fairly accurately (because it was so heavy).

Someone inevitably tried to make a rifle that fired automatic (notably Browning with his BAR). But for fast moving soldiers like the sturm-truppen of WW1, something like the bar was too heavy, too big, and fired too slowly. What was needed was something lighter and faster firing. The Germans adopted the 9mm pistol round in a shoulder weapon firing full auto, and this proved effective in clearing trenches during lightning attacks- and the smg was born.

Now imagine you are a Bolshevik commander and you need to arm your illiterate peasant troops, fresh from the kolkhoz to go off and fight the Germans. These troops may have never seen any machinery more complicated than a shovel in their entire lives - and consider that the assault rifle concept has not even been thought of yet. You need to get your troops into battle slinging lead downrange against the enemy as fast as possible, the sooner the better. Which weapon do you pick for them, a bolt action rifle? (How do you say 'sight picture' in Russian?) Or a lead-spitting submachine gun that's only a little more complicated than an anvil?
And dont even worry about having to arm every single soldier either! NYET! Just have the second wave pick up the weapons off their dead comrades from the first! (Yes, the Russkis actually did things like this at times. Dont even ask about their mine detection methods.)

 

I hope you will have good, verifiable, independent sources for this tiresome and useless banter of yours, for I am challenging you in public to present them, chapter and verse. Otherwise you will be nothing more than an ignorant racist.

 

I too would love to see the "sources" for all he stated. Or perhaps this is just his "opinion?".

 

One advantage of the rifles over the pistol cartridge SMGs in urban setting, o anywhere else, is un penetration of cover. Out rule for entrenching was that it took a full meter of compacted dirt to halt a full power MG round. Thats a bullet and propellant comparable to most WWII infantry rifles.

So four to five sand bags or a meter deep paraparet on your trench/foxhole. On the firing range we confirmed that school house rule. And we learned that just two sandbags were more than enough to stop the 9mm & .45 rounds. In buildings or forest you can see the same thing. A single course brick wall that provides adaquate cover from a 9mm SMG at 25 meters is worthless against a MosinNagant or Garand.

 

He is right about a true sub-gun being of pistol caliber, .45ACP, 9mm etc.

They are useful for certain applications such as CQB and clearing operations. But IMHO the main battle rifles and the carbines in large or intermediate calibers are always going to be more effective than an SMG, for most situations.

 

I second Za Rodinu. This is rubbish.

On the Russian peasants: 1941 was well after the establishment of primary schools in Russia. According to the Census Beauro, in 1939 65% of all soviet citizens could read and write.

The Russian peasants should be quite acquainted with machinery because the raison d'etre for collective farming was the mechanization of agriculture. Heavy duty tractors was a common sight in Russian collective farms; it should be remembered that the largest tractor factory in the world at the time was the Stalingrad factory. Even in the most impoverished of villages the local communist party office would have at least electrical light. Also, huge numbers of Russians live in the industrial mega cities and were more in tune with modernity than most German farmers from, for example, East Prussia. Russian factory workers made great tankers because they were highly skilled mechanics; to a lesser extend the peasants would be quite an adapt in fixing broken machinery since that was what they needed to do to survive. The ingenuity and expediency with which Russian tankers and infantrymen kept their equipment functional had been marked as a point of interest by many German officers.

The myth that the Russians used Human Wave without Rifles is utter, utter nonesense. The Russian Rifle Division was never short of rifles maybe with the exception of some desperate last stands organized at the last hour by the local militia in 1941 but that was no where near the shortage the myth suggested and such cases were extremely uncommon. The seminal On Infantry considered the Red Army soldier to be aboundantly equipped. During the Battle of Stalingrad there was one instance of Red Army troops being deployed without fully equipped with rifles in total. That was because the train car that carried their weapons had been destroyed by German dive-bombers. That unit was therefor ordered to gather weapons on the march between the station where they detrained and the battlefield. It was the Tsarist Army that failed to equip every man a rifle, not the Soviet Union.

 

Back to guns n' ammo, the Germans equipped one third of their Volksgrenadier Rifle Company with machine-pistols to be used as assault troops riding the StuGs to combat. The Russians used PPSh-41 on a much larger scale wherein entire battalions would be armed with submachine guns. This type of units were usually used as tank riders. For assisting armor in close in assaults the submachine gun was a superb weapon for WWII.

 

I'm under the impression that even STUGs were a relative rarity in German volksgrenadier divisions. They could count on one or two batteries at best.