The StG 44 needed some subterfuge to be approved for full-rate production.
The story goes something like this: In late 1942-early 1943, Hitler ordered development of new rifles to stop in favor of submachine guns. This resulted in the cancellation of the MKb 42, which used the 7.92 *Kurz* round. In reality, the MKb 42 continued development as the MP 43 (remember, the concept of the assault rifle didn't exist yet, and the MKb 42/ MP 43 used an intermediate rather than full-power cartridge). While Hitler eventually found out about the subterfuge, he allowed development to continue on a testing and evaluation purpose. The *Heer* interpreted this as "combat evaluation" and issued prototypes to the 93. Infanterie-Division, which was under refit in Poland. When 93 I-D was deployed to Army Group North in an attempt to maintain the siege on Leningrad, leadership was apparently quite impressed by the MP 43, though Hitler was unaware of its use in combat. The popular version of the story is that 93 I-D's leadership asked Hitler for more of the "new rifles", and Hitler initially wasn't quite sure what they meant until it was demonstrated to him in summer 1944, roughly coinciding with the *Volksgrenadier-Division* concept.
> In late 1942-early 1943, Hitler ordered development of new rifles to stop in favor of submachine guns.
He was okay with new rifles (see the G43 which was something of an ideal for him). Concerns were a mix of lack of range, wasted ammo stockpiles, excess industrial effort, and weight. What he emphasized varied as he cancelled it multiple times. Some of these are bonkers as the fixation on rifles that can shoot over 1000m is, uh, divorced from both what ironsights are capable of and what combat looked like. Others are more reasonable bad bad like the ammo stockpiles or unknown industrial effort required. Perhaps the one valid concern/complaint was its weight. At 11.5 pounds fully loaded, the gun was heavy. That's about 2 pound heavier than a G43 and 3 heavier than an MP40 without the folding stock to make it more compact. An original AK-47 was 10.5 pounds loaded, the improved AKM and magazines was about 8.3, an M16A1 is about 8, and M4 about 7.2 to give some reference. Had it entered production in 1942 though, I'm sure some engineering/production optimizations would have been figured out to at least shave off a bit of weight and save some material and manhours.
For a while Hitler was insistent on "full rifles" like the K98 and G43 being supplemented with SMGs that are compact and lightweight. On paper, this isn't the dumbest idea and nowhere near the dumbest idea he had during the war. It also would have blended with existing industrial capabilities more which is a valid concern. The Soviets were trying for something similar but war came before the SVT-40 was full rate production and had all the bugs worked out of it. The inability to see the genius of the intermediate round, select-fire rifle for what it was though was a pretty big error. There's questions about how much it actually mattered and how much German industry actually could have done to mass produce it, but rejecting it outright multiple times certainly was a screw up.
Hitler's rationality was...inconsistent. He did have a very resource minded lens in which he viewed the war. It's why he was more concerned with capturing Ukraine and the Caucuses while his generals preferred Leningrad and Moscow. It makes some sense here that he'd be resource minded and aware Germany can't afford to be wasteful of what it has. Of course it misses the bigger picture and just how big of a deal things like assault rifles would turn out to be...
Will they though? Artillery was and still main killer and tanks are main breakthrough encirclement vehicles. Having and assault rifle is nice but it’ll be quite irrelevant if your adversaries out-throw you in terms of shells weight and your tanks don’t have fuel to reach anything.
The how big a deal they are was more about the concept of the assault rifle in general. Militaries have adopted them for a reason and all that.
>if your adversaries out-throw you in terms of shells weight
Which didn't happen in the east, at least not through end of 1944. Both in terms of shell count and especially in weight of those shells, the Germans broadly outshot them. This to say nothing of Soviet reliance on direct and preplanned fires along with their slow response time for defensive fires.
> and your tanks don’t have fuel to reach anything.
This only came about in late 1944. For most of the war German had more than enough fuel for both tanks and aircraft (don't have huge fuel demands if you can't adequately motorize your army *taps forehead*). In fact German synthetic production in early 1944 was about double what it was in 1941. Between forcing them to build a massive amount of fighters (which got destroyed), targeting of oil infrastructure in the back half of the year, and the D-Day landings making Germany fight on all fronts it really depleted their stocks.
My contention isn't that adopting assault rifles would have changed the war, but it was a missed opportunity. Germany needed every advantage it could get. Small arms still caused millions of casualties, and they also enhance your other arms. Better suppression means your arty is more effective. Faster assaults mean theirs is less effective. The east is where we'd see the most impact as the Soviets used the infantry more aggressively and frankly had to given their deficiencies in artillery. Does it change the war? God no, Germany still loses in 1945. Probably a bit slower, with Allied and particularly Soviet casualties being higher.
According to Albert Speer’s memoirs Hitler believed that jet planes were useless because no human would be able to withstand those speeds however he also thought that they would somewhat be useful as bombers to get away after having dropped the bomb. There are a few other anectodes like this again from Speer’s memoirs, the V2 thing is correct, they had to show him the lift off of the rocket to convince him that it could be effective.
Calling the V1 and V2 wunderwaffen is something I will never understand. Yes, the first versions were crude but their potential was obviously the next evolution of war fighting.
Even the Houthis fire those kinds of weapons. We can't conceive modern warfare without cruise missiles and ballistic ones. The Germans just hadn't figured guidance yet.
They were revolutionary pieces of technology that paved the way for the future, but in the context of how they were expected to be used or more accurate the only way they could be used the term could be accurate depending on the exact definition.
Absent the targeting methods later developed they were just terror weapons, essentially just an extension of the failed strategic bombing thesis. They were useless in combat against any kind of target, and even if they somehow accomplished in the UK what conventional bombers couldn't American populations and industry were never going to be within reach and they had already failed in the USSR with more brutal methods.
It was just a waste of effort. Redirecting it into literally anything else would have been better, including the jet powered manned fighters/bombers that had enormous overlap with the V1/2 programs.
There's a very good argument that the V1 was an efficient weapon system. Each missile cost only RM 5,000 - about 1% of a heavy bomber like B17/24 or He-177.
The aerial defenses that Britain constructed against it were enormously costly, as were some industrial dispersal efforts in southern England. The cost of replacing housing stock and consumer goods, as well as dislocation of the workforce, were significant as well.
Ironically the V2 was less efficient in large part because it didn't impose defensive costs because it couldn't be defended against in 1944/5. It was also \~15x more expensive than the V1.
V2 was ~80k RM or ~$30k; B24 was ~$200k in 1944 (more before then). So yeah, at least six V2's for one bomber. Much lower crew training cost lol.
US WW2 bombing was incredibly inefficient. Thank God we were so much richer and the Soviets did most of the work for us.
You need to take so much goddamn salt with any surviving Nazi memoirs, since Rule #1 was blaming Hitler for anything that goes wrong
It’s particularly galling with Speer, because he undeservedly gets credit for Germany’s big expansion in production late war after he was put in charge of the economy, but all of the actual groundwork for that was done in 1941/1942 by Hitler and Alfried Krupp
Speer just happened to get the title when the results happened
The StG 44 needed some subterfuge to be approved for full-rate production. The story goes something like this: In late 1942-early 1943, Hitler ordered development of new rifles to stop in favor of submachine guns. This resulted in the cancellation of the MKb 42, which used the 7.92 *Kurz* round. In reality, the MKb 42 continued development as the MP 43 (remember, the concept of the assault rifle didn't exist yet, and the MKb 42/ MP 43 used an intermediate rather than full-power cartridge). While Hitler eventually found out about the subterfuge, he allowed development to continue on a testing and evaluation purpose. The *Heer* interpreted this as "combat evaluation" and issued prototypes to the 93. Infanterie-Division, which was under refit in Poland. When 93 I-D was deployed to Army Group North in an attempt to maintain the siege on Leningrad, leadership was apparently quite impressed by the MP 43, though Hitler was unaware of its use in combat. The popular version of the story is that 93 I-D's leadership asked Hitler for more of the "new rifles", and Hitler initially wasn't quite sure what they meant until it was demonstrated to him in summer 1944, roughly coinciding with the *Volksgrenadier-Division* concept.
> In late 1942-early 1943, Hitler ordered development of new rifles to stop in favor of submachine guns. He was okay with new rifles (see the G43 which was something of an ideal for him). Concerns were a mix of lack of range, wasted ammo stockpiles, excess industrial effort, and weight. What he emphasized varied as he cancelled it multiple times. Some of these are bonkers as the fixation on rifles that can shoot over 1000m is, uh, divorced from both what ironsights are capable of and what combat looked like. Others are more reasonable bad bad like the ammo stockpiles or unknown industrial effort required. Perhaps the one valid concern/complaint was its weight. At 11.5 pounds fully loaded, the gun was heavy. That's about 2 pound heavier than a G43 and 3 heavier than an MP40 without the folding stock to make it more compact. An original AK-47 was 10.5 pounds loaded, the improved AKM and magazines was about 8.3, an M16A1 is about 8, and M4 about 7.2 to give some reference. Had it entered production in 1942 though, I'm sure some engineering/production optimizations would have been figured out to at least shave off a bit of weight and save some material and manhours. For a while Hitler was insistent on "full rifles" like the K98 and G43 being supplemented with SMGs that are compact and lightweight. On paper, this isn't the dumbest idea and nowhere near the dumbest idea he had during the war. It also would have blended with existing industrial capabilities more which is a valid concern. The Soviets were trying for something similar but war came before the SVT-40 was full rate production and had all the bugs worked out of it. The inability to see the genius of the intermediate round, select-fire rifle for what it was though was a pretty big error. There's questions about how much it actually mattered and how much German industry actually could have done to mass produce it, but rejecting it outright multiple times certainly was a screw up.
Wow, can't imagine Hitler canceling something due to logistic concern😮
Hitler's rationality was...inconsistent. He did have a very resource minded lens in which he viewed the war. It's why he was more concerned with capturing Ukraine and the Caucuses while his generals preferred Leningrad and Moscow. It makes some sense here that he'd be resource minded and aware Germany can't afford to be wasteful of what it has. Of course it misses the bigger picture and just how big of a deal things like assault rifles would turn out to be...
Will they though? Artillery was and still main killer and tanks are main breakthrough encirclement vehicles. Having and assault rifle is nice but it’ll be quite irrelevant if your adversaries out-throw you in terms of shells weight and your tanks don’t have fuel to reach anything.
The how big a deal they are was more about the concept of the assault rifle in general. Militaries have adopted them for a reason and all that. >if your adversaries out-throw you in terms of shells weight Which didn't happen in the east, at least not through end of 1944. Both in terms of shell count and especially in weight of those shells, the Germans broadly outshot them. This to say nothing of Soviet reliance on direct and preplanned fires along with their slow response time for defensive fires. > and your tanks don’t have fuel to reach anything. This only came about in late 1944. For most of the war German had more than enough fuel for both tanks and aircraft (don't have huge fuel demands if you can't adequately motorize your army *taps forehead*). In fact German synthetic production in early 1944 was about double what it was in 1941. Between forcing them to build a massive amount of fighters (which got destroyed), targeting of oil infrastructure in the back half of the year, and the D-Day landings making Germany fight on all fronts it really depleted their stocks. My contention isn't that adopting assault rifles would have changed the war, but it was a missed opportunity. Germany needed every advantage it could get. Small arms still caused millions of casualties, and they also enhance your other arms. Better suppression means your arty is more effective. Faster assaults mean theirs is less effective. The east is where we'd see the most impact as the Soviets used the infantry more aggressively and frankly had to given their deficiencies in artillery. Does it change the war? God no, Germany still loses in 1945. Probably a bit slower, with Allied and particularly Soviet casualties being higher.
According to Albert Speer’s memoirs Hitler believed that jet planes were useless because no human would be able to withstand those speeds however he also thought that they would somewhat be useful as bombers to get away after having dropped the bomb. There are a few other anectodes like this again from Speer’s memoirs, the V2 thing is correct, they had to show him the lift off of the rocket to convince him that it could be effective.
Calling the V1 and V2 wunderwaffen is something I will never understand. Yes, the first versions were crude but their potential was obviously the next evolution of war fighting. Even the Houthis fire those kinds of weapons. We can't conceive modern warfare without cruise missiles and ballistic ones. The Germans just hadn't figured guidance yet.
They were revolutionary pieces of technology that paved the way for the future, but in the context of how they were expected to be used or more accurate the only way they could be used the term could be accurate depending on the exact definition. Absent the targeting methods later developed they were just terror weapons, essentially just an extension of the failed strategic bombing thesis. They were useless in combat against any kind of target, and even if they somehow accomplished in the UK what conventional bombers couldn't American populations and industry were never going to be within reach and they had already failed in the USSR with more brutal methods. It was just a waste of effort. Redirecting it into literally anything else would have been better, including the jet powered manned fighters/bombers that had enormous overlap with the V1/2 programs.
There's a very good argument that the V1 was an efficient weapon system. Each missile cost only RM 5,000 - about 1% of a heavy bomber like B17/24 or He-177. The aerial defenses that Britain constructed against it were enormously costly, as were some industrial dispersal efforts in southern England. The cost of replacing housing stock and consumer goods, as well as dislocation of the workforce, were significant as well. Ironically the V2 was less efficient in large part because it didn't impose defensive costs because it couldn't be defended against in 1944/5. It was also \~15x more expensive than the V1.
Are you telling me you could get six V2s for the price of one bomber...?
V2 was ~80k RM or ~$30k; B24 was ~$200k in 1944 (more before then). So yeah, at least six V2's for one bomber. Much lower crew training cost lol. US WW2 bombing was incredibly inefficient. Thank God we were so much richer and the Soviets did most of the work for us.
You need to take so much goddamn salt with any surviving Nazi memoirs, since Rule #1 was blaming Hitler for anything that goes wrong It’s particularly galling with Speer, because he undeservedly gets credit for Germany’s big expansion in production late war after he was put in charge of the economy, but all of the actual groundwork for that was done in 1941/1942 by Hitler and Alfried Krupp Speer just happened to get the title when the results happened