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I was reading another thread on the Lee-Enfield forum and it sparked a question in my mind.
Where would one go, if it's possible at all, to find out what a given regiment was issued, and what weapons it received? How detailed would this information be?
A given firearm, with a given serial, would be, I assume, in a traceable crate, delivered to a particular place, signed for by an officer and a record kept of which soldier it was issued to? If that's a golden scenario, what would be reality?
JD
The Springfield Research Service has records on some percentage of US military firearms.
You can get a factory letter from Colt (I think Ruger does this as well).
Records of who got what rifle or other weapon were local unit records and were not kept. No records of what a Regm't was issued either. Might be some in the Canadian War Museum's archives though. Never seen anything published anywhere though.
And then it gets weird. Lotta Commonwealth and CF regiments were shuffled around as to what they did. A Militia Cavalry Regm't, for example, didn't necessarily serve as an armoured/cavalry unit. The assorted Canadian Mounted Rifles units of the Boer War and W.W. I, for instance. Or a PBI Regm't might have served as an armoured unit. The Sherbrooke Fusiliers(issued No.1 Mk III*'s in 1940. Converted to an armoured regiment on 26 January 1942.) were one of those. Started out as infantry, served with distinction, as armoured.
There is no Commonwealth equivalent to the Springfield Research Service. That is a privately owned company too.
Such records are usually short term, and once their usefulness is past they are not worth the cost of preserving. Occasionally such stuff survives by chance - I found a list in the Public Records Office of serial numbers of rifles sold through the [British] NRA, because there was a query ex-post facto about whether they needed the sale mark applying.
Makes sense, and what I expected but thought I'd ask anyways. :)
Pity.