February American Rifleman

[firstflabn]

There is a big difference between dumping a spare barrel and choosing a marginal weapon that may save your life to avoid humping a couple of pounds. SLA Marshall's somewhat believable books chronicle the Army personnel dumping everything, spare ammunition, grenades, over the matter of weight. I would not expect the same behavior from Marines. HMGs were rarely carried. I'll give you another theoretical instance that you can pick apart: Suppose your assistant gunner and ammo bearers are humping cans of belted ammunition in addition to a spare barrel in a piece of web gear that may be a genuine hassle to keep on board comfortably. You ask the SGT if it's ok to ditch the barrel and pick it up later or just forget about it. If there has been no use of it for several days, it might be a great idea to dump it in favor of bullets. Gas masks are dumped by the hundreds, was there a "lesson learned" on that?

To my knowledge, they didn't prepare "lessons learned" reports on hypothetical situations. If your research has turned up any, I'd be pleased to learn of them. However, the 1st Marine Division's post-Chosin reports do employ careful speculation, versions of "maybe this or that would help" after explaining the event.

The wisdom of retaining the carbine in the USMC T/O had already been answered before the NORK's started south in June, so your wishful thinking is pointless. It had already been answered several times during WWII during rather sweeping T/O changes. The idea that the carbine had mechanical issues during Chosin is firmly rooted in fact. The point I was striving to make (and you either ignored or dismissed) was that if you rely on anecdote in place of research, you'll miss the point that other weapons had numerous reliability problems too. If you strip the context from even factual accounts, you distort the conclusion. Is that not obvious?

Since I've endorsed context as a good thing, and since we both seem to have an interest in the weight carried by weapons crews, how about a quick peek at how the Marine infantry battalion mortar and MG elements (both heavy and light) were organized in Oct 40. I'm fairly certain this is the last version before the carbine was adopted. Piecing together some secondary sources, looks like 65 rifles and 170 pistols. I can't help but wonder if the considered wisdom of the Marine Corps thought weight might be one issue leading to this distribution.

What did the first USMC T/O with the carbine look like? Again, for the weapons crews in an infantry battalion: 1 pistol, 132 carbines, 41 '03s. That's virtually a complete swap, carbines for pistols (at least proportionately as the quantities varied a bit).

I can't prove that the reason the Corps assigned a much higher proportion of carbines to their infantry battalions than did the army was because they also assigned a much greater number of MGs and mortars (correlation is not the same as cause and effect), but, when combined with remarks about the weight of other weapons, it's impossible to ignore.

If you can tolerate one more comment: I had always been a bit skeptical about the claims that the original carbine safety was changed because of WWII GIs getting it confused with the mag release, but I'll be damned, there it was in one of those WWII lessons learned reports. Still learning (now if I could just remember where I put stuff).