Brass stock disk

[Thunderbox]

Its probably more to do with the huge "turnover" of rifles and men in units due to the way the casualty system worked. Rifles and kit were dumped by wounded men, or stripped from the dead. The equipment then got taken back to Divisional or Corps dumps to be cleaned and repaired for re-issue. Rifles probably went even further back - to the Army-level depots where new trainees and recovered wounded were fed back into the replacements system. Contemporary accounts indicate that new recruits often/usually picked up their rifles & fighting equipment at Etaples, after they'd landed in France. The Corps and Divisions themselves swapped their sub-units, and the Regiments themselves were subject to frequent re-organisation in numbers of men and equipment holdings.

Thus brass unit butt disks would be fine for the permanent weapon holdings of a Regiment in peacetime, but they would quickly become irrelevant and completely inter-mixed in a wartime unit. Many British battalions got through over a hundred and fifty officers and several thousand other ranks during the course of the war - ie their original 30 + 800 or so were killed or wounded three to five times over. The chances are that most Regiments eventually lost all of their original rifles by mid-WW1.

I expect that the "1916" decision arose because of the tens of thousands of rifles that ended up back in the system following the Somme offensive.

One of the interesting ways in tracing this is by looking at the surviving contemporary butt disks themselves - many are marked to Artillery, RASC, and other units that were less likely to suffer mass casualties than infantry units.

I'm fairly sure that many Regiments reverted to marked butt disks during the inter-war period, so it probably wasn't a complete "ban" on their use.

[Peter Laidler]

Butt discs were available until very much later, as phosphated steel. They are mentioned in the 1942 Equipment Regulations. Theywere also reversible but Armourers were instructed to counterbore the reverse of the screw hole to accept the machine head wood screw

[nzl1a1collector]

Brass Disks were still used up until the 1980's. The NZ Airforce fitted Brass ID disks to their SLR rifles! Just a hangover from the No.4 Rifle days.

[browningautorifle]

Very pretty! The NZ forces also disapproved the carry handle saying "who would carry the rifle like a purse?" And they were correct to a point.

[Peter Laidler]

So far as I'm aware, the removal of the carrying handle of the L1A1's only occurred on active service in Malaya and SVNam. We had them fitted everywhere else. Can any current Kiwi's elaborate further?

[nzl1a1collector]

Exerts from Modification Instruction NZ 162/Mod 3 Issue, dated 2 Oct 80

4. Modification to be applied to. All Rifles 7.62mm L1A1

11. Detail. Remove handle carying dispose of a per para 9 above and replace with a neoprene washer detailed in para 8 above.

[Amatikulu]

The carry handles were removed in the South African Army as well

[browningautorifle]

In Canada, we had them from beginning to end. No exceptions that I am aware of. And they were never a problem. But we never had the butt discs.

[Peter Laidler]

We had them right through too but some of our Light Infantry and Gurkhas carried the rifle with the carrying handle while marching.

To be honest, the C-handle wasn't that well used. But constant rotating of the handle caused the sharp edge of the steel fixing bit to cut away at the body slot causing the handle to become loose and flop about. No use fitting another handle assembly because it was the slot that was worn so you had to bend the hard round spring steel fixing to suit............. which wore the body away more. We had a no-go gauge that we'd use for the slot. Too wide and the rifle got the chop

[303TF]

In Kiwi Airforce 74-94 , had carry handle on the SLR all time ( until replaced with AUG )