Dad's Army P14s

[CINDERS]

In regards to the lend lease agreement I think Britain only finished paying off the debts owed to the USA in the 1990's.
But as a life line to the cause of freedom it is a great thing the two allied leaders did to ensure the freedom for us all.

[Seaspriter]

finished paying off the debts owed to the USA in the 1990's.

Sounds like mortgage with more than 50 year payback terms to paid off with highly inflated money. It was obviously a good venture for all of us. Imagine if Adolph, Benito, and Tojo had managed to conquer the world!

[Peter Laidler]

Some of the stuff here never even got back....... Catalina flying boats were fully overhauled for the flight back, towed out into Loch Erne, punctured, filled up, slowly sank, broke a wing as they did and are still piled up on the bottom 200 feet down. Now leaking oil!

[Frederick303]

It does seem like a lot of the recorded 785,000 P17 rifles received by the UK and 677,000 Weedon rebuilt P14 rifles (plus the 40,000 not re-built but EYed) were never sold out of surplus stocks but sunk off of the coast of England.

The evidence for this is:

1) The lack of M1917 rifles with British commercial proofs, they are not all that common in the US and would be if 785,000 (-167,000 possibly sent to France) had been sold to the trade in between 1953 and 1968.

2) After 1958 none of the lend-lease rifles were allowed to be reimported, hence virtually none of the Savage No 4 could be imported after that date. None of the 114,000 M1917 rifles that were lend leased after March of 1941 could have been imported, if they had not already been imported by the fall of 1958. But most of the large UK lot rifle sales seem to date to the later 1950 into the early 1960s.

3) The relativity rarity of P14 rifles in the US. If the ~700,000 known to exist around 1945 had been sold off then they should be a lot more common in the US, but it seems that the ration of P14 rifles to No 1 MK III rifles is 1/8 to maybe 1/10, at least where I live. P14 rifles are not common by any means.

4) The description of large numbers having been dumped at sea by Major Reynolds in an American Rifleman article from 1967. He sated a lot of the Home guard rifles were not in the best of shape when that force stood down and as such the rifles were dumped at sea. Else where I seem to recall, but cannot recall the source that the main dumping of surplus stocks occurred in the late 1940s, prior to the Korean war. The focus of that article was not rifles but stated a lot of the items dumped at sea between 1946 and 1950 were damaged stocks of material that was considered not worth the funds required to refurbish them.

5) In the book "Deadly Business" (1984), the total number of arms bought by interarms from UK surplus between 1953 and 1968 was listed as just shy of 2 million. That includes large numbers of pistols they bought in the 1953 to 1958 time frame, which was just shy of 400,000 leaving only about 1.6 million P14, M1917, No 1, No 4, No 5 and 38,000 M1 rifles.

Of course Century Arms and Parker-Hale took large numbers as well, with Century winning a lot of the bids in the 1965 to 1967 time frame, while Parker-Hale took something like 200,000~250,000 of the 1958 970,000 million piece sale. Even if you add in these numbers there is no way the roughly 1.3~1.45+ million P14/M1917 rifles UK had at the end of WWII were sold to the trade and imported into the US of A.

6) In one of the books I read on Interarms, there was a description of Interarms getting a 300,000 lot of surplus rifles (type unspecified) that the Brits had drilled holes in the wooden packing cases so that they would sink and loaded same onto boxcars for the final transport. Someone recalled a firm was buying surplus rifles, and interams was asked if they wanted the rifles on the same terms as the nearly one million piece order of 1958/59. I think this was around 1960~1961. This seems to indicate it was a common pattern for disposal of arms and munitions at sea.

7) Years ago I recall speaking with a chap that said a lot of the M1917 rifles that came in in the 1962 to 1963 time frame came from French surplus sales. It is known that he French were supplied something like 167,000 M1917 from in-theater stocks before the Anvil landings in August of 1945, presumably from stocks sold or lend leased to the British in the 1940/1941 time frame. None of these rifles would have had the British proof marks applied.

8) 19,962 M1917 rifles were imported from Ireland in 1961, these were rifles thy had paid for in the September 1940 period. None of these rifles had UK commercial proofs.

9) Between 1946 and 1949 M1917 rifles were sold at around $7.50 each from the US DCM directly to consumers. No published figures exist of the numbers sold but it is known that when the M1 carbine was released for sale in 1957 that 250,000 were sold in 4 years. Given that the US economy did not really get going until late 1946 to early 1947 a reasonable top estimate is around 200,000 sold with the likely figures being a fair bit less.

If one adds up the supply of 7,8,9 it would seem the total M1917 rifles that could have come from these sources could not have been much more than 400,000 rifles. Pre war DCM sales could not have been much more than 80,000 rifles, based on the price and known M1903 sales in that period. Given that the UK had something like 785,000 M1917, if half were sold then UK proofed M1917 rifles should be very common, but I have never seen many of them. I have seen more Canadian marked M1917 rifles (generally RCAF) then I have seen UK proofed M1917 rifles.

Canada received 100,000 M1917 rifles in 1940, bought and paid for. Of that figure around ~50,000 were supplied to Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark by the Canadian government after WWII. The Danish ended up with most of them and used them as a home guard rifle (M53) with a new front sight. None have come back into the US of A, at least that I have seen. As such it would seem that at most 50,000 Canadian rifles have come back into the US of A, and that assumes every one was Canadian marked (unlikely). The implication is UK sourced M1917 rifles are likely less than 50,000 in the US of A.

In any case all the evidence indicates a lot of the P14 rifles and a lot of the British M1917 rifles held in UK stores were dumped at sea.

[bigduke6]

In regards to the lend lease agreement I think Britain only finished paying off the debts owed to the USA in the 1990's.
But as a life line to the cause of freedom it is a great thing the two allied leaders did to ensure the freedom for us all.

It was 2006 the last payment was made, some payments were missed in some years due to exchange rate etc.

[Flying10uk]

My Grandfather served in the Home Guard throughout WW2 and from what I can gather from other family members he was issued with a WW1 dated SMLE and bayonet. I believe it to have been a SMLE rather than a P14 or M1917 because family members distinctly remember the magazine extending below the fore end woodwork; obviously, this is not the case with a P14 or M1917. I believe that a number of Home Guard members were issued with the SMLE but I don't know how common a practice this was.

I have heard it stated that the majority of Lewis Guns issued to the Home Guard were the U.S. 30cal aircraft version (without Barrel Shroud) dating to WW1 and also that they were fairly well worn examples. Also it would make sense to issue 30cal Lewis Guns to units issued with the M1917 so as to standardise ammunition requirements within a Home Guard Platoon?

[Beerhunter]

The situation after the war was quite complex -- both the U.S. and Britain were deep in debt after fighting an enormously expensive series of wars around the world.

However the US economy was massively bigger than it was before the war whereas the British one was in ruins - both economically and physically.

BTW, as to Home Guard arms it could be thought of at one point as a 30-06 Army. Not only M1917 rifles but Colt M1917 Machine Guns and Savage Lewis aircraft guns converted for ground use. In common with many CCF contingents we as lots of Home Guard Manuals for the above.

[Flying10uk]

If some or all of the P14s were withdrawn from Home Guard use at some point during the war could/did they get supplied to resistance movements ion occupied Europe? If this was the case was this because of the calibre of the weapon (perhaps more readily available in Europe???) or was there a problem with supplying Lend Lease weapons to Resistance organisations which the U.K. government didn't actually own???

[Frederick303]

Transfers of equipment within the theaters was done with simply maintaining records of who owned what when it was transferred. At the end of the war an effort was made to sort it all out and offset the various leger accounts from one army to the next. For example New Zealand got its 40,000 No4 rifles in the 1946~47 time frame as an offset against monies owned to New Zealand by England.

P14 rifles were British property and any transfers would have resulted in a credit to the UK. Had they been provided to an allied army, the only issue would have been how much the UK was owed for the arms at the end of the war. The only record I have seen of UK P14 transfers were 40,000 rifles marked (indented) for issue to the Dutch free forces. There is one or two photos of these Dutch troops in US military garb supposedly potting away at the Germans in an urban environment with P14 rifles in the late fall winter of 1944/45. Looks like a classic propaganda shot.

If these transfers were made is kind of doubtful, as post war the Dutch were re-equipped with both US arms and Canadian/British surplus arms. Also the Germans were still occupying most of northern Holland north of the Rhine in May 1945, one doubts the free Dutch forces were all that large.

Certainly when Interarms bought their stocks of arms from Holland in the mid 1950s, the P14 rifles do not stand out as being a major part of the arms he bought (most was German and older Dutch arms such as 10.4mm Hemberg revolvers). Interarms ads from the period back that up.

Where the 677,000 Weedon rebuilt P14 rifles and the additional ~40,000 EY rifles ended up is sort of a mystery, though likely a lot of them ended up on the bottom of the North Sea.

Here in the US a small number of them have shown up with Weedon rebuild characteristics and Canadian property markings. As there were no large scale transfers noted in any book, it is likely these were arms transferred to Canadian forestry battalions or Canadian AA units, AA units having been known to be equipped with P14 rifles up until late 1943.

[Beerhunter]

If some or all of the P14s were withdrawn from Home Guard use at some point during the war could/did they get supplied to resistance movements ion occupied Europe? If this was the case was this because of the calibre of the weapon (perhaps more readily available in Europe???) or was there a problem with supplying Lend Lease weapons to Resistance organisations which the U.K. government didn't actually own???

GRRRRRRRRR! For once and for all - those P14s were NOT Lend Lease. They were bought and paid for during the Great War - over two decades before the Lend Lease Act. We always owned the bloody things the US Government had NO involvement!