German small arms questions

[Sidewinder]

Pablo Sanchez: You're right. I just like Lugers. I think they're quite good for such an old design, even if they never saw much action.

You want a good old design? Look at Browning's semiautomatic pistols. Gun manufacturers continue to use "short-recoil Browning action" even now! The M1911 remains in production to this day! Parts, accessories, and upgrades for Browning pistols (sights, scopes, scope mounts, compensators, you name it) are available damn near anywhere in the US, if not the planet!

[Marcus Aurelius]

The Japanese literally couldn’t afford all the ammunition submachine guns would eat up if they’d been mass issued, cheap as making an SMG could be.

I don't buy that. Pistol cartridges are cheaper to make than rifle cartridges. Italy issued more submachine guns than Japan and apparently had no significant problems making enough ammunition for them despite smaller industrial base.

[Sea Skimmer]

I don't buy that. Pistol cartridges are cheaper to make than rifle cartridges.

Slightly, so what? The Japanese Army had no automatic or semi automatic rifles at all and craptastic machine guns almost all of which fed from box magazines or strips rather then belt feeds. That means adapting SMGs cannot help but either vastly increase the amount of ammo consumed, or replace machine guns which all and all are far more important, particularly on the defensive. For the conquest of Malay Japan allotted just 100 rifle bullets per man for the entire campaign.

Meanwhile the Japanese economy was overheating on armaments production even in 1941, and only got worse during the war. If you want SMGs and ammo for them, you have to find something else to cancel. So what’s it going to be?

Italy issued more submachine guns than Japan and apparently had no significant problems making enough ammunition for them despite smaller industrial base.

Actually Italy had a horrendous time equipping its Army and was notoriously short of all kinds of equipment and ammunition for the entire war. What’s more the Italian army only inducted 4 million men during the course of the war, most of whom never left Italy and saw little or no combat. Italian army losses total less then 200,000 as a demonstration of its lack of really large scale combat and general tendency to you know, surrender, rather then fight intensely and gobble up ammo.

Japan in contrast had a massive war raging in China at all times and eventually built its army to a peak strength of 5.5 million men, after it had already suffered over 2 million losses, meaning over 7.5 million men served. But it couldn’t even come close to proper ally equipping and supplying all those men with its existing equipment, never mind the addition of new weapons. Of course Japan also built far more warships, far more aircraft (SEVEN TIMES more in fact) and far more merchant ships then Italy, and it was these items and not infantry weapons that decided the course of the war. This all more then eats up the Japanese superiority in GDP, which is about 35% and is a major factor in why Japan was a starving burned out shell of a nation by August 1945 while the totally inept Italian war effort had all but collapsed by the invasion of Sicily.