Organization of the WWII U.S. Army Infantry Rifle Squad

The US Army rifle squad of world war two was a bad organization too many soldiers and not enough fire power.

Damnn complicated as fuck 🤯

You did not mention the Carbing rifle... From what I seen in shows it was mostly for LT and drivers, or was that Hollywood getting it wrong?

I had an Uncle Frank in WWII! He was in the 4144th Quartermaster Service Company. Landed at Utah Beach. Survived the war only to die in '47 in a car accident.

I knew a vet from the 94th division 376th regiment and recall that he told me whenever they possibly could they would report the BAR as combat lost (when it was not) and secure additional BAR's ....he stated as time went on squads had far more BARs then official table would indicate. Current "experts" they say the BAR was obsolete, and not effective as an automatic weapon. But I clearly recall the old vet saying in combat they wanted more of them

So a BAR man or number 4 got an assistant with a Garand and a man to lug extra mags also with a Garand? Never knew that I thought only the machine gun teams had the extra help. EXCELLENT FILM.

Thank you man!! I appreciate it!

Interesting to note that the Marine Corps rifle squad TO&E went through 3 or 4 changes over the same time frame: It started the war with 1 BAR per squad this evolved to 3 per squad.

Does a similar video exist for WWII Field Artillery Battalion? (my father, Battery "A", 32nd Field Artillery Battalion, 18th RCT, 1st ID... Sicily, Normandy...to the end)

Honestly your video is more well researched than many a modern book.
Printing books has become so easy and cheap post war that any man with some bit of wealth can have his book printed.
It disturbs me most when videos or other books then refer to these books rather than to primary sources like you have.

You remind me if a lot of ww2freak001 since his videos on the German squad and Organization are similar

When I first watched this almost 4 years ago, I thought it would be just another video I watched while eating lunch. No doubt about it, this got me hooked on to military TOEs, its just so damn interesting!

thats pretty good...........wish you put out more videos..........covering more timelines and even other nations...........even modern............gods bless

interestingly enough, despite being universally issued to the army, the Marine Corps had quite a few difficulties acquiring the garand during the pacific theater and had to make do with the Springfield or even borrowed rifles from their allies or captured weapons from the enemy. I think the issues cleared up once U.S naval logistics became more secure, but its still interesting that that happened.

Massive respect.

No it's Charlie (the third letter of the phonetic alphabet) although there were people unsure of the spelling who used the spelling Charley in error. Able, Baker, and Charlie branches of a rifle company are pre WWII for the record and is documented in US Army training manual addendum a or i depending on the date of issue because in the prewar years the US Army switched from using Roman Numerals in lower case letters rather than the typical upper case letters to using the alphabet in lower case unless they cycled through the alphabet in which case they would use upper case letters

So while other countries stuck with bolt action rifles, it‘s notable that the Red Army ended up having access to a comparatively larger number of Submachineguns (around 8 million in total of the PPSh-41 and PPS-43, produced between 1941 and 1947), enough to equip a significant number of their rifle companies completely with SMGs. Not nearly all of them by far, but the other powers afaik only ever gave them to their Officers and some NCOs.

This is true even for the Panzergrenadiers who ought to in theory have been better-armed (their squads had two machineguns, for example).

So for the companies that had them, this would obviously make a significant difference as it massively increase the firepower available to the riflemen.

So, three Nazis walk into a BAR…