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Old 10-28-2010, 10:12 PM
HorseSoldier HorseSoldier is offline
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The Germans, while not as bayonet-happy as the French (is anybody more bayonet-happy than the French?), believed that the bayonet would overpower the rifle. They also believed that the true man-killer was artillery and machine guns.
The Germans were right.

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So when the Germans ran into the 2nd and 3rd Divisions of the AEF, there are so many accounts from both sides of how American rifle fire at unheard of ranges, slaughtered attacking Germans.
Except when guys were ordered to advanced in open order across No Mans Land (which the Germans had gotten away from by 1918) the basic lesson or rifle marksmanship from World War One was the same as World War Two -- guys with individual weapons couldn't reliably acquire, much less hit, an enemy past 300 or maybe 400 meters. What everyone found out during WW1 was that unless the enemy was obliging enough to cooperate with you killing him by walking slowly towards you in a straight line, all the emphasis on long range marksmanship training was just a waste of time. This is why the Germans got so big into developing the Maschinenkarabiner (which evolved, terminology wise, into the Sturmgewehr) during the interwar years. The same logic drove the US development of 276 Pedersen and the Soviet research into a .25" caliber intermediate-ish sort of round in the same timeframe.
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