Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Worst weapons of WWII

Teal made an interesting post in the "Best Weapons of WWII" thread:

"I guess the flipside would be "What was the 'junk' of WWII weapons?"
I'm not talking things that were R&D failures but widely issued and inventoried but total crap for the end-user?"


I'll start with Japanese planes. Not so much the Zero, it did have excellent maneuverability although we matched it with the F6F, but their planes' overall lack of armor and self sealing gas tanks. They'd catch on fire in a heartbeat.

Anything else come to mind?

Anything the French tried to use that they made....

The M4 Sherman Tank in Europe. No match against any German anti-tank weapons from the Panzerfaust to the 88mm gun.

US tanks, also known as a "Ronson", anything French or Italian, and AXIS Sally

The early war USN Mark 14 torpedo and its Mark VI exploder.

The problems were eventually resolved making the Mark 14 a very competent weapon but the early war versions sucked very badly.

You should have watched the Military Channel today. A couple of shows about strange weapons. Like bats that carried napalm, pigeons with napalm attached.

They even built a Japanese like village and dropped the bats from aircraft in a bomb (no explosive)devise and the bats flew down and set the village on fire. They canceled the program in early '45 after workng on it for about 2 years. Guess the B29s showed them they didn't need the bats.

I don't know what the devise was called but they used it to warn of gas attacks during WWII. In the early '50s they were sold as Halloween noise makers. Some of the vets in the neighborhood sure didn't like them.

Yeah like all the Italian Breda anti-aircraft guns the Brits captured during operation compass, reissued em, and shot the schidt outta axis aircraft with em.

1 Vicount Bernard Montgomery
2 General Charles DeGalle
3 Benito Mussolini

Maybe the 3 worst U.S. aircraft of WW2 in the Pacific?

F2A Brewster Buffalo
Douglas TDB Devastator
Bell P39 Airicobra

I'm sitting here going over what I know about various weapons and I can't really come up with much that was total junk on a level with the French Chauchaut of WWI, particularly individual weapons. Opinions vary on the effectiveness of the M1 carbine but folks either liked it or hated it.

Some equipment was outclassed fairly quickly, such as the Stuka, but on it's own it was a decent dive bomber and continued to serve the Germans om the Eastern front. It was just too slow to survive against the faster fighters. Most of our fighters were obsolete as we entered the war but it doesn't make them junk, just outclassed. Even with that, adaptive tactics allowed them to be useful against faster and/or more maneuverable foes. IIRC the old slow F4F was in use throughout the war.

My Dad thought the torpedo launcher on his Destroyer Escort was a pretty worthless weapon. It came close to rolling the DE over when it was fired. He said the Captain had it removed.

The Liberator pistol was intended to be a cheap way to arm resistance forces - hundreds of thousands were made, but at least according to Wiki, there is no documented case of one being used as intended.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberator_pistol

My father landed on Guadalcanal with a Springfield, he didn't carry it long.

if you want to stretch the definition a bit and call it a weapon, the Maginot Line wasn't all that great. Although I'd guess it was respected enough for the Germans to go around it instead of through it...


Getting back to other things, the amphibious tanks at Normandy were pretty well worthless except to drown their crews, although those were a fairly specialized weapon and not in general issue throughout the war.

NSAQAM your military and firearms back ground is very impressive indeed! Where Did you receive your impressive firearms and military training?Anti gun Gov Dayton? Al Franken? Hubert Humphry? Obama? Feinstein?

You supported this anti gun coke fiend

http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/in-the-news/2007/1/franken-seeks-advice-for-possible-bid.aspx


As a military combat vet who has trained in many of the combat firearms in the world I find it very offensive thatbsomeone like NSAQAM, who came on here after the election and bragged that he voted for anti- gun Obama twice and campaigned for anti- voter ID laws, resulted in the disenfranchisement of thousands of active military voters whose votes were not counted or cancelled by voter fraud accross the country.

http://minnesotafreedom.org/index.cfm/pageid/62

The Japanese Type 94 pistol was a pretty large piece of junk.

Could fire it by pressing on the exposed sear lever.

The Sherman Tank. It's main gun was too light and bounced off the Panzers and Tigers, and they were so lightly armored a single shot from one of the two German front-line tanks would set them ablaze.

The Sherman was a good tank when it first came out, as the Brits found it a good match for the Pzkw III and IV. The problem was our govt. didn't upgrade it or develop another more appropriate tank for Europe. Many tanks had gasoline engines and had less problems with fire. Very few tanks would withstand a direct hit from an 88mm, it would punch through the heaviest armor installed on WWII era tanks. A major Sherman flaw was that the ammo was stored behind the thinner vertical armor in the sponsons over the tracks. General Leslie McNair stood in the way of building anything superior. His reticence caused a lot of unnecessary deaths.

I read an article about a German Gas Trap rifle that was a dismal failure after real world testing. The ones they actually built were issued to clerks/etc. in the homeland. I guess it was a real pile and ugly to boot.

I've read a lot of disparaging things about the Reising gun.