"Useless weapons of the 20th century or dangerous to fire." Topic

What were the least useful weapons of the 20th century? There were lots, what is on your list for the worst? It could be dangerous for the user to use-for example- any early war Italian tank or tankette.

The black powder muskets Japan made at the end of the war to distribute to civilians. Even some of their standard weapons produced late in the war were substandard.

Black powder muskets? At the end of WWII? Wow, the Japanese military was desperate.

chauchat LMG, made by a bicycle manufacturer to appalling tolerances.

Gyrojet pistol, OK at medium ranges, poor at long range and not moving fast enough at close range.

Italian machine guns because why do you need the spent rounds put back in the clip

The Davy Crockett Nuclear Mortar, the blast radius was greater then the range.

M16 rifle. The only alleged military rifle with a manual assist to seat the bolt.

Since flooglestreet stole mine, I'll have to go with the anit-tank "lunge" mines. Had a Pk of at least one (and sometimes it got the tank, too)

Maybe it's just me, but I thought the Brits could have done better than the PIAT. . . .

Okay, out on a limb here……. Many nations produced mortars of 50mm caliber, and a few made slightly smaller. Apparently, as a delivery system for HE, all were deemed useless, as they were phased out as the war progressed. Issues of over-complexity were specifically cited for the German and Italian examples.

I acknowledge the historical longevity of the British 2" mortar (and it's clones) because, it's my understanding, that extensive use was made doctrinally of these weapons for delivering screening smoke. The reasons for their retention do no necessarily revolve solely around delivery of HE……

I also acknowledge the continued employment of the 50mm weapon in wartime Japanese service. Perhaps, a case of no better weapon to replace it, at the level at which it was used? Or, in context, is it more regarded as a grenade launcher (that's effectively what it's ammunition was..), so to be looked at, less critically, in that light?

Japanese and Italian hand grenades of the period don't win awards for user safety or reliability either.

Anti-tank rifles? In practice, some of the shortest-lived weapon systems on record.

Duck

The M50 Reising Submachine gun probably the worst sub gun ever.

The M50 ReIsing Submachine gun probably the worst sub gun ever.

Russian anti-mine dogs. More likely to blow up a Russian tank than a German one, because they were trained on Russian tanks.

"Russian anti-mine dogs. More likely to blow up a Russian tank than a German one, because they were trained on Russian tanks."

Allegedly came down to the difference between the smell of diesel powered, as opposed to gasoline powered vehicles, didn't it?

Duck

Several of the German late-WWII rocket and jet fighters. They were too fast for the pilot to be able to aim at anything as he zoomed past the bomber formations.

The British made Anti-Tank Grenade No. 74, commonly known as the sticky bomb an accident waiting to happen.

If planes are included the Blackburn Rock must be. A fighter too slow to catch up with the bombers it was chasing.

x42

Another for the Sticky bomb. The lunge mine wasn't very nice for the operator either, but at least he was expecting to die anyway. link

ME-163 killed more german pilots than Allied.

Another vote for the M16. I just finished reading C.J. Chivers' book "The Gun" (a good read, by the way), and sending our soldiers into battle with that POS was criminal.

Antitank rifles were good (alright, OK) at the time, they were phased out relatively quickly due to the fast R&D turnaround times for better individual AT wpns during war. Many armies kept them around for quite a while.

And for all the bad press about Russian mine dogs, the Soviets were in the best position to know how useful they were, and they kept using them for a while, too.

Didn't the British try a ship board steam mortar, that rusted?

From personal experience, the M-85 .50 cal machinegun mounted on early LVTP-7s/7A1s. If you could fire five rounds in a row without a misfeed or jam you were very lucky. Combined with the hydraulic weapons system – before my time, but I heard plenty about how it would spray flammable hydraulic fluid on the crew chief/gunner – it was worse than useless.

"The M50 Reising Submachine gun probably the worst sub gun ever."

My late father – a WW2 US Marine- was issued one of these contraptions when he was in the PTO…

You may rest assured my dad agreed with you; he despised the Reising with a passion borne of forced (and swiftly unwelcome) familiarity…

Leland R. Erickson

Balin, I disageee on their uselessness. The Holman projectors (steam powered grenade launchers) were made for the small coastal ships and trawlers that were being hammered by the luftwaffa in 1940.

After the disaster in France, there weren't enough machineguns for the army, much less merchant ships, so anything was better than nothing.

From memory, they fired a standard hand-grenade which produced, if nothing else, a nice puff of smoke, and could fire fast enough that you could scare off a bomber who wouldn't necessarily know it was just a hand grenade going off… 'Ach, these englanders have got AA guns on their trawlers!'

Also, there were instances of trawlers bombarding each other with potatoes for fun.

"Another vote for the M16. I just finished reading C.J. Chivers' book "The Gun" (a good read, by the way), and sending our soldiers into battle with that POS was criminal."

The M16E1, yes. Most problems were addressed a short time later with the A1. I put a vote on the M16-series as well, not because of it's flaws with reliability in the early years, but because the 5,56mm NATO ammo is proving increasingly insufficient to stop human beings. Especially those wearing any form of body armour. It's good if you want to limit damage in an urban area in say…your own country. But for the sake of the men and women, issue them something in 7,62mm NATO or 7,62x39 Soviet!

"Anti-tank rifles? In practice, some of the shortest-lived weapon systems on record."

As they first entered service in 1918, they lasted a lot longer than some other weapons ystems. Still in use in 1945.

From the pov of operator hazard, perhaps one of the most exciting weapons systems for the firer was the 4" Davy Crockett mortar. Firing nuclear warheads with a maximum range of 2km…..

I'd challenge the idea that anti-tank rifles were useless. Conceptually they were fine, but WW2 ensured they were rendered obsolete by tank developments much faster than would otherwise have happened. They did last 25 years after all.

I'd vote for the Brewster Buffalo as most useless to the Allied cause. Not only was it poor in Allied use, it was also effective against the Allies in Finnish use, so it did the double.

UP rockets on ships and in airfield defence were pretty stupid.

Then there was that mechanical trench-digger Churchill was so keen on.

Helldiver SB2C. Shorter range than its predecessor. What?

Reading about WW2 in particular, it seems clear that building robust bits of kit that were straightforward for your industries to produce was on balance the better industrial strategy. The nukes are the exception but of course Russia didn't beat Germany with nukes.

As production capacity favoured the Allies, Germany was forced to try to invent wonder weapons. This was a logical response, given that they could never have produced enough conventional weapons to win the war they chose. But it did give, as others have noted, the Me163, the ME262 (engines needed to be completely rebuilt every 12 hours), and so on.

From the UK, the Sten smg, which reliably fired the entire magazine when dropped heavily – as reported on these boards, this was used to advantage by some troops who employed them as re-usable grenades for clearing buildings.

Also the UK, the Smith gun, which fired glass bottles of napalm. Not used in combat, it had problems with the bottles breaking on firing & dribbling ignited napalm. And it used rubber bands for a recoil system.

Everyones 37mm Antitank gun. We pulled ours without ever using it.

Polaris A-1 Nuclear Missle. THe warhead never worked; fortuneately the Ruskies never found out so the threat still did until the A-2 came along.

According to what I read about the M16 is that the receiver mechanism was originally designed for a 7.62mm round and the greater energy capacity and subsequent blowback from firing it,hence SOME of the jamming problems(dirt will always be the number one reason,Lord knows I did my share of cleaning,too). The 5.56mm round was favored due to the "tumble" effect versus the straight through effect of the 7.62mm round.

We have a late war Japanese rifle we've never fired due to suspect manufacturing and what looks like shoddy manufacturing.Nothing would ruin one's day at the range more.

B1 bomber
B2 stealth bomber

(not that I'm complainging, I'm 100% happy that they ended up being nearly useless, considering what use they would have been needed for…)

37mm AT gun were used in Pacific Theatre as it was effective against Japanese armour.

And it was the main tank gun in 39-40 so i don´t say it was useless. Even useeful then against lightly armoured vehicles.

Anti-tank rifles. Perhaps we should look at their legacy. The Russians use the ammo (14.5mm) in heavy mg's, the 50 cal round was developed from/ influenced by a German Mauser AT rifle round from WW1.The current crop of anti-materiel weapons in 50 cal, 14.5mm and 20mm wouldn't look that different to an At rifleman from WW1 or 2. Also as far as I can tell the Soviets continued to use their AT rifles throughout WW2 as they found it quite effective against trucks and lightly armoured vehicles.
I think their use changed rather than than they were useless.
When the British thought to get rid of the 2in mortar the clamour from the infantry resulted in it being replaced with a more modern 50mm. Having their own 'mini-artillery' was considered highly desirable in the infantry.

37s were also the ultimate tank killer on the battlefields of the SCW. To such an extent that the Soviets hastily revised their views of tank design to try and produce a 'shell proof tank' aka the T34….

What about the Energa grenade ! Great for breaking something like your finger, thumb, wrist ect.

Actually, Femeng, the 37 was used by the Marines in the Pacific.

I would take an M-16 over an Uzi any day. Uzi has horrible sight system, poor range, and fires from an open bolt action, impossible to keep clean. I never understood the fasination with them. FWIW the MP-5, and SMG-2 were far superior and carried by better forces.
VR
James Mattes

The British K boats,steam powered submarines!

"Gyrojet pistol, OK at medium ranges, poor at long range and not moving fast enough at close range."

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The problem with the Gyrojet was a bad ammo run, the manufacturur of the ammo, crimped one of the exhuast ports on the back of the shell, throwing the projectile off balance. A very much smaller ammo run later corrected the issue, but by that time the Gyrojet Pistol/carbine had such a bad reputation that it was doomed. Still even the correct ammo had the short range issue. But still, IT'S A ROCKET GUN HOW COOL IS THAT!

When the US Army did a survey afer the war of what weapons worked and which didn't, veterans of the Pacific War were all in favor of the 37mm AT gun. Not only because it was perfectly adequate against Japanese tanks, but because it fired a very useful cannister round.

The Canadian Ross Rifle made by a buddy of the Minister of Militia. In the trenches, it clogs first time every time. Guys "lost" them for a Lee Enfield every chance they got.

"The bolt could also be disassembled for routine cleaning and inadvertently reassembled in a manner that would fail to lock but still allow a round to be fired, leading to serious injury or death of the operator as the bolt flew back into his face."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_rifle

Great hunting rifle though!

Incendiary Bat Bombs! Meant to burn down Japanese cities built of wood and paper. These were experimented with on a US base in the southwest. But the idea was abandoned after some got loose and burned down the base PX and movie theater. (I am not making this up.)

For less than ideal user safety, I would nominate Molotov Cocktail – a glass bottle full of flammable liquid is not the safest thing to carry around on a battlefield. Plus you needed to get rather close to the enemy tank to be actually able to use it.

However, if you managed to chuck it to the engine deck it would be rather effective, so far from useless.

B-1 and B-2 bomber? the NBM subs? I'd say the fact that they weren't used in their intended roll makes them very suscessful.

> B-1 and B-2 bomber? the NBM subs? I'd say the fact that they weren't used in their intended roll makes them very suscessful.

Not as useful as the B52 they were intended to replace… (nope, I never believed they would replace the B52 either – no matter what was promised at one time or another)

The M 16 bolt carrier expands more quickly then the receiver, eliminating most of the clearance so a less then perfectly clean weapon will freeze up. They did not really clear that up with the A1, although the dark bolt carriers seemed to work better then the silver ones.

The 16 is just tempremental. We used to put brass deflectors over the ejection port for left handed shooters safety during record fire and we always had problems with them. I am willing to bet that southpaws had 10 12% alabi fires on the record range.

I left some couple of years after the latest (?) 16 was developed. It was supposed to fire 3 round bursts instead of full auto. Word was the 3 round burst setting didn't work.

And it needs a manual assist to seat the bolt. The M 16 is the national poster child with the mothers march for mandatory abortion.

Most definitely the M-16, both because of its tendency to jam at embarrassing times and because the supposed extra effectiveness caused its rounds' tendency to tumble is largely a military old-wives' tale inflicted on credulous recruits by the same kind of knuckleheads who used to tell newbies in Vietnam that the VC and NVA could use our ammunition but we couldn't use theirs.

Next comes the M-79 grenade launcher and its descendants; I cringe every time I see some action star blow down a door or destroy a vehicle with one of the weakest and least-dependable antipersonnel weapons ever made.

Then there's the M-72 LAW. The Pentagon claimed it would penetrate 13 inches of armor. Anybody believe that? Let's have a show hands. Didn't think so.

My all-time favorite, however, is the Soviet WWII-era flamethrower. It had three tanks, each with a charge of black powder in the bottom to provide the necessary pressure to eject the fuel (sane peoples' flamethrowers use compressed air). Problem was, once the powder started burning you had to empty the entire tank or there could be a problem, for "ball of flame" values of "problem".

LT

What about those Japanese Balloon Bombs…

The pole charge, meant to be used to stuff a small explosive charge down the barrel of a tank's main gun, to disable same. I always had visions of the poor sod hiding behind a bush by the roadside, then rising up to find the gun tube pointing the other way.

Rats.

Also the Japanese incendiary balloons, meant to drift on the jet stream to the US and set fire to cities.

Then there's always the flaming pigs from ancient times. Nice of your enemy to send over barbecue on the hoof.

Then there's the M-72 LAW.

Given a choice between a Molotov Cocktail and M-72, I would happily take the later if I really had to try to tackle an enemy tank.

The S&W Model 76 sub gun. The first round I fired broke the extractor and the gun ceased to function. FOrtunately this was on a range and not in combat.

How about those Japanese mortar rounds that had to be tapped to arm? You know, the ones that looked just like the rounds that explode on impact and come already armed. I believe they were for the Type 81 "knee mortar".

I'd also like to second the vote for the M-79. In addition to the lack of power, the round was armed after a certain number of spins, so if it hit anything before it was armed the round would lie around waiting for an opportunity to spin JUST enough to go off. Walk on tip-toe when those bad boys have been fired in your neighborhood.