Billy Shears
Member
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2008
- Messages
- 1,020
I think the culture in the U.S. Army was always at least a bit more oriented toward handguns than in other nations' armies. Certainly there always seems to have been more effort on the part of troops not normally issued a handgun to acquire one, and there also seem to be a lot more reports of handguns being used in combat by U.S. troops than by the troops of other nations.
During their days of Empire, the British seem to have been more enthusiastic about the handgun than they were afterward. They had a first rate sidearm in the .455 Webley, and I'll never understand why they abandoned it for the .38/200 (just a .38 S&W with a slightly heavier bullet). The official reason given is that after the attrition among the BEF during WWI, and its virtual replacement by hastily trained and recruited mass army, experience showed that these raw new troops had a hard time coping with the recoil of the big Webley, and a less powerful sidearm that was just potent enough to do the job was seen as desirable. I have a hard time crediting this excuse. I bought a bunch of Hornady .455 Webley ammo, which duplicates the old British Mk. II loading almost exactly -- 265gr bullet, travelling at approximately 650fps -- so presumably it has similar recoil: virtually nonexistent. This is just about the softest shooting handgun one will ever find outside of a .22 target pistol. Why anyone would ever have trouble with the recoil of this gun I can't imagine.
More than likely what the raw troops really were having trouble with was the Webley's notoriously heavy trigger. And the switch to the .38/200 Enfield and Webley revolvers during WWII did not cure this problem, since they had essentially the same lockwork as the old .455 revolver. This would also explain why Smith & Wesson revolvers, bought by the British during the war were reported to have been much more popular than either the Enfield or the Webley in the new .38/200 caliber. With a much lighter, smoother DA trigger, the soldiers with the S&W could actually hit their targets.
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