British WWII Equipment

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I dare say, this page is delightfully British. Spot of tea?

The British Empire, had their work cut out for them. They entered with the French, but the French ended up being so hollowed out by ww1 and the interwar and that they ended up knocked out in a hurry. Then, having lost a good chunk of their equipment at the battle of Dunkirk, the Brits and its colonial possessions/Commonwealth members had to make do with whatever they had or whatever they could make, with a substantial amount of support from the American lend-lease program. That said, they still possessed the best Navy in the conflict, and many fine vehicles that aided in offensive and defensive operations. British equipment could be categorized as follows:

• Top-tier ships, planes and tanks designed before the war that either aged like fine wine over the war and were constantly upgraded (Spitfire), or more like vinegar and replaced with lend-lease materiel (most of the tanks).
• Indefatigable equipment from the previous war, whose performances varied between 'still better than nothing' (Webley revolver) to 'still kicking major Kraut behind' (Queen Elizabeth-class battleships).
• Simple and cheap, but effective equipment to get by on and for arming partisans (Sten).
• Lots of weird esoteric designs made for the intelligence services or domestically by commonwealth troops (Owen SMG).

Small Arms

Rifles and SMGs

• Lee-Enfield: The Lee-Enfield was the distant second best rifle of the war, carrying more bullets than the Kar98 but beaten out flat by the M1 Garand and about equal to the SVT. The Enfield was primarily influenced by the aforementioned British Pre-war colonial policy of having a rifle that could work well against dissenting colonials with a good number of shots if needed, after the Boer War taught some painful lessons when one-bullet-at-a-time loaded magazine early Lee-Enfields (and previous design Lee-Metfords which had inferior rifling) got matched up against Mausers. The biggest downside of the World War 2 era No 4 MkI was being unable to mount a sword bayonet as the World War 1 era SMLE MkIII/MkIII* could, which ended up not being that big of a deal because the spike bayonet did the job just fine. Another shorter variant, the No 5 MkI "Jungle Carbine" used a more conventional knife bayonet and got deployed at the tail end of the war. There was one more line upgrade into the No 4 Mk2 (by this time the Mark numbers had switched from Latin to Arabic numerals) which was mostly make work to keep the factory going until the production switched to the FN FAL's British variant, the L1A1. Afterwards, a 7.62 NATO Lee-Enfield sharpshooting variant called the L42A1 served as Britain's standard sniper rifle until the nineties.
• P14 Enfield: Old WW1 rifle that was mainly relegated to sniper use; despite having half the ammo capacity of the Lee-Enfield, it had superior accuracy to make up for it.
• Ross Mk.III: The Canadian's preferred rifle, it was a straight-pull design that theoretically could fire faster, but less smoothly than a turn-bolt. During WWI it infamously held up poorly in trench conditions, but also had superior accuracy as well, making it best suited as a sniper rifle. The problems came about as a result of it being originally designed for target shooting rather than combat. If it wasn't maintained well the bolt had a nasty tendency to shoot out the back in bad cases. Even snipers who appreciated the design and could maintain it better than the grunts needed essentially spotless ammo to stop jamming. Some were brought out in desperation as emergency orders after Dunkirk, but they mostly stayed on the home front in World War 2 and was used by guards, police and firefighters.
• DeLisle Commando Carbine: An adaptation of the Lee-Enfield for Commandos on clandestine missions; it was fitted with an integrally suppressed barrel and fired .45 ACP cartridges from an M1911 magazine. One of the quietest weapons used by the Brits, second only to the Welrod.
• Sten: The Sten was a fucking cheap weapon that many British troops hated with a passion due to being of shoddy reliability without being "broken in". Early war Stens (mostly Mk 2) were built to be as cheap as possible so that enough could be issued for the front lines, but later in the war, the British could afford to make better quality versions like the Mk 5. The Sten was also incredibly silent when suppressed, so much so that the Germans took notice and tried making copies of it for their own clandestine use. The Sten had reliability problems due to the magazine feed, infamously one jammed during Operation Anthropoid, Reinhard Heydrich's assassination, forcing a grenade toss to indirectly kill Heydrich via an injury and infection.
• Lanchester: used mainly by the Royal Navy, the Lanchester is a direct copy of the German MP28, itself an improvement on the MP18, the world's first SMG. The Lanchester had a bayonet lug, but most likely didn't see much use in bayonet charges.
• Sterling: similar to the Sten but better designed, both in terms of ergonomics and reliability. Essentially a Sten without the problems of having been designed in the desperate months after Dunkirk. It saw action very late in the war and was used for a long time during the cold war. Later used as the base for the Imperial E-11 blaster from Star Wars.
• Owen: Local Boy Saves Straya with Home-Built SMG! Seriously, this gun is bizarre-looking as the magazine sticks out from the top like a Bren Gun; that being said, it was very well balanced and performed well enough that the Australians kept it around for the next several decades.

Pistols

• Webley Revolver: Old reliable, having been in service since the 19th century, though by WWII was a bit too underpowered as .455 Webley doesn't hit quite as hard as more modern cartridges. Still, it was kept around because the Brits were short on everything.
• Webley Self-Loading Pistol: One of Britain's early attempts at an automatic pistol; it was never widely adopted because the British military still had collective PTSD from the awfulness that was the Mars Automatic, but still saw use in the Navy and later in the Royal Air Force, where pilots preferred to have an automatic if they were ever downed.
• Enfield No.2: The official replacement of the Webley, chambered in .38 S&W. Otherwise very similar externally, though some opted to remove the hammer spur to make it double-action only.
• Browning Hi-Power: Made under license in Canada, especially after Belgium fell to the Nazis, the Hi-Power was innovative in that it had twice the ammo capacity of contemporary pistols. It was mainly used by Commandos and Pilots, as the extra capacity was particularly important when operating behind enemy lines.
• Welrod: One of the most unique pistols ever made, the Welrod is optimized to make a pistol as quiet as possible. First, it was bolt-action, so that the only moving part on firing would be the pin. Secondly, it had an integral suppressor made with several rubber "wipes"; On the first shot the wipes would completely capture escaping gas to make the gun near-silent; by the tenth shot the wipes would have degraded enough that it was as loud as a standard suppressor. Lastly, it didn't look anything like a pistol when disassembled; if questioned by German authorities, the user would just say that it was a bicycle pump.

Machineguns

• Lewis Gun: a holdover from WWI that was brought back into service to make up for shortfalls in the supply of Bren guns. Despite being bulkier, it was still a very reliable machinegun, and remained in service until the war ended. That said, the large pan magazine is not the best kind of magazine for machineguns, especially since the bottom is open and can be exposed to dirt quite easily.
• Vickers: Britain's version of the Maxim gun, mainly used as a static emplacement. Ultimately, the Brits gradually stopped using the Vickers and started leaning more on using Mortars as their main infantry support weapon, especially since they already had Brens that could be relied on more as a frontline weapon.
• Bren: The Bren far outmatched anything made by the Americans, Japanese, or Italians. It was well-balanced with a decent number of shots and mechanically reliable. In spite of this, it was outshined by the Commie and Nazi LMGs, the former because the DP-27 was objectively better at providing suppressing fire, and the latter because 1000 goddamn RPM. Nonetheless, the Bren performed very well as a squad-level gun.
• Charlton: Created by the ANZACs when supplies of Bren and Lewis guns were low; this was a full-auto conversion of the Lee-Enfield by adding a gas rod to the side of the gun and replacing the bolt.

Anti-Tank Infantry Weapons

• Boys Anti-Tank Rifle: A five-shot bolt-action rifle that had been designed to penetrate tanks from the first World War, but had already become obsolete by the start of WWII. Still, it could punch holes in half-tracks and other light armor.
• PIAT: The PIAT was a unique AT weapon that was a spigot mortar that shot a shaped charge in an arc that would hit a tank on the lighter top armor of the vehicle. It had the secondary advantage of being an excellent house clearing weapon and unlike a rocket launcher, you could fire it from inside a house without burning your jimmies off with the backblast. While easier to build than the rocket weapons that would become the norm like Bazookas and quite popular among troops, it became rapidly outdated and was notoriously difficult to reload even to the point of causing injury, and to reliably hit a tank you had to get uncomfortably close and wait in ambush. It got ditched in favor of rockets in the fifties, specifically the M20 Super Bazooka. However, it was ubiquitous enough to be used by the Viet Minh and the French in Indochina and Israel had British surplus as well.

Misc

• What Ever the Fuck the Homeguard could find: After Dunkirk the British had a serious dearth of military weapons and was under the assumption that the German could try and jump the Channel at any moment. So at the same time as the Army tried to rebuild it self, the British also set up a civilian force, the Local Defense Volunteers, otherwise known as the Homeguard. But with the army it self short on weapons, the Homeguard had to get. . .creative when it came to armament. Hell at one point 250,000 fucking PIKES were ordered, and the guns were not much better at times as they got all the old crap the army didn't want. Not to mention the improvised armored vehicles with armor riveted on or trucks with concrete pillboxes. It was a mess early though it did get better when the Yanks started to get involved. The pike thing actually caused a minor scandal, Churchill had said something along lines of even a pike will do and someone took it a bit too literally.
• No.2 Flamethrower

Misc

• The Austeritys: England was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and it was, and to some degree still is despite the efforts of some, a very train based economy. When WW2 started though it was clear that the majority of the men who made the steam engines in common use of the time would be needed to make tanks, it is in part why a lot of British tanks were Riveted it was what there economy was geared to produce, but at the same time as the Germans bombed them and as parts simply wore out, these engines would need to be replaced. Hence the War Department tasked the economy to make special classes of engine, built to be cheap (Hence the name Austerity) and simple these engines would be the back bone of the British War Effort. The Austeritys and the German equivalent, the Kriegslokomotive are a reminder that tanks and ships and planes are cool and sexy but in the long run logistics and keeping the economy to make those tanks is ultimately more important in a full scale war then any one weapon system. Look at Ukraine right now, the only reason Russia is still in the fight is that there rail infrastructure is able to keep supplying tanks and men to the line at the same rate that the Ukraines are destroying it, and the Ukraines are in the fight because the Western Supply bases and factory are beyond where Russia can hit. Infrastructure. Wins. Wars.

WWII Topics
History:	The World Wars
Allied Powers:	United States of America(Equipment) - British Empire (Equipment) - Soviet Union (Equipment)
Axis Powers:	Nazi Germany (Equipment) - Fascist Italy (Equipment) - Empire of Japan (Equipment)
Minor Powers:	China - Ethiopia - Finland - France - Hungary - Norway - Poland - Romania
Games:	Advanced Squad Leader - Axis & Allies - Bolt Action - Flames of War - Ostfront