Rifle Platoon

This article is fucking 'Murican. Expect copious amounts of Freedom with an infrequent side of Awesome.

"People sleep soundly in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

– Richard Grenier

"And rifles go marching along."

The American Rifle Platoon was an organizational unit used during WWII and is a unit available in Flames of War. American Rifle Platoons typically had anywhere from 16-50 men, including a Lieutenant.

Flames of War

The stats

IRL

The Platoon as an organizational unit can trace its roots back to the early era of gunpowder and derives from the French word "peloton" which meant a small detachment of soldiers. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden organized his firing unit Platoon in the early 1600s, and by the latter part of the century, the French had adopted the system as well.

In WWII, the American Rifle Platoon consisted of the aforementioned number of men, mostly armed with M1 Garands, due to the American infantry philosophy built around the Rifle Doctrine. In the early war, officers, sergeants, and messengers would be equipped with the Thompson Submachinegun, but post-1942 this weapon was phased out by the more accurate but controversial M1 Carbine. A single B.A.R was present for each platoon, as well as a single M1903A4 Sniper rifle to be given to a man at the unit leader's discretion. M7 Rifle Grenade Launchers were intermittently passed through the unit to add long-range indirect fire against fortified positions or to get shots over obstacles such as walls or hills.

Mechanization didn't do much for American infantry in the war. On paper, every US infantry regiment had some trucks to haul their supplies, and roughly 150 jeeps, enough for each platoon to have a few for courier and medevac tasks, although as the war progressed many were field modified to increase capacity or mount weapons.

As for a brief rundown of every weapon:

• The M1 Garand was the best rifle in the whole damn war, not having the janky problems of emergency build SVTs, the bolt action inferiority of pretty much everything else, and the logistics line complicating STG with its separate caliber at a time with no fuel to go around.

• The Johnson 1941 Rifle, while adopted concurrently with the Garand, was used almost exclusively by US Marine paratroopers. On the whole it operated almost the same as the M1 Garand, with a few notable differences; it has a ten round capacity and it takes stripper clips instead of en-blocs. The army refused to adopt it fully due to the inability to mount a bayonet and that the Garand was more mechanically reliable.

• The B.A.R was probably the worst LMG outside the Type 99 or Breda. Not necessarily because the BAR was bad mechanically like the Breda or shooting peas like the 99 (it was created by John Browning after all), but more so of its implementation as a squad LMG. When it was introduced in WWI it was ahead of its time, but by WWII it was very outdated, and military thinkers failed to give it even basic design upgrades like a pistol grip, muzzle brake, or interchangeable barrel - features that plenty of foreign copies and non-military versions of the BAR all had. This was in large part because the Army spent most of its small arms budget on the Garand; since they couldn't make many BARs, any changes to the design had to fit the many 1918A2 pattern BARs in inventory. Mid-war it started to be replaced by the M1919 that had previously been issued to weapons platoons. However, as purely an automatic rifle to boost raw fire output rather than an LMG providing sustained support, the BAR was still highly sought after by servicemen. So much so that many infantry platoons often had the uncanny ability to make their allotted arsenal of BARs multiply, as well as changes to the Army's Tables of Organization and Equipment in the later war (Spring-Summer 1944) saw changes that allowed company commanders to equip most of their squads with two BARs instead of previously just one.

• The M1 Thompson was heavy, but a reliable weapon provided it wasn't equipped with a drum magazine (the M1, which also substituted the vertical foregrip of the original "Tommy Gun" with a simple plank, couldn't fit drum mags anyway). Not the match of the sheer firepower of the PPSh, but manufacturing and magazines were significantly superior. Not quite as controllable as the MP40, but fired faster. The replacement M3 Grease Gun was a cheap and simple gun used by tankers and other crew-served far longer than it.

• The M1903 was and still is a solid bolt action rifle, but it was clearly on the way out of the line of battle. Did well in the early war at the Pacific before the Garands got sent out at numbers and after that served as an excellent sniper rifle.

• The M1 Carbine was not terrible, but the marines often complained it had insufficient stopping power, though the M1 Carbine had always been intended as a backup weapon for support troops, not a frontline weapon. It worked best in close combat for units that were not expecting infantry combat but still needed something better than a pistol. M2 Carbine with automatic fire and M3 with night vision paved the way for assault rifles.

• The Bazooka was mediocre AT weapon and one of the first rocket launchers. While it performed well against bunkers and tanks, it struggled against the heavier armor that was deployed later in the war. Ironically, the Germans reverse engineered Bazookas and developed the Panzershreck as a result.

Frankly, though, the most dangerous weapon US infantry had was radios. Virtually EVERY US COMPANY, regardless of type, had a radio (usually an SCR-300 walkie-talkie). Some of the frontline platoons had radios (SCR-536 handy talkies) when available. No other army in the whole war attempted to give every officer a radio of their own (although Germany tried with Panzergrenadier units). What this meant was that every frontline US unit could call in artillery or close air support in minutes, often with the frontline lieutenants making their requests DIRECTLY to the battery captains.

In the Modern day, the US Rifle platoon officially consists of 42 men, including the Lieutenant in charge of the unit.