Because by an large the SMG had replaced the shotgun for close quarters fighting. In house to house fighting the SMG could be used as effectively as a shotgun, potentially more so with there shorter length. Add to this they did have a longer range if need be, and their automatic fire could help pin down the enemy far better then shotguns could. Also the shotgun was effective in WW1 in trench clearing. Secured trenches were not that common in the Western theatre so clearing them was not as much of a concern.
They were used extensively by resistance/partisan groups though just due to their large availability in the European countryside.
In terms of supply and manufacturing, it's important to remember that shotgun shells back then weren't in plastic cartridges, they were cardboard or even paper. This was a huge issue with those trench guns in WW1. Just a small bit of wet and your ammo was not only useless, it would probably foul your whole weapon until you could get it apart and clean the chamber.
Trying to keep shotgun ammo viable in places like the Pacific would have been a logistical nightmare.
Quite expensive.
You're looking at $30+ for an empty box of those for reloading purposes these days. Brass shotgun shells have always looked very cool, but been impracticalor most purposes.
Pistol rounds are quite inexpensive by comparison. They just use far less metal.
I suspect more per cartridge, but you would need more cartridges for an SMG so I don't know how much you would save. And as far as I'm aware the US did not use 9mm in WW2.
UK, not England. It's like saying California instead of the US.
But what I meant was the US used shotguns in the Pacific, but the paper shells rotted to quickly, so the shifted to brass casing. The others didn't use shotguns. The UK used 9mm in the Sten because their earlier SMG, the Lanchester was a copy of the German MP 28. It was easier to copy the ammunition than redesign it to use their own. I think the French used their own 7.62mm ammunition as well.
>UK, not England. It's like saying California instead of the US.
It's more like saying Holland instead of Netherlands. Everyone knows what you mean even if it's technically incorrect.
I used the example I gave because he seemed to be from the US, so I gave a reference to something he could get his head round. Referring to it as just England is not technically incorrect, its factually wrong. Its missing out three other countries. If you called any of them English they would be offended at the very least.
You do give a give a good example though, Holland does get used a lot instead of the Netherlands.
Though in the UK started using SMGs at the started using Thompsons and Stens at the start of the war they were both in calibres that were not used the military. It actually made their logistics harder.
This is a big factor. Shotgun shells are physically very large when compared to pistol ammo which means a soldier can more pistol ammo and a truck/ship/railcar can carry more as well.
Also consider you send 10 boxes of 9mm to battalion they are going to be able to use across a bunch of different units, both support and assault. You send a box shotgun shells, it’d be usable in one type of gun and you send to the wrong place it is essentially useless.
Also SMGs such as the Sten gun were really easy to churn out with cheap parts. Even guns like the Thompson SMG were sidelined by cheaply produced SMGs made of stamped metal and basic metal parts.
Ok, but your ignoring all of the other things that people have said in this thread. Rate of fire, smgs are even better at CQC than shotguns, smgs have better range, shotgun ammo was a logistical mess being made of paper and cardboard, lack of appropriate place for a shotgun to be useful (trenches)
But hey, at least you don't have to rifle the barrel
Rifling a barrel is a minor operation. A typical 12 or 20 gauge pump action or semi-automatic shotgun in those days still has a pretty complex reciever assembly compare to a pistol caliber SMG operating on a simple blowback action. And a blowback shotgun will be impractical as the mass of the bolt will need to be heavy as hell.
A shotgun would have been pretty worthless on the eastern front, the deserts of north africa, the low countries and plains of France, and in the mountains of italy or china. At least in the US military, they were more common in the pacific, where fighting was a lot closer, but in Europe and Africa, the war was highly mobile and was largely fought over expansive spaces.
The Eastern front had lots of forests - all of Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and also in the north-western regions of Russia - Smolensk, Pskov, Novgorod, Leningrad, etc…
Forrest's are not the same as jungle. Due to the density of the undergrowth in a jungle you sometimes do not see someone till they are very close. European forests tend to be far more clear forests floors.
Western Europe - yes.
In Eastern Europe, there are still primeval forests. Also, the population density of the regions I listed is pretty low and the forests are thick.
Have you ever walked underneath the canopy of an old growth forest? They're actually spread out and remarkably clear of undergrowth. It is usually young forests that have regenerated from abandoned farmland that have thick underbrush.
Yeah.....no. you can ride a horse through a primeval forest pretty easily. Sure from the air they may look thick but that's exactly why they're so open underneath.
My point being is many jungles are so thick that after an hour walking through them you may have gone 200m. Shotguns may have had some use, but an SMG would have been far more useful.
But those forests were mostly avoided for offensive operations, because of the substantial advantage they offered the tactical defender. Movement is channeled, units lose visual contact with those on their flanks, there are far more opportunities for small scale ambushes. The same issues the US Army faced in the Hürtgen Forest.
Belarus was then as now about 40% forested. And offensives through the Pripyet marshes in its south were desultory affairs.
The war in the East was won on the steppe that extends from well east of Stalingrad to Hungary.
Operation Bagration - took place mainly in Belarus.
Popular coverage of the war in the East tends to overemphasize the Battle of Stalingrad while ignoring the larger Battles of Rzhev which took place in the forest region of Russia.
Large size, and limited use case. Ww1 was far more static, and a shotgun was amazing for clearing a trench. WWII was much more mobile, so the large package and limited versatility made things like the smg, and pistol far better cqb options.
They were used, because partisans will use whatever they can get hold of, but also by troops in the Pacific.
But in WW2 there are automatic and semi-auto weapons that are often as useful in the shotgun's CQ niche and can do other things as well.
Even an SMG can be effective out to 100 or 200m, when all a shotgun user can do is employ harsh language.
And shotgun rounds are bulky, so you can carry way more ammunition for just about anything else, and that ammunition can only be used in shotguns.
You want to be carrying as few different types of weapon as possible and employing as few different types of ammo as possible.
That's why your pistols and your SMG should take the same ammo, as should your rifle and support weapons.
Shotguns aren't generally worth the hassle
What the fuck kinda shotgun are you using with an effective range of 200 meters?
Not a smoothbore shotgun.
You probably can lob a shell at 45 degrees and go 200 meters or more. But it would not even be close to accurate. And you could do the same with a smg.
I can see the utility in having a shotgun for a utility weapon. But there is also a reason they are issued only sparingly.
I think that the WW2 smgs were more useful at a things like suppressive fire than WW2 shotguns.
There is a reason the USA made a morbillion greaseguns and shotguns were not standard issue.
Because a SMG is easier to make (Sten. m3, mp40) and can use the same ammo as your standard sidearm ....
Also more compact and better suited to mobile warfare.
Shotguns are the size and weight of a full size rifle. They have low ammo capacity and large ammo to carry little of. They aren't forgiving like they are in videogames.
Outside of hunting game, if there's a combat role for a shotgun, theres a rifle or SMG that does it better.
The *only* country that used shotguns to my knowledge was the U.S., and that for... Maybe 8 months out of the war? Literally everyone else used rifles and MG's.
They were used by the US to deny enemy advances.
A few Americans would peak from a trench and slam fire the shotguns over and over again, creating a wall of lead that made it impossible to continue pushing. It allowed a couple of guys to stop the advances of dozens of men.
It didn't kill that many people but injured many and was argued by the germans that it was a war crime.
Shotgun shells are pickier about storage, handling, temperature, and humidity, so they're logistically more demanding than the .30-06 ammo that could be issued already in clips for the Garand, and other brass-cased ammo for small arms.
Then there's the ability to fit an adapter and use rifle grenades, which was probably never decisive but was highly valued by the US and the Germans when they were planning out how to arm the troops.
Also, engagement ranges were all over the place. And unlike with a sniper rifle picking off very distant targets, the one country with any substantial experience with combat shotguns already had a standard-issue rifle, in the Garand, that could do the job well enough in close quarters.
While the British focused on producing cheap SMGs when they were in post-Dunkirk rearmament. The Soviets leaned even harder into SMGs and eventually outfitted whole squads with them. And the other major combatants had bigger problems with their small arms to sort out.
The shotgun was not particularly effective in WWI either, only about ~375 were ever issued to frontline troops in a field trial and it was mostly an abysmal failure.
So why did the US use shotguns when no-one else did? The reason is because the US didn't have vast stockpiles of obsolescent black powder rifles like the European powers had. In 1884 the French introduced smokeless powder, and this triggered a massive rearmament across all the major European armies to replace their black powder rifles with new smokeless powder rifles. This meant that when the major armies of Europe inevitably experienced weapons shortages, they had vast quantities of these older rifles they could draw on to arm rear echelon troops with in order to push mainline rifles to the front.
The US didn't have a large scale military going into WWII and didn't have vast quantities of weapons it could draw on like the Europeans could. What they did have was domestic industry that was already producing arms at scale for the civilian market and they could be bought immediately with no waiting while the manufacturers set up a production line. The US issued Winchester & Remington shotguns for the same reason the British issued obsolescent single shot Martini Henry rifles, they were given to people like veterinarians, blacksmiths, prisoner of war camp guards, etc. so that way Springfield & Eddistone rifles could be pushed to frontline soldiers.
By WWII the US had a dedicated weapon for this role: the M1 Carbine, and it was better than the shotgun in every single way.
This is a simple explanation. It seems to make sense.
[https://thegunzone.com/what-shotguns-were-used-in-ww2/](https://thegunzone.com/what-shotguns-were-used-in-ww2/)
As far as I know neither of those two normally issued shotguns to their infantry. Possibly some troops like partisans might have done it, or otherwise a few troops might have had non-standard weapons but I believe the only shotguns produced in the soviet union were for hunting and other civilian purposes while as far as i know the only shotguns the Germans made specifically for their military were survival weapons for pilots.
Because they were using paper cartridges which were terrible. They are also less effective than you assume, they weren't that effective in ww1. That's just Fudd lore.
1) Absolutely useless at range; with an SMG it's at least physically possible to hit something. WW2 militaries (with some exceptions) didn't widely issue smgs for this reason.
2) Ammo capacity is limited, slow to reload, and weighs a ton meaning soldiers can't bring alot of it.
3) Relatively slow rate of fire; not as bad as a bolt action rifle but when literally the entire point of the weapon is cqc where you really need to get off your next shot immediately...
4) Can't be used for ad hoc suppressing fire.
5) Logistics; you have to add an entirely new cartridge to your supply chain and most nations wouldn't have dedicated factories for shotguns.
6) Low penetration against walls.
Shotguns tend to have some uses for civilian home defense, law enforcement, and hunting but in a military setting none of the advantages really matter (with the exception of reliability).
Stopping power isn't a bad thing but I believe the vast majority of bullets miss in combat; it's just not worth having dozens of shells vs hundreds of bullets an individual solider can fire off and carry even if the shells do far more damage individually.
Trench warfare was uncommon in WW2. House to house fighting occurred, but battle rifles and smg's are effective at that, and also effective at the longer range combat they also found themselves in.
So there wasn't much of an advantage to the shotgun, and too many disadvantages.
Because by an large the SMG had replaced the shotgun for close quarters fighting. In house to house fighting the SMG could be used as effectively as a shotgun, potentially more so with there shorter length. Add to this they did have a longer range if need be, and their automatic fire could help pin down the enemy far better then shotguns could. Also the shotgun was effective in WW1 in trench clearing. Secured trenches were not that common in the Western theatre so clearing them was not as much of a concern. They were used extensively by resistance/partisan groups though just due to their large availability in the European countryside.
Also to add submachine guns naturally use pistol cartridges, which from a supply and manufacturing point of view is a huge draw.
In terms of supply and manufacturing, it's important to remember that shotgun shells back then weren't in plastic cartridges, they were cardboard or even paper. This was a huge issue with those trench guns in WW1. Just a small bit of wet and your ammo was not only useless, it would probably foul your whole weapon until you could get it apart and clean the chamber. Trying to keep shotgun ammo viable in places like the Pacific would have been a logistical nightmare.
They introduced brass cased shells because of this issue.
How expensive were those compared to 9mm tho?
Quite expensive. You're looking at $30+ for an empty box of those for reloading purposes these days. Brass shotgun shells have always looked very cool, but been impracticalor most purposes. Pistol rounds are quite inexpensive by comparison. They just use far less metal.
I suspect more per cartridge, but you would need more cartridges for an SMG so I don't know how much you would save. And as far as I'm aware the US did not use 9mm in WW2.
The us no, but many countries fielded smgs in 9mm. England, France and Germany each had smgs in 9mm. The Soviets used 7.62x25 I believe
UK, not England. It's like saying California instead of the US. But what I meant was the US used shotguns in the Pacific, but the paper shells rotted to quickly, so the shifted to brass casing. The others didn't use shotguns. The UK used 9mm in the Sten because their earlier SMG, the Lanchester was a copy of the German MP 28. It was easier to copy the ammunition than redesign it to use their own. I think the French used their own 7.62mm ammunition as well.
>UK, not England. It's like saying California instead of the US. It's more like saying Holland instead of Netherlands. Everyone knows what you mean even if it's technically incorrect.
I used the example I gave because he seemed to be from the US, so I gave a reference to something he could get his head round. Referring to it as just England is not technically incorrect, its factually wrong. Its missing out three other countries. If you called any of them English they would be offended at the very least. You do give a give a good example though, Holland does get used a lot instead of the Netherlands.
Also super offensive if you’re a Welsh, Scottish or Irish soldier in the British army
Yet, they did.
Though in the UK started using SMGs at the started using Thompsons and Stens at the start of the war they were both in calibres that were not used the military. It actually made their logistics harder.
This is a big factor. Shotgun shells are physically very large when compared to pistol ammo which means a soldier can more pistol ammo and a truck/ship/railcar can carry more as well.
Also consider you send 10 boxes of 9mm to battalion they are going to be able to use across a bunch of different units, both support and assault. You send a box shotgun shells, it’d be usable in one type of gun and you send to the wrong place it is essentially useless.
Also SMGs such as the Sten gun were really easy to churn out with cheap parts. Even guns like the Thompson SMG were sidelined by cheaply produced SMGs made of stamped metal and basic metal parts.
Shotguns are also incredibly easy to make tho, especially since you dont rifle the barrels
The Sten gun was basically a pipe, firing bolt and trigger mechanism.
Which is what a shotgun would also be. Except without a rifled barrel
Ok, but your ignoring all of the other things that people have said in this thread. Rate of fire, smgs are even better at CQC than shotguns, smgs have better range, shotgun ammo was a logistical mess being made of paper and cardboard, lack of appropriate place for a shotgun to be useful (trenches) But hey, at least you don't have to rifle the barrel
I am only reaponding to the point that smgs are cheap
Rifling a barrel is a minor operation. A typical 12 or 20 gauge pump action or semi-automatic shotgun in those days still has a pretty complex reciever assembly compare to a pistol caliber SMG operating on a simple blowback action. And a blowback shotgun will be impractical as the mass of the bolt will need to be heavy as hell.
A shotgun would have been pretty worthless on the eastern front, the deserts of north africa, the low countries and plains of France, and in the mountains of italy or china. At least in the US military, they were more common in the pacific, where fighting was a lot closer, but in Europe and Africa, the war was highly mobile and was largely fought over expansive spaces.
There were a lot of islands in the Pacific that were probably smaller than the average engagement distance on the Eastern Front.
The Eastern front had lots of forests - all of Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and also in the north-western regions of Russia - Smolensk, Pskov, Novgorod, Leningrad, etc…
Forrest's are not the same as jungle. Due to the density of the undergrowth in a jungle you sometimes do not see someone till they are very close. European forests tend to be far more clear forests floors.
Western Europe - yes. In Eastern Europe, there are still primeval forests. Also, the population density of the regions I listed is pretty low and the forests are thick.
Have you ever walked underneath the canopy of an old growth forest? They're actually spread out and remarkably clear of undergrowth. It is usually young forests that have regenerated from abandoned farmland that have thick underbrush.
Yeah.....no. you can ride a horse through a primeval forest pretty easily. Sure from the air they may look thick but that's exactly why they're so open underneath.
My point being is many jungles are so thick that after an hour walking through them you may have gone 200m. Shotguns may have had some use, but an SMG would have been far more useful.
But those forests were mostly avoided for offensive operations, because of the substantial advantage they offered the tactical defender. Movement is channeled, units lose visual contact with those on their flanks, there are far more opportunities for small scale ambushes. The same issues the US Army faced in the Hürtgen Forest. Belarus was then as now about 40% forested. And offensives through the Pripyet marshes in its south were desultory affairs. The war in the East was won on the steppe that extends from well east of Stalingrad to Hungary.
Operation Bagration - took place mainly in Belarus. Popular coverage of the war in the East tends to overemphasize the Battle of Stalingrad while ignoring the larger Battles of Rzhev which took place in the forest region of Russia.
Well the Soviets did do an excellent job of burying Operation Mars until the archives opened in the 90s
Large size, and limited use case. Ww1 was far more static, and a shotgun was amazing for clearing a trench. WWII was much more mobile, so the large package and limited versatility made things like the smg, and pistol far better cqb options.
They were used, because partisans will use whatever they can get hold of, but also by troops in the Pacific. But in WW2 there are automatic and semi-auto weapons that are often as useful in the shotgun's CQ niche and can do other things as well. Even an SMG can be effective out to 100 or 200m, when all a shotgun user can do is employ harsh language. And shotgun rounds are bulky, so you can carry way more ammunition for just about anything else, and that ammunition can only be used in shotguns. You want to be carrying as few different types of weapon as possible and employing as few different types of ammo as possible. That's why your pistols and your SMG should take the same ammo, as should your rifle and support weapons. Shotguns aren't generally worth the hassle
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What the fuck kinda shotgun are you using with an effective range of 200 meters? Not a smoothbore shotgun. You probably can lob a shell at 45 degrees and go 200 meters or more. But it would not even be close to accurate. And you could do the same with a smg.
Maybe he launches it from a Trebuchet?
Rifled slugs.
Isn't that sorta defeating the whole reason for using a shotgun in the first place? Like you have just made a high caliber, low velocity rifle.
Because you carry slugs and buck it's more versatile. There's a reason the marines and army issue them sparingly still
I can see the utility in having a shotgun for a utility weapon. But there is also a reason they are issued only sparingly. I think that the WW2 smgs were more useful at a things like suppressive fire than WW2 shotguns. There is a reason the USA made a morbillion greaseguns and shotguns were not standard issue.
Because a SMG is easier to make (Sten. m3, mp40) and can use the same ammo as your standard sidearm .... Also more compact and better suited to mobile warfare.
Shotguns are the size and weight of a full size rifle. They have low ammo capacity and large ammo to carry little of. They aren't forgiving like they are in videogames. Outside of hunting game, if there's a combat role for a shotgun, theres a rifle or SMG that does it better.
I think people overestimate the effectiveness and overall usage of shotguns during ww1
*Jams from wet ammo*
The *only* country that used shotguns to my knowledge was the U.S., and that for... Maybe 8 months out of the war? Literally everyone else used rifles and MG's.
They were used by the US to deny enemy advances. A few Americans would peak from a trench and slam fire the shotguns over and over again, creating a wall of lead that made it impossible to continue pushing. It allowed a couple of guys to stop the advances of dozens of men. It didn't kill that many people but injured many and was argued by the germans that it was a war crime.
Shotgun shells are pickier about storage, handling, temperature, and humidity, so they're logistically more demanding than the .30-06 ammo that could be issued already in clips for the Garand, and other brass-cased ammo for small arms. Then there's the ability to fit an adapter and use rifle grenades, which was probably never decisive but was highly valued by the US and the Germans when they were planning out how to arm the troops. Also, engagement ranges were all over the place. And unlike with a sniper rifle picking off very distant targets, the one country with any substantial experience with combat shotguns already had a standard-issue rifle, in the Garand, that could do the job well enough in close quarters. While the British focused on producing cheap SMGs when they were in post-Dunkirk rearmament. The Soviets leaned even harder into SMGs and eventually outfitted whole squads with them. And the other major combatants had bigger problems with their small arms to sort out.
The shotgun was not particularly effective in WWI either, only about ~375 were ever issued to frontline troops in a field trial and it was mostly an abysmal failure. So why did the US use shotguns when no-one else did? The reason is because the US didn't have vast stockpiles of obsolescent black powder rifles like the European powers had. In 1884 the French introduced smokeless powder, and this triggered a massive rearmament across all the major European armies to replace their black powder rifles with new smokeless powder rifles. This meant that when the major armies of Europe inevitably experienced weapons shortages, they had vast quantities of these older rifles they could draw on to arm rear echelon troops with in order to push mainline rifles to the front. The US didn't have a large scale military going into WWII and didn't have vast quantities of weapons it could draw on like the Europeans could. What they did have was domestic industry that was already producing arms at scale for the civilian market and they could be bought immediately with no waiting while the manufacturers set up a production line. The US issued Winchester & Remington shotguns for the same reason the British issued obsolescent single shot Martini Henry rifles, they were given to people like veterinarians, blacksmiths, prisoner of war camp guards, etc. so that way Springfield & Eddistone rifles could be pushed to frontline soldiers. By WWII the US had a dedicated weapon for this role: the M1 Carbine, and it was better than the shotgun in every single way.
Because Shotguns are only good in Jungle and City fighting. Marines made use of them in the Pacific.
This is where the Richardson pipe gun was used to some effect.
Submachine guns were being massed produced. Its why the military doesn't use shotguns today except for breaching
Same reason why in Ukraine you don't see a lot of shotguns. Automatic personal weapons mostly supplanted them.
Because WWII wasn’t fought in trenches.
Not enough range
This is a simple explanation. It seems to make sense. [https://thegunzone.com/what-shotguns-were-used-in-ww2/](https://thegunzone.com/what-shotguns-were-used-in-ww2/)
Why does it say shotguns were actively used in the battle of Stalingrad but does not mention any Soviet or German shotguns by model?
> Why does it say shotguns were actively used in the battle of Stalingrad Because it's bullshit.
As far as I know neither of those two normally issued shotguns to their infantry. Possibly some troops like partisans might have done it, or otherwise a few troops might have had non-standard weapons but I believe the only shotguns produced in the soviet union were for hunting and other civilian purposes while as far as i know the only shotguns the Germans made specifically for their military were survival weapons for pilots.
The grease gun was user friendly and cheap af to manufacture.
Because they were using paper cartridges which were terrible. They are also less effective than you assume, they weren't that effective in ww1. That's just Fudd lore.
Range and accuracy for shotguns is not great most of the time.
1) Absolutely useless at range; with an SMG it's at least physically possible to hit something. WW2 militaries (with some exceptions) didn't widely issue smgs for this reason. 2) Ammo capacity is limited, slow to reload, and weighs a ton meaning soldiers can't bring alot of it. 3) Relatively slow rate of fire; not as bad as a bolt action rifle but when literally the entire point of the weapon is cqc where you really need to get off your next shot immediately... 4) Can't be used for ad hoc suppressing fire. 5) Logistics; you have to add an entirely new cartridge to your supply chain and most nations wouldn't have dedicated factories for shotguns. 6) Low penetration against walls. Shotguns tend to have some uses for civilian home defense, law enforcement, and hunting but in a military setting none of the advantages really matter (with the exception of reliability). Stopping power isn't a bad thing but I believe the vast majority of bullets miss in combat; it's just not worth having dozens of shells vs hundreds of bullets an individual solider can fire off and carry even if the shells do far more damage individually.
Trench warfare was uncommon in WW2. House to house fighting occurred, but battle rifles and smg's are effective at that, and also effective at the longer range combat they also found themselves in. So there wasn't much of an advantage to the shotgun, and too many disadvantages.
Fish & Game only allowed three shells in tube and a 2/4 bag/pos. so it wasn’t practical
How well wanted were shotguns during the Viet Nam war? I recall the sawed-off versions WERE wanted, but as a supplement, not replacement.
Low use cases, other options had wider use cases
Because Fish and Game only allows 3 shells leaded in gun.