AMMUNITION: “THE PRECIOUS”

“Not knowing what lay ahead, Broughton ordered them to proceed

by fire and movement, with two groups alternating at bounding
ahead while the prone half delivered a covering fire with rifles,
carbines, and the BAR. It was probably a sheer waste of bullets
since the folding of the ridge provided a natural protection, and in
the end it cost them dear.

They emerged onto the skyline and squatted down behind the
rocks. The summit of 219 was just above them, less than 50 feet
away. Looking up, they could see the earth bank of an
entrenchment, and the upper parts of men’s bodies as the
Chinese bobbed up and down to fire on them. Grenades were
coming down the slope thick as hailstones but the distance was
overgreat and they were exploding before they reached the
platoon.

Broughton whispered to his men: “How much ammunition you

got?” Pvt. James Warmley replied: “Two bullets.” Broughton said:
“That just what I’ve got.” The others said they had absolutely
none; every magazine and belt had been emptied in the futile
firing during the climb. Pvt. Charles Murray said: “I think we’d
better get the hell out of here.”

That was what they did.”

The River and the Gauntlet, S.L.A. Marshall

Ammunition is a precious commodity to the militiaman. It

doesn’t grow on trees and it cannot be wasted. For instance, the
individual cannot burn up 600 rounds in 20 minutes…without hitting
anything…and then pull back to have a helicopter drop another full
load of ammo, something that happened to a unit of American and
Afghan commandos not long ago in Afghanistan. If the small unit of
light infantrymen burns up 600 rounds in a single short engagement,
they’re sucking hind tit and down to bayonets and rocks. This is why
both marksmanship and semi-automatic fire are important in
husbanding the crucial amount of ammunition at hand.

Training in and using the exact same tactics as a large, wasteful,

fully-equipped military with an endless supply train and extremely
deep pockets just doesn’t make that much sense for the self-
supporting small arms-equipped light infantry. It would seem to be a
recipe for disaster. You just can’t pour out buckets of ammunition in
hopes of inflicting a casualty. You’ll run out of bullets before regular
forces do, fast and guaranteed.

An army supplied literally at will by a single radio call can afford to be

wasteful and use plenty of full automatic fire. But in doing so, the
soldiers lose the very basics of rifle marksmanship. For instance, in
Vietnam, American military leaders greatly espoused the full-auto
capability of the M16 in the hands of the individual soldiers as
“firepower”. It did indeed provide volume of fire, but not necessarily
hits, and the average soldier lost his basic marksmanship skills in the
process.

Major Lones Wigger, an Olympic class shooter, took over a

marksmanship program for the 23rd Infantry Division in Vietnam in
1971. Part of his task was to train up replacements fresh from basic
training in the states. He was not impressed; only ten percent of the
recruits could hit a one-foot-square target at 25 meters.

“I found the average replacement could not hit a silhouette target at

twenty-five meters, knew little of basic marksmanship fundamentals,
and did not understand why he needed to zero his rifle.”

Major John R. Foster of the 101st Airborne also conducted a

marksmanship refresher course, but this one was for combat veteran
line grunts, with two men per company per week, usually around
thirty troopers total. All the men…except for one…were given two 30-
round magazines and one minute to put as many rounds downrange
at a man-size silhouette target at 50 meters’ range. They almost
always shot in the standing position on full-auto. The average group
scored four to six total hits out of 1,800 rounds. The last man was
given a short refresher course in basic rifle marksmanship and fired
from the prone on semiautomatic. He invariably put many more shots
into the target with 60 rounds than all the rest had with 1,800 rounds.

Colonel David Hackworth, doing an on-the-ground study of American

infantry in Vietnam noted: “When suddenly confronted by small
numbers of the enemy, the Americans firing their M16's will in the
overwhelming majority of cases miss a target fully in view and not yet
turning. Whether the firing is done by a moving point or by a rifleman
sitting steady in an ambush, the results are about the same -five total
misses out of six tries - and the data basis includes several hundred
such incidents. The inaccuracy prevails though the usual such
meeting is at 15 meters or less, and some of the firing is at less than
10 feet. An outright kill is most unusual. Most of the waste comes
from unaimed fire done hurriedly. The fault much of the time is that
out of excitement the shooter points high, rather than that the M16
bullet lacks knockdown power, a criticism of it often heard from
combat- experienced NCO's. The VC winged but only wounded by an
M16 bullet, then diving into the bush, makes a getaway three times
out of four, leaving only his pack and a blood trail. As to effectiveness
over distance, until recently he data basis deriving from 6 major and
approximately 50 minor operations contained not one episode of VC
or NVA being killed by aimed fire from one or more M16's at ranges
in excess of 60 meters.”

As a result, it required a lot of small arms ammo to kill a single VC or

NVA. Estimates range from a low end of 50,000 rounds per kill to a
high end of 200,000 rounds.

On the other hand, the Aussies in Nam were primarily armed, at least
initially, with the L1A1 inch-pattern FAL or SLR (Self-Loading Rifle),
which was semi-automatic only. Those armed with the SLR’s fired an
average of 275 rounds per kill. In patrol encounters it was 187. With
all small arms including machine guns and M16s included, the total
round count was 485 per kill. That, of course, includes the real full-
auto suppressive fire from real machine guns, if you consider the M60
a real machine gun. However, in about 22 per cent of all 1ATF
contacts, thirty shots or less resulted in an enemy casualty. All this
despite the Aussies’ general distaste for the body count method, and
that they did not “extrapolate” numbers or include “probables” in their
count.

Even some major national militaries had to learn the value of

accurate slow fire and conserving ammunition solely due to a lack
of bullets to fire. The United States Marines on Guadalcanal, for
instance, were pretty much abandoned early in the campaign, their
supply ships and escorts chased away by Japanese naval and air
forces. From high-ranking commanders to front-line grunts, the
importance of making the most of their ammunition was stressed.

“Teach not to waste ammunition. Learn to make every shot count.”

Colonel Amor R. Sims.

“We learned not to fire unless we had something to shoot at.

Doing otherwise discloses your position and wastes ammunition.”
Corporal Fred Carter.

Even the Japanese in WWII, almost universally noted for their

less-than-stellar marksmanship, decided they needed to stress it
later in the war as their bastions were being cut off and strangled;
“left to die on the vine”, as General Douglas “Dugout Doug”
MacArthur put it. With supplies of ammunition running out, these
notes came from two different captured official Japanese military
documents:

"Supply: ‘Get one of the enemy every time you shoot’ is to be a

maxim of this fight. The defenders must shoot the big forms of the
enemy [United Nations] as they approach. As many provisions and
as much ammunition as possible must be stored in the front lines.
However, these supplies should be widely dispersed as a protection
against bombing.”

“With regard to shooting, large quantities of ammunition are seldom

available at the front; therefore expert marksmanship must be
developed during the training period. The principle ‘Get a man with
every round’ is very sound. This is particularly important with regard
to heavy weapons. You must avoid random firing; aim your shots
well.”

Ammunition, especially for American calibers, was desperately

hard to come by for American and Filipino guerillas fighting the
Japanese occupiers of the Philippine Islands during WWII. Colonel
(should have been General) Wendell Fertig led the resistance
movement and learned one had to go to real extremes to conserve
ammunition amongst poorly trained guerillas.
“In my command in the Philippines, I found that the only way to
break out of an ambush action was to provide indigenous
personnel with limited ammunition. A guerilla with an empty rifle
will retreat readily, while one with an adequate supply of
ammunition will stay too long and risk capture.”

At one point, guerillas were also required to bring back their empty
brass for reloading. You only got as much new ammunition as the
number of spent cases you brought back!

There are, fortunately, less extreme ways to conserve precious

ammunition while still being effective in the firefight. One way to
achieve these goals as well as conserve ammunition is by the use of
well-aimed individual fire from semi-automatic rifles. I believe it was
Clint Smith from Thunder Ranch who put it best: “Shoulder-fired full-
auto is only good for turning money into noise.”

Conducting extensive studies of small arms use during the Korean

War, Army historian and researcher S.L.A. Marshall noted that when
American GIs were fighting desperately to stem the massed Chinese
human wave attacks, the automatics—BARs, machine guns,
Thompsons, M2 carbines--quite often ran completely out of
ammunition during these actions. But the semi-automatic M1
Garands in the hands of riflemen never ran completely dry.

“VALUE OF SLOW FIRE

The Korean experience proves substantially that the fighting posture
of the line is most sound when automatic fire is combined with slow
fire in its weapons complex. This subject will be treated more
extensively in the data bearing on evaluation of the various weapons.
Suffice to say now that any trend toward eliminating the semi-
automatic, hand-carried weapons in favor of full-automatic weapons
in the hands of all infantrymen should be vigorously combated. In
perimeter defense, the time almost invariably comes when the
automatic weapons run short of ammunition, with the local issue still
to be decided. This is the crisis of the contest, when decision may
swing either way, depending on which side is most, capable of
delivering the last few volleys.
The semi-automatic weapons are conservers of ammunition. Apart
from their great value in the hands of a good marksman at any stage
of the fight, they compose the weapons reserve which becomes of
inestimable value in the last hours when both sides are near the point
of exhaustion. In the infantry company data from Korean operations
there are numerous examples wherein the retention of the position
depended finally on fire from the M1, and rifle fire finally decided the
issue. The troops who carry the weapon almost unanimously
recognize the vital importance of this factor. On the basis of their
experience, they would not concur in any suggestion that the line
could be strengthened by fitting it exclusively with full-automatic
power.”

Kind of sounds like SLAM is espousing say, oh, a semiautomatic

M14. And in the same category we can put the civilian semi-
automatic versions of the FAL, HK91/CETME, AR10. It’s worthy of
note that some of the armies with a reputation for marksmanship--
Australia, Great Britain, Canada—adopted a semiautomatic-only
version of the FAL.

I often use for examples mountain troops and paratroops. That’s

because such units often operate in independently, in small groups,
and without supporting arms. Resupply of both beans and bullets can
be difficult and tenuous. In many cases, the engagement must be
decided entirely with small arms, yet they must still retain enough
ammunition for continued action.

“Ski patrols, assault units, or raiding parties are not suited for
a prolonged engagement, because of their usually limited
ammunition
supply. They detach themselves from the enemy after forcing a
decision, or complete his destruction in close combat.”
German WWII Gebirgsjaeger mountain troops knew full well that
small arms could often be the only means they had to make the
decision in the fire fight, and used these tactics to increase the
“firepower” of their individual weapons and cut down on ammunition
expenditure.

“In cases where ski troops have no artillery support, fire fights alone
are frequently the only means of securing the success of the
engagement. Increasing the allotment of telescopic sights to riflemen
strengthens the fire power of the squad and favors the more frequent
firing of single shots. Concentration of the fire of all rifles with
telescopic sights to overpower important single targets (enemy
leaders, observation posts, and machine guns) can be of particular
advantage before and during an attack, and also in defense.
Because
of the limitations of transportation in ski warfare the platoon or squad
leader must control the use of ammunition.”

Although the Swiss had, for many decades, stressed and achieved
an almost unparalleled level of individual marksmanship, this was
espoused even more by their special mountain regiments. This
was, in large part, due to the difficulty of ammunition supply and
also to the fact that the rifle was often the only weapon available to
mobile small units in rough mountain country.

The carbine to which this article refers to is the K31, sometimes

erroneously referred to as the Schmidt-Rubin, a straight-pull bolt-
action, faster than any conventional bolt-action rifle but slower than
a semiautomatic rifle.
 “On account of the ease with which it is operated and its small size
and weight, the carbine can be carried anywhere without a great deal
of inconvenience. Its simple action permits almost instantaneous
opening of fire and it is not in any way affected by the cold. Its firing
accuracy is excellent even at distances in excess of three hundred
yards, since a gun in good condition and well adjusted possesses
extremely slight dispersion in the hands of a good marksman. The
maximum consumption of ammunition may be fixed at six rounds per
minute, and even this is a bit high. It is not hard, therefore, to
maintain a supply of ammunition even in relatively inaccessible
locations.”

Weapon Nature of Rate of Fire Weight

Fire
Carbine One round at 6 rounds per 1 clip 5.6 ounces
a time minute
Sub- Bursts of 5 to 60 rounds 2 magazines 5.7
machine 8 rounds per minute pounds
gun
Machine Bursts of 20 to 250 rounds 1 box of ammunition
gun 30 rounds per minute about 24.2 pounds

“In mountain service and exercises, we should emphasize individual

carbine fire more than we have in the past. It is admitted that
mountain soldiers already can shoot. It is certainly necessary.
He must learn to shoot in snow, among rocks, in extreme cold, while
wearing mittens, at night, and especially in fog. The targets should be
at varying distances, from thirty-five yards to three hundred, even five
hundred yards. He must be able to register hits on visible targets in
from five to twenty seconds. In short, no matter what the situation, he
should be able to make each shot count. When he has aquired a
certain mastery of shooting, he will take up patrol fire under the
control of his chief…

The carbine is perfectly suited to aimed, high-angle fire (the opposite

of grazing fire). By crossing the trajectories of several weapons, there
will not be many dead angles in a given zone (Fig. 1)

The morale effect of surprise fire coming from several different

directions and penetrating into all the angles of a terrain is very great.
If, in addition to this, the material effects are considerable as a result
of good accuracy, the enemy detachment will have had experience
from which it will not immediately recover.

These are the very results we are aiming at!”

In many cases, especially during the Second World War, paratroops

often had to operate on their own, without support weapons, and,
despite some successful air drops often with a tenuous—at best—
means of resupply. From Crete to Arnhem, they frequently had to
make do with their own small arms and what ammunition they had
brought with them, and so had to get the most out of it.
 GROUND TACTICS OF GERMAN PARATROOPS

The commander of a German parachute demonstration battalion

recently issued to his companies a directive which affords useful
insight into some of the ground tactics that enemy paratroopers may
be expected to employ. The following extracts from the battalion
commander's order are considered especially significant:

1. Since so many targets are likely to be seen only for a fleeting

moment, and since the rifleman himself must disappear from
hostile observation as soon as he has revealed his position by
firing, the German paratrooper must be extremely skillful at "snap
shooting" (rapid aiming and firing). The following three points are
to be noted and put into practice:

a. Snap shooting is most useful at short ranges. It will not be

employed at ranges of more than 330 yards, except in close
combat and defense, when it will generally be employed at ranges
under 1,100 yards.
b. Even more important than rapid aiming and firing is rapid
disappearance after firing, no matter what the range may be.

c. Movement is revealing, also. Men must move as little as

possible and must quickly find cover from fire at each bound.

2. I leave to company commanders the distribution of automatic

and sniper rifles within companies. I wish only to stress the
following principles:

a. Wherever possible, sniper and automatic rifles will be given to

those paratroopers who can use them most effectively. In general
practice, this rules out commanders and headquarters personnel
(who have duties other than firing).

b. There seems to be a general but incorrect impression that our

sniper rifles improve the marksmanship of men who are only
moderately good shots. These rifles are provided with telescopes
only to make more distinct those targets which are not clearly
visible to the naked eye. This means that an advantage accrues
solely to very good marksmen firing at medium ranges—and, what
is more, only where impact can be observed and the necessary
adjustments made. Since the sniper is seldom in a position where
he can observe for himself, a second man, with binoculars,
generally will be detailed to work with the sniper.

Even in jungle fighting, where everything is point blank and chaotic,

other methods besides the blind spraying the bush of with mass
volumes of full automatic fire have proven effective in the past.

A British officer in Burma during WWII, Captain H. Peacock, a former

forest ranger in Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa, advised jungle
soldiers on shooting the bolt-action SMLE rifle.

“Shooting.—The correct use of a rifle deserves a few words. In the

jungle quick decisions and timing are of far more urgency than mere
accuracy. The affliction known as ‘stag fever’ is far more prevalent in
the jungle than in open country, where there may be time to exert
self-control and shoot calmly and accurately. To fire at the right
moment, to know when to hold one’s fire, are all-important under
conditions where a second shot is most unlikely to be obtained after
a miss. In the jungle, fifty to seventy-five yards is a long shot. Study
your rifle and make sure of absolute accuracy at close ranges: and
fight against ‘stag fever’, which attacks the most experienced of us.”

While I have little use for Communists, and even less for Che
Guevara, he did have a few rational thoughts on the effective
armament of poorly-supplied and trained guerilla units during the
Cuban Revolution. Even with poorly-trained shooters, it’s hard to
waste too much ammo with a bolt-action rifle.

“The arms preferable for this type of warfare are long-range weapons
requiring small expenditure of bullets, supported by a group of
automatic or semi-automatic arms. Of the rifles and machine
guns that exist in the markets of the United States, one of the best is
the M-1 rifle, called the Garand. However, only people with some
experience should use this, since it has the disadvantage of
expending too much ammunition…An ideal composition for a
guerrilla band of 25 men would be: 10 to 15 single-shot [bolt-action]
rifles and about 10 automatic arms between Garands and hand
machine guns, including light and easily portable automatic arms,
such as the Browning or the more modern Belgian FAL and M-14
automatic rifles.”

In the successful counter-insurgency fought in the jungles of Malaya,

British and Commonwealth forces had plenty of automatic small
arms. Even so, to be used most effectively, only the submachine
guns were fired full-auto, and then still aimed from the shoulder

SUMMARY OF METHODS OF FIRING WEAPONS

The best results with all automatic weapons are likely to be
obtained when fired from the shoulder as aimed fire, 9 mm carbine
shots in short bursts, and M1/M2 carbines in single shots [semi-
automatic].

Weapon Do’s Don’t’s

Owen 9 mm SMG Fire from shoulder in Don’t fire single
[Sub-machine aimed bursts— rounds.
Gun] 3-4 rounds at close Don’t fire from the hip.
Range, or Don’t fire from rough
2-3 rounds at longer alignment of sights
range. from shoulder.
SMG 9 mm Fire from shoulder in --do--
L2 A1 aimed bursts—
(Patchett) 2-3 rounds at close
range or
2 rounds at longer
range.
M1/M2 Fire from the shoulder in Don’t fire from the hip.
Carbine single rounds at the
[M1 semi-auto] highest possible rate.
[M2 full-auto]
No. 5 Aimed fire from Don’t fire from the hip.
Rifle shoulder in single
[Jungle Carbine, rounds.
Bolt-action]
7.62 Self- Aimed fire from Don’t fire from the hip.
Loading shoulder in single
Rifle (FN) rounds.
[Semi-automatic]
In 1964, the United Kingdom was fighting counter-insurgency in
Aden. The Radfan was an area of rugged, stony mountains rather like
Afghanistan, only lower elevation. Although an unsuccessful mission,
the saga of the Edwards Patrol of the SAS is of note.

In the delicate balancing act between mobility and firepower, and not
supposed to seek combat but rather secure a drop zone, the troopers
of the patrol carried five 20-round magazines for their SLR’s, one in
the rifle and four in their ammo pouches. An additional 50-round
bandoleer for reloads was also carried. A single .303 Bren Gun was
also carried in the role of the SAW.

A sick patrol member slowed their progress so that when daylight

came, they had to hide in two old sangers (fighting positions built of
rocks). At 1100, they were unfortunately discovered by a wandering
goat herder (shades of Bravo Two Zero!). A brutal ordeal began.

An all-day firefight ensued. The Arabs greatly outnumbered the

British patrol and were armed with bolt-action SMLEs. They were
very good with those rifles too, but the SAS troopers held them off
with their own aimed and deliberate fire for two hours until air support
arrived. The RAF Hunter aircraft kept the tribesmen pinned down, but
at dusk their support was lost and, as in Afghanistan, terrorist
reinforcements had been filtering into the area all day, slowly
surrounding the position despite the air strikes. A rescue helicopter
had been driven off, shot full of holes. By nightfall, every man in the
patrol had been wounded either by bullets or rock fragments from
bullets smashing into the sangers. One man was dead.

The SAS men destroyed their radios and made a break for it after
dark. During the escape, Captain Edwards was killed. After the break-
out, as they crept towards the nearest British outpost, four Arabs
picked up their trail. Two men heard them and waited; rather than
hide in ambush and delivering a large volume of fire, the SAS
troopers stepped out into the path and quickly cut all four men down
with SLR’s. When two more guerillas later picked up their trail again,
an identical ambush dispatched them too.

The wounded and battered patrol eventually hooked up with a British

Saladin armored car near daybreak and was transported back to
base. They had survived incredible tribulations against overwhelming
odds. Even though they had started with only 150 rounds apiece, had
been marching or fighting for 36 straight hours, had engaged in a
day-long firefight and two ambushes, there was still some ammunition
left for their semi-automatic SLR’s.

The Rhodesian Light Infantry

This is how the elite units of the Rhodesian security forces, almost
always outnumbered and not relying on aerial resupply if stealth was
needed, conserved their ammunition while still using their South
African R1 versions of the FAL to very good effect.

“Terrorists generally fired on fully automatic – ‘spray and pray’. This

would often start high, and would rise. The indiscriminate use of
ammunition on fully automatic usually meant they would run out long
before the Rhodesian troops.

To ‘Win the Fire Fight’, riflemen would consume the first two
magazines as quickly as it remained practical to maintain accuracy,
using single rounds or double taps (While trained to use the double
tap, my Commando’s policy was the use of single rounds - Aim,
Squeeze and Switch). As with the rifleman’s use of magazines, the
[machine] gunner was free to offload the first one or two belts. Each
stick member was responsible for monitoring his own ammunition
usage during the firefight, and running out was an unforgivable sin!”
Later, we’ll cover their famous Drake or Cover Shoot, to explain how
to suppress the hell out of the enemy with just “double taps”.

Fighting “Small Wars” in the Caribbean and Central America between

the World Wars, the United States Marine Corps also knew about
tenuous supplies of ammunition despite their early use of aerial
resupply, and the need to get the most from what they carried. After
1936 and the first military adoption of the M1 Garand, when it filtered
down to them Marines believed that an infantry unit armed solely with
semiautomatic rifles was just fine.

“If the rifle units are completely equipped with the semiautomatic rifle,
the inclusion of any full shoulder weapon in each squad is not
warranted. If the basic arm in the patrol is the bolt-action rifle, the
armament of each squad should include two semiautomatic, or two
Browning automatic rifles, or one of each. This proportion of
automatic shoulder weapons to bolt-action rifles should rarely, if ever,
be exceeded. Ammunition supply in small wars operations is a
difficult problem. Volume of fire can seldom replace accuracy of fire
in a small war. The morale of guerrilla forces is little affected by the
loss of u particular position, but it is seriously affected by the number
of casualties sustained in combat. The majority of the personnel in an
infantry patrol should be armed, therefore, with weapons that are
capable of delivering deliberate, aimed, accurate fire rather than with
weapons whose chief characteristic is the delivery of a great volume
of fire. The automatic weapons should be utilized to protect the
exposed flanks, or to silence hostile automatic weapons.”

So, since there’s really no choice available other than semiautomatic

battle rifles (or assault rifles, if you must), a formation lacking in fully
automatic weapons doesn’t necessarily mean it’s toothless or
ineffective, and can still keep enough ammunition to fight another
day.

http://benandbawbsblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/ammunition-precious.html