With personal space at a premium inside the tracked metal monsters of a World War II tank battalion, guns sometimes got unofficially smaller.
Check out this great image, snapped some 80 years ago this month, of two members of the 784th Tank Battalion at a railway marshaling yard in recently occupied Eschweiler, Germany on 23 January 1945, just after the Battle of the Bulge.
(Photo: W.C. Sanderson/ Signal Corps No. 111-SC-259409/ NARA NAID 276537211)
According to the official released wartime caption, the above shows Pfc. Floyd McMurthry (in the foreground) of Canton, Ohio, test-firing an M-3 Grease gun, while Pvt. Willie R. Gibbs (in the background) of Birmingham, Alabama, test-fires a sawed-off M-1 Carbine “which he shortened with his light tank to make it easier to handle.”
Let’s zoom in on that M1 a bit.
Judging by the size of the 8.5-inch handguard on the M1 Carbine, Pvt. Gibbs seems to have whittled this gun down to about 24 inches overall, with most of the 17.75-inch barrel abbreviated. The standard M1 Carbine went 35.6 inches overall.
No word on how the performance of the short-stroke piston action Carbine was affected in the above instance, although it is known that, some 20 years after the above image was captured, American advisors in Vietnam were often chopping down their M1s to more pistol length versions. Meanwhile, “Enforcer” pistols from Iver Johnson and Universal were marketed in the 1970s-90s with barrel lengths in the 9.5 to 10.25-inch range.
But that’s a different article.
For reference, the 784th Tank Battalion, a segregated unit equipped with a mix of M4 Sherman medium Tanks and M5A1 Stuart light tanks, entered combat in Europe in December 1944 and fought its way into Germany with the 104th “Timberwolf” Infantry Division.
Company B, 784th Tank Battalion at Sevelen, Germany on March 5, 1945. The two tanks to the left and right are M5 Stuarts while the vehicle in the center of the image is an M3 half-track. Note the extensive use of M3 Grease Guns, which remained prized by American armored vehicle crews through the 1990s. (U.S. Army Photo: SC 336785)
The 784th later linked up with advancing Soviet troops on the Elbe River and spent several months on occupation duty in Germany after the war. The 700-member battalion suffered nearly 200 casualties during its WWII service.