The Allied Arsenal

Every book tells you what these weapons could do.

Almost none of them tell you what it took to build one — what it cost, how many hours it consumed, which factory made it, and why a government at war chose it over the alternative.

Historical reference books built from wartime production records, ordnance department reports and period technical manuals.

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Twenty Rifles That Fought the War — Field Reference No. I — Fig. 1 · Field Reference No. I, cover

Allied Arsenal 570,000 Views 4,880 Subscribers Every figure traceable to a wartime document. Where the records disagree, the disagreement is stated.

The gap

Why these references exist

There is no shortage of books on the weapons of the Second World War. Most of them tell you the same things. Caliber. Muzzle velocity. Effective range. Weight, loaded and unloaded. If you have been reading this subject for thirty years, that information is already on your shelf — probably four or five times over.

What almost none of them tell you is what it took to put those weapons in the field.

What a Garand cost the government in 1941, and what it cost in 1945. How many machine-hours went into a Thompson before Savage redesigned it, and how many after. Why the Red Army stopped building the ZiS-2, and what changed on the battlefield that made them start again.

Those answers exist. They are in ordnance department reports, procurement files and production summaries. They are simply not in the books.

Weapons were not chosen because they were the best. They were chosen because a government under pressure — with limited steel, limited machine tools, limited skilled labour and a deadline set by an enemy — decided they were good enough, cheap enough and fast enough.

That decision is the story almost nobody tells. It is the story these references are about.

Field Reference No. I — Free

Twenty rifles that fought the war

Twenty service rifles from every major combatant. Each one covered in full: the weapon itself, the men who carried it, the numbers behind it, and an honest verdict on what it actually did in the field.

Twenty rifles — Allied, Axis, and several history has quietly dropped
Wartime specifications taken from period manuals, not from repetition
Production figures, with the source named for each
A field verdict on every weapon — what it did well, and what it did not
77 pages, laid out for reading rather than skimming
Instant download. PDF. Print it if you prefer paper.

This is a complete reference, not a sample. Nothing is held back, nothing is blurred, and there is no chapter missing at the end. If you never buy anything from me, it is still yours to keep.

Read it first

A complete chapter, before you consider buying

Not a preview. Not the first two pages. The complete ZiS-2 chapter from The Arsenal Reference, exactly as it appears in the book — every page, every table, every drawing.

Read it, then decide for yourself whether the rest is worth having.

ZiS-2 chapter, page 121 — Plate A · The Arsenal Reference, ZiS-2 chapter, complete and unaltered

ZiS-2 chapter, page 122 — Plate A · The Arsenal Reference, ZiS-2 chapter, complete and unaltered

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Method

How each entry is built

Collect the period manuals and technical publications
Pull production and procurement records for the same weapon
Reconcile the figures — and note where they disagree
Write
Technical review
Layout, and drawing to common scale
Final source check, entry by entry

Step three is the one that takes longest, and it is the reason these references exist. Published figures for the same weapon frequently conflict. Most books pick one. This one shows you both, and tells you which record it came from.

Attribution

How a figure is attributed

Every number in these references carries the document it came from. Not a bibliography at the back — the document, the date and the leaf, printed under the table the figure sits in. Four pages from the Arsenal Reference, unretouched.

A Sherman specification table with its source line beneath: TM 9-731A, War Department, 14 November 1942, paragraph 5, Tabulated Data, folios 12 to 14. — Fig. 2 · The ordinary case. Manual, department, date, paragraph and folio range, under every specification table in the book

A table of five Soviet man-hour figures above its source line: CIA/RR PR-47, Central Intelligence Agency Office of Research and Reports, 29 January 1954, leaf n28, printed folio 21. — Fig. 3 · An intelligence report cited to the leaf. The line naming where these five figures came from is redacted in the original, and the entry says so

A table of weapons with columns for what the source printed, the measuring convention, and the source and date; each row names a different manual. — Fig. 4 · Thirty weapons, thirty documents. The right-hand column is the whole argument: every row names its manual and its date

A specification table with the muzzle velocity and maximum range cells left blank, and a note beneath explaining that TM 9-305 leaves them blank. — Fig. 5 · An absence, attributed. Two cells are blank because the manual leaves them blank, and the note says where the missing figures are

The Arsenal Reference

The Field Reference explains the weapon. This explains the decision behind it.

Every weapon in this book was a choice. Someone in a ministry or an ordnance department chose it over an alternative, at a price, under a deadline, with a fixed supply of steel and machine tools and men who knew how to run them.

The Arsenal Reference is the record of those choices.

What each weapon cost, at the start of the war and at the end
How many machine-hours a single unit consumed, and how that fell
Which factories built it, and what they built before the war
What had to be given up in order to build it
How each nation's production compared, on the same scale
What happened when the decision turned out to be wrong

182 pages · 30 weapons

Plate B · Comparison of editions

The Field ReferenceFree	The Arsenal ReferencePaid
What the weapon did	Why the nation built it
Twenty rifles, in full	The complete arsenal
The soldier's view	The war ministry's view
Specification and field use	Cost, tooling, output, contracts
A verdict on performance	A record of the decision
Read it in an evening	Keep it on the shelf

Start with the Field Reference. It is complete on its own terms.

Interior

Inside the Arsenal Reference

Reference Edition page 164: man-hours table — Fig. 6 · Man-hours per gun and carriage, four British equipments, 1964 official history

Reference Edition page 172: four weapons compared by length — Fig. 7 · The book's only length comparison — printed as figures, not a drawing, each with its convention

Reference Edition pages 156 and 157: entry 30, Inglis Bren Mk II — Fig. 8 · Two-page spread, entry 30: a Czech gun, a British licence, a Canadian factory

Reference Edition page 169: ZiS-2 guns built by year — Fig. 9 · ZiS-2 guns built by year, 1941–45, including the year the total is nil

Reference Edition page 166: source line under the Soviet man-hours table — Fig. 10 · Source line under the Soviet man-hours table: agency, report, date, leaf and folio

Reference Edition page 159: what each source measured — Fig. 11 · Thirty weapons, one question: twelve state the convention, fourteen omit it, four print no length

The reference

What the Arsenal Reference covers

Thirty Allied weapons — armour, anti-tank, artillery, submachine guns and machine guns. Contract prices where a contract survives, man-hours where a ministry counted them, factory output by year, and the procurement decisions behind all three. Every figure attributed the way the four above are.

See the Arsenal Reference

Standards

Editorial standards

Every figure in these references is traceable to a document, and the document is named.
Where two records disagree, both are given, and the disagreement is stated rather than resolved silently.
Where a figure is reported rather than confirmed, it is marked as reported.
Where a comparison could not be made honestly, it was not made — and the reason is printed in the book.

Detail

Questions

Why isn't this on Amazon?

Two reasons. Amazon's formats don't handle the tables and technical drawings this book is largely made of — the layout breaks. And once a book is in the catalogue, existing buyers can't be sent a revised edition. Selling direct means the material stays as it was compiled, and everyone who owns it gets every future revision free.

What sources were used?

Every plate in the book is a figure from a named government manual, credited individually to its manual, with the figure number and date where the source prints them. The American entries come from War Department technical manuals — TM 9-1275 for the Garand, TM 9-1270 for the Springfields, TM 9-1276 for the carbine. The British entries come from TM 30-410, the War Department's 1942 Handbook on the British Army, and the P14 from FM 23-6. The Soviet plates are postwar US intelligence publications — FSTC-CS-07-35-66 and the Special Forces Foreign Weapons Handbook — because no wartime Allied manual in the public domain illustrates those weapons, and the book says so where it happens. Every photograph is a wartime original taken between 1939 and 1945, most from the Library of Congress and the Office of War Information. Five entries carry no plate at all, and each of those explains why rather than substituting something else.

Can I print it?

Yes. A print-optimised version is included with every purchase, laid out for a standard home printer.

Will updates cost extra?

No, permanently. When a new edition is issued you will be emailed a link to it at no charge. This applies to every buyer, including the first one.

Do I need an account?

No. You pay, you get a download link by email, and that is the end of it. There is nothing to log in to and nothing to cancel.

Will you sell or share my email address?

No. I use it to send you the book and occasional research notes. There is an unsubscribe link on every email and it works immediately.

I already have a large WWII library. What is actually new here?

The production and procurement side. If your shelf already covers what these weapons did, this covers what they cost, how long they took, who built them, and why they were chosen over the alternative. If you find it duplicates what you already own, the terms for returning it are on the sales page.

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