Just putting this one out in the ring as a possibility...

List of secondary and special-issue World War II infantry weapons - Prototype Weapons

Norway

• Eriksen M/25 machine gun

Poland

• Mors submachine gun

United States

• M2 Hyde submachine gun

Japan

• Type 5 Rifle

Wasn't japan forced to effectively dismantle it's military post-ww2? That aside, NK's launch in japan's direction??

Type 4(Redirected from "Type 5")

Cartridge: [7.7×58mm Arisaka]

Action: Gas-operated, rotating bolt

Muzzle velocity: 840 m/s (2,800 ft/s)

Feed system: 10-round internal box magazine loaded via two 5-round stripper clips

Fits the bill perfectly and explains the rapid follow up from/between the first 1 or 2 hits that JFK took, to the final kill shot after the shooter had ranged their (his/her) target properly.

History

During the Second World War, Japanese soldiers relied on bolt-action type rifles. However, guns were getting scarce and their main military rival, the United States, had replaced their bolt weapons with modern repeating rifles. At the same time Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were also developing their own prototypes which would give them great advantage on the battlefield. This pressured Japan to find a quick way to cope with their military disadvantage. Instead of designing and investing in a new weapon from scratch, they opted to copy the American M1 Garand. Initially, the Japanese experimented with re-chambering captured American M1 rifles, since the 7.7 Japanese cartridge is dimensionally similar to the .30-06. They found that while the Garand could chamber, fire, and cycle with the 7.7 ammunition, the en-bloc clip system was incompatible with the cartridge and would not feed reliably. Instead the Japanese designers reverse engineered the M1 and discarded the en-bloc clip, replacing it with a fixed internal 10 round magazine charged by two 5 round Arisaka Type 99 stripper clips.[2]

Japan had previously developed semi-automatic service rifles, but none of them has been viewed as successful or of trustworthy quality. The design work for the Type 4 began in 1944. The rifle was meant to be mass-produced in 1945. However, the Japanese defeat in the war in August halted its manufacturing. At the time, only 100 guns were completed out of the 250 in the workshop. Twenty of them were taken by the Allies at the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal on Honshu after the end of the war.

Today, the Japanese Garand is a rarity. An example of this rifle can be found in the US National Firearms Museum, in the World War II section.

Variants

According to the Japanese version of this article there was a Navy variant and an Army variant, the differences are not listed.

In popular culture

It appears in the Battlefield video game franchise as the "Type 5". It is featured in Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 1943 and briefly in Battlefield Bad Company 2.

Variants: I bet one was perfectly capable of accepting a suppressor...

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