Hey all. I'm nearly ready to start writing my story, but I'm stuck on one thing; what sort of weaponry did the Germans have around D-Day/Market Garden, in the sense of rifles, machine guns, RPGs, etc, etc? Any help is appreciated!
If you google WWII German Guns the first website has pictures and some information on common weapons used by the Germans in WWII. Though I am not sure if any of them were introduced after D Day, it doesn't say. But you can always look them up further.
Try video games. Not always spot on, but pretty helpful. Also reading and research in WWII weapons are very helpful and plenty of books on the subject. I suggest you start there.
I don't really know of the weapons, but I often use google to search down information on the weapons I do use in stories. Thus I figured I'd do the same to help you out. Here's a few links I found. Hope they give you some assistance. http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-weapons/enemy_ww2.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_II_German_infantry_weapons http://www.2worldwar2.com/german-secret-weapons.htm
I don't usually without checking behind it, but just getting a handle on the types of guns and technologies for them is all you need to go from there and search for them elsewhere.
You say this, but of the weapons I have experiance with, and know about, I find Wikipedia is - dispite it's reputation - to be rather accurate.
You cannot evaluate the accuracy of information from a single source. And if you only compare against the references that single source provides, chances are it will agree with those references.
Wikipedia is one of the most well-maintained encyclopaedias available on the Internet. The canards of it being unreliable are old and fictional at this point. There are now historians, professors, and scientists writing for it -- such has been the incredible surge of Wikipedia in the last few years. It is, most definitely, a reliable source.
Right. It's as fine as any other encyclopedia, except the review process takes place at random intervals AFTER it has been published. I stand by my statement. So do all the college professors who instructed us that Wikipedia references are not acceptable for academic papers.
I'm aware, Cog, that it is not accepted in academical circles. Our class has been told in no uncertain terms to avoid it completely. But we've also been told to avoid a lot of websites unless they're academic. Just don't be so quick to dismiss Wikipedia as a good source of information, despite it being the pejorative curse of the academic world.
This forum is called Research, so it is completely appropriate to point out good and poor practices in gathering information. Wikipedia is discourged as a orimary source for good reasons. You are perfectly free to disregard that if you wish. I, on the other hand, am perfectly free to point out that it is an unreliable research strategy. Oddly enough, it is often about bias. Not bias against Wikipedia, but bias that can and often does find its way into Wiki articles, and can endure there for quite some time. And even if there is no deliberate bias, the article is no better than the research put into it by its author. As long as the article contains citations for all its major assertions, the reviewers may not spot the omission of important sources for quite some time.
The only way you can really write about weapons is through having experiance of them first hand, THAT is the best source. And even where I live, here in the UK, it's very easy to not only try guns: hold them, shoot them at a target, reload them; but also to buy them; and we have the worst gun laws in the world.
