How much of a problem was the swelling of the forestock of the Lee Enfield ..or for that matter the U.S. 03 and Garand rifles in the damp humid climate of the Pacific in WW 2...ie: Burma...Guadacanal....the dampness and humidity must have had some impact on these rifles to maintain their zero....the rifles bedding would be all beat to crap from operating in these conditions....i read that the U.S. forces had problem with their M14 rifles in Vietnam....when the M16 is not so prone to this problem..
The stocks of both the 1903 and Garand were treated with a linseed oil based finish. The wood absorbed the oil readily and was virtually impervious to swelling. The soldier was also instructed to clean their rifle stock of excess dirt then give a light coating, hand rubbed, of oil. The dark stocks you see on a lot of well used milsurps are the accumulation of years of dirt and oil application.
The problem the troops had with the M-14 in Vietnam was not related to wood stock problem...mind you some of the hippy troops might have been at woodstock...but anyhow.
In transit across the pond a lot of the M-14's had been improperly secured for transit...this caused the an issue with the sights. Apparently the front sight became lossened and caused the zero of the rifle to wander. In order to repair this, all that was needed was a allen wrench(I can't remember the size). None of the troops, company commanders or NCO's were allowed to have this simple tool. The rifle had to be turned in to the company armorer for repairs, this generated an "Out of Service" or "Unservicable" tag that was recorded in company records. When the upper level officers reviewed the company records they saw these unservicable records and falsely assumed the M-14 was not reliable and not suited to battlefield conditions... this, of course was a wrong assumption. The situation also generated more emphasis on replacing the M-14 with the M-16, which by the way, had it's own serious problems which would render the firearm totally useless. The early M-16's that ended up in the jungle did not have chrome plated bores and chambers...this meant they developed corrosion mainly in the chamber due to the damp conditions in the jungle and lack of proper cleaning. This corrosion would then create a failure to extract a fired round, something you did not want in a firefight. They rectified this fairly quickly...though the problems did not stop there. In the early 70's the prime contractor for military ammunition had a change in the lot of powder they were using for the 5.56 cartridge. This, unknowingly, created higher chamber pressures in the gun thus hammering the daylights out of the M-16. It also increased the cyclic rate of the gun creating even more problems.
The army complained to the contractor building the rifle about the problem; so they fitted a special buffer to compensate for the hgiher pressure ammunition.
In the end they Army kept the glorified Gopher gun as standard issue and relegated the M-14 to secondary issue...interesting note is that you are seeing more troops carrying M-14's in irack.
Sorry for the long dissertation.
Cheers
