alright Mike makes a couple more very solid points. however you did forget a couple though one wasn't exactly a major player, italy and finland also did not use a Mauser rifle either.
and it wasn't just the french rifles that Germany repurposed that they got caught holding, Austrian M95s, Russian 91/30s and SVT40s(they captured so many of those that they even gave them a german designation), and Italian Carcanos which out of desperation they tried converting too 8mm to try and give their troops anything that could shoot a bullet they could manufacture.
to claims of the M1/M2, the M1c was never meant to be a hard hitting, armor piercing machine of death. it was supposed to be a light weight alternative to the M1 garand for soldiers that already have a bunch of weight to pack around like radio operators and artillery spotters. the 30 carbine may have had limiting stopping power but it was a hell of a lot better than swinging a pair of binoculars to defend yourself. a full auto version offered little advantage over the thompson sub machine guns except for lighter weight and the people normally issued a M1c were not very likely to have to use it in combat unless things were going badly, giving them a spray and pray weapon was just not a very popular idea.
EDIT: also wikipedia is not the best place to quote information from, anyone can edit the information therein so if I really wanted to I could say that the K98K was developed in Narnia and fired rainbows... the information was written by guys just like you and me and unless they were actually part of those councils that decided to convert to a different caliber then they have no idea what the true motivations were.
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Notice how those who used the 6.5 got their rear end handed to them when the real fighting took off.
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Japan started the war by trying to take out the US' entire pacific fleet because they knew that they didn't have the resources to compete with the US in a long term war, they started WWII with about a year and a half's oil reserves... lucky for them their fleets were pretty much sunk by the end of 1942 so they had less demand for oil.
Italy was a tiny military force compared to just about any of the other major players in WWII, they had very few tanks, planes, and a very small almost nonexistent navy. these nations were not defeated because they used a 6.5 caliber bullet, they were defeated because they were outnumbered, outmaneuvered and lacked any sustainable natural resources.
the US has been using the 5.56 for about half a century now and just about all of those people we were fighting favored various 30 calibers and I can't think of a war that we have had our, and I quote, 'rear ends handed to us'
and I also missed who was talking about spys?