I love the feel of a Garand in my hands, it feels like...History!
Posted on 09/21/2013 3:22:22 PM PDT by virgil283
it happens. especially when ammo is rare as gold. It’s coming back though so we can enjoy our sport once again.
The repeat rate for the M1 Thumb is very low. It makes an impression on the mind and thumb. I know!
Mosin fire ball?
why it do that?
I think it would still be a formidable weapon in the hands of someone who knew how to use it. The M16A2 has a 30 round mag which seem like a decisive advantage but if you were for example, a resistance soldier fighting against a tyranical government, you would likely be engaging troops from as far away as possible and you, very likely, would be firing no more than 8 rds before breaking contact and moving to a new position. Ammo availability is worth considering as well. We have seen how fast the NATO rounds can disapear from the shelves but, throughout all of that, rounds like .270, .243, 22-250, and 30/06 remained available.
The .276 caliber was a superior caliber and lighter to carry. 6.5MM is the optimal caliber for both distance and terminal velocity.
By 1927 Garand was instructed to develop a rifle to handle the .276" caliber
The 30-06 was chosen because of millions of 30-06 rounds left over from WWI.
cartridge. Five years later, however, Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur
decided in favor of .30 caliber and the project was abandoned.
Also a common round between rifle and machine gun.
I fired the M-1 left-handed in the Marines. Drill instructors allowed it so long as I didn’t get my fingers caught. I learned real fast how to load a clip with my right thumb on the operating rod and the clip and four fingers into the receiver. Never did get my fingers caught.
Have you ever seen or heard of a slide-fire kit put on a
SOCOM 16?
M-14s were weapons during my initial army tour. No one could control them on full auto out of 3 battalions I ran the range for one year. They had a sgt. come from 18th corps to show us it could be done.
“MacArthur sure made a very wise decision by insisting that they stick to the 30-06 rather then going to the .276.”
Douglas MacArthur (then Chief of Staff, US Army) made a decision, but it’s arguable that he made a questionable choice operationally. Sad to say, it was logistically the only course possible in the Depression-wracked starvation-budget days early 1930s, and was politically expedient.
Interested parties should read Julian Hatcher’s _The Book of the Garand_ for the story.
John Cantius Garand designed several small arms (including one operated by primer motion) before turning to gas operation; his initial versions of what became the M1 chambered the 30-06 cartridge. Then he was ordered to rework it to chamber the U S Army Ordnance Corps 7x51mm experimental cartridge know to today’s gun culture as the 276 Pedersen cartridge.
John D Pedersen - the world’s foremost arms designer, after John M Browning’s demise in 1926 - had developed a delayed-blowback rifle proposed for US military issue, but he did not “push” the cartridge on the armed forces. Military leaders were already looking for something better.
In the aftermath of the Great War (it did not receive the numeral “I” until WWII), all combatants recognized that the rifles issued in 1914-18 were so large and heavy that they hampered troops on the battlefield. Also, the cartridges they fired were excessively powerful: though lethal at longer range (above 400m or so, out to max ranges of 2000m) at typical battle-encounter ranges they overdid the job. Most training experts cast doubt on the ability of any nation’s average trainee to see far enough, gauge ranges accurately enough, and hit reliably enough to make use of what we are now pleased to worship as “main battle rifles.” Rifles and ammunition were so large and heavy that commanders despaired of getting their soldiers to hump enough ammunition to get through a fight.
And so the search for smaller, lighter rifles firing smaller, lighter cartridges began.
It was noted that the Italians, Imperial Japan, Nordic nations, and the Greeks all fielded 6.5mm rifle cartridges; Spain and many South American countries used the then-elderly 7x57mm Mauser. All were deemed “good enough”. Each and every one was shorter, lighter, and less violent in recoil than the 30-06 (which was the very longest military cartridge of its time). The 30-06 pushed Garand’s design to its very limit; the military eventually had to redesign the issued round because the 30M1 bullet (172gr boat-tail, designed for max-range performance in machine guns) could not be pushed quick enough to please users. Therefore, the 30M2 bullet (153gr flat base) was adopted before WWII, serving until the 7.62x51mm NATO was adopted in the 1950s.
Th 276 Pedersen was as good as a 30-30, comparable to all the 6.5mm rounds, and only a little behind the 7x57.
An M1 chambering 276 Pedersen could hold ten rounds, double the capacity of most bolt action military rifles (Great Britain’s Lee-Enfield excepted). And a properly proportioned rifle would have been lighter and handier than the actual issued M1, holding as it did only eight rounds of the larger 30-06.
After the Chief of Staff issued his edict, John C. Grand reworked his rifle again, to fire the 30-06. The M1 went into production and was issued, and US troops carried it to victory. Along the way, the industrial workers, government bureaucrats, paper-pushing deskbound officers, and the American people wrought countless miracles of industrial organization, production, transportation, and preparation: victories in their own right. Could the war have been won more handily, or at less cost, shooting Germans and Japanese with 276 Pedersen bullets? Difficult to say for sure. What can be said is that a force armed with 276 Pedersen M1s (or with the Pedersen Rifle, for that matter) would have been toting a rifle that needed less steel, less wood, less brass and nickel and nitrocellulose and copper - all the nameless but vital ingredients that cannot be spared, if the forces are to prevail.
A great deal of fuss has been made by armchair commandos and “military intellectuals” alike, about the wartime benefit of weapons that chamber the same cartridge. Machine gun crews can use riflemen’s spare ammo, and vice versa. In actual service, US forces never did so: 30M1 rounds went into clips, and into boxes, and pallets, and got sent to the troops. 30M1 rounds for M1919 machine guns, and aerial/naval guns, got shoved into cloth belts or steel links, and made their way to combat forces. The twain did not meet.
After the Second World War, all nations renewed the search for newer infantry rifles; the conviction had become almost universal, that cartridges like 30-06, 303 British, 7.92x57 and the like were far too heavy and powerful for most tactical uses. Cartridges much smaller than the 276 Pedersen were designed, tested, chambered in new weapons, and used. The USSR made a close copy of Germany’s 7.92x33 Kurz, and fielded its 7.62x39 until the 1970s in many weapons. The UK tried to get NATO to adopt its 280/30 cartridge, but the US refused to go along, insisting on the 7.62x51, which performs identically with the 30-06 but is half an inch shorter.
In just over a decade, the US undercut NATO and reversed its prior preferences for “main battle” cartridges, by adopting the 5.56x45 with the M16, with downrange performance rather less stellar than the 276 Pedersen, any of the 6.5mm rounds, or the UK’s 280/30. At the behest of the US, NATO finally went with its version of the 5.56x45 in the 1980s; the USSR had in the 1970s already begun to field its 5.45x39mm round, with performance below that of the much-cursed 5.56mm.
Perhaps we should have avoided all the drama and adopted the 7x57mm after the Spanish-American War.
Take a look at earlier editions of WHB Smith’s _Small Arms of the World_: edition 10 or earlier.
When I was in Vietnam I carried a Remington 12 gauge pump, with sawed off barrel. I'd like to have one of those again too!
Yup yup. Boom boom. We gone.
I love the feel of a Garand in my hands, it feels like...History!
A walnut stock is just gorgeous.
Heh, that ball of flame! And the sound, too...me and a couple of friends took our Garands down to the range and were plugging away, man, what a sound. I cannot imagine what is was like when there were hundreds of them firing at once.
That photo drives me NUTS!
The BANDAID !!!
Why does it appear Magically in this scene??
anyone??
Bueller,,,
My favorite one was this goof in "Dr. Strangelove" where the B-52's shadow on the ground as it flew at low level was that of a B-17...for a few fleeting seconds I thought I had found something nobody had seen...:)
Ah, the innocence...:)
The 36th Infantry Division was still using Springfields during the Italian Campaign in 1943.
It’s hard for me to find any serious faults with the 30/06. It’s heavy and has a bit of recoil. That’s about it IMO. I like 308 win for most applications but, the fact remains, anything the .308 can do, the 30/06 can do a little bit better. Some things it does a lot better. My new dream rifle is the Noreen BN36, an AR10 chambered in 30/06 as a matter of fact.
The Horror,the horror,
of contamination of You’re bodily fluids!
Except for the sawed off barrel, there's no good reason you can't get yourself a nice personal defense pump with an 18" barrel. They're not that expensive.
My daughter owns a couple of handguns (38 & a 9mm), but she also owns a Remington 1100 semi auto. That's the one I'm really glad she has when I think about the scenario of SHTF where she lives. She's been professionally trained with a shotgun and is apparently pretty good with one. Makes a dad feel all warm and fuzzy.
As a home defense weapon I prefer the shortened barrel for storage and maneuverability. ( I know the legal issues)
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