I believe you mean that that the WWII M1 Garand is a .30-06
round. The M1A is a civilian version of the M-14 which fires a 7.62mm round ie .308. You are correct that the .30 cal round is a large caliber than the .223.
Best gun ever. My dad got a bunch of old Springfield Armory 30-06 bolt rifles back in the 60’s. I took two and had the heavy military stock removed, the sights removed, the bolt heated and bent, then ground down to clear a scope. New light cherry burled wood stock. Best deer rifle out in the open at 200 plus yards ever!. I use a 30-30 for woods and close shots.
“An M1A Gerrand actually fires a more powerful cartridge in a larger caliber than a “Modern Assault Rifle” does.” [Fai Mao, post 4]
“I believe you mean that that the WWII M1 Garand is a .30-06
round. The M1A is a civilian version of the M-14 which fires a 7.62mm round ie .308. You are correct that the .30 cal round is a large caliber than the .223.” [TaMoDee, post 10]
“US Rifle, Caliber 30, M1” is the official nomenclature of the first semiauto rifle officially adopted by any major power - in 1936. Designed and developed in the 1920s by John C Garand while he was employed at the National Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, it went through three major revisions (including two changes of caliber) before final approval was forthcoming.
All errors in spelling and nomenclature are forgiven ... ordnance-history enthusiasts don’t always agree on how John Garand’s surname should be pronounced. He was born in Quebec and immigrated to the United States at an early age, and was said to favor stressing the first syllable, as in “GAR-and,” from which Fai Mao’s phonetic rendering is easily extrapolated. Later in life, Garand’s son was overheard by family friends answering the phone thus: “Ga-RAND residence,” stressing the second syllable. Common usage among rifle owners and the shooting community in general follows the second pronunciation.
The M1A rifle, an adaptation of the US M14 rifle, was introduced in 1974 and is still made by Springfield Armory Inc, a commercial gunmaking firm in Geneseo, Illinois with no connection to the US National Armory (which was closed in 1968). 44 year later, many gun publications, hundreds of websites, and thousands of chatboard posters still get it wrong, referring to it as “M1A1” or similar mistaken designations.
John Garand not only struggled to incorporate the numerous changes and adaptations demanded by the US Army Ordnance establishment, and senior leaders of the War Dept combat arms branches. He also designed much of the industrial machinery used in producing the M1, and ultimately ironed out a number of production snarls, many of which were caused by undocumented changes in configuration of parts, undertaken by ill-informed junior engineers and technicians.
The M1 served as the primary issue rifle of US forces from 1936 until 1957, when the M14 was officially adopted. The M1 remained in military service, arming front-line units as late as 1961 because of M14 production problems. It kept serving in Army National Guard outfits and some military schools into the 1970s. When I entered the US Air Force Academy in 1971, I was issued an M1 in the 1.92 million serial number range.
Civilians may still purchase M1 Garand rifles from the government, through the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Hundreds of thousands were exported to allies. Negotiations are under way to return them to the country to be sold to the public. M14s were never released for sale to civilians, as they are select-fire and thus legally machine guns.
The M14 (and its semi-only clone, the M1A) fired the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, the first NATO-standardized item of ordnance, a round very close in dimensions to the commercial 308 Winchester.
7.62mm NATO was derived from the US 30-06 military cartridge; its case was 1/2 inch shorter and it was optimized in other ways to work better in automatic arms (including a thicker rim and a wider extractor groove). Ballistic performance at the muzzle was almost identical to military 30-06, but the NATO round offered greater effective range because it was loaded with a boat-tail bullet, a more streamlined aerodynamic shape compared to the flat-base bullet loaded in the final issue version of 30-06 (official nomenclature 30M2).
The select-fire M14 was in no sense an “assault rifle,” which was officially defined as a select-fire shoulder arm chambering a cartridge of lower power and range than the standard rifle cartridge of the day.
US Army Ordnance designers tinkered for 12 years following World War Two, but were unable to come up with anything more advanced that the M14, which is an elegant-handling, highly accurate arm, but is nothing more than a slightly-improved M1, with a fire selector switch, scope-mount fixtures, a flash suppressor, and a detachable box magazine.
The Armory had wrought an industrial miracle in its WWII production of John Garand’s rifle; per-unit cost fell to about $26.00 per rifle, at a time when Savage produced the M1 Thompson Submachine Gun for $47.00 each (both are in then-year dollars). Eventually, total production was almost 5.5 million units.
The M1 Garand was a success story the Armory naturally ached to repeat, and the M14 was sold in part on the claims by Armory staff that WWII machinery used on the M1 could turn out M14s for lower total cost than that for an entirely new design.
Armory claims proved impossible to fulfill: only a tiny number of parts interchange with the M1. M14 production was bedeviled by numerous delays and quality-control problems; production was halted early, at some 1,380,000 units, which included production runs by commercial firms Winchester, H&R, and TRW. The last company had no gunmaking experience at all but experienced fewer problems than the Armory.
The 5.56mm NATO cartridge weighs just half of what a 7.62mm NATO cartridge weighs.
SAFETY NOTE: 7.62 NATO and 308 Winchester are widely believed to interchange, but they will not, especially when attempting to fire 308s in a rifle marked “7.62mm NATO.” Max and min tolerances are different, and it’s possible to get an out-of-battery discharge, especially in semi-auto rifles where the closing movement is more abrupt. Much commercial 308 ammunition is loaded to higher velocities and pressures than 7.62mm NATO.
Users are strongly advised not to shoot either cartridge in a rifle chambered for the other. Please shoot safely.