American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms (25 page)

In 1942, the British edition of
Yank
magazine printed the story of a U.S. Army Air Corps sergeant who seemed to be a pro with the submachine guns that had just been issued to his unit. He took a Tommy gun apart piece by piece, then quickly snapped it back together, and blasted away a target. When a major asked him where he learned the skill, the sergeant shrugged.

“Well, sir, you see,” he said, “I once hadda take these things apart in the back of a car going seventy miles an hour.”

He’d been a bootlegger before going to work for Uncle Sam.

Born out of the horror of WWI’s trenches and made infamous by Prohibition-era gangsters, John Thompson’s submachine gun had finally fullfilled its promise during WWII. The gun remained in the U.S. military inventory for years after the war. Some were still being used for special missions during the 1960s.

A friend of mine named Donnie Durbin runs the best gun store in Texas, in my opinion. Donnie is a Marine—I won’t call him a retired Marine, because once you’re a Marine, there is no such thing as retiring from the Corps.

Donnie did a stretch of fighting in Vietnam. While he was there, he happened across a Thompson submachine gun that had been dropped by a VC somewhere along the way. (VC means Viet Cong, aka the enemy, for y’all under thirty.)

He carried it around for a few days, and liked it. Even though from a different era, it still had plenty of power, wasn’t really that hard to control, and best of all, it was just cool. A gangster gun.

But after a week or so, he decided to give it to someone else. The thing got to be heavy carrying through the jungle. It wasn’t just the gun; the bullets and their drum magazine added several pounds to his kit. And if you don’t think a couple of pounds make a difference to a warrior, you’ve never thrown on a loaded ruck and humped it ten miles.

At the same time, gun technology had given Donnie and his brother Marines rifles that could fire nearly as fast on full auto and were about two pounds lighter when empty. While those rifles had not yet been perfected, they clearly owned the future.

You might make an argument that the Tommy gun redeemed its reputation with all the good work it did in World War II. There’s a lot of stock in that—it was the instrument of freedom for a lot of people. Of course, history is a complicated subject. The good sits right next to the bad pretty much all the time. The same fella who was a bootlegger and might’ve used a Tommy gun against the police turned out to be a soldier who used it against death camps and extermination.

The Tommy gun defined the submachine gun category. But that definition has gotten narrower over the years. Today’s true submachine guns, such as the MP5 family, are now mostly specialty weapons. In one direction, they’ve been replaced by squad-level machine guns that have the power of some of the heavy weapons of World War I and II. On the other side, they’ve seen lightweight carbines take up much of their territory.

Then again, as cool as it was, the Thompson was never the top gun in the American inventory, not even in World War II. Pride of place there belonged to a weapon that both continued old traditions, and broke new ground: the M1 Garand.

8

THE M1 GARAND

“In my opinion the M1 rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised.”

—General George S. Patton

In the early morning of August 18, 1942, Army Corporal Franklin “Zip” Koons was woken by a spray of water from the English Channel and the drone of airplanes in the distance. He jumped up.

One of the men with him put his hand out to steady him.

“Get ready, Yank,” said the man, a British commando. “The beach is ahead.”

Corporal Koons took a deep breath, then ran his hands over his rifle as he pulled himself to his feet in the boat. The weapon’s wood was sleek and almost oily with the spray of the sea. It was a new gun: an M1 semi-automatic that fired eight shots, before reloading. The commandos were jealous.

Or would be, if it successfully proved itself. No one had used one in combat before.

Koons checked to make sure it was loaded—probably the twentieth time since he’d set out—then fixed his eyes on the shadows ahead. Two British Spitfires buzzed to his left and began firing. They were aiming their guns at the beam of a nearby lighthouse, trying to distract the defenders’ attention as much as knock the light out.

It worked, in a way. Nazi anti-aircraft guns began to respond, shattering the peace of the tiny coastal village below Dieppe, France. The whole countryside was now awake, thank you very much.

I’m really in the war,
Corporal Koons told himself.
Damn.

Koons and forty-nine other American Army Rangers were about to become the first Americans to see combat in Europe. They’d been training with the British commandos for weeks, earning their respect bruise by bruise. But for all the live fire exercises, all the forced marches and the endless gun drills, none of the Rangers could say in his heart that he was completely ready for combat. That was something they’d have to experience firsthand to truly understand.

The shallow boat grounded hard against the rocks, and Koons jumped out behind his commando buddy, running like hell for the shadows under the cliffs ahead. His fate depended on three things—his resolve, the men he was with, and the untested rifle he held out of the water as he ran to shore.

He couldn’t have made a better choice when it came to men. The commandos were the rock stars of World War II, badass warfighters who could do everything from take over an enemy town to blow up a docked warship. The Rangers were no slouches either; every man on the mission had volunteered three times, and most of them were as ballsy as the toughest commando.

The rifle—that was something special as well. It was the “U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30, M1,” a ten-pound, eighty-five-dollar, gas-operated, air-cooled, clip-fed semi-automatic. It was new to the unit—Koons had only just wiped off the heavy protective grease it had been shipped in the other day. But it would soon prove to be one of the finest guns ever made.

The M1 Garand has been called “the gun that saved the world,” and that’s not an exaggeration. The rifle is without a doubt the most important in modern American history. To the Greatest Generation, and even their kids, the M1 defined the word “rifle.”

It was created by John Cantius Garand, a quiet, humble gun designer who worked for the U.S. government’s Springfield Armory, in Massachusetts.

Garand was a native Canadian who, like a lot of gun designers, was a little odd. It’s said he used to flood his basement during the winter so he could skate there after work.

Good thing he didn’t live in Texas.

After World War I, the Army realized that a semi-automatic or self-loading rifle would give whoever used it a great advantage. Of course, being the Army, they wanted the weapon to be all things to all people—it had to be light, had to be accurate, and it had to take more abuse than a mule in winter.

The smartest thing the Army did was hire a bunch of people, including Garand, and told them to have at it. Garand had been discovered, more or less, because of a design for a machine gun he’d invented. It was an interesting arrangement: When fired, the primer moved back and hit the firing pin, which came back and unlocked the bolt. A cam and a spring combination kicked out the shell and brought in a new cartridge. It was different than any other mechanism around, and even more complicated than it sounds. But it did work—just not well enough to beat out other designs.

Garand tried using the same mechanism in a semi-automatic rifle. That performed a little better. But he didn’t have a breakthrough until he let go of that idea entirely. Instead, he found a way to use the gas generated by the burning powder to do work in the rifle that, till now, had been done by hand or recoil.

U.S. warriors and their M1 Garands during the Pacific Island campaign.

National Archives

As the bullet in the M1 Garand moves out of the barrel, the gas behind it finds its way to a small port. The pressure of the gas drives a piston back. This moves the operating rod and powers the mechanism that opens the bolt, kicks out a round, and feeds a new one. Cams, lugs, tangs—the mechanical pieces work together like the insides of an old-fashioned watch, but are tough enough to take the pounding and abuse involved in launching something at the speed of sound, or thereabouts.

New developments in powder propellant were key to making it all work, since the gas had to be produced in a certain volume and pressure. (Slow and steady in this design was better than all-at-once quick.)

Garand was not the first person to think of the idea. Browning had been there before, and the principle was being used for machine guns. Garand got it to work in a semi-automatic rifle that could be mass-produced. His willingness to think about problems in a whole different direction put rifles on a new course.

While Garand was developing his designs, another genius, also a little peculiar, was working on his own project. John D. Pedersen’s semi-automatic rifle had a different, more complicated mechanism. It also used a .276 caliber round. There were a few advantages to using the smaller cartridge in an infantry rifle, including weight and wear on the gun. Not to get too technical here, but one of the interesting sidelights of the workup on bullets for the new rifle showed that smaller bullets could do more damage at certain distances than the .30-06. That’s a point to remember down the line.

Garand first produced his gun in .30 caliber. Then the Army brass heard the arguments in favor of the smaller rounds and decided the next infantry rifle should be chambered for .276. So he went back to the workbench and came up with a .276 version.

It was better than the .30. In fact, it was better than Pedersen’s, too. The Garand .276 was easier to manufacture, and less prone to breakdown, at least according to the tests.

That’s when Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur stepped in. General MacArthur insisted that the next infantry rifle, whatever it might be, should be chambered in .30-06.

He didn’t do it because of the bullet’s impressive accuracy, range, or superior stopping power. Rather, the Army had been kicked in the gut with budget cuts, and adopting a gun with the same bullet they’d been using for twenty years was a lot cheaper than the alternative. It was the middle of the Depression, and things were tough everywhere.

There’s a bright spot in every cloud.

It took a few more years to actually perfect the .30-06 version of Garand’s gun, but the M1 Garand was offically tapped as the Army’s rifle on January 9, 1936. Getting it into the hands of soldiers would take longer still—but it did get there. The rest, as we say, is history.

The M1 Garand was the world’s first semi-automatic rifle issued as standard weapon to any army. It boosted the combat power of the American fighting man over his enemies, who at that point were pretty much all armed with World War I–type bolt-action rifles. The Japanese, for example, mostly used the Arisaka Type 99. The Type 99 was modeled after the Mauser and held only five rounds.

To load the M1, a soldier locks the bolt by pulling the operator rod on the side back. He wants to give it a good tug, making sure it locks; if he’s gentle there’s a chance the mechanism will slide back forward later and try and grab his thumb. He then takes the eight-round clip and pushes it down with some authority into the receiver. The bullets click into place. He removes his thumb—loading is always supposed to be done with the thumb, according to the manual and the old instructors. The bolt slaps forward.