Sangamon
County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois
| |
Sangamon
County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights Springfield, Illinois |
|
 Semi-auto
Snipers - the M1C and M1D Garands
Phil Davis Speaking at the 4/7/08 SCRA Meeting May 2008 GunNews I made a trade which usually is the beginning of the inspiration for most of my monthly talks. Without looking at the scope, most of you know what I'm holding in my hands, an M1 rifle. I'm going to give you a really brief history of the M1 rifle also known as an M1 Garand. Then I'm going to tell you what makes this one different from the standard one and then I'm going to go over the various different variations of the M1 Garand that were assembled for a specific purpose starting in July of 1944. The Original Garands The M-1 Garand was developed in 1936. It was produced by Winchester, Springfield Armory, International Harvester, Harrington Richardson, Beretta of Italy and the National Defense Ministry of Indonesia. It is an 8-round .30 06 caliber rifle. It's official nomenclature, it's official name is US Rifle caliber .30 M1. Garand is the name given to the rifle by the designer, John C. Garand. George S. Patton said, "it's the best as far as I'm concerned." He called it the greatest battle implement ever devised. During World War II it would be hard to find an Army or Marine Corp veteran that did not know about the M1 Garand. In most cases, even though they may have cussed it for being heavy, it worked every time. It was accurate and it was reliable. There were two things about the M1 Garand that most soldiers did not like. Number one, if you are in a hurry and did not close the bolt properly, your thumb gets chambered with the first round. I got my first M1 thumb when I was twelve years old at the Abe Lincoln Gun Club on a Sunday morning at a DCM shoot. They also had another thing that had a 8-round en bloc clip. Yes, everybody talks about a high capacity clip. No those are magazines. A clip is a piece of metal the M1 Garand uses them. Eight shots enclosed in a clip that you push down here, it goes all the way in and when it goes in it clicks and then the bolt will close. After the 8th shot as the round is ejected the clip also clears the receiver with a very loud ka pling! I would imagine this would be a very disconcerting sound for you to hear when you were in a place like Bastone, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Korea or even the jungles of Vietnam as you'll find out that these rifles did spend some time in Southeast Asia as well. I have talked to several World War II and Korean vets who used that to their advantage. They would carry an empty clip around in their pocket. They'd get two or three guys down there with fully loaded rifles. One of them would fire two shots and another would take that clip and pling it off the helmet of the guy next to him. Ka pling! Up would come five or six Germans running straight at them. Bang, Bang, Bang, they would mow them down. It happened quite frequently because the Germans, the Japanese and the Koreans understood what ka pling meant too. Ka pling meant there's a guy in there that has to dig an 8-round clip out of his web gear and get it stuffed into his rifle. The M1 Garand is gas operated and very reliable. The other rifle that I've got at home, my dad got from the DCM back in the 80's. I know for a fact that I've somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand rounds fired through it and I have never had a malfunction. It has never jammed. I've shot it dirty and I've shot the nastiest ammo imaginable through it. I've shot corrosive World War II ammo and I've shot military surplus ammo from all over the world. I've even shot some of those .55 grain excellerators that you're not supposed to shoot out of M1's. It's very accurate, very reliable and very robust. There's not a part of this rifle that's not functional, it's comfortable to shoot and the recoil is not that great. It started out in 1936. If you get one that was made between 1936 and 1941 your gas tube on top is going to look a lot different. It's called a gas trap gas tube. Its going to come down and have a different shape up here in the front. I've only seen one of those in my life and if you find a gas trap M1 Garand buy it if it's less than $10,000. I've only seen one. I was sitting at the Left Handers Gun Show table at New Berlin about five years ago. I saw an old guy come walking in with a Garand over his shoulder and something didn't look right about the gas tube. I shook my head and looked at again and I started making a beeline for it. About that time another guy walked up to him and asked him how much he wanted for the old rifle. He said , "Oh, I figure it ought to be worth about 500 bucks." The guy peeled out five one-hundred dollar bills right there on the spot and handed them to him. I was as close as from here to the doorway and the look on my face was the same as a five-year old child who is watching someone stomp their pet puppy to death in front of him. Because I just realized that someone just bought a $10,000 rifle for 500 bucks right in front of me. That is called a gas trap M1. In 1940 they changed it to the system they've got now. This is the same rifle that they basically made five and one half million of between 1940 and 1956. The United States Army used the M1 Garand until 1957. At one time they developed and adopted the M14 which is a modified box magazine 7.62 caliber version of this rifle, modified gas system and a modified magazine. Everything from here back with the exception of the magazine is the same except the M14 had this really cool switch right here. There are a lot of them they locked into the semiauto position because an M14 on full automatic position is impressive to say the least. A Shortage of Sniper Rifles When the United States went into World War II their sniping rifle was the 1903 A4 sniper rifle which is a 1903 Springfield with a Weaver 330 scope on it or a Lyman Alaskan scope on it. The military designation of the scope was an M73. The two and a half power scope was standard and while the Marine Corp had a few eight power Unerti scope which was the most powerful scope of World War II, the average was two and a half. The standard reticle for a sniper during World War II was a standard tapered post with a cross hair. It was popular was it gave an excellent field of view especially on a moving target. You just put the post in the center of somebody's chest and pull the trigger. It's fast. The 1903 A4 Springfield rifle was the sniper rifle they went into World War II with and it stayed standard as one of the standard sniping rifles all the way through Korea. However in 1943 there was a shortage of them given the numbers of men who were qualified sharp shooters. Somebody came up with the idea of taking the standard US rifle caliber .30 M1 and mounting a telescopic sight on it. Now there's a problem. You have to mount it off to the side. There were two variations, both of them adopted in June of 1944. No M1C or D sniper rifles made the invasion of Europe no matter what your video game says. There were two them. The first was called the M1E7, experiment model seven. It would have had three holes drilled here and it would have had a Griffin and Howe sporting scope mount, a single lever sporting scope mount on the side. It might have either a Weaver or a Lyman Alaskan scope on the side. It was developed at the Winchester factory with using Griffin and Howe mounts which Winchester was very familiar with because that's what they put on a lot of their Model 70 sporting rifles. Springfield Armory came up with a new idea, a way that this could be done and conversions could actually be done to M1 rifles in the field. They would take a separate barrel completely and have it set, they'd turn down the breech area of the barrel and the sleeve would fit on there. Then all the armorer would have to do would be find a good quality rifle and all the parts were inspect, unscrew the barrel, screw in and head space the new barrel and then mount the scope on the side by way of one large hand screw. Then you've got a sniper rifle because it has a different hand guard, but everything else is the same. The scope also was a different type. This was the US model M84 sniper scope. It is a 2.2 power tapered cross hair scope, very clear optics even though it is 50 or 60 years after the fact. I would have no problems with going out after I have had a chance to zero this in really well and using this at ranges I would use any other sniping rifle at. The Parallax Problem The problem with the M1C's and D's sniping rifles are as I said the parallax problem. Your scope is set off to the side. The manual said to zero these rifles at 300 yards. That meant at anything less than 300 yards your bolt was going to hit just ever perceptibly to the right. Anything further than 300 yards was going to hit just to the left. If you get way out there at 1200 yards you're talking 8 or 10 inches it's going to be out to the left. But then again you're talking 8 or 10 inches, if you're holding on a man's chest, it's still going to put him down. This rifle has a flash hider, not to hide the flash from your enemy but to hide the flash from yourself. If you've ever shot a large caliber rifle at night or at dusk, a .30 06 is pretty at night but don't try to see anything after you've pulled the trigger. If you shoot an M16, an AR15, an M14 or an M1 Garand at night with both of your eyes open, you're going to see this great big white glowing ball on the middle of everything that you look at. What that does, you're still going to have the big fireball bloom out in front of you but this hides the most intensive, the white hot part of the flame from your night vision. So in low light conditions and no light conditions that will actually protect. There were two types of flash hiders issued with the M1 Garand sniping rifle, there was this type and then there was a prong type that kind of looks like the first M16 flash hider, it's got five prongs. The prong type looked really cool but in the jungles of Korea and Vietnam they weren't liked very much because all kinds all kinds of vegetation and cool stuff would get stuck between those prongs. It's really hard to maintain accuracy when you've got twigs over the axis of your bore. The M1 Garand C and D did see very limited action during the last year of World War II. They started hitting the field about March or April of 1945. They didn't see as much service in the Atlantic theatre as they did in the Pacific. In some of the islands of the Pacific there are good pictures of Marine snipers with M1C and M1D sniping rifles using them to great effect. Korean Heyday Where the M1 sniping rifle came into it's own was in the Korean conflict. There were several thousand of them on hand in Korea and they were put to good use. The Army were the only ones that were issuing these at first. The Marine Corp stuck with their 1903 A4's with an 8 power Unerti scope on it. In tropical combat conditions they were a nightmare to keep maintained and regulated and keep them on zero. The Marine Corp finally gave in in 1952 and said okay, we'll adopt the M1C model sniping rifle. They did not like the D because they did not like the single point of mounting. They said we want the D but we're going to put our own scope on it. So they called it the MC52 or Marine Corp model 52 sniping rifle with a Stith-Kollmorgan scope on it. Stith- Kollmorgan had never made a rifle scope before the Marine Corp. They had always made periscopes for the Navy and the periscopes inside of tanks but the Marine Corp mandated the Stith-Kollmorgan scope on their rifle. Both the Marine Corp and the Army used the M1C and the M1D in Korea. It stayed in service until 1966 in the Army and until 1967 in the Marine Corp when both of them were replaced by the M40 and M24 respectively. Both of these are based on the 700 Remington 308 caliber sniping rifle. Some of these M1C's and D's did stay in the US military inventory on duty with National Guard and reserve units until the 1970's. They are very accurate and very reliable. The M1Garand itself is still a first line weapon in some third world countries such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Phil Davis Index Return to SCRA Home Page |