American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms (26 page)

Top: the M1 Garand and its eight-round en-bloc clip. Middle: John Garand (left) presents his weapon to the U.S. Army’s Chief of Ordnance (middle) and the commanding officer of the Springfield Armory (right). Bottom: M1s being loaded for the front; by 1944, almost 4,000 were being produced a day. 

Wikipedia
(top);
Library of Congress
(middle and bottom)

Done. The first round is chambered and the gun is ready to go. From that point, the soldier can fire as quickly as he can pull the trigger. When the bullets are gone, the clip is ejected with a loud ping. The rifle is singing for new rounds.

General George Patton called the M1 “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” Historian William Hallahan described the Garand as “one weapon that outgunned its counterparts in every other army in the field.” It was tough and dependable no matter where or how it was used. “In surf and sand, dragged through the mud and rain of tropical rain forests, sunbaked, caked with volcanic ash, covered with European snows that melted, then refroze inside the breech, beset by rust and mildew, mold and dirt, the Garand still came out shooting.”

But all this lay in the future back in 1942 near Dieppe, France.

As Zip Koons ran up the narrow path from the beach, he heard the muffled bang of a grenade exploding in a nearby house. Guided by some French spies, the commandos at the head of the team had run into a house where Germans were known to be sleeping. The Germans had tried to resist.

Most likely they wouldn’t have been taken prisoner anyway, not by the French.

Koons kept running. His team was assigned to destroy a German gun battery so the main assault to the north could proceed without interference. His job was to help secure the farm that bordered the woods near the artillery. There was a barn on the property, and the commandos were just getting to it when Koons ran up. Another American Ranger, Sergeant Alex Szima, was already there with his Thompson.

“Go to it, Yanks,” said the commandos.

Szima and Koons ducked in and started clearing the barn. It was empty, but in the dark they couldn’t take that for granted. Sweat poured off the corporal as he followed Szima across the floor and then up to the loft. The place was empty.

They found a wide hay door on the second story and opened it. There in the dim light across from them sat the battery, no more than a few hundred yards away. The first Nazis, woken by the gunfire, were just now running to their posts.

Szima said something Koons didn’t hear. He was too busy raising his rifle to his shoulder.

Across the way, the German reached his weapon and started getting it ready to fire. Koons pressed his trigger.

Bam!

The M1 jerked against his shoulder.

It felt good.

The man he’d aimed at was down. Another was running to take his place.

Bam.
Koons fired again.
Bam.

The M1 was as accurate as the Springfield at this distance. The recoil was easy to control. The sights, which he’d zeroed on the ranges back in Scotland, were steady and sturdy. But the real asset was the clip—eight bullets—and the fact that he didn’t have to move his hand to reload, unlike the bolt-action Springfield he’d come to Britain with. He just moved to the next target, or steadied his aim if he missed.

Bam.
Again and again. Reload.

Commandos were swarming into the battery area.

Bam.
Koons nailed a German who was raising a gun to shoot.

Bam,
another German fell.
Bam, bam, bam.
Until there were no more targets.

The commandos secured the artillery emplacement and began disabling the guns. They had no way of knowing, but their small part of the mission was one of the few things that went right for the Allies that day. The raid on Dieppe got a lot of people killed, Canadians mostly, and a handful of Americans as well.

But it was an important baptism of fire for the Rangers. In their first combat action they proved that Americans could fight as equal partners with the premiere warfighters of their generation. The lessons they learned there were soon used in Africa and Sicily, then back in France itself.

It also showed they had one hell of a gun in the M1, better in fact than any other on the battlefield. Koons and his friend Szima were accused of being sharpshooters, but they claimed they were no such thing. “I was a bartender, before the war,” laughed Szima.

They figured out later that Corporal Franklin “Zip” Koons probably killed twenty Germans that day. But he simply shrugged. Koons told everyone he’d just been doing his bit. He smiled when the British pinned a Military Medal on his chest, making him one of the few foreigners to ever get the honor. He survived the war, and went home to Iowa, where he raised a family, worked as a banker, and lived the American dream without much of a fuss, just like millions of other members of the Greatest Generation.

Even before it was used in combat, the M1 Garand was recognized by America’s British allies as a powerful and important weapon. Koons and his fellow Rangers had demonstrated the gun not only for the commandos, but for the Queen, who knew enough about guns to be impressed by the type of clip it used. But even with the Queen as an admirer, the M1 remained an American gun. There were a few exceptions, but mostly the Brits stuck with bolt-action versions of the Lee-Enfield as their standard infantry rifle. They were fine weapons, but they weren’t Garands.

The British commandos wanted the Rangers’ M1s for themselves, and tried to do some horse trading on the side. But the Rangers weren’t buying. They knew what they had.

It wasn’t only foreign soldiers who lusted for the semi-automatics. When they hit the beaches at Guadalcanal in August 1942, most of the U.S. Marines were still armed with weapons of the previous war, the superb but increasingly outdated M1903 Springfield bolt-action rifles. The Marine brass figured they were getting great results with the 1903 Springfield, and they just weren’t so sure about the M1 Garands.

That thinking changed right quick. What rifleman worth his salt doesn’t want his gun to hold as many bullets as possible in a firefight? And to reload fast? On Guadalcanal, it was not unusual for the Americans to face lightning banzai charges by Japanese troops. Reloading a Springfield under normal circumstances was not difficult, but a guy charging at you with a bayonet is not normal. You needed a bullet ready at all times.

Lieutenant Colonel John George remembered a time when a Marine struggled to reload after firing. With an enemy soldier charging in, two nearby army soldiers simply “pointed their Garands, still holding more than half-magazine capacity, at [the enemy’s] chest. Then they pumped the triggers until both clips were ringingly ejected from their receivers. They lowered their aim to keep the stream of metal pouring through him as he fell to his knees, then his haunches, then on his face, clutching his rifle tightly to the last.”

That only had to happen once for certain Marines to decide they had to have the new guns—by any means necessary.

“We had to keep ours tied down with wire,” remembered Colonel George. “Leathernecks were appropriating all they could lay hands on by ‘moonlight requisition.’ In daylight, they would come over to our areas to barter souvenirs with the freshly landed doughboy units; any crooked supply sergeant who had an extra M1 rifle could get all the loot he wanted. When the Marines began to get a few Garands up to the front the demand proportionately increased. They quickly learned that the M1 did not jam any more often than the Springfield, and that it was equally easy to maintain.”

There’s a story told about a Marine corporal of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion marching very tightly behind an Army sergeant leading an advance platoon during the campaign. The Army man asked the leatherneck what the deal was.

“You’ll probably get yours on the first burst, Mac,” answered the Marine, eying his companion’s M1 Garand. “Before you hit the ground I’ll throw this damn Springfield away and grab your rifle!”

If you were bound for combat, there was a lot to like about the M1 Garand. It had several more rounds than the Springfield. You could fire much faster than anything but a machine gun. It had less recoil than a bolt-action rifle. It had an excellent sighting system. You could drop it in salt water and sand with few ill effects. Fast-firing, fast-reloading, accurate, user-friendly, durable, and reliable—check, check, double-check. It was easy to disassemble, clean, and oil.

On the negative side, the “pinging” sound the weapon made when you fired your last round and the clip flew out let the enemy know you had to reload. If you didn’t push the operating rod back right or had something else miss its catch when you were loading, your thumb got slammed by the bolt, giving you the infamous “Garand thumb.” Otherwise, properly maintained and handled with reasonable sense, the weapon was effective and about as soldier-proof as it is possible to make a gun. Of course, once men had eight shots without having to reload, they wanted more. Can’t blame them for that.

“G.I. passes a roadside grave,” a battlefield sketch with M1 Garands. Guadalcanal, 1943.

Library of Congress

On Guadalcanal, in a slow, grinding struggle, the American soldiers and Marines expelled the Japanese in February 1943.

It was an important turning point in the war. The American victory, combined with the U.S. Navy’s earlier success at Coral Sea and Midway, shifted the momentum against the Japanese. They would never recover it.

“Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history,” said Japanese infantry commander Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi. “It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.”

In the European Theater, the M1 Garand offered U.S. infantrymen three more shots and less time between them than the standard German Karabiner K98 Mauser rifle. The Germans tried pretty hard to find a suitable semi-auto replacement for their bolt-guns, but couldn’t quite hit the sweet spot with anything. So the K98s remained the main thing in German hands when they came up against Americans.

That’s not to say that some of the German guns, including the Karabiner K98, weren’t impressive. As a matter of fact, most people credit the Nazi StG44 with being the first assault rifle ever. That gun seems to have influenced the famous AK47, though the AK is a very different beast. And our M60 machine gun owes a lot to the German MG42, a battlefield bulldog that pretty much defined the term “suppressive fire.” But as far as rifles went, the M1 was better than anything the Germans were fielding in serious numbers during the war.

The thing that seems to have impressed American soldiers the most wasn’t the M1’s accuracy or even the number of rounds it could fire. John Garand’s baby was just as tough as they were, and cared about as much as they did for creature comforts. Which is a good thing, because they don’t call war “being in the shit” for nothing.

“The most amazing thing about that M1 is you could throw that thing down in a mud hole, drag it through it, pick it up and it would fire,” said Darrell “Shifty” Powers. He was one of the famous “Band of Brothers” of E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division “It wouldn’t jam; it would fire. What we did mostly was keep the outside of it as clean as we could with a rag or something. And we’d clean the bore out as often as we could. Any time we were off the line we’d clean the rifles well. In combat, when you were right on the line you don’t take time out to clean the rifle. You just kept the mud and dirt wiped off the outside of it the best you can. They were outstanding weapons, that rifle worked all the time.”