American Rifle - Alexander Rose [157]
In 1916 Garand read of the army’s search for a machine gun and applied himself to the task of designing one. What he came up with relied on an overly complex mechanism—but it worked. An impressed officer at the National Bureau of Standards gave him a position as “master gauge and gun experimenter” in Washington, starting August 18, 1918, to perform further work on the gun, but the Armistice halted any future progress. Even without the cessation of hostilities, the novel, expensive machine gun would probably not have made it to production stage, but Garand’s thorough knowledge of advanced mechanical principles persuaded the Ordnance Department to bring him into the fold at a salary of $3,500 a year. After qualifying for civil service, Garand joined the semiautomatic rifle design unit at Springfield Armory on November 4, 1919, and became an American citizen the following year.42
He was blissfully happy at Springfield. During the winters Garand practiced ice-skating incessantly. Finding the ice at outdoor rinks insufficiently smooth for his fancy moves, he partitioned off a twelve-foot-square room in his (rented) house, opened the windows and chimney to create a draft, and flooded the floor with a hundred gallons of water. Voilà, lovely skating all winter, every winter—until his marriage in 1930 to Nellie Shepard, a salesgirl at a local department store, who promptly put an end to the bachelor’s high jinks. She introduced him to the rather less blood-pulsing delights of gardening and bridge.43
Garand tried to develop a semiautomatic based on the same primer-operated principle (i.e., the firing pin performed double duty as cartridge-igniter and breech-operator) as his machine gun. In 1920 and 1921 he produced two models; both were respectfully, if not enthusiastically, received.44 In 1922, after Garand simplified the mechanism, Ordnance asked him to make twenty-four specimens for field trials. It took the gun-maker four years—an indication that the mechanism was still too complex for easy production—to prepare all the samples, and it was only in June 1926 that all of them were issued to infantry and cavalry testers.45
Internal reports revealed that the “Garand” (as it was now called around the department) was noted for its smooth operation and could easily rapid-fire one hundred of the army’s standard .30-06 rounds.46 A Washington Post story on an early private demonstration of the Garand even speculated that it would “replace the Springfield” in coming years.47 If he hadn’t known it before, Pedersen was now certain he had a major rival in this Garand fellow.
For the moment, at least, he still held the upper hand, thanks to a wholly unexpected finding in the summer of 1928. The army, confronted by Pedersen’s insistence that the .276 was the equal, if not the better, of the .30 in causing incapacitation (either by death or wound trauma), commanded three Medical Corps officers and an Ordnance representative to run tests on eighteen unfortunate swine selected for a grisly experiment.
Using .30-06, .276, and small .256 rounds (used in some European armies), the testers discovered, much to everyone’s surprise, that at short range (defined as 300 yards) the .256 “gave by far the most severe wounds in all parts of the animal.” It was the .276 that “must be considered as occupying second place” in causing trauma, with the .30-06 trailing behind. At 600 yards, however, the performance gaps narrowed significantly, and all the bullets inflicted almost equal amounts of wounding. In brief, at ranges of 300 to 400 yards, any bullet could be considered an excellent killer, though the smaller calibers tended to leave gorier wounds.48 For Pedersen, the “Pig Board” results justified his caliber reduction and made the Garand’s retention of the .30-06 look like overkill.
Cheering as the results may have been (except for the pigs), Pedersen was now confronted with a different kind of challenge, one related to his ammunition. The army had announced in 1925 that