American Rifle - Alexander Rose [158]
Garand, who had been lagging behind Pedersen in the popularity stakes, now made a radical decision to junk his primer-operated prototype, the one he had been working on for nigh on a decade. A solitary overachiever—how else to explain the strictly private ice rink, the single-minded motorcycle racing?—he would start all over again, this time designing his weapon to accommodate the M1 and the .30-06, thereby nailing his colors to the .30 forever and challenging the army to decide between himself and Pedersen, champion of the .276.
Garand’s decision to throw away his primer mechanism was not strictly voluntary but was instead forced upon him by the fact that the M1 ammunition would work poorly in his existing model. This was because the 150-grain .30-06 was packed with a type of smokeless powder known as Pyro D.G., a quick-burning propellant. As soon as the powder was ignited, the pressure inside the chamber rose to a peak and dissipated rapidly as the bullet zoomed down the barrel. The propellant inside the 172-grain M1, however, was of a more modern type called IMR (Improved Military Rifle) that was a progressive burner; that is, it burned slowly at first and gradually built up pressure as the bullet raced toward the muzzle, thereby avoiding the peak-and-valley profile of the Pyro D.G. The Garand’s primer-actuated mechanism relied on an initial burst of energy to work, and so IMR left his semiautomatic system gasping for power.
After careful thought Garand settled on making a gas-operated rifle. This type of semiautomatic system used a tube connected to the muzzle to harness the high-pressure gas created by the explosion and recycle it backward to operate the firing mechanism.50
But was he too late? On September 21, 1928, impressed by the Pig Board results, the recently convened Army, Navy, and Marine Corps Semiautomatic Rifle Board stunned everyone by approving the adoption of the .276 “as the standard caliber for the semiautomatic shoulder rifle to replace the present shoulder rifle caliber .30.”51 Five months later Ordnance canceled all future development on the Garand gas-operated .30.52 Fortunately, by that time Garand had a good handle on the workings of the new system and was able, thanks to copious amounts of burned midnight oil, to churn out a .276 version with a ten-round clip.
Suddenly the Pedersen—whose benighted inventor had been convinced he was a shoo-in this time—was again confronted by the infernal Garand. At this point Pedersen made a fatal error. Over in Britain, Vickers, the huge armaments concern, had been keeping abreast of the army trials and was convinced that Washington was poised to choose the Pedersen as the national rifle. Expecting that when it happened there would be a rush of foreign orders, Vickers wanted to be the firm ready to fulfill them. Knowing that Pedersen, unlike Garand, held the patent rights to his arm, the company invited him to oversee the retooling of its factories in preparation for that happy event. Accordingly, in 1930—at the exact moment when he should have been working flat out to beat Garand—Pedersen sailed across the Atlantic and stayed there, out of sight and out of mind, until the summer of 1931.53
During Pedersen’s absence his rifle went head-to-head against the Garand .276. An infantry board’s firing test in the early spring of 1931 found that the Garand was superior in rate of fire, in hits per minute, and in hits per pound of ammunition. It also gathered praises for its simplicity of operation and construction (just sixty parts now, compared to the Pedersen’s ninety-nine). “A man who has never seen the rifle can be taught its stripping and assembling within a few minutes,” said the impressed testers. “The Garand is the best semiautomatic rifle” presently