American Rifle - Alexander Rose [162]
With eighteen machinists detailed to help him, Garand completed the eighty as soon as May 1934. Marksmen, veterans, and recruits alike tested the weapons under the hardest possible conditions short of actual war. In October 1935, just as MacArthur stepped down as chief of staff to become the senior military adviser to the Philippine government, the trials were completed, and both infantry and cavalry unanimously approved adoption of MacArthur’s rifle. On January 9, 1936, the “Garand M1” became the standard service arm of the American army.70 For the first time in living memory, the United States was actually ahead of its traditional competitors in rifle development: Britain, France, and Germany all went to war in 1939 with the same rifles they had used in 1914.
The Garand couldn’t have happened along at a better time. By 1936 the gathering storm in Europe was turning nasty, the Spanish Civil War had begun, the Disarmament Conference had finally dissolved after accomplishing nothing, Japan was becoming overtly aggressive in the Pacific, and Hitler’s Germany had revealed the existence of a secret air force and announced that it was expanding the Wehrmacht to thirty-six divisions. Though Western governments continued to talk the language of peace, they were quietly beginning to rearm: across the Atlantic, Neville Chamberlain was lobbying his Cabinet colleagues to construct a massive bomber deterrent, while Roosevelt belatedly approved enlarging the army from 118,750 to 165,000 troops.
Within two years the M1 rifle project, begun as part of an economic stimulus program, dovetailed into the campaign to strengthen national security by rearming America’s antiquated army. On January 28, 1938, Roosevelt told Congress that “our national defense is inadequate for purposes of national security and requires increase.”71 Exactly one week (February 4) after that declaration, following the example of the earlier Roosevelt, the president wrote a letter to be read out at the NRA’s annual banquet:
You are doing what I believe to be a meritorious work, contributing your efforts to carrying on the successful promotion, among citizens of this Nation, of rifle marksmanship—an accomplishment in which our forefathers so effectively excelled . . . Both national and international rifle competitions, which you encourage, have served to inject the idea of sports into rifle shooting . . . while encouraging a free spirit of rivalry [and which] also makes an essential contribution to the national defense.
Whereas in 1932, as the waves of pacifist sentiment rolled in, Roosevelt had felt that controlling handgun ownership in general would “tend to decrease crimes of violence in our State,” by 1938 he believed that the NRA formed an existing corps of marksmen who could be used to train the new citizen armies that he was convinced would be needed. Over the course of the coming war, in fact, NRA instructors would train more than 1.75 million American soldiers.72
Setting up the manufacturing facilities and producing sufficient quantities of the M1 rifle were necessarily lengthy processes, even for as simple an arm as the Garand, which had been designed for easy mass production. One of the Pedersen’s drawbacks had been its inventor’s propensity to conceive, customize, and hand-engineer each and every piece, along with its associated machinery and tools. Garand, conversely, was more concerned with stripping each piece down to its very essence; he preferred to sketch out his concepts on rough blueprints and rely, if possible, on already available machinery.
a) A rifling shop at Springfield.
b) A drill press installed in 1861 and still in use in 1935.
Even so, making interchangeable rifles—as old John Hall had discovered a century before—was a colossal undertaking. Exacerbating the problem was the fact that except for two small programs to make machine guns and pistols during the war, the armories had not retooled since about 1900, when Springfield had set up shop for the Model 1903. Even then some buildings and