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By Root 2183 0

all these considerations in mind, the speed with which the armory set up the M1 production line was remarkable, truly testament to the long shadows cast by John Hall over the American economic system. In September 1937—just eighteen months after the rifle had been authorized for use in January 1936—the first interchangeable Garands began rolling off the line at the rate of ten per day. Efficient mass-production methods rely on growing economies of scale, increasing automation, and steadily improving worker skill, so this figure gradually rose to twenty per day on March 1, 1938; to eighty per day on July 1, 1939; to one hundred per day on September 1, 1939 (the date Germany invaded Poland); to two hundred per day on January 22, 1940; to four hundred by July; to six hundred the following January; and to one thousand by June 1941 (when the United States was still at peace). By September 1943 production was averaging four thousand per day. By VJ-Day in the summer of 1945, Springfield and its associated arms-makers (such as Winchester, Remington, and Savage) had churned out 4,028,395 Garands.75 To put those extraordinary numbers more graphically, whereas before the war it had taken four minutes and eight operations to make one particular small part for the Garand’s rear sight, by the late spring of 1941 a single machine tool specially designed for the task cranked out six every twenty-seven seconds.76

Initially, the Garand M1 received a rough reception from civilian experts who were suspicious of rifles that appeared to soft-pedal the skill of marksmanship. Owing to the War Department’s overly protective, or self-defensive, attitude toward its latest acquisition, the NRA was convinced that it was covering up something dubious about the Garand. In the late 1930s sample rifles were made deliberately difficult to get ahold of, and there was a persistent rumor—an accurate one—that early M1s suffered from a loose gas-cylinder assembly that rattled the front sight and threw off the shooter’s aim.77

Admittedly, the government was concerned with secrecy at the time, but keeping the NRA—whose members were hardly likely to be enemy saboteurs—in the dark was neurotic. As a result, when the minor gas-cylinder problem was fixed, no one informed the NRA, let alone, bewilderingly, Major General Milton A. Reckord, member of the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, chief of the Maryland National Guard, and an extremely active executive vice president of the NRA. Owing solely to the army information blackout, Reckord continued to labor under the misapprehension that American soldiers were being issued a shoddy, unmarksmanlike arm—and he wasn’t reluctant to call his friends in the press and on Capitol Hill to tell them about it.

In the winter of 1940 the storm broke. On February 22 Walter McCallum published the first part of a three-article series in Washington’s Evening Star questioning the Garand’s abilities and quoting Reckford extensively.78 The outcry was such that the following month the House Military Appropriations Subcommittee convened to examine the evidence. In response to the charge that in 1939 the army had “discovered a defect so serious that a new barrel had to be designed,” the Ordnance chief, Major General Charles Wesson (described in the papers as “cagey” but “capable”), said that the Garand was “the best semiautomatic rifle ever considered by the Army.” A barrel defect there had been; serious it wasn’t. Even so, Reckord testified to the subcommittee that “the War Department has made a very grave mistake,” and he was backed up by Representative D. Lane Powers of New Jersey, who said that “we do not want to appropriate for . . . additional rifles if what we hear and what we read and what we are told by some well-informed people is true.”

In May Reckord revealed what was up his sleeve in The American Rifleman, the NRA’s house publication. Mr. F. C. Ness, an expert shot and frequent contributor to the magazine, had, through charm or guile or both, been able to borrow one of the jealously guarded Garands for three