American Rifle - Alexander Rose [165]
Infuriatingly for Ordnance, and embarrassingly for the army, Ness concluded by rating “the Johnson” as better than the Garand. The Johnson—the creation of a tall young Bostonian and former Marine, Captain Melvin Maynard Johnson, Jr.—was the rifle of choice for discerning NRA members: they had been kept abreast of its evolution by The American Rifleman, which had run at least four articles on the subject.80
Johnson, born into an affluent family in 1909, was, like so many of America’s firearms inventors, from an early age quite fascinated with these masterpieces of the mechanical sciences. A member of the Harvard class of 1931 (the same year he was commissioned in the Marine Corps Reserve), he was graduated from its law school in 1934. Though he practiced his trade until 1939, his childhood interest never died, and the Corps sent him to Quantico to attend its weapons schools. While serving as its observer at Springfield, he gained firsthand experience with the Pedersen and Garand rifles. In his off time, he tinkered with guns and founded Johnson Automatics, Inc.81
In 1935–36 he conceived a recoil-operated semiautomatic rifle based on a Mauser 98 action. The army tested it a few times, with fine results, in June and October 1938. Johnson had expressly designed his weapon for Creedmoor-style marksmanship and perfect handling: it would not even accommodate a standard bayonet for hand-to-hand combat and was handcrafted in every particular. Befitting its bespoke qualities, the Johnson consisted of 140 parts (compared to the M1’s then-71).82 As the Johnson was wholly unsuited to modern warfare, on February 23, 1940, Ordnance officially refused to consider it for adoption.
The NRA’s reaction was not a favorable one (its April American Rifleman editorial was titled “The Courage to Be Frank”), reinforcing its position with Ness’s critical review of the Garand in the subsequent issue. The army, which had hitherto been quite blasé about the matter (after all, Ordnance rejected dozens of prototypes each year; Johnson’s was no different), was forced to take action before, in the words of an annoyed Ordnance officer, the army was forced to fight a war “not with the gun the soldiers wanted, but rather with the ones that someone had persuaded the public that the Army ought to have.”83
The contender: Melvin Johnson’s semiautomatic .30 rifle.
To stifle the controversy, Ordnance believed that the Johnson had to be seen to fail. A competition was quickly arranged between the Garand and the Johnson for May 9, 1940, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Members of the press, army representatives, House politicians from both sides of the aisle, and the Military Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee attended, including its powerful chairman, Senator Elmer Thomas, and the man who would be the star of the day, sixty-one-year-old Senator Ernest Lundeen, a former captain in the army reserve.
The first set of targets was placed at six hundred yards, and in the first heat the Johnson narrowly outshot the Garand in accuracy 404 to 393; but in the second it faded as the Garand took 405 points to its 348. In the rapid-fire round there was no competition, for despite its semiautomatic action, the Johnson was hardly faster than the manual Springfield Model 1903 and could fire just fifteen shots per minute in experienced hands. The Garand did at least twenty-two and could rise as high as twenty-six under ideal conditions. Accordingly, Time reported that “the Garand seemed to stand up well under 150 rapid-fire rounds” and was “reasonably accurate.” Finally the Johnson was, as expected, slightly more accurate at six hundred yards.
Senator Lundeen tried his hand at both rifles and received a round of applause from the crowd for his dead-eye marksmanship; he found the Garand—surprisingly—more accurate. “Sedate in high-top shoes,” he fired sixteen successive bull’s-eyes with the M1 (at three hundred yards), following it up afterward with eleven using the Johnson. With this feat