American Rifle - Alexander Rose [166]
With the Johnson now a no-go for the regular army, just one holdout against the Garand remained: the U.S. Marine Corps, which insisted on keeping its Springfields. The Marines were adamant that the factor distinguishing them from the post-1914 army was their magnificent marksmanship training, and they felt that the Garand detracted from their skills.
To decide the matter once and for all, the Marines organized their own weapons competition in November 1940. The Garand—the Establishment weapon, the one backed by Ordnance, the general staff, the Washington political class, and the army—would be run directly against the Springfield, the Old School rifleman’s rifle, in the most tightly administered and stringently measured test of all.
The Marines were most interested in, first, accuracy, and second, ruggedness and dependability in battle conditions. Though there was a war conveniently going on, America had not yet entered it, and so the Marines were obliged to hold the trials at their base in San Diego using forty enlisted men, all marksmen. Beginning on November 18, the guns were tested to their limits in no fewer than thirty-seven shooting and abuse tests (timed shots, various ranges up to a thousand yards, firing under adverse conditions, differently sized targets, firing under fair-to-ideal conditions, prone shots, standing shots, and sitting-from-standing shots, among others).
In terms of accuracy, it turned out, the Garand was (in the words of the testing board) “comparable to the M1903” and far outclassed the Springfield in the number of shots per minute it fired. When it came to ruggedness, however, the Springfield triumphed: it survived a fourteen-hour-long test in which, to simulate a long march through rainstorms, the rifles were subjected to freshwater sprinklers for two hours off and on (the Garand suffered a 20 percent malfunction rate); it survived submersion in a mud bath (the M1 failed to work); and most impressively, it survived a test assuming that Marines (as these soldiers of the sea do) “have landed through heavy surf sufficient to break completely over men and equipment, and immediately engage in combat on a sandy beach.” Repeatedly sprayed with salt water and dragged through sand, the Springfields could be operated with difficulty, while the Garands could not be fired.
Against Ordnance’s expectations, the new rifle had not vanquished the old. The Marine Corps board concluded that while the Garand was an excellent semiautomatic, it was, at the end of the day, a semiautomatic. The forty-year-old Springfield remained the gold standard for tough dependability. Even so, soldiers using it were noticeably fatigued, thereby exacerbating the Model 1903’s relative slowness of fire relative to that of the Garand, a firearm that could keep up a colossal volume of fire for sustained periods of time because the gun was doing the work. As always, the question came down to whether you wanted to kill the enemy with one shot or many. The Springfield remained “the darling of those who believe with Colonel William Prescott of Bunker Hill (‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes’) in deliberate, sharpshooting marksmanship,” summarized Time. “The Garand is three to three-and-a-half times faster, [and] is therefore the logical choice of those who put high fire power above