American Rifle - Alexander Rose [170]
One issue remained particularly thorny: the lack of a common rifle caliber, and a common rifle to fire it. The Americans had assumed that the British and Canadians would choose the good old .30-caliber; they assumed wrong. While the Canadians tried to stay neutral, the British were determined to reduce the caliber to .280 and expected their American allies to do likewise. If Washington refused, London was willing to adopt its own rifle and caliber, thereby throwing into doubt the solidity of NATO solidarity. This spat over the longest fifth of an inch in history would almost tear apart the nascent Atlantic alliance and would ultimately lead to the M14 fiasco—the great blunderbuss bungle.
The trouble began in May 1944, when Springfield began investigating whether the semiautomatic M1 could be converted into a fully automatic weapon. With a semiautomatic the shooter must pull the trigger each time he fires, but an automatic weapon continues to fire so long as his finger is depressing the trigger. For automatics to work with any success, their magazines must be larger than the Garand’s relatively miserly eight-shot one. Designers accordingly began drawing up plans for twenty-and even thirty-round clips—and immediately ran into the usual problem afflicting rapid-firing arms: they require lighter, smaller bullets because the heat buildup with full-power cartridges becomes intolerable, and because the repeated recoil and “bucking” of the gun makes a nonsense of accuracy. One solution to the heat issue was to add thickened wooden handguards to the weapon, a fix that would helpfully add several more pounds to the rifle’s weight (in addition to the heavier clips). A heftier rifle dampened recoil and the rifle’s tendency to jump upward and rightward as the spent casings were spat out. Unfortunately, even the Garand, which had not been counted as a particularly feathery rifle back in 1936, was already proving too much of a hump during tough campaigns, soldiers were complaining. Carrying an automatic version, with all the surplus ammunition that that entailed, would make an uncomfortable situation worse.
The army accordingly began asking Ordnance to see if it could do anything to lighten the soldier’s load—to below nine pounds—while retaining the weapon’s powerful hitting power with the .30, even when firing on automatic. Most important, Springfield’s practical-minded production engineers (always on shaky terms with the armory’s theoretical researchers) insisted that at least 85 percent of any new weapon must be able to be made using existing M1 tooling.2
Given these demands, there was no possibility of reducing the Garand’s weight significantly. In the lead-up to the Normandy landings and a possible invasion of Japan, the Pentagon wanted to add all sorts of extras (bipod, flash hider, larger mags, telescopic sight, muzzle brake, and a grenade-launcher) so that the improved M1 could function as a one-stop shop for all its armaments needs. If all went well, the new, improved M1 could replace the Browning Automatic Rifle (powerful but not easily luggable at twenty pounds), the short-barreled carbines favored by paratroopers (light but underpowered), and the Thompson submachine gun (great volume of fire but very short-range, firing bullets as wildly as a Chicago gangster). In a perfect world, the new rifle would be as light as a carbine, as rapid-firing as a tommy gun, and as knockdown dangerous as the Browning. Ordnance, unfortunately, lived in an imperfect one.
John Garand, undaunted nonetheless, plowed ahead in his usual methodical way and produced a prototype in October 1944 dubbed the T20. Despite his best efforts, the weapon could not be all things to all men. For one thing, a