American Rifle - Alexander Rose [171]
Between October 1944 and the spring of 1945, Garand obsessively beavered away on the successor to his own M1. When he finally emerged from his cavernous workshop, he bore a miracle gun, made all the more so by its hasty genesis. Fitted with all its accoutrements, it weighed more than thirteen pounds, but stripped down to its absolute basics, it was just a few ounces heavier than a standard M1. It could be produced on existing tooling, and it had an innovative muzzle brake attached to reduce the fearsome recoil of its impressive, if theoretical, seven-hundred-rounds-per minute capability. In August 1945, just before two atomic bombs forcibly induced Japan to surrender, 100,000 of them were ordered.3
In that halcyon period following VJ-Day, the last thing the world needed, now that it was finally at peace and had not yet been sundered into its Western and Eastern halves, was a new Garand of any kind. Just as Pedersen had had the bad luck to invent his device in the waning days of the First World War, so now did his former rival experience the pain of having his creation canceled—after only a hundred T20s had been made. Indeed, in a replay of the years immediately following the 1918 Armistice, Ordnance was among the first departments to have its budget slashed. By the fall of 1945 the number of employees in Springfield’s manufacturing department had fallen from 3,100 to 900, with more cuts threatened.4
One of the lucky survivors was Colonel René Studler, chief of the Small Arms Development Branch. After graduating from Ohio State University and marrying Mildred, his college sweetheart, Studler had joined the army in 1917 as an enlisted man, and after six months he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the new aviation section of the Signal Corps. There he became a pilot, one of the few in this newest of military arms, and after five years he transferred to Ordnance. As one of its young stars, he was sent to MIT, where in 1923 he obtained a degree in mechanical engineering. He later helped supervise the Pig Board trials that compared the effect of various calibers on helpless swine. In the early 1930s, as one of the few Ordnance men who was conversant in several languages, he was dispatched to Europe in a kind of Major Alfred Mordecai role, his instructions being to file technical reports on the state of Europe’s armaments. An assiduous, wiry fellow blessed with a snappy mustache and sufficient independent wealth to not have to worry about whether the bean counters would pay his travel expenses, Studler astounded his superiors by dutifully submitting no fewer than three hundred reports between July 1934 and February 1939. Owing to their tediousness, few, if any, of them were actually read, but on his return Studler (like Mordecai) could justly be regarded as knowing more about infantry small arms than any other American.5
Socially ambitious (he was a keen equestrian and tennis player) and described as being “impatient with delays and irritated by incompetence,” Studler hoped to cap his career as a general and chief of Ordnance.6 He therefore desperately craved a small-arms success. He had originally placed his hopes in the Garand T20, but talk of a new common NATO rifle revived his spirits. If the North Atlantic Treaty signatories adopted an American-made weapon, Studler would instantly outshine his predecessors: the Ordnance Department