27 Feb 2024 Garand Picture of the Day

[Mark in Rochester]

A USMC instructor shows an ARVN soldier how to operate the M1D rifle at the Dai La Pass range in November 1969.

[Bob Seijas]

John Garand's M1E8 design was WAY better than the M1E7 with G&H custom fit mount, but the E7 was chosen and adopted as the M1C. Seven years later in 1951 Ordnance abandoned it and gave SA an emergency order for 15,000 M1D's. It's pretty clear to me that G&H needed the war work and got it through political influence. I said so in a GCA Journal article titled "M1C -- Was the Fix In?" in the Spring 2013 issue. Garand's M1D lasted almost 40 years.

[Bob Seijas]

An interesting piece of trivia is that SA had prepared a bunch of accurized rifles for the 1948 National Matches in which the High Power matches were scheduled to resume after the interruption for WWII. The delay in changing the course of fire to blend the 8-shot autoloading M1 with the 5-shot bolt-action M1903 postponed the match, so SA put the "match" guns in storage. When they got the emergency order for M1Ds for Korea, they pulled them out of storage and used them to make the first M1Ds. They would probably be in the high 3 million serial range, but that's strictly a guess.

[ssgross]

I said so in a GCA Journal article titled "M1C -- Was the Fix In?" in the Spring 2013 issue.

That was a good article, Bob. If I remember your article correctly (or maybe I'm remembering a different article, perhaps you can confirm) there was also production shenanigans due to these politics. In order to keep the work exclusive, G&H insisted that receivers be sent to them for the mounts to be put on and whoever was in their corner pulling the contract strings obliged, causing huge delays.

[Bob Seijas]

Collectors always wondered about that... you mean Springfield couldn't drill 5 holes in a receiver to mount a bracket? Instead they had to send them to New York so G&H could do it and then send them back three months later? The rationale Ordnance used to justify picking the E7 was that the sniper was needed immediately, and the G&H version was a proven hunting rifle design. That was swept under the rug when SA questioned the decision, as was Garand's redesign of the G&H mount to make it sturdier and easier to manufacture. "What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."