Bonus Garand Picture of the Day

[Mark in Rochester]

Information

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[RCS]

I know two collectors that have M1 rifles with these infrared scopes. I have handled one of them about ten years ago. The mount fits the M1C hole pattern and both
rifles were built up. these rifles are very awkward to carry. Suppose to be issued to Special Forces around 1961. The M14 also mounted the infrared scope too

[Bob Womack]

Weapons, a pictorial history book by Edwin Tunis, features a drawing of a sharpshooter with an M2 carbine sporting a very similar night scope lash-up on p.142. Hilariously, just now when I went to look it up, the book fell right open to the page. With a little research I found that it had been drawn from this pic:




That's a lot of junque to hang on a carbine!



Bob

[browningautorifle]

these rifles are very awkward to carry.

I'll bet. Then you'd need a stump to rest it on to shoot. Our FNs were a hog with a nightscope on and it was streamlined compared to that.

[fjruple]

https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...ct17ku6y-1.jpg

The scope is an AN/PAS-4 active Infrared Night scope. This was the last active infrared night scope used by the US military before switching to the passive "starlight" AN/PVS-1 scopes. I remember reading that the US military provided these scopes to the South Vietnamese military in lieu of the AN/PVS-1 which initially were classified hardware as Confidential and the US military did not them to fall into the VC hands. The US military would lose several in combat to the VC anyway but the Russians could not manufacture the imaging scope as they did not have the know how. The US military developed mounts for the M1919A4, Browning M1918A2, M1 rifles and M1 carbines. The US military earlier had these mounted on their M14 rifles. The Russians developed their SVD rifles and scopes to counter these active infrared systems. The scope mount is probably from the M14 and they used a Griffin and Howell M1C base to mount the AN/PAS-4 to the M1 rifle. Bases were still available in the 1960's from Griffin and Howell.

[Bob Seijas]

I knew a guy who was a sniper in Nam and used the IR setup until one night he was in a tree scanning the field and a bullet slammed into the light source, blowing him right out of the tree. The bad guy evidently had a Russian Dragunov with a scope that could detect IR. Had the enemy aimed lower, my friend would have been dead. He never used the IR again.

[browningautorifle]

They were great for casting a search light across an area but active IR was dangerous for passive search. Just like using a white light at night...I remember them well.

[BEAR]

For a short while we had the upper hand in night sight technology with the "Starlight" systems. The Soviets used IR that cast a beam of light across their viewing range, undetectable by human sight, but could be seen by our NVGs. However, our systems were virtually useless on very dark, overcast nights with no ambient light sources to enhance. Try using a An/PVS 1 in a sealed blacked out room, no Bueno! NVGs today use a combination of IR and Starlight.

BEAR

[browningautorifle]

he Soviets used IR that cast a beam of light across their viewing range, undetectable by human sight, but could be seen by our NVGs. However, our systems were virtually useless on very dark, overcast nights with no ambient light sources to enhance. Try using a An/PVS 1 in a sealed blacked out room

That's what I refer to as active and passive. I thought those were common terms...

[BEAR]

Sorry, didn't mean to step on your response.
You are correct, but just for clarification for those who are not familiar with those terms and strategies.

BEAR