GCA Article On M1 Clip

[browningautorifle]

Vets Lie or missrember.

Very much so and not so much dishonestly. I had a situation decades back that I recalled clearly about being in a spot and a man I knew well was in the vehicle with me...a few years ago I mentioned it and he told me he was in the other vehicle...all those years I had it wrong.

Why do we go through this whole thing about the M1 ping over and over...?

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[Mark in Rochester]

Why do we go through this whole thing about the M1 ping over and over...?

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.

The simple explanation is that both cases are true in a full scale push it is very unlikely to hear the ping yet if a soldier is isolated it can be an issue.

The problem come in when it is absolutely held that it is an either or proposition both are true



http://thegca.org/wp-content/uploads...52-reduced.pdf

Page 5 #10. The noise caused by ejection of the empty clip from the M-1, despite the fact that at close range it could be heard by the enemy, was considered valuable by the rifleman as a signal to reload


The Ml's Tactical Advantage?

The "Question & Answer" on "The Ml 's 'Deadly Defect?'" (November 2011, p. 42) reminded me of a conversation I had with my dad regarding the Ml Garand and its clip during WorldWar II. I just got off the phone with my dad to confirm his Garand clip experiences. His name is Robert Emary, and he served in I Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, l0lst Airborne Division. When the war ended, he was a technical sergeant and first sergeant for the company. He was a replacement and fought from Market Garden to Berchtesgarten.

According to him, at Bastogne it was very common practice to bait the Germans by squeezing and releasing an empty clip to get the "ping," and a lot of times an enemy would stand up, and that was the end of them. Initially, the Germans always seemed to know the exact time to expose themselves to put accurate fire on someone who had just emptied their Garand. He and his comrades knew the Germans could hear the clips coming out and also figured they were counting rounds. This happened pretty regularly at Bastogne, he said, because there were a lot of close-range engagements in the woods and dug in positions. Also, he always carried a couple empty clips in his field jacket pocket and would simply squeeze the clip, let it slide out of his fingers, hit the ground and be ready to shoot. After they started doing this, the Germans got a lot more cautious.

He also told me some of the other tactics they used. When they were badly outnumbered, which was almost all the time, the Browning Automatic Rifleman would initially never fire other than a couple semi-automatic rounds. They were baiting the Germans and trying to get a number of them to get bold and expose themselves. When this happened the BAR man would let them have it. He said this was very effective and several times got them out of some bad situations. ~

DAVE EMARY, NEBRASKA

[Bob Womack]

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.

Occam's razor: "entities should not be multiplied without necessity" I've often wondered how soldiers who certainly had "temporary threshold shift" (temporary reduction of hearing due to overload) and very possibly "shooter's notch" (permanent loss of hearing in a notch in the midrange due to exposure to firearms noise without hearing protection) could detect the ping of a clip ejection in anything other than utter silence and the clip being ejected onto a hard surface.

Bob

[ROCK]

http://thegca.org/wp-content/uploads...52-reduced.pdf

Page 5 #10. The noise caused by ejection of the empty clip from the M-1, despite the fact that at close range it could be heard by the enemy, was considered valuable by the rifleman as a signal to reload

That's a very interesting report. I did a quick scan and on pg. 77 there was a mention of difficulty loading clips. Also, three officers stated their preference of magazines over clips. I wonder if there was any desire for the M1 to use 20 round BAR magazines? I haven't seen anything critical of the 8 round capacity of the clips. GI's were familiar with BAR magazines and I wonder if they would have preferred the bulkier 20 round magazine vs.the lighter and more compact 8 round clip.

I know that a couple of experimental rifles were produced that used different types of magazines that eliminated the clips. One of them used a Johnson type rotary magazine. Another was a side loader. Both were loaded with two 5 round stripper clips. There did not seem to be any desire to increase capacity beyond 10 rounds though. However, the Army did adopt the 20 round magazine for the full auto T20 rifles due to their high rate of fire.