Why did Germans hate the American M1 Garand or Grand if you want to start a fight in the comments? The man who designed the rifle pronounced it Garand, so that’s what we’re going with.

Now, however you say it, this rifle was something special when it appeared in World War II and for many reasons which we’re about to get into.

So, let’s start from the very beginning.

When the First World War ended, the United States Army saw that infantry firepower wasn’t keeping up with the battlefield.

Machine guns and artillery had dominated, and the standard American rifleman, armed with his boltaction Springfield M1903, could only fire as fast as he could work the bolt by hand.

This was pretty much the same for all other armies around the world.

The army wanted something better, a rifle that could give individual soldiers higher sustained fire without needing the weight, the complexity, or the crew that came with a light machine gun.

So, in 1919, the search for a semi-automatic service rifle [music] officially began.

Now, semi-automatic rifles weren’t some far-off dream at this point.

Commercial gun makers like Remington and Winchester had been producing semi-automatic hunting rifles since 1905, and the Chief of Ordinance explicitly stated [music] they were willing to test a semi-automatic as soon as someone submitted one.

So, why did it take over three more decades for the military to actually [music] adopt one? Well, the answer comes down to the 306 cartridge.

You see, the Army was deeply committed to this round, and for good reason.

It had been tested out to 1,800 yd and was considered effective at ranges far beyond that.

But all that power came at a cost.

The 306 generated enormous chamber pressure, required a heavy powder charge, and that made the cartridge case fairly long.

A self-loading action has to contain all that pressure while also handling a heavy bolt cycling back and forth at high velocity.

The commercial semi-autos of the time simply couldn’t manage it.

Something like the Remington Model 8 chambered in 35 Remington was designed for medium-sized game inside 200 yards.

As far as the military was concerned, that was nowhere near powerful enough.

Building a semi-automatic action strong enough to handle a full power military cartridge reliably meant making a rifle that was simply too big and too heavy for general issue.

Early trials through the 1910s and early 1920s brought in various contenders, including foreign designs like the Danish bang rifle and several domestic experiments.

None of them could balance robustness, weight, and reliability with the brutal demands of the 30 6.

Then John Canantius Garand arrived at Springfield Armory in 1919 and immediately began working on the problem.

His real breakthrough came when he turned to a gas operated system.

This design tapped off a small portion of the propellant gases from the fired cartridge into a cylinder mounted beneath the barrel.

Those gases drove a piston and operating rod that cycled the bolt, ejecting the spent case and chambering a fresh round.

It was a system that used the rifle’s own energy to do the work, distributing the forces in a way that didn’t overstress the parts.

This solved the fundamental problem that had stumped everyone else.

By the mid 1920s into the early30s, the Army ran repeated competitive trials, and [music] Garand’s gas operated designs consistently stood out.

But here’s where things get interesting.

During this period, the Army seriously considered abandoning the 36 altogether.

They were testing a lighter cartridge called the 276 Pedison, which would make semi-automatic operation easier to engineer and let soldiers carry more ammunition.

This caliber performed well in trials and in 1930 the 276 Garand actually won formal recommendations for adoption but it never happened.

The high command stepped in and rejected the new caliber on logistical and economic grounds.

The United States still had massive stockpiles of 306 [music] ammunition left over from the first world war.

And in the middle of the great depression, nobody wanted to build an entirely new supply chain from scratch.

So Garand was forced to go back and adapt his design to the heavier, higher pressure 306 cartridge all over again.

After years of trials and internal debates, the rifle was formally adopted on January [music] 9th, 1936.

It got the designation US rifle, caliber 30 M1.

You see, this was the first time any major military power standardized a semi-automatic rifle as its primary infantry arm.

While most other nations would enter the Second World War still issuing boltaction rifles to their troops, the Americans were positioning themselves a generation ahead.

And they didn’t waste time scaling up.

By June of 1941, just a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Ordinance Department was producing a thousand M1 rifles every single day.

So before we get into the fighting, let’s actually explain how this rifle works because there are a lot of misconceptions floating around.

As you probably already know, the most distinctive feature is the NB block clip system.

Army leadership explicitly rejected detachable box magazines because they were convinced troops would lose them in the field and that the opening where a detachable [music] magazine inserts would let dirt and debris into the action and cause jams.

Garin designed a fixed internal magazine that fed from a stamped steel clip, basically a U-shaped piece of metal that held eight rounds in a [music] neat stack.

You load it by locking the bolt open, pressing the loaded clip down into the receiver from the top until it clicks into place.

Then pulling the bolt back slightly and releasing it.

The bolt snaps forward, strips the top round off the clip and chambers it from there.

Every time you fire, the bolt cycles automatically.

The follower inside the magazine rises, and the [music] next round feeds into the chamber.

And then as the last round is fired, the follower rises high enough [music] to trip the clip latch and the empty clip gets ejected straight up out of the receiver with that iconic metallic ping.

It’s probably the most famous sound any rifle has ever made.

The bolt stays open after that last shot, which tells the shooter it’s time to reload.

Now, you’ve probably heard the story that this ping sound would betray an American soldier’s position and let the enemy know his rifle was empty.

But think about it for a moment.

For this to actually [music] matter, you’d need a lone American soldier fighting at such close range that the enemy could hear that small metallic sound over the chaos of battle, recognize what it meant, and rush him before he could reload.

In reality, American soldiers fought alongside their fellow troops.

And while one man was reloading, the Germans still had plenty of other rifles to worry about.

Combat is chaotically loud, and that ping was almost always lost in the noise of gunfire, explosions, and shouting.

Many veterans who actually carried the rifle insisted the ping was too faint to hear beyond a few feet.

There are even some stories of soldiers deliberately tossing an empty clip to bait an enemy into exposing himself, but I don’t know whether they were actually used in real combat.

And of course, no discussion of the M1 would be complete without mentioning the infamous [music] Garand thumb.

This refers to getting your thumb caught and smashed by the bolt when loading a fresh clip incorrectly.

The operating rod on the Garand snaps forward with real force, and if your thumb is still in the way, you’re going to feel it.

This wasn’t particularly common in actual combat, but it happened often enough on training ranges that it earned a lasting reputation.

Basically, you learned the proper technique quickly or you learned it painfully.

When the M1 finally went to war, it was the first standard issue semi-automatic rifle adopted by any major military power.

The practical advantage over bolt-action rifles was enormous.

A soldier with a M1 could fire all eight rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger without ever moving his hands on the rifle.

That meant he didn’t have to break his cheek weld or lose his sight picture between shots, which dramatically cut down recoil recovery time and let him re-engage targets much faster.

In raw terms, the rate of aimed fire increased roughly 2 and 1/2 to three times over what a bolt-action rifle could achieve.

But like any new technology, the M1 faced skepticism from the men who would actually carry it.

Veteran soldiers who trained on the Springfield M1903 predicted the semi-automatic would be less reliable and less accurate than their beloved boltaction.

Officers worried that new recruits would struggle with the more complicated mechanism.

There were even early logistical headaches with ordinance personnel unfamiliar with the new rifle accidentally shipping [music] five round stripper clips meant for Springfields to units already equipped with GANs.

The rifle got its first serious battlefield test in the South Pacific in 1942.

At that point, most of the Marine Corps was still resistant to switching over, reportedly by core preference, not because garands weren’t available.

So, the first Allied offensive action of the Second World War, the Guadal Canal Campaign, was actually made with a rifle from the previous war.

But once the Marines finally got their hands on the Garand and tried it in combat, they wanted more of them as fast as possible.

They quickly learned that the M1 didn’t jam any more often than the Springfield and was equally easy to maintain.

[music] Despite concerns about how a gas operated rifle would hold up in the harsh Pacific climate, the Garand actually performed very well with regular maintenance.

There weren’t any significant [music] problems.

American troops were pretty satisfied with their new rifle, and it served as a nice morale booster knowing they were the only ones with semi-automatics.

It didn’t go unnoticed by the Japanese either.

They quickly realized the change in American squad firepower and thought US units had far more machine guns than they actually did.

Because so many semi-automatic rifles firing at once created a volume of fire they’d never encountered before.

Banszai charges that had worked against poorly equipped Chinese troops weren’t nearly as effective now.

Japanese soldiers were often cut down by riflemen long before they could reach American positions.

[music] It was then time for the Germans to meet the Garand as well.

When American troops first faced German forces in Operation Torch in November 1942 to understand why the M1 had such [music] a frustrating impact on German forces, we first have to clear something up about what the Vermacht was actually armed with.

If your impression of German infantry comes from movies and video games, you probably picture troops carrying MP40 submachine guns, the revolutionary STG44 assault rifle, or maybe the FG-42 paratroop rifle.

And yes, the Germans did produce these genuinely advanced weapons.

But look at the actual numbers.

Germany produced about 1.

1 million MP40s, [music] somewhere around 430,000 STG-44s and only about 7,000 FG42s.

Now compare that to over 14 million KR98 boltaction rifles manufactured between 1934 and 1945.

So you see the difference.

The Kar98 [music] remained the primary German service rifle until the very end of the war.

Despite what propaganda footage might suggest, the overwhelming majority of German soldiers carried essentially the same type of weapon their fathers had carried in the First World War.

Now, this doesn’t mean German infantry was ineffective.

Far from it.

But their doctrine worked completely differently from the American approach.

German squad tactics centered on the MG34 and later MG42 machine gun as the primary source of firepower with the bolt-action riflemen serving in a support role built around keeping that machine gun fed and protected.

The Allies used automatic weapons to support riflear armed infantry while the German army reversed the process entirely using infantry to support machine guns.

[music] It was an effective system but it meant the average German rifleman was outgunned by his American counterpart in individual engagements.

The Germans weren’t blind to the semi-automatic advantage.

They tried to answer it.

And the story of those attempts explains a lot about why the Garand was so remarkable.

Their first serious effort was the Ga41 chambered in the standard 792 by 57 mm Mouser cartridge and fed from a 10 round fixed magazine using stripper clips.

On paper, it looked reasonable, but in practice, the G41 failed disastrously.

The problem started with a mandate from the German army that no holes could be drilled into the barrel for a gas system.

This forced designers to use a complicated muzzle trap mechanism based on the old Danish bang rifle principle where gases were captured at the muzzle to drive the action.

The system proved incredibly prone to carbon fouling and corrosion.

The muzzle assembly consisted of many fine parts that were difficult to keep clean and a nightmare to maintain under field conditions.

American testing showed the G41’s reliability was significantly inferior to the M1 Garand, especially when exposed to mud and rain.

Production of the Mousa variant reached only about [music] 6,700 units, and of those, roughly 1,700 were returned as completely unusable.

Total G41 production across all variants reached about 120,000.

But the design was fundamentally flawed.

The Gaywear 43 was Germany’s attempt to fix these problems, and they did it by essentially copying the Soviet SVT40’s shortstroke piston gas system.

[music] Entering production in October 1943, the G43 was genuinely better.

It featured a 10 round detachable box magazine, was lighter than the G41, and used stamped parts in place of many machined components to speed up manufacturing.

But Germany still couldn’t make it work at scale.

Production began far too late, giving them barely 18 months before the war ended.

German industry was already stretched to breaking [music] point producing tanks, aircraft, and ammunition, and there simply wasn’t capacity to retool for mass semi-automatic rifle production.

Total G43 production reached about 400,000 units, while the Americans built 5.

4 4 million M1 Garand.

The United States managed to equip virtually all of its infantry with semi-automatic rifles, something Germany was never able to come close to achieving.

The Soviets had their own semi-automatic rifle, the SVT40, adopted [music] in 1940.

It fired the 762x 54R cartridge from a 10 round detachable magazine.

But the SVT40 had serious problems.

It was sensitive to ammunition quality and prone to reliability issues that Soviet testing quantified at about a 10% failure rate compared to just 1.

75% to the M1 Garand.

The Soviets eventually phased it out in favor of the older Mosen narant boltaction and submachine [music] guns because they were much cheaper to produce and easier for poorly trained conscripts to learn and maintain.

Britain actually considered the M1 Garand in 1939 but was already committed to Lee Enfield production and couldn’t justify the disruption of switching.

Japan developed the Type 4, which was essentially a direct copy of [music] the Garand, but they only managed to produce about 250 rifles before the war ended.

The M1 succeeded where all these efforts failed because it combined reliability and mechanical simplicity in ways no competitor could match.

The rifle could also launch grenades using the M7 series launcher, a simple tube type adapter that slipped over the muzzle and locked onto the bayonet lug.

A rifle grenade would sit on this tube and the soldier would load a special blank cartridge.

Firing the blank propelled the grenade toward the target.

Because this setup effectively disabled the gas system, the rifle had to be cycled manually while the launcher was attached, but rifle grenades could reach targets at 100 to 200 yd without needing a dedicated mortar team.

Now, the Garand wasn’t perfect, and two complaints came up repeatedly from combat veterans.

The first was weight.

A loaded M1 with a period leather sling came in at about £10, and with a bayonet attached for combat, you were looking at over £11.

Even by 1940 standards, that was heavy.

The M1903 [music] Springfield it replaced weighed 8.

7 pounds.

And the M1 carbine that was developed specifically [music] for support troops weighed only 5.

2 lb, meaning the Garand was nearly twice as heavy as the carbine.

Pre-war Army Ordinance reports explicitly stated that the M1 was too heavy and cumbersome for most support personnel like staff officers, artillerymen, [music] and radiomen to carry, which is exactly why the lighter M1 carbine was developed in the first place.

[music] The second complaint was more tactical.

You couldn’t easily top off a partially empty magazine.

Say a soldier attacking an enemy position fired four or five rounds, then jumped into cover before making another advance.

He’d want a full eight rounds ready.

But he couldn’t easily check how many were left, and he couldn’t just slip a few more rounds into the clip to top it up.

He could manually eject all the remaining rounds and the [music] clip, losing whatever ammunition was left.

or he could fire off the remaining rounds to empty the rifle if he is not worried to reveal his position, which was actually the more common field method despite wasting ammunition.

There are techniques to single load rounds back into a partially full clip, but they are slow, require two hands, and are completely impractical under fire.

The obvious solution would have been a detachable box magazine.

But for the American military, innovation didn’t arrive until the M14, which wasn’t adopted until 1959.

The M1 Garand remained the standard American service rifle through the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, equipping most United Nations infantry throughout that conflict.

It started its career as a rifle superior in almost every way to what the enemy carried.

But by the end of its 22-year service life, it was becoming desperately outdated.

The rifle that finally replaced it was the M14.

Essentially a heavily modernized Garand built around the new 762x 51 NATO cartridge as a shorter, more efficient successor to the [music] 306.

The key improvements addressed the Garin’s main limitations.

A 20 round detachable box magazine finally eliminated the endlock clip and the rifle offered select fire capability with both semi-automatic and full automatic modes.

The M14 was ambitiously designed to replace not just the M1 Garand, but also the M1 Carbine, the M3 Grease gun submachine gun, and the M1918 Browning automatic rifle, consolidating four weapons into one.

However, this was soon deemed impossible with the M14 seen as not quite the right platform for this combined role, and with some serious issues from the start.

In full automatic fire, soldiers found the rifle was basically uncontrollable because of powerful recoil.

After just a few rounds, the muzzle [music] would climb so badly that you were shooting at the sky.

At approximately 11 lb and 44 in long, it was actually heavier and longer than the Garand it replaced.

The traditional wooden stock swelled in humid jungle conditions, affecting accuracy, which became a serious problem as American involvement in Vietnam escalated.

Combat reports showed that soldiers couldn’t carry enough of the heavy 762 ammunition to maintain fire superiority against enemies equipped with AK-47s, [music] and the terrain in Vietnam forced most engagements to 300 m or less, completely negating whatever range advantage the M14 theoretically offered.

So, the M14 ended up with the shortest service life of any standard American infantry rifle in the modern era with only about 11 or 12 years.

The M16 assault rifle chambered in the much lighter 5.

56 NATO cartridge officially replaced it between 1967 and 1969.

You see, the Germans had actually figured out this intermediate cartridge thing already during the Second World War.

Their studies showed that most infantry combat happened at less than 300 [music] m, often much closer.

Full power rifle cartridges were overkill for these engagement distances.

So their solution was the 792x 33 mm Kurts.

Basically the same bullet KR 98 fired but with a shorter cartridge case which meant less recoil but more powerful than pistol caliber submachine guns.

This intermediate cartridge concept was tested with the STG44.

And while that rifle came too late to matter [music] in the war, the idea behind it influenced everything that came after.

The 5.

56 NATO round that replaced the 762 was essentially the same thinking applied decades later.

By the 1970s and 80s, virtually all major militaries had made the same transition to intermediate cartridges.

Full power rounds still have their place for long range precision shooting, but they’re no longer what every rifleman carries, but that’s the topic for another video.

John Garand himself received the medal for merit on March 28th, [music] 1944.

Personally awarded by President Roosevelt, it was the highest civilian honor available at the time.

[music] recognition for the man whose rifle had given American soldiers an edge.