Late in 1944 the Ordnance Committee recommended adoption of a magazine-fed, select-fire version of the M1 Garand as a new standard US infantry rifle. Both Springfield and Remington developed rifles to meet the requirement, with Springfield’s being the T20 and Remington’s the T22.
The Springfield design went through several iterations from the original T20 to the T20E1 and T20E2, with the capability to launch rifle grenades, mount optical sights, and fire in either semiautomatic or full auto. The first examples of the final T20E2 design were ready in June 1945, but the program lost momentum in August when Japan surrendered. It did continue slowly until 1949, providing some of the basis for the eventual M14 rifle.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to these original examples from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts:
https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
I notice that the extractor is missing on most of them, and I wonder why? Can you fill in anything on this?
Another problem of the BAR magazine was that it was flimsy. That was not a problem with the BAR, since it’s an heavy and stable platform, but the recoil slamming M1 Garand conversions on the face of the magazine was enough to deform it. That’s why it had been modified in the E1
Thanks for the interesting video on the E series M-1. I have shot many matches with my M-1 and in 1966-67, I shot the M-14 in basic training and in one match in Germany. Iit was interesting to see the developmental stages which became the M-14. I was a small arme repairman MOS 46B20 so while I was in training at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, I was able to shoot the M-14 in full automatic. What a hand full. Later, we were trained on the M-16, what a difference. I was a wood and steel guy until then.
I was in a DCM affiliated club in 1967, and went to the National Matches at Camp Perry in 1967 on the Ct. State Team. I was issued a brand new National Match M-14, and was very impressed with it- I won two silver medals. In the Small Arms Firing School, we were given an introduction to the M-16. Very early range rifles, painted green, beat all to hell. I was less than impressed.
Several decades’ M-16 use (in one guise or another) impress you yet? Just a little?
They are far better today than the one I used. It was a hard used range rifle. The sergeant yelled at me when I went into a tight sling prone- “You’ll bend it!”. It was green, with cigarette burns on the plastic. About 6 pounds. It went “SPUNG!” every time I fired it. Compared to a National Match M-14, or even a stock M-1, no comparison. However, I now have an M-4 clone. Depending on ammo, very accurate. And reliable, and cheap to shoot. And lots easier (lighter) to carry.
I noticed the E1 and E2 rifles were missing their extractors. Were they just removed or did they have breakage problems in full auto fire?
I get the feeling that some nitwit was doing the whole “one weapon to rule them all” plan. Yeah, bad idea. Equip an entire squad with something like the T20E2 and nobody will be able to do anything proficiently unless you count dying like idiots to some enemy machine gun nest. Just ask Kirk.
So the fighting men equipped with the M14 who lost their lives in Vietnam died like idiots?
How about we wait for an actual expert to issue the corrective statement instead?
The idiocy that gets the most people killed is rarely down at the rifleman/platoon leader level. Where it is most prevalent and does the most damage is waaaaaaay higher up in the institutional hierarchy.
The guys who were forced to try and overcome the M14’s disadvantages in Vietnam combat weren’t the idiots; it was the people that refused to make the necessary real-world observations during WWI and WWII, and then identify the proper answer to the conundrums of small arms in combat, then actually procure to meet those needs.
The guys doing the dirty work down at the coal face really had no other choice, given what they were handed. Losing a firefight to a well-organized swarm of NVA or VC fighters because you couldn’t generate enough firepower with the M14 that they issued you, or be able to make the rapid snap shots required in close-quarters jungle fighting…? That was on someone, but it wasn’t the guys down on the ground.
The system was dysfunctional and delusional about the nature of combat reality. The leadership above them didn’t care to take the trouble to determine if they were being provided with correct answers, and discounted infantry combat because “atomic bombs had changed everything”. Which they had not.
At some point, yeah… There was idiocy. Where it was most manifest, however? Not in with the guys doing the fighting with what they’d been handed by their leadership.
I think the M14 represents a basic failure of accountability for the Army. Just like the whole “Hey, why weren’t we prepared for the IED campaign…?” should have warranted some soul-searching questions, and no doubt, the whole probable failure in drone warfare we can observe on the horizon.
The guys dying in job lots because their leadership failed to adapt to drones aren’t going to be the ones actually at fault, but I guarantee you that they’ll get the blame. And, the nice bodybags to go with it.
Maybe it were better to say at least some of them were killed by the idiots who equipped them.
“(…)fighting men equipped with the M14 who lost their lives in Vietnam died like idiots?”
Certainly this does not apply to all, but some that fell were result of McNamara action https://www.historicmysteries.com/history/project-100000/39337/ code-named 100,000 which resulted in drafting men, which would be rejected by Korean War-era standards, this included, but was not limited to, low mental aptitude
Project 100,000 did not allow anyone inducted under that law to serve outside of COnUS. I had to process a number of these individuals at Fort Sill, Oklahoma during late 67, early 68. I believe that the time frame is accurate but it is over 50 years ago. I had one individual with a GT score of 3.
Anecdotal evidence from men who were there, and who I trust to have told me the truth would indicate that the block on the “100,000” going overseas was… Less than perfect.
One of the factors you have to work with was that there was (and, occasionally still is…) a serious incentive for recruiters to cheat their asses off, and use either ringers or outright chicanery to get their vict… Err… “Applicants”, yeah, that’s the right word we used, through the testing system. Just as there was for the physical, although that was harder.
So, you could have actually been like a CAT IV on the ASVAB, and still gotten through the system as a CAT III or even a CAT II. Signed up for some fancy skilled MOS, sent to the school, washed out, and then wound up in Vietnam as a basic Infantryman or something. For some reason, no matter how stupid you demonstrate yourself to be when it comes to performance, they never re-test you, so you’d qualify for all sorts of “alternate assignments” if you couldn’t walk your BS talk when it came time to pass training.
There are reasons I’m dubious about the testing. It’s a test; the only thing it reliably measures is your ability to pass it on the day of… I didn’t give a damn when I took mine as a way to get out of classes in high school, took it entirely off-handedly, and still managed to score above the 90th percentile. On the old test.
There are reasons that the Marines give a second ASVAB as part of their reception process before training begins. They have to; the system could never trust the recruiters to be honest about things, given the draconian incentive process that the Marines give their recruiters. Their systems were virtually set up with “How do we make the recruiter’s life a living hell, and incentivize them doing anything it takes to get bodies in Marine boots…?”
Even in the early 1990s, it was possible to game the system. When I got to Korea after borgling out of US Army Recruiting Command myself (with the honest intent of doing my remaining time and then telling the Army to f*ck off…), I ran into a case wherein there had been obvious recruiter f*ckery.
When I went to Korea, it was in the immediate aftermath of Desert Storm. They’d shut down assignments to Korea, and since that was a short hardship tour, everyone had been there for an extended tour. As well, we were getting in literal loads of new people straight out of initial entry training, and it was like having a herd of puppies rather than the usual mix of “brand new and jaded” that a truly balanced unit has.
There was this one young man… Oi. I couldn’t work out what was going on, because he was embedded in a cluster of fellow newbies over in one of the other platoons, but he was obviously waaaaaaaaay out of place. Once he caught your eye, you could tell he was only getting by because all the guys around him were helping him and masking his actual capacities. The leadership in that platoon had all been in country on extension for a minimum of 18 months, and they clearly did not give a damn about what was going on.
New leadership came in, went “WTF?”, and someone took the opportunity to investigate. Took forever to get the info out of the troops, but it soon became clear that the young man in question was not in any way a person who could have ever passed taking the ASVAB on his own merits. The guys he was embedded with were guys who’d been in IET with him, and had carried him all the way through it. He was a really lovely person, very friendly, very helpful, and if you put him to a simple task like sweeping or cleaning something, he would stay on it and do it perfectly all damn day, no complaint or question.
Upshot was, they got him up to the medical people up at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, and we had an immediate nuclear explosion as a result. What had happened was that the Army psychiatrist doing the evaluation of him immediately twigged to “Hey, this kid isn’t actually capable of being in the Army, and is actually clinically diagnosable as mentally disabled…”
Said psychiatrist had a daughter who was Down’s Syndrome, and he about to lost his mind, as the vernacular goes. The whole thing wound up as a major Congressional investigation, and the only thing that saved our unit from wholesale slaughter on the “relief for cause” front was that we’d done nothing wrong; no harassment, no abuse. The victim of all this went from our barracks to one of the wards up at Yongsan, and the psychiatrist’s home, where he and the daughter with Down’s Syndrome were perfectly sympatico.
When everything shook out, it turned out that he was actually a “missing persons” case from either Ohio or Pennsylvania (I forget that detail), where the recruiter had, at the height of the Desert Storm recruiting drought, had found him and essentially frauded him into the Army while basically kidnapping him. When he got to IET, the drill instructors decided to play a game of “How far can we get this guy…?”, and because the Desert Storm training standards were in place, managed to make it happen. The 15-6 file on this kid was epic; our guys who’d been carrying him testified about the drill instructors laughing as they doctored his training records out on the training stations during Basic, and a whole lot of other crap. It was quite sickening, when it was all put together and looked at as a chronicle event. I had to go through the 15-6 packet because when it all finished, I was the acting Operations Sergeant for the company. From what I remember, about 15 people in USAREC, the recruiting command, literally went to jail, a bunch more got fired, and the fallout up at Fort Leonard Wood was similar in the training pipeline. I mean, for the love of God, you looked at this poor kid, and the only thing keeping you from asking “WTF? How’d he get here…?” was the fact that he’d gotten through the recruiting and training process, so… Obviously, he can’t actually be mentally retarded, right…? Right?
Yeah, interlock enough malicious assholery, and yes, yes he could. Sadly.
If I could go back in time and do what I’d like to have done to the responsible parties, their punishments would have made Vlad the Impaler queasy. It was only by sheer chance that he hadn’t wound up in the cohort of replacement troops being sent over to Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm, rather than Korea, and if the balloon had gone up over there, with him there? Oh. My. God. The potential for tragedy all the way around was mind-boggling, and those assholes who’d perpetrated that whole fraud did it to all of us. I mean, how the hell would you like to be in the middle of Korean War 2, DMZ Boogaloo, and have to deal with someone whose scoring on the “mental retardation” charts was barely on the paper? I mean, he was a lovely shining happy guy, but… Effectively, at about the level of a profound Down’s Syndrome child, with a mental age of a very slow five-year-old.
Impalement would have been too merciful. I’d have had to come up with something more… Creative.
RE: McNamara’s 100,000.
There’s a lot to be said about that program, but… There were men among that number who were anything but dummies.
One of them had enough smarts to become one of the Sergeant Majors of a unit I was assigned to. He was functionally illiterate, as in “Dyslexia so bad he couldn’t read” illiterate. He was anything but stupid, because it took me over a year to put together enough facts to figure out that there was something “off” with him. Most never noticed it; the man quoted regulations and field manuals verse and chapter, accurately and down to the last word. He had a memory like a damn elephant, and if you ever had him asking questions…? God help you if you didn’t know the right answer.
The man was genius at hiding his illiteracy. New manual or regulation came out? He’d have a little seminar session with random junior leaders, and have them read the new regulation or manual out loud, for everyone. People thought that was how he made sure other people were actually reading the manuals, but… That was how he kept on top of it all. He had a thousand and one other little dodges he’d come up with, and they were seamless. Great Sergeant Major, I’d happily work for him again. I only caught on to what was going on because of some observations I made of him interacting with the battalion operations officer, who was in on it with him. I think he’d been his Platoon Sergeant when the Major was a Lieutenant Platoon Leader, so they had history. The ops officer swore me to secrecy, after I asked him.
The real deal with McNamara’s 100,000 was that it was mostly composed of people who “didn’t do well on the tests”, and that category covered a really broad swath. People like that were denigrated then, and denigrated now, but… I have my doubts about the sanctity and value of “the test”.
Frankly, I had some supposed genius-level assholes wearing sergeant major stripes that I worked for who I’d walk away from, in order to work for that gentleman illiterate, again. He was a consummate senior NCO, and if he’d been able to have his dyslexia dealt with properly as a kid, I think he’d have had a much different trajectory in life.
“only thing it reliably measures is your ability to pass it on the day of…”
Ability and/or willingness. I suspect quite a few people have done poorly on purposes on the ASVAB.
The whole “One weapon to do it all” idiocy, coupled with “One cartridge to rule them all” is something that anyone with a lick of sense can observe.
Likewise, the needs and necessities of actual combat. In the vernacular of war, what doesn’t work faces elision, and what does gets adopted. Note how the M4 carbine basically drove the M16A2 out of service as the standard infantry arm, mainly because “lighter, handier” trumped “longer, heavier, complicated sight”.
The term “desire path” ought to be brought out of civil engineering and applied generally to systems of things like small arms. People like the Marines don’t like heavy belt-feds, thinking they are slowed down by them, but if the combat conditions don’t actually allow for their little fast moving clots of infantry to do the mission, then they’ll have to be bringing back all those too-heavy belt feds, because they’re the only thing capable of doing the damn job…
Reality gets a vote. One weapon to do it all might work for some guy living under a highly restrictive government regime that limits gun ownership extensively, but for the infantry squad in almost all potential theaters, it’s plain insanity on stilts. You can’t do “all the things” with just one weapon: If it’s light and handy enough to do close-quarters work, then odds are that it isn’t heavy enough to provide effective supporting fires. Or, serve as a PDW, which is something they basically wanted these rifles to do, firing .30-06 ball. Insane.
Also, entirely unnecessary. I lay you long odds that were you to work the logistical benefits accruing from “one rifle to do it all” up against “horses for courses”, you’d rapidly find out that the costs of shipping heavy ammo in for the individual weapon would outweigh the benefits of having a weapon that truly did everything as they envisioned. I mean, if you’re gonna have to load everything for the support weapon role, which is what this idea implies, then every single round you ship is going to be “support weapon”, which loses the entire benefit of having lighter ammo loads for the individual rifleman.
This is going to be precisely what kills NGSW, in the end. There’s no bloody point to it, and the entire idea of this hulking individual weapon is insane; the guys trying to use those things at close quarters are going to observe that they did much better with the M4, and then what’s going to happen? They’re going to do precisely what they did with the M16A2, pawn it off on the support arms, and glom onto all those M4 carbines. Mark my words: The desire path of war leads away from this idiotic super-heavy individual weapon concept.
The Wehrmacht came so close in 1942-45 with the combination of the MG42 on the actually-usable tripod, backed up by the squaddies armed with the MKb variants. (My personal preference? The original MKb42.)
Failing having enough Sturmgewehrs to go around, the Russian idea of giving everybody an SMG was a good fallback position.
In either case, the squaddies wouldn’t be trying to snipe somebody at 1,000 meters, or even 500 meters. That was the MMG’s job. Their job was to make sure nobody wearing the other guy’s uniform got within 300 meters of the MMG crew while they were at work. For that, the Sturmgewehr was just about perfect.
The 9mm SMG was usable out to about 150-200 meters, if all you wanted was to hose an area with autofire. Which strictly speaking is what the individual soldier should have been doing.
The problem today is, the One Cartridge To Rule Them All mentality has left us with an adequate IW (M4), but support MGs that either use the wrong cartridge for their job (5.56 x 45mm), or ones that are quite simply too damned heavy for mobility (M240). MG42/59, or better yet SiG 710-3 aka MG45 II, was what we should have been using going back to before that execrable M60, complete with the original tripod.
The new 6.8 x 51mm, yet another iteration of 7 x 57mm Mauser circa 1892, is going to take us right down that same footworn path yet again. Too much for the IW and probably Not Quite Enough for the MG.
For anybody who thinks “but the duplex load!”, look up how the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force and the Spanish Army used 7.62 x 51mm. One load for the MG, another (less-powerful) load for the IW. Interestingly, in both cases, the IW load ended up being essentially a 7.62 x 39mm in a 7.62 x 51mm case.
The trouble, of course, was people kept getting the two confused with each other. Resulting in excessive wear on the IW, frequent malfunctions in the MG, and an unwanted level of general aggravation all around.
I look at 6.8 x 51mm and I see the same thing all over again.
Expect somebody to try putting a tracking chip in each and every round to “talk” to one in each and every weapon.
“Beep! Beep! No, this isn’t the one that goes in this weapon! Get the right one! Beep!”
The new generation of “whiz kids” are as arrogant and clueless as McNamara’s.
clear ether
eon
The duplex load is the worst of both world. For the dubious advantage of using the same brass, you have ammos that can be easily mistaken, still to big and heavy, and so limiting of the soldier’s ability to carry them, and also use more raw material than really needed.
And with it supposedly “self-regulating” by barrel length (WTF?), fired in the shorter IW barrel you’re going to get hellacious blast and flash as the unburned part of the progressive-burning powder mix ignites on contact with the air. And no fancy flash suppressor is going to be able to alleviate that, because it’s going to happen in front of it, beyond the muzzle.
With the “second stage” igniting inside the longer MG barrel I anticipate serious bore erosion and possibly bulging in the last third of the bore. Note that custom rifle makers and cartridge designers like P.O. Ackley fell off the “duplex” or even “triplex” load mix bridge with custom cartridges in the 1950s, and concluded that it wasn’t worth the aggravation in terms of ruined barrels and almost nonexistent accuracy and consistency.
There’s “re-inventing the wheel”. Then there’s “I don’t care what anybody else thinks, square is infinitely superior to round and shows how brilliant I am”.
I’m pretty sure the latter position is where Ordnance is right now.
clear ether
eon
What about universal bullet but 2 different cases?
Are there any development experiments tried in that way.
WHy in the freaking WHAT did they not use a brake what points up, keeping the muzzle down, in lieu of that monstrosity welded on to the front of the barrel?
Something like a Cutts?
The lower part of that brake is removed, I suspect, to permit bayonet mounting.
See Bm59’s tri-compensator.
However, even the tri-compensator is not enough to shoot 7.62 NATO (and .30-06 is worse) controllably full auto from the shoulder, only from the bipod.
I’m sure Ian is well aware of the history, but as he had plenty to talk about here, it didn’t get addressed as a precursor.
John Garand originally implemented or sought to implement a 20-rd box magazine for his initial iteration of his rifle in the 1920s (the T1919) when creating his ‘primer blow back’ operational system; during this time, the Ordnance Board made it clear in their search for a new semi-auto rifle that a detachable magazine was fine, but not ‘preferred’ – a preference for an internal magazine was more to their liking.
When changes to the standard .30-Caliber cartridge more firmly staked the primer in place, Garand’s many years work on a primer charged blow-back operation system to actuate cycling of the rifle was no longer viable.
In revising his invention to a more mainstream gas-operated system, Garand also went with switching to his own version of an en-bloc feed design based on John Pedersen’s patent for the same, who had been working on a competing semi-auto rifle against Garand’s creation.
The problem with Pedersen’s en bloc design was that it could only be loaded one way whereas Garand’s ‘version’ of the en bloc was symmetrical up/down so it could be loaded either way. Garand made just enough changes as to not run afoul of Pedersen’s patent.
The en bloc was thought to be a good way to store ammo, make it easier to pass among soldiers, be consistent and less finicky, and not be concerned with the cost of expensive detachable magazines being damaged or lost.
In those early years of semi-auto rifle development, detachable box magazines often proved to be a weakness of reliability (but who even now days hasn’t had the occasional, one wonky magazine in their bag, that causes frequent failure-to-feed issues? Pedersen’s en bloc idea proved to be more reliable, so it stuck, and Garand adopted it for his own. But there is no doubt that Garand thought a detachable magazine was a better idea against the Ordinance Board’s wishes. yet, they liked the en bloc, so he made a better one than Pedersen had.
And it stuck.
The problem with the T20 and M14 was the “One size fits all”. Just another case of the good idea fairy striking again!
If they had stuck to just upgrading the M1 to fit a 20 round box magazine it would have been worthwhile. But trying to go for full auto as well was just such a waste of time.
I expect the troops in Korea would have appreciated a 20 round Garand, so long as no-one was stupid enough to think it could replace the BAR. Then, by the time of Vietnam, the army could have been using FALs in .280 calibre, and neither the M14 nor the M16 would ever have existed. But that presupposes that the US Army Ordnance did not exist either.
Notice no bayonet. That was still a part of the attack mode of that era soldier. Is that why the M5 bayonet lug fits into the gas screw and not over the muzzle blocked by the muzzle deflector?