American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms

by Chris Kyle

  Corporal Koons took a deep breath, then ran his hands over his rifle as he pulled himself to his feet in the boat. The weapon’s wood was sleek and almost oily with the spray of the sea. It was a new gun: an M1 semi-automatic that fired eight shots, before reloading. The commandos were jealous.

  Or would be, if it successfully proved itself. No one had used one in combat before.

  Koons checked to make sure it was loaded—probably the twentieth time since he’d set out—then fixed his eyes on the shadows ahead. Two British Spitfires buzzed to his left and began firing. They were aiming their guns at the beam of a nearby lighthouse, trying to distract the defenders’ attention as much as knock the light out.

  It worked, in a way. Nazi anti-aircraft guns began to respond, shattering the peace of the tiny coastal village below Dieppe, France. The whole countryside was now awake, thank you very much.

  I’m really in the war, Corporal Koons told himself. Damn.

  Koons and forty-nine other American Army Rangers were about to become the first Americans to see combat in Europe. They’d been training with the British commandos for weeks, earning their respect bruise by bruise. But for all the live fire exercises, all the forced marches and the endless gun drills, none of the Rangers could say in his heart that he was completely ready for combat. That was something they’d have to experience firsthand to truly understand.

  The shallow boat grounded hard against the rocks, and Koons jumped out behind his commando buddy, running like hell for the shadows under the cliffs ahead. His fate depended on three things—his resolve, the men he was with, and the untested rifle he held out of the water as he ran to shore.

  He couldn’t have made a better choice when it came to men. The commandos were the rock stars of World War II, badass warfighters who could do everything from take over an enemy town to blow up a docked warship. The Rangers were no slouches either; every man on the mission had volunteered three times, and most of them were as ballsy as the toughest commando.

  The rifle—that was something special as well. It was the “U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30, M1,” a ten-pound, eighty-five-dollar, gas-operated, air-cooled, clip-fed semi-automatic. It was new to the unit—Koons had only just wiped off the heavy protective grease it had been shipped in the other day. But it would soon prove to be one of the finest guns ever made.

  The M1 Garand has been called “the gun that saved the world,” and that’s not an exaggeration. The rifle is without a doubt the most important in modern American history. To the Greatest Generation, and even their kids, the M1 defined the word “rifle.”

  It was created by John Cantius Garand, a quiet, humble gun designer who worked for the U.S. government’s Springfield Armory, in Massachusetts.

  Garand was a native Canadian who, like a lot of gun designers, was a little odd. It’s said he used to flood his basement during the winter so he could skate there after work.

  Good thing he didn’t live in Texas.

  After World War I, the Army realized that a semi-automatic or self-loading rifle would give whoever used it a great advantage. Of course, being the Army, they wanted the weapon to be all things to all people—it had to be light, had to be accurate, and it had to take more abuse than a mule in winter.

  The smartest thing the Army did was hire a bunch of people, including Garand, and told them to have at it. Garand had been discovered, more or less, because of a design for a machine gun he’d invented. It was an interesting arrangement: When fired, the primer moved back and hit the firing pin, which came back and unlocked the bolt. A cam and a spring combination kicked out the shell and brought in a new cartridge. It was different than any other mechanism around, and even more complicated than it sounds. But it did work—just not well enough to beat out other designs.

  Garand tried using the same mechanism in a semi-automatic rifle. That performed a little better. But he didn’t have a breakthrough until he let go of that idea entirely. Instead, he found a way to use the gas generated by the burning powder to do work in the rifle that, till now, had been done by hand or recoil.

  U.S. warriors and their M1 Garands during the Pacific Island campaign.

  National Archives

  As the bullet in the M1 Garand moves out of the barrel, the gas behind it finds its way to a small port. The pressure of the gas drives a piston back. This moves the operating rod and powers the mechanism that opens the bolt, kicks out a round, and feeds a new one. Cams, lugs, tangs—the mechanical pieces work together like the insides of an old-fashioned watch, but are tough enough to take the pounding and abuse involved in launching something at the speed of sound, or thereabouts.

  New developments in powder propellant were key to making it all work, since the gas had to be produced in a certain volume and pressure. (Slow and steady in this design was better than all-at-once quick.)

  Garand was not the first person to think of the idea. Browning had been there before, and the principle was being used for machine guns. Garand got it to work in a semi-automatic rifle that could be mass-produced. His willingness to think about problems in a whole different direction put rifles on a new course.

  While Garand was developing his designs, another genius, also a little peculiar, was working on his own project. John D. Pedersen’s semi-automatic rifle had a different, more complicated mechanism. It also used a .276 caliber round. There were a few advantages to using the smaller cartridge in an infantry rifle, including weight and wear on the gun. Not to get too technical here, but one of the interesting sidelights of the workup on bullets for the new rifle showed that smaller bullets could do more damage at certain distances than the .30-06. That’s a point to remember down the line.

  Garand first produced his gun in .30 caliber. Then the Army brass heard the arguments in favor of the smaller rounds and decided the next infantry rifle should be chambered for .276. So he went back to the workbench and came up with a .276 version.

  It was better than the .30. In fact, it was better than Pedersen’s, too. The Garand .276 was easier to manufacture, and less prone to breakdown, at least according to the tests.

  That’s when Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur stepped in. General MacArthur insisted that the next infantry rifle, whatever it might be, should be chambered in .30-06.

  He didn’t do it because of the bullet’s impressive accuracy, range, or superior stopping power. Rather, the Army had been kicked in the gut with budget cuts, and adopting a gun with the same bullet they’d been using for twenty years was a lot cheaper than the alternative. It was the middle of the Depression, and things were tough everywhere.

  There’s a bright spot in every cloud.

  It took a few more years to actually perfect the .30-06 version of Garand’s gun, but the M1 Garand was offically tapped as the Army’s rifle on January 9, 1936. Getting it into the hands of soldiers would take longer still—but it did get there. The rest, as we say, is history.

  The M1 Garand was the world’s first semi-automatic rifle issued as standard weapon to any army. It boosted the combat power of the American fighting man over his enemies, who at that point were pretty much all armed with World War I–type bolt-action rifles. The Japanese, for example, mostly used the Arisaka Type 99. The Type 99 was modeled after the Mauser and held only five rounds.

  To load the M1, a soldier locks the bolt by pulling the operator rod on the side back. He wants to give it a good tug, making sure it locks; if he’s gentle there’s a chance the mechanism will slide back forward later and try and grab his thumb. He then takes the eight-round clip and pushes it down with some authority into the receiver. The bullets click into place. He removes his thumb—loading is always supposed to be done with the thumb, according to the manual and the old instructors. The bolt slaps forward.

  Top: the M1 Garand and its eight-round en-bloc clip. Middle: John Garand (left) presents his weapon to the U.S. Army’s Chief of Ordnance (middle) and the commanding officer of the Springfield Armory (right). Bottom: M1s being loaded for the front; by 1
944, almost 4,000 were being produced a day.

  Wikipedia (top); Library of Congress (middle and bottom)

  Done. The first round is chambered and the gun is ready to go. From that point, the soldier can fire as quickly as he can pull the trigger. When the bullets are gone, the clip is ejected with a loud ping. The rifle is singing for new rounds.

  General George Patton called the M1 “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” Historian William Hallahan described the Garand as “one weapon that outgunned its counterparts in every other army in the field.” It was tough and dependable no matter where or how it was used. “In surf and sand, dragged through the mud and rain of tropical rain forests, sunbaked, caked with volcanic ash, covered with European snows that melted, then refroze inside the breech, beset by rust and mildew, mold and dirt, the Garand still came out shooting.”

  But all this lay in the future back in 1942 near Dieppe, France.

  As Zip Koons ran up the narrow path from the beach, he heard the muffled bang of a grenade exploding in a nearby house. Guided by some French spies, the commandos at the head of the team had run into a house where Germans were known to be sleeping. The Germans had tried to resist.

  Most likely they wouldn’t have been taken prisoner anyway, not by the French.

  Koons kept running. His team was assigned to destroy a German gun battery so the main assault to the north could proceed without interference. His job was to help secure the farm that bordered the woods near the artillery. There was a barn on the property, and the commandos were just getting to it when Koons ran up. Another American Ranger, Sergeant Alex Szima, was already there with his Thompson.

  “Go to it, Yanks,” said the commandos.

  Szima and Koons ducked in and started clearing the barn. It was empty, but in the dark they couldn’t take that for granted. Sweat poured off the corporal as he followed Szima across the floor and then up to the loft. The place was empty.

  They found a wide hay door on the second story and opened it. There in the dim light across from them sat the battery, no more than a few hundred yards away. The first Nazis, woken by the gunfire, were just now running to their posts.

  Szima said something Koons didn’t hear. He was too busy raising his rifle to his shoulder.

  Across the way, the German reached his weapon and started getting it ready to fire. Koons pressed his trigger.

  Bam!

  The M1 jerked against his shoulder.

  It felt good.

  The man he’d aimed at was down. Another was running to take his place.

  Bam. Koons fired again. Bam.

  The M1 was as accurate as the Springfield at this distance. The recoil was easy to control. The sights, which he’d zeroed on the ranges back in Scotland, were steady and sturdy. But the real asset was the clip—eight bullets—and the fact that he didn’t have to move his hand to reload, unlike the bolt-action Springfield he’d come to Britain with. He just moved to the next target, or steadied his aim if he missed.

  Bam. Again and again. Reload.

  Commandos were swarming into the battery area.

  Bam. Koons nailed a German who was raising a gun to shoot.

  Bam, another German fell. Bam, bam, bam. Until there were no more targets.

  The commandos secured the artillery emplacement and began disabling the guns. They had no way of knowing, but their small part of the mission was one of the few things that went right for the Allies that day. The raid on Dieppe got a lot of people killed, Canadians mostly, and a handful of Americans as well.

  But it was an important baptism of fire for the Rangers. In their first combat action they proved that Americans could fight as equal partners with the premiere warfighters of their generation. The lessons they learned there were soon used in Africa and Sicily, then back in France itself.

  It also showed they had one hell of a gun in the M1, better in fact than any other on the battlefield. Koons and his friend Szima were accused of being sharpshooters, but they claimed they were no such thing. “I was a bartender, before the war,” laughed Szima.

  They figured out later that Corporal Franklin “Zip” Koons probably killed twenty Germans that day. But he simply shrugged. Koons told everyone he’d just been doing his bit. He smiled when the British pinned a Military Medal on his chest, making him one of the few foreigners to ever get the honor. He survived the war, and went home to Iowa, where he raised a family, worked as a banker, and lived the American dream without much of a fuss, just like millions of other members of the Greatest Generation.

  Even before it was used in combat, the M1 Garand was recognized by America’s British allies as a powerful and important weapon. Koons and his fellow Rangers had demonstrated the gun not only for the commandos, but for the Queen, who knew enough about guns to be impressed by the type of clip it used. But even with the Queen as an admirer, the M1 remained an American gun. There were a few exceptions, but mostly the Brits stuck with bolt-action versions of the Lee-Enfield as their standard infantry rifle. They were fine weapons, but they weren’t Garands.

  The British commandos wanted the Rangers’ M1s for themselves, and tried to do some horse trading on the side. But the Rangers weren’t buying. They knew what they had.

  It wasn’t only foreign soldiers who lusted for the semi-automatics. When they hit the beaches at Guadalcanal in August 1942, most of the U.S. Marines were still armed with weapons of the previous war, the superb but increasingly outdated M1903 Springfield bolt-action rifles. The Marine brass figured they were getting great results with the 1903 Springfield, and they just weren’t so sure about the M1 Garands.

  That thinking changed right quick. What rifleman worth his salt doesn’t want his gun to hold as many bullets as possible in a firefight? And to reload fast? On Guadalcanal, it was not unusual for the Americans to face lightning banzai charges by Japanese troops. Reloading a Springfield under normal circumstances was not difficult, but a guy charging at you with a bayonet is not normal. You needed a bullet ready at all times.

  Lieutenant Colonel John George remembered a time when a Marine struggled to reload after firing. With an enemy soldier charging in, two nearby army soldiers simply “pointed their Garands, still holding more than half-magazine capacity, at [the enemy’s] chest. Then they pumped the triggers until both clips were ringingly ejected from their receivers. They lowered their aim to keep the stream of metal pouring through him as he fell to his knees, then his haunches, then on his face, clutching his rifle tightly to the last.”

  That only had to happen once for certain Marines to decide they had to have the new guns—by any means necessary.

  “We had to keep ours tied down with wire,” remembered Colonel George. “Leathernecks were appropriating all they could lay hands on by ‘moonlight requisition.’ In daylight, they would come over to our areas to barter souvenirs with the freshly landed doughboy units; any crooked supply sergeant who had an extra M1 rifle could get all the loot he wanted. When the Marines began to get a few Garands up to the front the demand proportionately increased. They quickly learned that the M1 did not jam any more often than the Springfield, and that it was equally easy to maintain.”

  There’s a story told about a Marine corporal of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion marching very tightly behind an Army sergeant leading an advance platoon during the campaign. The Army man asked the leatherneck what the deal was.

  “You’ll probably get yours on the first burst, Mac,” answered the Marine, eying his companion’s M1 Garand. “Before you hit the ground I’ll throw this damn Springfield away and grab your rifle!”

  If you were bound for combat, there was a lot to like about the M1 Garand. It had several more rounds than the Springfield. You could fire much faster than anything but a machine gun. It had less recoil than a bolt-action rifle. It had an excellent sighting system. You could drop it in salt water and sand with few ill effects. Fast-firing, fast-reloading, accurate, user-friendly, durable, and reliable—check, check, double-check. It was easy
to disassemble, clean, and oil.

  On the negative side, the “pinging” sound the weapon made when you fired your last round and the clip flew out let the enemy know you had to reload. If you didn’t push the operating rod back right or had something else miss its catch when you were loading, your thumb got slammed by the bolt, giving you the infamous “Garand thumb.” Otherwise, properly maintained and handled with reasonable sense, the weapon was effective and about as soldier-proof as it is possible to make a gun. Of course, once men had eight shots without having to reload, they wanted more. Can’t blame them for that.

  “G.I. passes a roadside grave,” a battlefield sketch with M1 Garands. Guadalcanal, 1943.

  Library of Congress

  On Guadalcanal, in a slow, grinding struggle, the American soldiers and Marines expelled the Japanese in February 1943.

  It was an important turning point in the war. The American victory, combined with the U.S. Navy’s earlier success at Coral Sea and Midway, shifted the momentum against the Japanese. They would never recover it.

  “Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history,” said Japanese infantry commander Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi. “It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.”

  In the European Theater, the M1 Garand offered U.S. infantrymen three more shots and less time between them than the standard German Karabiner K98 Mauser rifle. The Germans tried pretty hard to find a suitable semi-auto replacement for their bolt-guns, but couldn’t quite hit the sweet spot with anything. So the K98s remained the main thing in German hands when they came up against Americans.

  That’s not to say that some of the German guns, including the Karabiner K98, weren’t impressive. As a matter of fact, most people credit the Nazi StG44 with being the first assault rifle ever. That gun seems to have influenced the famous AK47, though the AK is a very different beast. And our M60 machine gun owes a lot to the German MG42, a battlefield bulldog that pretty much defined the term “suppressive fire.” But as far as rifles went, the M1 was better than anything the Germans were fielding in serious numbers during the war.