M1 Garand

History of the M1 Garand

Born in Quebec, Canada in 1888 John Cantius Garand spent his youth living on a farm near St. Remi with his eleven brothers and sisters. After the death of his mother in 1899, The family moved to Jewett City, Connecticut. He learned English while sweeping floors at a textile mill, he also worked at a shooting gallery where he developed an interest in firearms. Later taking employment at a tool making company in 1909 in Rhode Island, and in 1916 moving to another tool making company in New York.

In 1917, after the first world war the United Stated Army began taking bids for designs of a light machine gun. Garand submitted a design to the US Navy that was initially rejected, but he was offered a job as a weapons designer and was transferred to the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. It was here where he developed the M1 Rifle to meet the requirements of being semi-automatic, strong but light and easy to manufacture, and using the .30-06 service cartridge.

He found the most effective design was a gas operated system, designing a long stroke piston to cycle rounds. He also used a reversible en-bloc clip which held 8 rounds and would eject from the gun after the last cartridge was fired giving the M1 its iconic ping. Garand when through several rounds of prototyping, testing a redesigning before the M1 was standardized in 1936.

The US army received the new M1 Garand in 1937, in 1940 the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was enlisted as a second source for the rifle because at that time production was slow. When the Americans joined the fight in World War II in 1941 The Companies were only producing around 600 Garands a day ramping production up to close to four thousand a day at their peak. By the end of the war, in 1945, they had produced over four million M1 Garand Rifles. The United States was the only country whose troops carried semi-automatic rifles as the standard and the tremendous advantage is what led General George Patton to call the M1 Garand “The greatest battle implement ever devised.”

After the war, many M1s were put into storage or loaned to allies. When North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950 production of the rifle resumed by Springfield Armory and two new manufacturers: Internal Harvester Corporation, and Harrington & Richardson Arms. Almost 1,500,000 new rifles were produces and the Garand remained in service until the superior AK-47 arrived and was officially replaced by the M14 in 1957, though it was still a regular active-duty component until 1963, seeing use in some military units until 1970, and remained in service as the national standard service rifle until 1994.