If a Garand pings in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? The answer is “yes”, because German super-hearing allows them to detect high-pitched noises from up to a kilometer away!

The funny thing about myths is that sometimes debunking them simply leads to the creation of more and wilder myths in response. Bloke on the Range discovered this fact after the release of a video in which he tackled the legend of the M1 ping which supposedly gave dastardly German and Japanese soldiers the edge over brave US GIs armed with Garand rifles during World War II. In a follow on video, Bloke takes a look at some of the wilder explanations his commenters gave for how GIs would use this ping against their opponents, which range from the plausible but not practical to the outright silly. Take a look below:

Ultimately, this seems like one of those myths that almost certainly isn’t true, but which will probably never die, either. It’s too intuitive – especially with the video games of today that do not simulate batte noise – to imagine that the ping would have been a cue for the enemy, even though upon closer examination the theory just doesn’t hold up. On top of that, despite being wrong, the idea that GIs and Germans went back and forth using the “ping” to get one up on each other just makes for a fun story!