#JohnGarand

Photo Of The Day – We travel back in time to 1964 for some Apocalypse Now feeling.

Continuing our series of articles telling about most expensive firearms  sold in the major US auction houses, today we’ll take a look at the five most expensive firearms sold in  September 2018 Rock Island Premiere Firearms Auction. This auction set a world record of the largest single firearms auction in the history with combined sales worth over $20 million.

Rock Island September 2018 Premiere Firearms Auction catalog is now online. Just like in the case of one of our previous articles, I browsed the catalog and selected five of the most interesting lots that are weird, rare, unusual or significant in terms of history and firearms technologies. The names of the guns are linked to the corresponding Rock Island Auction page where you can learn more about these guns and see more detailed pictures of any particular firearm. The list goes in no particular order.

The following is an article that was originally written in Russian by TFB contributor Maxim Popenker, and Andrey Ulanov, and translated to English by Peter Samsonov. With their permission, I have replicated the text here, and edited it, for the enrichment of you, our readers!

The American M1 Garand was the world’s first general issue semi-automatic rifle. It is famous for many reasons (such as the harmonious ping it makes when ejecting its en bloc clip), but it is a magnificent piece of engineering that you can only truly appreciate by seeing what’s inside.

The M1 Garand is certainly a great design, but it’s often forgotten that it is fundamentally a piece of late 1920s technology, and it has some serious flaws. Its Achilles’ heel, though, is probably its susceptibility to mud, dirt, sand, and other foreign matter. Ian and Karl at InRange TV took an M1 out to the Arizona desert to give it a mud bath, testing the gun’s resistance to unforgiving conditions, the video of which is embedded below:

This is the fourth part of a series of posts seeking to describe and analyze the 7.62mm Lightweight Rifle concept promoted by the Americans, and subsequently adopted by NATO in various forms. This series will cover development from before World War II to the present day, but will focus primarily on the period from 1944-1970, which constitutes the span of time from the Light Rifle’s conception until its end in the United States with the standardization of the M16. This article itself deals with the fully automatic variants of the M1 rifle developed before US focus shifted to the then-new, shorter .30 Light Rifle cartridge that led to the 7.62 NATO caliber. Therefore, all rifles covered in this article were chambered for the standard .30 M2 caliber, and the series of fully automatic M1 derivatives chambered for the .30 Light Rifle experimental round will be covered in a subsequent installment. In more than one way, this is the first “true” installment of the Light Rifle series, as the three preceding articles can be considered prologue material, though that does not reduce the importance of their subjects. My readers should also note that while I consulted a variety of sources to write this article, my narrative heavily relies upon Bruce Canfield’s magnum opus The M1 Garand Rifle , as well as R. Blake Stevens’ U.S. Rifle M14 from John Garand to the M21. Indeed, the title of this article is adapted from the third chapter of that latter book, as I could think of nothing superior.

What rifle influenced Kalashnikov’s famous carbine design more, the Garand M1, or the Haenel MP 43? This question was broached by blogger Jeff of TwistRate in a video posted to the Full30 gun video hosting website recently. Readers can follow the link to watch that video before reading my discussion of this question below.

In preparation for an upcoming article about “light rifle” development (i.e., full power automatic infantry rifles), I have been reading the excellent Collector Grade Publication three-part volume on the FN FAL rifle. In it is contained the transcript of the 1950 Light Rifle trials, which pitted the American T25 design (a rifle that was at once a hybrid of the M1 Garand and BAR, but at the same time much more than that) by Earle Harvey, the Anglo-Polish EM-2 design by Stefan Janson, and the Anglo-Belgian FN FAL design – by none other than Dieudonné Saive, John M. Browning’s Belgian protégé – against the Second World War veteran the M1 Garand. The tests were comprehensive, but not all included the “control” rifle – the M1. Why this was so is not clear to me. In the rain tests, the M1 beat the EM-2 and was not so far behind the FAL and T25, and in the cold tests the M1 was a clear winner, functioning flawlessly (this would be echoed later when the T44E2 would beat the FAL in trials in Alaska, preventing its cancellation and eventually leading to the adoption of its descendant, the T44E4 as the M14, in 1957).

With the introduction of the successful metallic cartridge in the 1840s, an explosion of innovation directed towards rapid-firing infantry weapons rocked the world. The culmination of this would be the mass-produced self-loading rifle, realized with the adoption of the Garand in 1933, its standardization in 1936, and eventually its mass production after 1939. However, the Garand was far from the first self-loader ever devised; many know of the Mexican-Swiss Mondragon rifle, but even earlier than that were the Cei-Rigotti of 1898, the STA series of rifles from France beginning in 1896, and the Madsen-Rasmussen of 1888, to name a few. Many of these early rifles worked fairly well, even; the Madsen-Rasmussen, Mondragon , RSC 1917, Mauser Selbstlader, and several other weapons were successful enough to be adopted in some capacity by military forces. Why, then, did the world have to wait until the late 1930s to finally realize the standard-issue selfloading rifle?