Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I want to touch on a couple of really cool
little anecdotes from the development of the M1 carbine.
I did a longer, bigger scale video on really the big picture of the M1 carbine fairly recently,
and I left out some of these details because they weren't suitable to an overview sort of video.
But ... they're such cool elements to the story that I really want to share them with you.
And I think people with manufacturing experience in particular will really appreciate just how ...
like the story of the M1 carbine is so much more impressive than you even realise.
The ... mythology in American pop culture, such as it is, about the M1 carbine
is that "Carbine" Williams, David Marshall Williams, this out of jail, ex-con, ex-bootlegger, shot a cop,
gets out of jail and like out of Zeus's forehead springs fully formed from his brain the M1 carbine in two weeks.
And that's basically nonsense. By the way, my source for this material is Larry Ruth's fantastic book "War Baby!",
which is one of the best, one of the most comprehensive, reference sources
on information about the M1 carbine, especially its development.
So the reality is the M1 carbine was a scaled-down version of a .30-06 calibre rifle that Winchester had been working on.
Specifically Winchester had David Marshall Williams working on it.
So the M1 carbine would embody all of the mechanical elements from the gun that Williams had been working on.
So Williams is brought in from the very beginning as part of the team to scale this rifle down to .30 carbine.
Now ... Winchester wasn't planning to do this until René Studler, who's head of Army Ordnance, sees
this 7.5 pound .30-06 calibre rifle that they're working on and says,
"There's no hope for that, like we're not going to replace the M1 with that thing.
But if you can do a .30-06 rifle at 7.5 pounds, you can absolutely do a rifle in .30 carbine at 5 pounds,
which is what we're looking for. You totally need to scale that thing down and submit it to our trials."
And Edwin Pugsley, who's running Winchester, says,
"Well, OK, if you think it's that much of a shoo-in and it's that well-suited, OK, we'll go ahead and do it."
And in 13 days Winchester pulls this off. Now they produce one pilot rifle in 13 days, and it's not Williams who does it.
They present this idea to Williams and here's the thing, Williams is a talented gun designer. He's intelligent.
He came up with the gas tappet system that's used here, he did a number of other things that were really well done.
But he's not a team player. He's short tempered, he's difficult to work with,
and when they present this plan to him his reaction, reading between the lines a little bit, is basically,
"That's way too fast of a timeline to do this, we can't possibly do it right, it won't work, impossible. I want nothing to do with this."
And ... he's specific about that, he tells Pugsley,
"Don't put my name on this, ... when this fails like I don't want it coming back on me.
This wasn't my idea. Sure, the project can be done, but not in this kind of time frame."
Well Pugsley is not deterred, ... Winchester goes ahead and works on this project without Williams.
They've only been employing him for about two years anyway, they kind of gave him this side project.
They get a couple of guys in particular from the experimental shop and the drafting department.
I would say the two real heroes of the M1 carbine are a draftsman, I don't know his formal title,
his responsibility in the project was largely doing blueprints and dimensioning, by the name of William Roemer.
And a machinist, again I don't know his formal position at Winchester,
functionally he is a machinist, by the name of Fred Humeston.
And these two guys ... they take a 7.5 pound .30-06 and just kind of fundamentally scale it down.
One of the major things that lets them do this is that William Roemer realises that
the Winchester 1905 self-loader, they can take the trigger mechanism and magazine and magazine well,
the whole assembly off the Winchester 1905 and just drop it into this new gun.
The .30-06 rifle that they were working from fed with en bloc clips, just like the M1 Garand.
... They can't do that with the .30 carbine submission, that gun is required to use box magazines.
So they're able to save a tremendous amount of time and work by realising they can just substitute this
fully developed, fully tested, ... system into their new prototype. And they do that.
Humeston and some of the other guys in the experimental shop get this gun built up.
Like they use an M1 Garand op rod, they like cut off the the gas piston end,
weld some extra weights on it to bring it up to the right weight.
This is absolutely a knock it out fast, rough-and-tumble, ... in fact there are no blueprints for this gun.
They never drew any, they didn't have time, they didn't build it from blueprints. They built this gun basically on instinct.
And they took it up in early August, August 11th they demonstrated it to some Ordnance Department officials,
I don't remember the General's name offhand. They fire a total of like 350 rounds through the thing.
It has 14 malfunctions, most of them when they ... literally hold the rifle loosely.
So like the rifle jumps back instead of being braced against the shoulder, that causes a number of malfunctions.
But in general this thing runs, and the General who's overseeing this little demonstration trial,
he is a big rifle guy. He's a competitive shooter, ... high-power marksmanship, that's his background.
And he picks this thing up and goes, "This feels fundamentally like a rifle." And he's very impressed by it.
And hey, 14 malfunctions out of 350 rounds on a gun that's this quickly knocked together, this really impresses them.
And so they say basically like, "This is great. ... Really, like finish it off,
make it what we specifically need for the trials which involves things like a double stack magazine."
So one of the reasons that that Winchester 1905 system worked so well on this prototype is that
the 1905 was chambered in .32 Winchester self-loader, which is the cartridge
that .30 carbine was based on. So they don't need to develop a new magazine even at that point.
However, the 1905 Winchester magazine is a single stack magazine, holds 5 rounds. That's not suitable for the trial.
So they have to come up with a double-stack magazine and then of course a new magazine well,
they're gonna have to adapt a trigger mechanism for it.
There's a lot more work involved at this point, because their initial prototype was ... a proof-of-concept really.
So they go back to the drawing board on like August 13th, August 12th.
And the absolute deadline for submitting a rifle to the trials is September 15th.
So they have literally one month to do this. And they have to build a complete rifle from scratch
that's gonna make it through an endurance test, a mud test, a sand test, everything.
So the plan as it starts out is that Williams, who has kind of come around a little bit like,
"Oh this thing actually worked. Well, OK, maybe, ... sure I'll help run this thing."
They've got Williams, and his job is to basically fundamentally design the gun.
And then Roemer is going to take that theoretical design and put specific dimensions on it, you know, draw it.
And then Humeston and the other guys in the experimental ... shop are going to actually build a prototype from it.
And they get a couple days in and what they find is that ... they can't work with Williams,
he is slow and careful, which ... like those are good things usually, but there's a time deadline on this.
It's it doesn't matter if you make a perfect gun in five weeks, because after ... September 15th it doesn't matter.
You can't enter it anyway. You've got to have something by the 15th.
And kind of the last straw is ... they've started working on the receiver,
and they're like three days of machine time into the receiver, and Williams decides,
"Ah, we made a mistake, we have to change something. Throw that receiver out,
the shop can work overnight and just make a new one based on this new tweaked design that I have."
And Pugsley, who's running Winchester, comes in and he has to OK this, and he hears this argument and he basically goes,
"No no, no, no, no. That's a detail. We don't have to make a whole new receiver to fix that."
And fundamentally what's going on is that Williams is not suitable for this project.
And so Pugsley takes him off the team, it's like, "Alright, we're doing this without you."
And Williams goes off and basically sulks in a corner, and starts working on his own
M1 carbine design which he would finish ... well after the deadline was up.
And it goes nowhere, and it's ultimately a dead end in history because it didn't fit the timeline.
Sometimes timelines are absolutely important, critical elements of a project like this.
Roemer and Humeston continue on and they build this rifle, and ... like final assembly is done on Friday, September 12th.
They have to submit this gun on [Monday] the 15th.
And they figure, "OK, you know, we've got all ... weekend to get a brand-new, untested gun working enough
to go through a 1,000 round endurance trial, and mud tests, and it's gonna be like 5,000 or 6,000 rounds
that are going to go through this gun in the next couple of weeks. Look, we got the whole weekend to fix it, piece of cake."
They get a call from Studler, who's like, "So, how's it going?" They're like, "Well, we don't really know yet, we haven't shot it yet."
And Studler kind of goes, "You haven't what now?"
Turns out ... the 15th is the start of the testing, but if the gun hasn't gone through a couple of preliminary things like
Aberdeen Proving Ground has to do basic photographs of it for record keeping,
and they want to run 1,000 rounds through the gun just to make sure that it works
before they waste time putting it into a full service ... testing trial.
So they actually have to get the gun up there no later than noon on Sunday.
And they're gonna take a train to do it and they have to leave Sunday morning.
So all of a sudden they don't have all weekend to get it done, they have Saturday to get it done.
And they get the thing assembled, they go out they try some shooting and the thing ... it's not reliable, it ain't working.
There are two main problems. The first is it often doesn't fully cycle.
And the second is as they shoot it, it builds up a ring of metal around the chamber
that after about 40 rounds prevents it from feeding.
So, they ... actually figure out the [second] problem fairly quickly. It turns out when they examine it in detail,
the bullets are hitting the edge of the chamber as they feed. And there's a little bit of metal getting shaved off the bullet
every time it cycles. And that builds up, and after about 40 rounds there's too much and ... the bolt won't lock.
And so they they open up the back end of the chamber just a little bit. That fixes that problem, great.
However, the gun's still not cycling. And at this point like they're having dinner on Saturday night going, "Well, what do we do now?"
Like they have time to try one thing.
Pretty much if if they guess the wrong fix, they won't have time to try a second fix.
And so their guess is that the gas port's too small, because it is kind of a small gas port,
the symptoms seem to fit with not enough gas.
And so they go, "OK, well, we'll give it a try."
Well the machine shop's on the first floor of the Winchester complex that they are in,
and the experimental shop's up on the fifth floor, all the elevators are broken.
So they're like, "Well, we'll just drill out the gas port with this drill press over here in the main machine shop."
And I can seriously just picture this, they've got two guys holding the gun freehand
in the drill press while the third guy is drilling the gas port out.
And you know exactly what's going to happen if you've worked in a machine shop,
yeah, the drill bit gets stuck halfway in and snaps off.
So, OK now, it's ... Saturday evening and they've got half a drill bit stuck in their only gun.
Well, OK, they managed to get the broken bit out, they drill the gas port through.
And they have time to fire about 300 rounds through it, and it works. They appear to have found the solution.
They send the gun off Sunday morning up to Aberdeen.
Aberdeen runs 960 rounds through it with I think three malfunctions, almost flawlessly.
Like holy crap, these guys figured it out.
And in the firearms industry in particular, this is frankly bordering on miraculous.
The idea that you could get it working that well with that little trial and error is fantastic.
And it speaks volumes to the skill and the knowledge of Roemer and Humeston in particular who made this happen.
And it gets better. So on the 15th the formal trial starts.
They're allowed to leave one guy there, ... like a company representative. And they leave Humeston, the machinist.
And by September 18th the carbine's doing great, like Winchester's way ahead of the other competitors in this contest.
And then the bolt breaks. And they look at it and like there's clearly there's a flaw in the steel that they used to make the bolt.
It's not a problem with the design of the bolt, it's just the material they used. Like shit happens, basically.
But if they don't finish the trial, they're out.
They're doing great. They ... are given a day, like, "OK, it's the 18th. The bolt has broken,
you need to have this gun back up and running on the 19th, or else you're out of the trial.
And by the way, you can't take the gun with you."
And by the way there are no blueprints for this gun because it's a one-off.
Like they were tweaking it right up to the last minute that they shipped it off to Aberdeen.
So Fred Humeston calls Winchester at 7:00 p.m. on the 18th and says, "The bolt broke, we have to make a new bolt."
Pugsley gets a couple of machinists in who work overnight roughing out a new bolt.
So ... you start with a big chunk of metal and you form the approximate shape, ... get rid of most of the material.
And then you have the finishing operations for a part like this, where you actually like cut
the exact dimensions on the locking lugs, and the exact dimensions on the firing pin hole, and everything like that.
And these are the dimensions that are really going to determine if the thing actually works.
Well, some of the shop technicians rough out a bolt for Humeston to save him some time, he takes the train back.
The morning of the 19th he gets into the shop. And he gets in there and he cuts ... all the finishing operations on the bolt from memory.
There are no blueprints. He doesn't have the gun, he can't test fit it. He cuts a brand new bolt.
Takes it back to Aberdeen, drops it in the gun, and it works.
And the Winchester submission wins the trials on this basically untested ... the idea that you could build a bolt,
like he got the head spacing right from memory, without having the gun to even test fit it once.
That man is the hero of the M1 carbine development project.
Because David Marshall Williams was off sulking, trying to figure out how to do a better gun in twice as much time.
Fred Humeston made that thing happen and he won the trials.
So I think that is a magnificent story about the skill of some of the machinists at Winchester
who made that gun happen. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the story.
Once again my reference on this is Larry Ruth's book, "War Baby!"
There are actually three volumes of this book that cover the whole scope of the M1 carbine
long after World War Two as well as during the war.
Definitely check those out. They were published by Collector Grade and I think they're still available in print today, at least for a while.
Anyway, I think a fantastic look into the history of the gun that everyone thinks today is kind of simple and ubiquitous.
Thanks for watching.
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