[ M1C Sniper Garand ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the James Julia
Auction House taking a look at some of the guns
they're going to be selling in their upcoming
October of 2016 Firearms Auction.
And today we're taking a look at an M1C Garand.
This was the first adopted US semi-automatic sniper's rifle, and it was kind of a dismal failure.
These are extremely rare and collectible guns.
Unfortunately they are highly faked guns as well, and we'll get into why in a moment.
But let's begin by pointing out that when World War Two started
the US had a semi-automatic standard infantry rifle.
And yet the ... sniper rifles that were actually used in World War Two were all bolt-action rifles.
Well, a lot of people saw that as a problem.
"Why are we restricting snipers with this old bolt-action system
when we've got the fancy new high-tech stuff for the regular infantry grunt?"
So there was a project to develop a sniping version of the M1
at Springfield Armoury, as well as being open to other entrants.
And ultimately after some experimentation,
including prismatic scopes and some interesting ideas,
ultimately the decision came down to two different variants: the M1E7 and the M1E8.
Now the E8 was a version that was designed by John Garand himself (and team members),
and that would actually go on to be adopted as the M1D.
Now, we'll take a look at that in a later video.
The M1E7 was a system designed by the Griffin & Howe Company,
a well-known sporting rifle manufacturer out of New York.
And theirs was adopted as the M1C.
Now ... the Springfield Armoury was not happy about that decision.
They thought there were a lot of problems with the M1C design, and they had some good points.
Now the way this system works is basically just a scope rail
screwed onto the left side of an M1 Garand receiver.
The advantage here was it required
basically no other modification to the gun except a couple of holes in the receiver.
And ... it was 3 holes for screws and 2 holes for tapered pins.
And you put the pins in to hold the mount in place,
tighten down the screws, stake them in place and - done.
And then you have a detachable scope base,
which we can take off like this.
So you can carry this around in a protective container or can.
Mount it on, with presumably no loss of zero, when you need to shoot.
Lock it down, presto, you're good to go.
The problems with this: really the problems all came down to cost and accuracy.
And it seems that actually political machinations
... probably had a lot to do with the adoption of the M1C.
So ... let's start with the first problem
which is these scope bases had to be installed before the receivers were heat treated.
Because once they are heat treated, they are very hard and they're much more difficult to drill accurately.
So Springfield, (which by the way, is the only manufacturer of M1s that made sniper rifles)
Springfield would send receivers to Griffin & Howe before they'd been heat treated.
Griffin & Howe would mount this rail and send it back to Springfield,
who would then heat treat the whole assembly.
Now you might be wondering, ... "How complex is this if ... Springfield Armoury,
the nation's premier military firearms facility,
can't handle this scope mount installation themselves?"
Well, no, it wasn't hard at all. It was 5 holes drilled in the receiver,
and 3 of them tapped, it was a very simple process.
Which is kind of what points to politics being ... some of ... what was going on in the background.
Griffin & Howe made a nice chunk of money doing this work
that was really actually quite simple work.
Now maybe there was some patent or copyright stuff involved.
But it seems more likely that some senator
managed to get involved in the appropriations process,
and decided it would be really good for his district in New York
if Griffin & Howe got this nice lucrative contract to do this.
Now, this annoyed the snot out of Springfield Armoury because,
in addition to it being kind of insulting that
they weren't ... able to handle drilling a couple of holes,
it was also a big ... obstacle in their production process.
They had to take things out of the production line, send them to New York 150 miles away,
get them back, put them back into process.
It was annoying, it was inefficient.
So there was a second problem involved with this ... rail mounting system,
and that came up with accuracy testing.
With the early guns it was discovered that there were major accuracy problems
with a lot of these early guns.
And some testing revealed that the reason
was that the steel composition was a little bit different between the receiver and the scope rail.
I mean that ... shouldn't be surprising, they weren't intended to be made exactly the same.
And the rail and the receiver have different requirements for strength,
and flexibility, and durability, and all that sort of thing.
The problem was they were being permanently fixed together:
screws, pins, and stakes, and then heat treated as one unit.
And the heat treat would affect the two different compositions of steel slightly differently,
and you'd end up with a little bit of warping between the two parts,
which caused major accuracy issues.
So after that was discovered,
they realised what they had to do was send the receivers to Griffin & Howe,
who would set the ... rails in place but not stake the screws.
They'd come back to Springfield where the bases would then be removed,
and at this point they started serialising the bases so they knew which rifle they went to.
Springfield would remove the bases, heat treat the bases and the receivers separately,
and then reinstall them and stake the screws down at that point.
And this is kind of a stupid process to have to go through.
But once they figured that out, OK, they were able to address that accuracy issue.
There was another accuracy issue that came up that it turned out that the tolerances
on the scope base and the scope mount weren't really all that well done,
and they led to looseness.
There ... were a lot of these scope mounts that just didn't hold a zero well, so they had to fix that.
They went back and adjusted the tolerances, adjusted the engineering drawings,
fixed that problem as well.
They discovered that the flash hiders, if they weren't nice and tight,
those would actually cause the rifles to shoot worse.
Now if they were tight, if they were done well and properly,
they could actually enhance the accuracy of the rifle.
But if they were loose, they'd mess up the barrel harmonics and you'd get a rifle
that actually shot worse than without the flash hider on it. So they had to fix that.
All of these things led to basically the M1C never being issued in World War Two.
The guns were adopted in 1944, but it took them long enough
to get all these production issues worked out that the first few rifles were
just barely being shipped out and issued in the Pacific when the war finally ended.
They were never used in the European theatre because
they just hadn't figured out how to get them quite right by the time the war ended in Europe.
So that is the M1C. Now I've kind of made it sound like a pretty lousy rifle.
All that aside, once they got into the field, you know what? They worked.
They were durable scopes, they were effective rifles.
... Here I go again, one of the other problems with the M1C
because they were mounting these rails on bare unassembled receivers,
there was no way to tell how accurate the rifle was going to be
when you picked it out to be a sniper rifle.
You put the rail on, and then the whole rest of the rifle got assembled,
and then you got to test fire it and see if it was a nice accurate gun or if it was a piece of junk.
And a lot of them were pieces of junk, relatively speaking.
They may have met standard M1 infantry rifle accuracy requirements,
but not good enough for a sniper rifle.
The infantry rifle was about a 4 minute of angle gun.
The M1C requirement was 3 minute of angle,
which is still not something that most people today would consider an accurate rifle.
So a lot of these guns had to go back and be reworked.
There are a lot of little speciality things you can do to an M1 to make it shoot better.
And a lot of that work had to be done to these things
before they would really be effective sniper rifles.
That said, they were in service for quite some time.
While they didn't see use in World War Two, they did see use in Korea.
In total about 8,000 of these were manufactured by the end of 1945.
And then actually about half of them were un-manufactured.
The scope mounts were removed, the holes were plugged,
and the rifles were reverted back to standard configuration. I believe in the late '50s.
Unfortunately, that led to a lot of those surplus scope rails
becoming available on the commercial market where they were used to,
in many cases, make fake M1C snipers.
With all that in mind, let's go ahead and take a closer look at the rifle.
We'll take a look at some of the specifications of the scope,
and cheek pad and a couple of the other accessories.
So of course, one of the obvious distinguishing features here
is that the scope on this rifle is offset to the left.
And of course that had to be done because the M1 feeds from a solid 8 round clip
that has to go straight in the top of the rifle.
There's really no effective way to single feed the M1.
So if you're going to put a scope on it, you can't have the scope interfere with your loading.
So the answer was to offset the scope to the left.
Now in order to facilitate that they added a cheek pad to the rifle.
It's a leather cheek pad.
What's kind of unusual about it is, if you're used to add-on cheek rests on scoped rifles,
normally you think of that as something that comes up over the top of the comb here
to lift your eye up to scope level.
Well, on the M1C the level of the optic is basically the same as the level of the iron sights.
This scope is ... able to be mounted very low because it's offset.
However, obviously it's mounted off to the left.
So the purpose of this cheek pad is not to raise your cheek,
but to move your cheek to the left, and that's what it does.
Now if we look at the mount, you can see the two levers here on the side.
If I rotate those forward, I can then slide the scope off the front of this dovetailed rail.
That works nice and smoothly, that actually worked pretty well,
it's a nice stable mounting platform.
As long as the underlying rail is in good shape and the fit between the two is good,
you'll be able to hold zero when that scope comes on and off.
You'll see there are two pins here, and then three Allen head screws.
If we look on the inside of the receiver,
you can see all those things coming through on the inside.
Now standard Army practice was to peen those screws in place so they wouldn't back out.
This particular rifle is a Marine Corps rework, that's why those screws are not peened.
This has a 1950s barrel, and if we look right here you can see it's marked,
it's a little hard to see, there you go, SA 52.
So that's why this one isn't peened in place.
I should point out there are no special markings, aside from this Marine Corps rework.
On a standard M1C you won't find anything special, it's not going to be marked "M1C" anywhere.
It'll just say "US Rifle, Calibre .30, Springfield Armory",
which is the only [one] of the M1 manufacturers that made sniper rifles.
And the serial numbers will be between 3.2 and 3.8 million, that's really all you can say.
There are some known blocks of rifles, because the receivers were sent in small batches each time,
but that's more in depth than we're going to get into in this video.
Now the scope that was used with this was a Lyman Alaskan.
Which was a commercial rifle scope designed in 1937,
and first introduced in Lyman's catalogue in 1939.
And it really was a very good scope for the day.
It was a 2.5x power scope. These had a 35 foot field of view at 100 yards.
They had a 5 inch eye relief, which is pretty nice, that's long enough to be
comfortably shootable, you're not going to jam the scope into your eye shooting this.
We have windage and elevation adjustments here on the scope.
And 1 minute of angle adjustments, I should mention.
Now there ... were some commercial Lyman Alaskans that were used early on.
But the standard scopes fall into two different categories,
the M81 and the M82 were their designations.
You can see this as an M82, the only difference between those two is the reticle.
So the M82 is what the Army preferred, and that has a single vertical post reticle.
The M81 was the commercial version of the reticle, which was a simple crosshair.
I should also point out the difference
between the commercial and the military scopes was this sunshade added to the front,
and this rubber eye cup added to the back.
So that's the reticle of the M82, it is very, very simple, just a single vertical post
(Zoom back out of the scope here.)
You can see this is offset enough that you could still use the iron sights, if you wanted to.
Now let's take a look at these adjustments, because ...
this works on a commercial hunting type rifle, but it was not ideal for a military sniper.
So if you want to make any adjustments, the first thing you have to do is take off this threaded cap.
Once that's out of the way, then we have a little dial here, you can see this is pretty small.
And ... those numbers are minutes of angle.
So each of these little white hash marks is 2 minutes,
and you have clicks in between.
So this has 1 minute of angle adjustments on both elevation and windage.
They're quiet, they're kind of subtle, you can feel them, but
you cannot hear them there I am assuming.
I can just barely hear them, in fact I think I can feel them more than I can hear them.
And it's not going to come through the microphone.
So this is not a super-easy user-friendly system to adjust.
Also the magnification is relatively low, 2.5x power.
However, what this scope did have going for it was durability.
The Lyman scope was a durable piece, a rugged piece, it was well weatherised.
That's something that we really take for granted today,
that your scope's not going to fog up in inclement weather.
But in the 1930s that ... was more of a novel feature than it has become today.
So these scopes were good at all of those things.
From a basic military point of view, this is a scope that would work.
It would always work, it would keep working, you could use it as a backup weapon if you needed to.
And that was more important to the military than having something that was
... had the most potential precision for a sniper.
So we'll also take a look at this flash hider.
Obviously this was seen as a more specialised requirement of a sniper
to conceal the source of muzzle flash a bit.
And this flash hider is a pretty simple thing, it's just a clamp-on accessory.
It snaps onto the bayonet lug and the muzzle,
and it's just a plain hollow cone.
If it's raining, by the way, and you have one of these on your M1, don't carry it muzzle up.
As one of the early manuals points out, it will act like a funnel
to direct rainwater down the bore of your rifle, which is a problem.
And to fit this you just slide it on: it's held there, held there,
and that little spring latch loops around behind the bayonet lug and holds it in place.
So you can see this: "Hider, Flash, M2".
As I mentioned, Aberdeen did some studying on these flash hiders,
and discovered that if they were loose, kind of like this, which most of them were,
they would contribute to some significant accuracy problems with a rifle.
Now if they were a nice tight fit you didn't have that issue.
But this is part of the reason that when the M1C was in production
the acceptance rate on first-run rifles was only 40%.
So more than half of the M1Cs that came right out of the factory were immediately rejected.
And apparently the rework success rate was even less, it was only about 20%.
Once a rifle got rejected, only about one in five of them could actually
be restored up to the level of accuracy that was required for service adoption.
Well, thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
These really are very cool, interesting, and collectible rifles,
even if they didn't really fill the sniper rifle role quite as well as
everyone had hoped back when they were being manufactured.
There are very few of these out there, it's especially difficult
to find ones that are true, proper provenanced, authentic M1Cs.
And that's why I took the opportunity to take a look at this one today, because it is.
So, if you'd be interested in adding this to your own collection,
definitely the highlight of any US World War Two collection, or M1 Garand collection,
well, take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to the James Julia catalogue page on the rifle,
where you can look at their pictures and their description.
And if you like the thing you can place a bid by phone,
or come up here and participate live in the auction.
Thanks for watching.