[ Johnson M1941 Rifle ]
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
that they're going to be selling in their upcoming
October of 2016 Firearms Auction.
And today we're taking a look at a Model of 1941
Johnson semi-automatic rifle.
These are a really cool, lesser known part of US military firearms technology during World War Two.
This was a rifle that didn't quite compete directly with the M1 Garand.
But ... basically Melvin Johnson designed this rifle in 1936,
right as the M1 was being finally approved and put into initial production.
And Johnson thought his rifle was better than the M1 for several different reasons.
And ... he really worked hard petitioning the government and the military to adopt his rifle,
not necessarily in place of the M1,
although I'm sure he would have been thrilled if that had been the outcome,
but what he was really hoping for was to get his rifle as a substitute,
a secondary, an alternative gun in military service.
And legitimately, considering this from his perspective
(of course it would be great for him if they adopted it), but
there is some validity to the concern, especially early on, that
who knows how well the M1 is actually going to work once it's in mass production?
There are a lot of guns out there where the initial handmade prototypes are fantastic,
and work great, and have a ton of potential.
And then when the gun is transferred, when that design has to blend into mass production,
tolerances change, clearances change, manufacturing techniques change.
And sometimes guns just don't come out of that process well.
In fact, an excellent example would be the Colt All American 2000.
The prototypes of that gun were fantastic.
The design was tweaked and then adapted for mass production,
and the result was ... a pretty dismal failure.
Well Johnson was concerned, maybe altruistically, and maybe selfishly,
that that might be the case with the M1 Garand.
And if it was, he wanted to be there with an answer, both for himself and for his country.
So despite all of his best work, the gun was only adopted in very, very small numbers by the US military.
In fact it wasn't formally adopted at all.
He had a companion light machine gun to this, which we have a separate full video on,
and that gun was actually adopted by the US Paramarines.
They needed a light machine gun that they could jump out of airplanes with,
and the Johnson light machine gun had a ... quick, easy-detachable barrel.
It was a nice light gun to begin with, it fit that requirement perfectly, and so they were adopted.
Well at that time
there just happened to be a whole lot of Johnson semi-automatic rifles available for the taking,
and a number of Paramarines kind of helped themselves to these rifles somewhat unofficially.
Now the reason that these existed was,
while Johnson had been unable to get the US military to buy a lot of Johnson rifles,
he was able to successfully sell a batch of 30,000 to the Dutch government.
And he made this sale very early, before the US was even in the war.
And the Dutch were realising that, "Wow, the Japanese are going to be a big potential threat,
we need a lot more armament for the Dutch East Indies." That's where these guns were headed.
And then the Japanese did in fact invade,
and pretty quickly conquer and secure the Dutch East Indies.
At which point, well, the Johnson rifles, most of them hadn't shipped.
Some of them I believe had shipped to Holland,
a few of them got to the Dutch East Indies, but not very many.
And they were not able to be put to good use.
And there were still a lot of them left in the United States,
basically sitting on the docks ready to go, with nowhere to go.
And so some enterprising Marines got their hands on those rifles,
and there is ... evidence of use of these guns in places like Bougainville
in the Pacific Theatre early in the war.
In fact there's a Medal of Honour winner who used a Johnson semi-automatic rifle,
there's a statue of him in Illinois with his Johnson semi-automatic rifle.
There's an excellent amount of history about these guns actually used by the ... US military,
despite not being formally adopted.
So, mechanically what we have here is a short recoil gun.
Meaning that the barrel reciprocates, not far, about a half an inch, every time you fire.
That reciprocation is locked with the bolt.
And by the end of that travel the bolt has rotated slightly and unlocked,
and can then travel backwards on residual inertia and [operate] the gun.
This has a rotating bolt, in fact, when we take a look at the bolt
you'll notice it looks a lot like an AR-15 bolt, and that's for good reason.
Melvin Johnson would go on to work briefly with Eugene Stoner
early in the development of the AR-15 (or AR-10 rifle really).
And it is expressly this locking system that was used ... by Stoner in the AR.
Pretty much all good ideas in firearms for the last many decades
have been combining this good feature from that idea,
and this good feature from something else,
and putting them together into a package that's very effective.
The magazine on the Johnson is an interesting kind of an unusual type.
It is actually a rotary magazine, it has a spool that will hold 10 rounds.
It can be fed by stripper clip, it can also be single loaded fairly easily, unlike the M1 Garand.
... I should say, they did actually experiment with box magazines in the development of the Johnson.
Modified BAR mags, kind of like everything of that era.
And the government wasn't necessarily interested in a detachable box magazine
on an infantry rifle, and there are some good reasons for that.
It would prevent you from getting into a really low prone position,
which was something that was of more concern then than it is today.
Possibly we are less concerned about it today
because people don't want to give up the extended magazines that they have today, but.
There was also concern about damaging the magazines,
magazines were more expensive than clips.
There were a wide variety of reasons that you might choose not to use a detachable box magazine.
Now Melvin Johnson thought that the idea of a recoil-operated firearm
was a much better idea than a gas piston.
There's nothing out at the front end of this gun to get damaged, or break, or erode the rifling.
The Johnson handles really nicely because there isn't a lot of weight out at the front end.
Melvin Johnson thought these were really compelling benefits.
In actual testing the Johnson wasn't perfect, it had its flaws like every rifle.
And ultimately it really kind of came out neck and neck, even with the M1 Garand.
And had it been around in the testing in like 1932,
I think there's a decent possibility that the US might have ended up adopting this rifle.
However, by the time it was developed and available a couple of years later,
the M1 was already far enough along in the adoption and production process that
the Johnson would have had to be substantially better to be worth
throwing away all the work that had already been done to adopt this other rifle instead.
And in reality the Johnson wasn't a bad gun,
it was pretty much the equal of the M1 on average.
And that wasn't sufficient to justify adopting it over the M1 at that time.
I should point out, one of the particular complaints that the Army had,
and while this may have been a big concern then,
I think it's something that we recognise today as being
really not such an issue, is a bayonet lug.
Because this is a short recoil gun,
the design is based on a specific weight of the barrel that's going to be moving.
If you make the barrel too heavy, ... the energy from firing ...
won't be able to push it far enough back to properly cycle the gun.
Especially in dirty, muddy, nasty conditions.
Well, when you hang a bayonet on a rifle, you're adding weight to the barrel.
And in this case there's nothing out here to hang a bayonet on except the barrel itself.
You couldn't mount it to the forend because it's 14 inches back from the muzzle.
So hanging this big 16 inch standard-issue bayonet
was a significant problem for the Johnson, it would cause it to not run right.
So Johnson developed his own special bayonet, which is a little minimalist spike bayonet.
Kind of like what you'd see on an FG-42 or a French MAS 36.
Not quite, but similar in style.
The idea of, "How can we make a functional bayonet
to pass this little check-box requirement with the minimal amount of weight necessary."
And the Johnson bayonet is kind of a flimsy afterthought, really.
Some Johnston's don't even have bayonet lugs,
this one happens to be produced with a bayonet lug on it.
And you do find the bayonets from time to time. But,
that problem with bayonet mounting was one of the notable areas
where the Army, the US military Ordnance Department, ... said,
"You know, this ... is inferior to the other rifles we have today because of that bayonet issue."
Anyway, why don't we go ahead and take a closer look at this,
let's take it apart and go through the disassembly process.
So we'll start by taking a quick look at the markings here.
There is a lot of them, and they're in very fine print right on the top of the receiver.
It's calibre .30-06 semi-auto. Johnson Automatics was the company.
Some patent numbers on the left.
And we've got our serial number B6355 there on the bottom.
Now regarding controls we have a bolt handle,
and to open the bolt you actually have to unlock it first, which requires pushing it up.
So you push it up and then cycle it backwards.
If you just try and pull it while it's down, it's locked and it won't go anywhere.
This is where you actually load cartridges, you can see a stripper clip guide right here.
And if you want to single load, you push this down, stuff cartridges in one at a time.
That actually works really well, that's a slick system.
We have a safety here in front of the trigger guard.
This is fire, that is safe, so just a simple little throw switch there.
So the Johnson sight picture is a very simple aperture.
We have this flat plate here, and you'll notice it's
very finely checkered, that's to prevent glare.
And then we have a front post protected by two big wings.
And I don't think I'm going to be able to get a good ...
- oh, there you go, there's your sight picture. Till the camera refocuses.
... This knob on the right is your windage adjustment.
Very simple, it just threads that flat plate with the aperture left and right.
Then elevation is adjusted with this rear tangent sight.
This is actually in concept very much like an early commercial type of tangent sight.
And what we do is just lift up on this,
move that to the appropriate position, and it lifts the rear sight up.
So it's marked at 100, 3, 5, 7 and 900, but of course you have the intermediate stops.
That would be 2, that's 3, and so on.
Now I mentioned that the barrel reciprocates, which it does just like that.
And it is basically because the barrel has to be free to reciprocate
that it is so easy to take the barrel out.
... Alright, I took the sling off to make this a little bit simpler,
so it doesn't get in the way of our view.
To remove the barrel we have a plunger in that hole,
this is designed to be taken apart entirely with a cartridge.
I have a dummy cartridge here.
Put that in there, push down on the plunger,
that pops the release on this locking bar.
And then all I have to do is push the barrel in slightly, and that will pop up.
Now I just unlock the bolt, pull it back just a hair,
and then the barrel slides right out the front.
If you look at the breech end of this barrel, you'll see all those broach cuts for locking lugs.
Just like an AR-15, because [this is] where the idea came from.
So the next step for disassembly is to remove this rear cover.
We have another plunger pin right here, I'm going to push that in, and then lift this piece up and out.
That goes there.
... There we go.
So now you can see that.
This lifts up and out, and that's just a cover over the back of the receiver.
Once we're in there, now we can see this tail which rides on the bolt.
And this is our recoil spring, the actual spring is down here in the stock.
And our next step in disassembly is to pull this forward, push the bolt [tail] up.
We can use our cartridge again to just pull that up out of the way.
And now this is accessible to pull the bolt back out of the rifle.
However, there's something we have to do first, and that is to remove the bolt handle.
Getting the bolt handle out is probably the trickiest single step of disassembly.
You can see there's a little pin in the centre.
What we actually have to do is grab that pin and lift it up.
And then we slide the bolt handle forward in its slot.
The bolt handle will come out the front, then we can remove the bolt.
So ... prop this up so you can see it, sort of.
There we go, that's a weird process to get.
A lot of people will resort to using pliers to grab that little pin.
So once this comes out the front,
you can see, ... now that this is off, that ... that's the same pin.
So what you're doing is lifting that up, so that it comes out of its little locking hole.
Once that is out, then we can pull out this thing.
And then the whole bolt slides out the back of the action.
Now you'll notice that the extractor just fell off the gun when I did this.
That's intentional, that's not broken.
You'll see there's a hole in that, and there's a hole in the bolt here below it,
and the extractor is held in place by this pin on the charging handle.
Which is a cool feature in that ... it's impossible for this to just fall out during use,
but it's extremely easy to take out if you need to replace it.
On a lot of guns the extractor is under a ton of spring tension, and little tiny pins,
and you need punches, and it's generally really obnoxious to try and remove and replace.
Now, lastly, we can separate the front of the bolt from the back.
The back of the bolt here has the firing pin and firing pin spring.
The front of the bolt is the bolt head with the locking lugs, looks very much like an AR there.
So in order to travel in the receiver, these two have to be lined up parallel like this.
When the bolt goes all the way forward, this tail has spring pressure on it.
It's pushing forward, and it is going to force the front end of the bolt to rotate, like that.
That rotation locks the locking lugs in place, and then the gun is ready to fire.
... So you can see the back end of the firing pin here, right there.
If the gun's not in battery, ... you can see the firing pin there, but it's not exposed.
Once the gun is locked like this,
then the firing pin will come through the breech face and can fire.
And then when the gun recoils, this comes back locked into the barrel.
A camming surface in the receiver forces the back end over like that,
and then the whole thing can travel backwards to cycle.
So there you go, one complete field stripped Johnson 1941 rifle.
I think it is high time that I put this back together,
and we take it out to the range and put a few rounds through it.
So this does have a stripper clip guide, and I can feed it via stripper clip.
Push the rounds far enough in, there we go.
Or you can also load them with individual rounds.
So I can take one round at a time, ... there we go.
So unlike the M1, this could be easily topped off so to speak.
You can with the M1 as well, but it's kind of an annoying pain.
So, got 8 rounds in there now, do a little bit of shooting.
The Johnson kicks because it's a .30-06 rifle. It's a nice smooth shooting gun.
This really was really the equivalent, the equal, of the M1 Garand.
It was just a little bit too late to be an effective competitor.
There was no way that they were going to ditch the M1 and replace it with this
by the time that these were available.
So Melvin Johnson never quite got his way,
but ... the Paramarines who used these things really liked them.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
1941 Johnson rifles, ... they are around,
but they are pretty desirable and they're kind of hard to find.
So this particular one is a pretty nice gun.
As you can see it ran perfectly for me out there, the bit of shooting we did with it.
If you'd like to own it yourself,
do your own comparison trials between it and the M1,
and see which one you think is better, which one you prefer shooting.
Well, take a look at the description text below the video,
you'll find a link there to the Julia catalogue page on this rifle.
You can take a look at their pictures and description, and if you don't like the looks of this one,
I believe there are two others in the Sporting and Collectibles Auction that Julia is having,
the early days session of this upcoming auction.
So take a look through their catalogue, you'll find the other two as well if you're interested.
And you can place bids on any or all of those over the phone,
or here live in Maine in person at the auction.
Thanks for watching.