[ Johnson Model R ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Cody
Firearms Museum taking a look
at a very unusual Johnson automatic rifle.
Now I have a video on the general history
of the standard Johnson automatic rifle, the Model 1941.
Check that out if you want the overall story of this rifle.
What I want to talk about today are some of the issues surrounding some
of the very early development of the Johnson, and in particular obviously this one.
So technically speaking this is a Model R military pattern Johnson rifle,
because this dates to the point when (well, I guess ... it's kind of true throughout Johnson production)
they were looking for both civilian and military sales for the rifle.
Now the ... very, very first two prototype Johnson rifles were made by
a little machine shop that Melvin Johnson contracted with.
However, once he got to the point where he wanted to actually start
demonstrating guns for militaries, he needed to produce a couple more guns.
And this wasn't necessarily the sort of thing you could economically do
with what is basically a tool and die shop
that's going to make every part by hand, and charge you a ton of money for it.
So Johnson started looking for a corporate partner.
He had done the design, but he didn't have a rifle factory at hand. So how does he get guns made?
Well, he contracted with the Marlin Company in the fall of 1937
to make prototypes for him, with ... an eye towards Marlin then being able
to put the rifle into full-scale production when they, of course,
got the big military contracts that they were hoping they would get.
So Marlin made a number of guns.
But the initial Army trials didn't go quite as well as they were hoping.
And then by spring of 1938 Marlin was starting to look around, and realised
there's probably going to be a lot of military contracts out there for the taking.
And they made the decision that there were better options,
they didn't want to be tied down to the Johnson automatic rifle which might not succeed,
and miss out on big Army contracts for other stuff that they could make.
So in the spring of 1938 Marlin basically told Johnson,
"Hey, we can't continue this relationship."
They gave him some suggestions for alternative suppliers,
and Johnson ended up going to a company called Taft-Peirce,
and they were pretty well-respected, basically an R&D sort of shop.
And they were not capable of, and not interested in,
putting the Johnson into full-scale production.
But they were willing to take a contract with Johnson to make
something like up to 50 initial pre-production guns.
And that would allow Johnson to sort of iterate on the design,
make more examples, maybe make them in different calibres perhaps,
or take them to different countries for demonstration.
So shortly after Taft-Peirce started making Johnson rifles,
Johnson went into a second stage of military trials.
And this was in August of 1938 at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.
And at this point the Johnson rifle that's being tested uses a detachable box magazine.
Well, the magazine was causing a lot of the problems for the gun in the trials.
And the problem for Johnson was the action was pretty sound and pretty good,
but he's having problems with magazines: feed lips, magazine springs.
There wasn't adequate time to really perfect the box magazine,
and it's making his rifle look bad, and that's a real problem.
And so he started looking for alternatives and decided,
"Let's try a fixed 10 round rotary magazine."
That is the Type R ("R" for rotary) Johnson automatic rifle.
And so Taft-Peirce built (at the time) 7 of those.
They would later build ... I believe another 7 additional ones.
But they built Type R rifles, and they were making them for
both civilian and military applications, or advertising.
And one of the other issues they were having at the time with militaries
is that militaries wanted a bayonet on the rifle,
and the original early Johnsons didn't have any provision for a bayonet.
Remember they have a recoiling barrel, and so a bayonet's
potentially kind of a tricky thing, but they wanted it.
So in addition to making rotary ... magazine rifles,
Taft-Peirce also made a couple of ... Model Rs that had bayonet lugs on them.
And if you're going to do the bayonet lug, well, also try having maybe a heat shield on it,
or handguard on the whole barrel.
So this was the military pattern of the rotary magazine Johnson.
Alright, so if you're really familiar with the Johnson, you've already been looking at this
and being like, ... "That rifle's not right, like there's things wrong with that," and you are correct.
In this case the magazine on this has been replaced with a
... standard production rotary magazine.
The profile of the original Taft-Peirce Type R magazines was a little bit different,
didn't have the same pattern of reinforcing ribs in it primarily.
And it didn't have the Parkerised type finish to it, so you'll notice
most of the gun is blued, this is kind of this greyish Parkerised colour.
That's because this is a replacement magazine.
However, it is the standard pattern of the magazine developed for the Type R.
And this sort of thing is not uncommon in prototype guns like this.
This was a rifle that Johnson was going to have on hand.
And if they wanted to do more experimenting with it,
and, say, the early magazine got damaged in some test somewhere.
Well, just replace the magazine with the current one, that's a better design anyway.
Companies like this, all companies generally,
don't look at their early products as historically valuable items
when they're in the middle of desperately trying to save the company and actually get a contract.
So early prototype guns are simply tools to be used to further the company goals.
Same thing goes for the rear sight, this is a later style of standard rear sight.
The actual Type R had ... functionally the same sort of sight,
but had a round aperture back here, a little different style of windage knob.
Just a few stylistic changes.
Now that said, here's the stuff that is totally original and really cool.
There's a little tiny Taft-Peirce, TP, manufacturing stamp there with the company name.
And then the receiver markings on this rifle are different
than what you would eventually have on the standard production guns.
It's interesting that it has a US patent mark on it, US patent numbers on it,
and it also has a Canadian patent mark on it.
And then we have our serial number here, which is R-14.
Now the initial batch of production was 7 Model R rifles.
They would eventually get to at least number 17.
That was the one that was used in US military trials in 1939, we'll touch on that a little bit later.
But very limited production of these guns by Taft-Peirce.
But really you didn't click on this video to look at the markings.
Well, a few you did, most of you clicked on it to look at this funky, weird handguard.
So if we take a look at this up a little closer, this whole assembly is fixed to the barrel.
So one of the things about the Johnson is that it is a recoil operated action,
which means that every time the rifle cycles,
the barrel is going to cycle backwards to unlock the bolt.
In theory, you could fix the handguard and the bayonet lug to the receiver shroud here,
and have the barrel reciprocate inside it.
Or you can mount this all to the barrel and have it all reciprocate together.
There are pros and cons both ways.
So the way that they have set this up you're adding a bunch of weight to the barrel.
And especially when you mount a bayonet on this
(this is, by the way, set up for a Krag or a Springfield bayonet),
that adds a lot more weight. And the balance of the rifle's functioning,
like the dynamics of how this functions, are based on movement of the barrel.
So you make the barrel heavier, it's going to move slower.
That's potentially going to cause reliability issues
if you don't change around some things like spring weights,
or remove weight elsewhere on the barrel assembly to compensate.
This would eventually lead to Johnson developing his own, very lightweight, spike-type bayonet.
Now the other option would have been to fix all of this stuff to the receiver.
The potential hazard there is then you're adding potentially a lot of friction areas,
say, up here where the barrel has to cycle inside this front nose cap.
And if that gets a little bit of dirt in it, or if it gets wet and rusts,
that also causes major reliability problems.
I would tend to agree, I think, with Johnson and do it this way,
make this all reciprocating mass, and then try and rebalance the gun to handle it.
It's a little bit interesting to me that they went ahead and
put a sling swivel out on the front of the bayonet,
given that there was already a sling swivel
on the receiver to go along with the one on the buttstock.
But I suppose that gives someone the option of how they want to exactly configure the sling.
The one other very real argument against this whole thing is that part of the design intent
of the Johnson was to allow the barrel to cool very well by having the whole barrel exposed.
And you can see that with the perforated front receiver shroud here.
It allows air flow through to the barrel.
Well, you put a handguard on it like this,
and you're trapping a lot of that heat inside the handguard on the barrel.
Is that a big deal or not? That's hard to say,
because ultimately no one ever adopted the gun with this sort of handguard on it.
Although it does give you the potential benefit of if you ... jump up and grab the gun to move,
you may well grab it out on the barrel.
And if the gun's got nice and hot, you can have a situation
that you grab the barrel and burn yourself, and the handguard is certainly nice for that.
Now on the other, other hand of course, everything being compromises,
there are benefits to having a handguard out here.
One of them, probably the most significant one,
is that this handguard makes the rifle much more practical for actual bayonet fighting.
And that was another complaint against the Johnson in its original form
with the exposed barrel is, ... especially if you've been firing the rifle, the barrel gets very hot.
If you're going to actually use the bayonet in combat, it's much more practical
to ... have the option at least of holding the gun out at the end like this.
And that handguard makes that possible.
After these were manufactured, Johnson left on a trip to Europe to demonstrate the gun
and try to make some foreign military sales, and this was in 1939.
He first took the gun to Britain where they did some testing, they were kind of impressed, but
probably could have seen this coming, especially if he'd been more open,
a little less optimistic and perhaps biased about his own rifle.
The British were not interested in adopting a rifle that was not chambered for .303 British.
They figured, "Hey, we took the ZB-26 and adapted it to .303.
Anyone else that wants to sell us rifles, they can do the same thing."
But Johnson wasn't interested in trying to adapt this to a rimmed cartridge,
which indeed would have been quite a lot of work.
So the British trials ended up going nowhere.
He had also been planning to demonstrate the rifle in the Netherlands,
but that visit was called off on a forecast with a high probability of Nazis.
There was a significant concern about imminent invasion of the Netherlands,
and that put off his testing there.
He wanted to demonstrate the rifle to the French military,
but they just really weren't interested in it at all, they were pretty happy with the MAS 36.
And of course what Johnson didn't know is that the French were working
intensively on their own semi-automatic rifle.
They came very close to getting it into production before the war.
So they didn't want to take on something new, foreign, and commercial.
So he went home from this trip rather kind of dejected.
... He'd thought that there was really high hopes for these rifles.
And in particular this exact pattern is one of the ones that was on this demonstration trip.
Well he gets home. Ultimately ... late 1939 is the final definitive test with the US military.
And the Johnson does reasonably well, but fails to impress the military to the point
that they're willing to replace the M1 Garand with the Johnson.
And eventually he would get his one major contract, which was indeed with the Netherlands.
That would come in the spring of 1940, and from there we can
move along to the general story of the production Johnson automatic rifle.
So, I think it's really cool to get a chance to look at this sort of "What if?"
When you are designing a rifle like this for different clients,
there are a lot of experimental models that often come up as,
"Maybe they'll like this, maybe they'll like that."
And we normally don't get to see that sort of thing.
And it's very cool that this one has been preserved here in the Cody Firearms Museum collection.
In fact, once I'm done filming it here it will go back up on display in the public gallery,
where it's visible to anyone who comes to the museum.
Along with thousands of other very cool firearms, both experimental and standard production,
from hundreds of years ago to fairly close to the present day.
So if you're in the Cody area, and it is a beautiful area,
I would strongly encourage you to stop in,
check out the Cody Firearms Museum, and tell them I sent you.
Thanks for watching.