Johnson M1941 Rifle

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian I'm here today at the James Giulia 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's semi-automatic rifle these are a really cool lesser-known part of US military firearms technology during World War 2 this was a rifle that didn't quite compete directly with the m1 garand but well 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 spent 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 and alternative gun in military service and legitimately considering this from his perspective of course 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 guns 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 all-american 2000 the prototypes of that gun were fantastic the design was tweaked and then adapted for mass production and the result was pretty 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 u.s. paramarines they needed a light machine gun that they could jump out of airplanes with and the Johnson light machine gun had a detachable barrel 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 realizing that Wow you know the Japanese are gonna 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 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 to Holland a few of them got to the Dutch East Indies but not very many and 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 well documented used evidence of use of these guns in places like Bougainville in the Pacific Theater early in the war in fact there's a Medal of Honor winner who used a Johnson semi-automatic rifle there's a statue of him in Illinois with his Johnson semi-automatic rifle and there's an excellent amount of history about these guns actually used by the military 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 it's 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 function 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 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 in by stoner in the AR you know 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 oh 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 ten rounds can be fed by stripper clip it can also be single loaded fairly easily unlike the m1 garand and Johnson they did actually I should say they did actually experiment with box magazines in the development of the Johnson modified be AR mag is 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 were 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 firearms 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 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 u.s. 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 altered 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 in 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 recognize 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 it the energy from firing and won't be able to push it far enough back to properly cycle the gun especially in you know dirty muddy nasty conditions well when you hang a bandit on a rifle you're adding weight to the barrel and in this case there's nothing out here to hang a ban on except the barrel itself you couldn't mount it to the fore end because it's you know 14 inches back from the muzzle so hanging this big 16 inch standard-issue bayonet was a significant problem for the jumps and 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 French mas 36 not quite but similar in style the idea of how can we make a functional bayonet kind of to pass this little checkbox requirement with a 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 bandits from time to time but that problem with bayonet mounting was one of the notable areas where the army of the US military ordnance department op said you know this isn't this is not where this is inferior to the other rifles we have today because of that ban that 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's a lot of them and they're in very fine print right on the top of the receiver its caliber 30.6 semi-auto Johnson automatics was the company and some patent numbers on the left we've got our serial number be six three five five 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 that's locked and 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 very simple aperture we have this flat plate here and you'll notice it's very finely chequered that's to prevent glare and then we have a front post protected by two big wings and I don't think I'm gonna be able to get a good there you go there's your sight picture till the camera refocuses there's no 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 one 103 five seven and nine hundred but of course you have the intermediate stops that would be two that's three and so on so 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 we have all right 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 brooch cuts four locking lugs just like an ar-15 because that's 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 goes up 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 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 center when 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 and then we can remove the bolt so drop 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 pin you can see now that this is off that that pin is 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 the extractor just fell off the gun when I did this that's intentional that's not not broken you'll see there's a hole in that 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 makes this 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 a 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 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 boat 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 see the fire so you can see the back end of the firing pin here right there if the guns not in battery pushing that won't you know 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 a an annoying pain so got eight rounds in there now do a little bit of shooting the Johnson kicks because it's a thirty out six rifle this is a nice smooth shooting gun this really was really the equivalent the 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 gonna ditch the m1 and replace it with this by the time that these were available so Melvin Johnson never quite got his way but a the paramarines who used these things really liked them thank you for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video 19:41 Johnson rifles are there around but they're they're 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 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 catalog 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 you

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Views: 890,184

Rating: 4.967957 out of 5

Keywords: johnson, m1941, 1941, rotating bolt, short recoil, 30-06, dror, lmg, 1945, 1944e2, melvin johnson, garand, m1, rotary, paramarine, iwo jima, bougainville, bougaineville, usmc, 1ssf, israel, israeli, usa, united states

Id: aY19tDMDvr4

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2016