Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on
ForgottenWeapons.com, I'm Ian McCollum. And today we're gonna take a look at the M1 carbine. This is in no way actually a forgotten weapon, but I think there are some important elements of the story behind the M1 carbine that you may not be familiar with, and I think it's important to recognise and understand the carbine in the form in which it was adopted in order to better understand the guns that
attempted to become the M1 carbine but failed. And also to understand where this weapon went
through its development cycle after World War Two. So just to put it in a little bit of context,
the M1 carbine did not exist prior to 1941, and by the end of 1945 more than
6 million of them had been manufactured. That is the most production of any American
military firearm during World War Two. We made more of these than
M1 Garand rifles, believe it or not. So there had been requests from the military for a light rifle. They showed up in 1938, although I believe
there were some sporadic requests before that. In 1938 they were pretty serious, like we'd really like to have a light
carbine, a light rifle, something in this sort of general form factor. And they were ignored by the ... Ordnance Department
because, well, there just wasn't really any money to put into wacky new projects like this.
Well, by 1940 the military was still asking for this, and they got a much better reception because the world
got to see the German attacks into various parts of Europe. What we call today blitzkrieg, and
what they saw there was kind of like, "Holy cow, it's really easily possible for enemy troops to break
through the lines and then all of a sudden you've got guys who are in administrative and staff roles, and drivers, and basically
people armed with 1911 pistols who might actually be facing enemy infantry." And when they went back and looked at some of the captured
German like field hospital reports from World War One, they came to the conclusion that
basically nobody was ever able to effectively shoot a German with an M1911 pistol,
except perhaps Sergeant York. Basically what they found was there were
so few casualty reports involving the 1911 that either it was never getting used,
or it wasn't getting used very effectively. And truth be told, a 1911 pistol is a weapon with ... an effective
range of about 25 metres, unless you're really skilled with it. Which most guys aren't, especially when you start to radically and rapidly enlarge the army through
volunteers and conscription to fight a new world war. You don't have the time to train
people to become expert pistol shots, and these are all people who have much
more important roles to be doing anyway. So the idea was, "Let's adopt a
carbine that will fill the role of the pistol, but it's something that you can shoot much more
effectively, to a much longer range, with a lot less training." Even a modicum of training you can be pretty
effective with an M1 carbine out to 100 yards or more. That is the original intended role of the carbine. It was to
arm people who would otherwise be armed with pistols. So drivers, in some cases headquarters and
administrative staff, sometimes medical staff. Artillery units in particular, guys who had other primary
weapons like mortars or later in the war Bazookas, Bazooka teams would be armed with M1 carbines. Paratroopers would eventually adopt a version of the M1 carbine
as well. It was intended to be basically a replacement for the pistol. During the war both the Army and the Marine Corps at
various points actually suggested using it to replace the submachine gun entirely as well,
although that was never acted on. But that was the purpose. We'll touch on how the M1 carbine kind of ... its reputation has been sullied a bit by people
trying to use it as a substitute for the M1, or later the M14 rifle, and that didn't work out so well. But let's get back to how this was originally developed. So 1940, the military asks for this sort of
weapon and they get taken a lot more seriously. There's money involved that can be
spent on this now, like people care. Alright, so let's get back to how
this was actually manufactured. In 1940 the Ordnance Department starts taking
this request for a light rifle a lot more seriously, there's ... space in the military budget now to do this. So they set out a set of requirements and they ask
for proposals for rifles from various manufacturers and individuals and inventors. They want these
guns in hand no later than February 1st 1941. And the requirements are basically it has to weigh no
more than 5 pounds, it has to be effective out to 300 yards, and it needs to be carried by a sling, and
they're looking for a semi-automatic rifle. So they get nine major submissions and they actually delay
the tests until May because they have to get ammunition. I should point out the cartridge for this new weapon was
something that they actually worked on in parallel with Winchester. They went to Winchester for help in the winter of 1940, like, "We
kind of want an intermediate, middle ground kind of cartridge." And Winchester looked at it and said, "What you should do is
base something on our ... .32 Winchester self-loading cartridge." Which Winchester had used in their 1905 rifles. And it's ... about the same size and style as the M1 carbine
cartridge, the .30 carbine cartridge, that they ended up developing. That's why. They basically took the .32 Winchester
self-loader, they ... shrunk it down to be .30 calibre in parallel with the M1 Garand, that simplifies some
tooling requirements and ammunition making requirements. It's not quite a perfectly straight walled
case, but it doesn't have a shoulder. It's kind of an overgrown pistol cartridge, it fires a 110 grain, round
nosed, jacketed bullet at an ... ideal velocity of 2,000 feet per second. So it really is a middle ground kind of cartridge. There are some
people who are going to denigrate it as being really wimpy. On the other hand it's got as much energy at 100
yards as like a .357 Magnum does at the muzzle. It's not a wimpy cartridge, although
it is in no way comparable to .30-06. So, with this cartridge in mind and with its basic rifle requirements,
the Ordnance Department sends out a request for guns. They get nine proposals back. The ammunition manufacturing takes a little longer than
planned. They end up delaying the tests until May of 1941, And we'll cut through a lot of the chase, I've actually got
some videos on some of these prototype submission rifles. Nobody wins the trials. Some of the guns are
better than others, but nothing satisfactory. Now Winchester, who would ultimately design
this rifle, wasn't involved in the first trial at all. Winchester had just recently taken on a
contract to start manufacturing the M1 Garand, they were involved in a bunch of other stuff
and they looked at this thing and they said like, "We just don't have the capacity, the time and labour and expertise.
We are busy doing too many other things, we can't take part in this." However, one of the things that Winchester was
working on was a rifle to compete with the M1 Garand. It was an action that had originally been designed by
Jonathan Browning, half brother of John Moses Browning, and Winchester had picked it up and they were working
on this, and they've been working on it for a couple of years. The Marine Corps was actually sort of legitimately considering it. At this point in 1941 Winchester was
referring to it as their M2 .30 calibre rifle, and it looked a lot like an M1 Garand.
Not exactly the same, but similar. And one of the distinguishing features of it
is it had a little short-stroke gas tappet system. Which was the patented invention
of a guy named "Carbine" Williams. Well, he would become known as
"Carbine" Williams, David Marshall Williams. There's a lot of lore surrounding David Marshall Williams
about how he invented the M1 carbine in 13 days, and that's basically 85% bunk. In reality, "Carbine" Williams was in fact an
ex-con, he had been in jail for killing a guy in the process of some
bootlegging and running from cops. He got out of jail, got a job with Winchester, and
turned out to be a pretty darn talented gun designer. ... He initially got his job because
he had developed a way to adapt the 1919 machine gun to fire
... .22 rimfire cartridges for training. Also did some work on adapting the 1911 to .22
rimfire. Winchester saw that work, you know like, "Yeah, you know this guy kind of knows
what he's doing, let's bring him on board." And the project they gave him was taking
Jonathan Browning's rifle and making it actually work. And he did this by replacing the gas system
with his designed little gas tappet system. By the way, I also have a video on the
Winchester M2, there is one surviving example. Well in 1941 one of the Winchester employees, Edwin Pugsley,
had this rifle, and their goal was to make a very lightweight .30-06. They had this 7.5 pound .30-06 rifle, and he happens
to show it to René Studler, who was Chief of Ordnance. And Studler basically looks at this and says,
"We're not getting rid of the M1 Garand, so just forget it. But we've got this light rifle thing, and that
gun if you can make it 7.5 pounds in .30-06 that's a perfect gun to scale down, make it in
this new cartridge, and submit it to our trials. Because the first round of trials was
inconclusive, there's gonna be a second round, you should totally submit that because it looks great." And at this point Winchester had like two
weeks before the due date for these trials. They had to come up with
something if they were gonna do it. Now the legend is "Carbine" Williams like
goes off and invents the M1 carbine by himself. The reality is he had been working on the
mechanical systems behind the M2 for many years. What Winchester did was take that, scale it down.
"Carbine" Williams' initial response was basically, "That ain't gonna work and if you go ahead and
try it without me I'm not taking responsibility for it. Like, you're crazy to even try that. It's not
gonna work. ... Leave me completely out of this, I don't want my name attached to it
because it's gonna be a dismal failure." Well Winchester's employees, and we'll get into the details of some
of this in a later video because there's some awesome stories in here, but Winchester's employees
turn out a one-of-a-kind prototype. So they've got the cartridge already
designated that they need to use, they don't have time to develop a new magazine
or a new trigger system or anything like that. So they just take basically the whole trigger and magazine housing
off of a Winchester 1907, Winchester self-loader, throw that in there. They've got a single stack magazine, it's not really what was called
for, but it's good enough for a two week ... proof-of-concept gun. And they ... go out to test fire it for Army Ordnance,
and it goes through just about 1,000 rounds. Like 960 rounds with three malfunctions. Wow, that's fantastic. And this is August of 1941. The trials
are gonna be in the middle of September. So Winchester now has about a month to take this one-
off rifle, turn it into something that's actually suitable for a full fledged endurance and ... mud testing,
rain testing, sand testing, the works. An actual real government prototype trial.
Competitive trial by the way. And again, we'll get into some of
the stories behind this in a later video. But the short version is they pull it off. They manage to
make one gun, which is the prototype of the M1 carbine. They don't even have blueprints at this point. They just
make one, hand fit it, it works, send it off to the trials. They literally get it into Aberdeen Proving Grounds
on the ... evening of the last day to make the cut. And, lo and behold, they end up winning the trials. Long story,
we'll cut it a little bit short this video is getting quite long already. From there, now the problem is production. Winchester
doesn't have the industrial capacity to produce as many M1 carbines as the military thinks it's going to need.
The initial estimate, by the way, is half a million of them. They which course end up making 12 times that
many. So right from the beginning it's kind of a well-known thing that there are going to
be other contractors manufacturing the rifle. So there are a couple months of debating and
bureaucratic stuff, you know the paperwork side, but right from the beginning it was clear that
the Inland Company, which was a division of GM (interestingly, Inland grew out of the factory building
that originally built the Wright brother's airplane), ... they're gonna be one of the main contractors. Back earlier in the tests when it didn't look like
Winchester was actually going to be the winner, Inland had already been given a contract to make 1,000 of
the guns either developed by themselves with George Hyde, or the gun developed by John Garand, who
also entered a prototype into this competition. They already had a contract to to start building
those and to get production up as a subcontractor, so it was pretty clear when Winchester won that
Inland would also be building Winchester guns. And in fact Inland and Winchester employees and
engineers were meeting and going over the design even before Winchester had been formally
announced as the winner of the program. Inland would go on to be ... the biggest subcontractor for the gun,
making just over 2,000,000 of them during the course of the war. But there ... would be six or eight
other subcontractors as well. So Winchester made it, Inland made it, and then
a bunch of other companies also got contracts. So, that's probably enough
introduction about the M1 carbine. Let's take a look at this one, and I can show you some of
the features of the carbine as it was originally designed. Because it would go through a number of revisions. Winchester managed to actually basically meet the
requirements, which is kind of a little bit unusual for a gun like this. The M1 carbine unloaded comes in
at just over 5 pounds, like 5.2 pounds, which is remarkably close to the goal weight of 5. And
what they have is an exceptionally light and handy carbine. And it was extremely popular with
a lot of troops largely for that reason. Now the action looks a lot like an M1 Garand action
because of the similarities based on the Winchester M2 rifle, which used the same sort of rotating
bolt system as the M1 Garand. And that's where a lot of the
similarity originally comes from. This was outfitted with a 15 round standard
magazine. The original trials requirements asked for 5, 10, 20 and 50 round magazines.
What they ended up standardising on was 15. These magazines are kind of one of the weak points of the
gun in general. They are not particularly durable magazines, they ... weren't deliberately intended
to be disposable, but they kind of are. And so one of the things that troops who were
using M1 carbines during the war did was just regularly replace magazines just to be safe. As the gun was originally adopted and
manufactured through the beginning of World War Two, the controls involved a push button safety.
So this is the fire position, that's the safe position. You also had a push button magazine release. The magazine itself actually has
two magazine catches on the back. And those two catches are
held up by this mag release. So when you push it over, those two catches
open up and the magazine can drop out. The original design used a two position flip
sight. So it had settings for 100 metres here, and 300 metres with a slightly smaller
aperture for longer range precision fire. Not windage adjustable except by
sliding the entire sight in its dovetail. And then the front sight is a single block unit.
So there is no adjustment of the front sight at all. You will find manufacturer's markings on two places on
these guns, one of them is on the back of the receiver. This particular one it's a bit worn there, but it is Standard Products, which
is abbreviated "STD PRO", they're one of the smaller manufacturers. This has a serial number in
the very low 2,000,000 range. Every one of the contractors received its own
block, or blocks, of serial numbers to use. So the M1 carbine itself has a single serial number range, and
the different manufacturers occur at different points in that range. Now we also have a marking here on the front of the
receiver, and that's the same across all M1 carbines, just says US Carbine, Cal .30, M1 And then we have a marking on the front of the barrel on
the top there, indicating who made the barrel and when. So the flaming bomb there is
a US Ordnance approval mark. This particular barrel was made by Underwood who supplied most of the barrels for Standard Products, and this one was made in August of 1943. I think it's interesting and useful to point out ... that
the M1 carbine was absolutely the product of a true manufacturing system. This wasn't a situation where every
factory simply manufactured all the parts and built M1 carbines. There was a tremendous amount of
use of subcontractors for these guns. So for example, Standard Products only actually
made 4 parts, they made receivers, they made bolts they made trigger housings,
and they made operating slides. Every other part, so virtually all of the small parts
plus the barrels, were made by various subcontractors who supplied multiple different
manufacturers. And it's that sort of industrial outsourcing and logistical
capacity that made it possible to make 6,000,000 of these guns in just a couple of years
time, while also producing everything else for the war effort. Now there are a lot of other parts that did change
over the course of M1 carbine production. So a few of those include the front barrel band.
This is the first type which is narrow, it got wider. And then later on one of the more substantial
changes was the addition of a bayonet lug. The upper handguard changed form a bit. The early ones had a narrower sight groove in
the middle, and just one set of rivets back here to hold on the little metal tab that reinforces it. That was increased to four rivets
and the sight groove widened later on. This has the later what's called a "potbelly"
stock. It's a thicker, heavier duty stock. The safety lever would be changed to a rotary safety, so that
it didn't get mixed up with the push button magazine release. The rear sight would change to an adjustable rear sight. There was actually two versions of that,
there was an early forged or milled rear sight, and then there was a later
simplified stamped rear sight as well. Contours on the operating slide would change. The bolt, later in production they would stop cutting
the ... top of the bolt flat, and leave it just fully round just to simplify and economise on production. There are a lot of these little changes, and I don't
have the time or the ability to go into all of them today. This is more of an overview of the M1
carbine as it was used in World War Two. Now by the way the reason that we have this
kind of unusual configuration to the stock here, is that there was an oil bottle that went in this slot
that actually acted as basically the rear sling swivel. So the sling looped around the
oiler, the oiler pulled into this slot, which holds it in here, and then the
sling comes out through this slot, and attaches to this sling swivel at the front of the gun. Now to disassemble this, we're actually going to start by
loosening the sling swivel and pulling the barrel band off. In addition to being tightened, this is also
held in place by a little spring clamp here. We can pull that off, that allows
us to remove the upper handguard. You can see the metal reinforcement
here with the later four rivet pattern to it. Now it looks like you have to remove
the screw back here, you actually do not. This is a metal inset plate that holds the action
in place. All we actually have to do is lift up, this hook is what holds the action into this lug in
the stock. So that screw can stay right where it is. So with the stock removed we can
see the actual operating parts here. Pardon this one it's still kind of grungy,
it does need a more thorough cleaning. But this is a really simple gun to take apart. So we can
actually start by pushing out this little pin right here. With this pin out we can then lift
the whole fire control group out. So it's hammer fired. This is all a single
integral component, and that's really cool. We then have a bolt, an operating slide, and
a recoil spring. And this I can just pull out. There is a tube on the side of here, and some
production actually used a separate detachable tube. One of the issues during production was being able to deep
hole drill this tube without it coming out the side of the receiver. Anyway, we have a guide rod in there. That little guy is the recoil spring for this. And now you can actually see David Marshall
Williams' little gas tappet system here. So that little piston, when you fire, is gonna
move just a few millimetres backwards, and it's normally housed right inside there. That
piston is going to hit this slide, give it a pop backwards, and while the piston, the tappet itself, doesn't keep moving,
it provides enough energy to this to cycle all the way back, compress the recoil spring,
and eject the empty cartridge. At this point disassembly is
relatively similar to an M1 Garand. You can bring the slide to right here and it lifts off. We can then rotate the bolt out. I'm not really doing this
in the most efficient way, but there we go, going to take the
bolt and pull it out of the gun. There's our firing pin, plunger ... ejector,
big ol' extractor on the side of the bolt. Just like the M1 by the way, this has two locking lugs.
One of them here and one of them, this big one, that also acts as the cam surface for the
operating slide to open and close the bolt. And then we have a little cutout right here, that allows the
operating slide to be just lifted right off the side of the gun. You can see the imprint right in there
where the gas tappet actually hits this. And this is obviously one of the main
fundamentally important components. And there is your stripped
receiver and barrel and gas block. So it really is simple. It's a small gun compared to most
because it does use that ... relatively diminutive cartridge. And really a very interesting gun to look at from both a
tactical perspective and a manufacturing perspective. After World War Two of course, the carbine
would go on to kind of grow in scope and scale. Late in the war they introduced the M2
carbine, which was a fully-automatic version. They introduced a 30 round magazine
to complement the full-auto capability. They would introduce the carbine with the M3 infrared
scope, that also came actually late in World War Two. That would be used in the Korean War, the M1 carbine
in general would see substantial use in the Korean War. Too much use really. By the time of the Korean War there are a
lot of guys who are kind of trying to make this into a standard rifle. It doesn't really fill that role well. This is a fantastic, extremely capable, accurate and, you know,
great firepower sort of weapon when you compare it to a pistol. It's anaemic and under-powered and short ranged
and fragile when you compare it to an M1 rifle. So, therein lies where we see different opinions
about the utility and the quality of the M1 carbine. ... So the M1 carbine wasn't really available to the general
public until the 1960s because these were military weapons. And until they were actually released
as surplus in substantial numbers the only ones that were really floating
around the private market were, you know, maybe a few that had been sold
off in various ways here and there, and guns that had been kind of smuggled back
as souvenirs after World War Two or after Korea. In the 1960s the US government released a
substantial quantity, hundreds of thousands of these, to the civilian market through the
Civilian Marksmanship Program. Now most of those guns had gone through a series of arsenal
retrofits and upgrades and refurbs before they were ever released. So most of the guns on the market have been
updated with things like new safeties, new sights. And that makes the early configuration guns
like this one, which is mostly early configuration, particularly desirable to collectors. And
in my mind this is a particularly interesting, the most interesting, version of the carbine because
it reflects how the carbine was originally manufactured, and ... the form that it took during
most of its actual use in World War Two. So this particular one came to me courtesy
of Inter Ordnance, or Royal Tiger Imports. They brought in a whole mess of interesting guns
from Ethiopia, and it included a lot of M1 carbines that were provided to Ethiopia as military aid before going
through any of these arsenal retrofits in the United States. So they have some early guns, they have
some late guns, they have some mixes. And they have guns from all sorts of different
manufacturers who were involved in production. So. It's a really cool opportunity, especially if you're
interested in getting an early configuration gun like this one, because they have a bunch of those because of
the weird alternative path that these guns took into Ethiopia and then back here
into the US only very recently. So check out Royal Tiger Imports if you're interested in picking
one of these up yourself. As I said, they have a wide variety of ... quality ratings, manufacturers, early/late, you name it.
Check out their website and see all their details. Otherwise, I will leave you with some links at
the end here to some of the other guns that were involved in the M1 carbine story, like
Jonathan Browning's Winchester M2 rifle. That's a really cool one that they
have at the Cody Firearms Museum. And now this gives us a good basis to talk about
some of the other aspects of the M1 carbine, where it went, and some of the stories behind it. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
