Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company and I'm taking a look at some of the guns from their upcoming April of 2016 Premiere Auction. And I have a totally awesome rifle in front of me. This is a T3E2 Garand rifle, and this is the final trials version of the M1 Garand in .276 Pedersen calibre. And this thing came about that close to being adopted as the US military's standard service rifle in 1932. ... And it was really only because of one guy that the US ended up retaining the .30-06 cartridge and having a bigger rifle than this instead. So John Garand's work on self-loading rifles started in 1919. At that time he was working for the Bureau of Standards, and he developed what's called a primer actuated
rifle, where the mechanism was based on this idea that when you fired the rifle the pressure in the
cartridge would actually force the primer back slightly out of its pocket in the head of the case,
and you'd have a little piston in the centre of the bolt and when the primer was forced back that would
push this piston, and that piston would operate the rifle. Garand wasn't the only person to come
up with this idea, a couple other people did, but it never really turned into anything practical because
it would have required a special type of ammunition. The military really liked to stake its primers in
place to be really sure that they didn't move, and so adopting a primer activated rifle would have
required a totally different supply of ammunition. Garand realised this and after a couple years he
abandoned that idea and went to a gas operated rifle, ... tapping gas from the end of the barrel. Now
he went through several iterations of this rifle, and by 1929 he had developed
pretty much what we see here. A 1929 Garand (which was designated the T3 rifle),
would be pretty much recognisable to anyone as a Garand, it'd kind of be a weird looking Garand,
but you'd know what it was. Kind of like this. The rifle was tested in the big 1929 rifle
trials done by the US Ordnance Department, and it was tested against a bunch of other competitors,
including John Pedersen's toggle link delayed blowback rifle. And then a bunch of others, the ZH-29 was in
this test, the Thompson Autorifle was in this test, the Heinemann rifle I believe was in the test.
The White ... rifles weren't there yet. But a number, ... It was the big trial where they took all
the major players and ran a big first test. And the outcome was that two rifles really
showed the best results, the Garand and the Pedersen. And so the future rifle trials, with the exception
of the White who kind of showed up a little bit late, the future rifle trials were really just competitions
between Garand and Pedersen at that point. Now the T3 rifle from the 1929 trials had a
number of problems, it had some feed problems, it had some parts breakage problems.
And the Pedersen rifle did as well. And so both designers went back
and started tweaking their design. And in Garand's case he developed the T3E1 variant,
and then the T3E2. And the E2 is the final version. Mechanically, at a gross level, it was the same as
the basic T3, the same basic Garand mechanism, but he'd made some tweaks to resolve
those feeding and parts fragility issues. So 20 of these rifles were ordered, and they were going to
be used in field testing by both infantry and cavalry units. And the Pedersen rifle the same thing was
done, a small batch was made for field testing. And then it was actually at this point it was left up to the troops
in the field and then the Infantry Board and the Cavalry Board to make their own decision on whether
they preferred the Garand or the Pedersen, and how they compared to the existing rifles in inventory,
the Springfield rifle and the BAR automatic rifle. And as it turned out both the infantry and the
cavalry testing boards preferred the Garand, and they preferred the .276
cartridge over the standard .30-06. The results that they came up with from this
field testing were that the .276 cartridge was easier shooting, it had less recoil,
it had faster follow up shots. So interestingly, the .276 had pretty much the same trajectory,
the same external ballistics, as the .30-06 cartridge. The bullet was a bit lighter, this fired a 125 grain bullet, but the muzzle
velocity was pretty much the same, it was about 2,700 feet per second. And so, the bullet had less inertia, but it was also more aerodynamic,
and the result was basically identical external ballistics. So you didn't have a significant difference there, but you
did have reduced recoil, reduced ammunition weight. So it's interesting as the infantry did a series of
basically rate of fire and accuracy testing put together. They put up targets, and I don't have details on
how far the targets were and what size they were, but they ran the same test with the 1903 Springfield,
the BAR, this rifle and the .276 calibre Pedersen rifles. And what they were looking for was the rate of fire, how many
aimed shots per minute, and then the number of hits per minute. And then interestingly they ... actually calculated
the number of hits per pound of ammunition. Because that makes a difference when you're
comparing, say, a .30-06 Springfield to a .276 Pedersen. And what's important is given the weight of ammo
that you're going to strap onto every infantryman, how many hits can you expect them to make in a
given situation with that amount of ammunition? And the Garand was the best rifle by that standard, it was
about 15% better in terms of hits per pound of ammo than the Pedersen in .276, and it was also about
15% better than the Pedersen in terms of rate of fire. So this was just a smoother shooting, better
handling gun than any of the competitors, both the bolt action Springfield, by
a long shot, and the .276 Pedersen. Now a quick note on that cartridge. A lot of
people have heard of it, but to put it in some context, as I mentioned it was a ... 125 grain
bullet at 2,700 feet per second. We don't really have a cartridge today in
common use that's really analogous to that. This is ... less powerful than .308, it's more powerful
than the 7.62x39 and ... the 6.8mm Remington SPC. The best equivalents are actually the
6.5 Carcano and the 6.5 Japanese cartridge, the 6.5 Grendel is also pretty close. And those cartridges offer plenty of
power for actual military effectiveness, but they've got substantially, measurably, less recoil. And they
weigh less than a full power .30-06 or 8mm Mauser or a .308. The Army had actually done its own testing on a series of
different cartridges, they looked at the .30 calibre rounds, .276 calibre rounds, and also .256 calibre
rounds ... to determine ballistic effectiveness. And they actually did these tests on live animals, there
was a test on pigs and there's a test on anesthetised goats. And the conclusions that they drew were that the .30-06 was
sometimes a little bit better at long range because it had more mass, but at close range the smaller calibre rounds were
actually more effective than the .30-06 because they tend to be unstable, and they created larger wound
channels at close range than the standard .30-06 cartridge. So anyway, we're at this point as of 1932 this rifle has
been tested by the infantry and tested by the cavalry, the reports are in, and the Semi-Automatic Rifle Board having
gotten their assessments from the troops in the field, now it's time for them to write a final
report and make a recommendation to submit to the general Ordnance
Department on what rifle should be adopted. And they put together a report that is very complimentary
of the .276 calibre Garand, this exact rifle in fact. And they say that these ought to be adopted. Now it's interesting that they
recognised defects in this rifle at the time, and they're the same things that people still
mention to this day as being problems with the M1. Specifically, they mentioned that the back of the receiver
was open to the ingress of dirt when the bolt was closed. The operating rod was also exposed and open to dirt. The stock, because of the way the Garand
disassembles where you pull the stock off, the bedding was really not suitable
to particularly good accuracy. And they actually toyed with the idea of recommending that
the Army should get rid of this cool disassembly feature in preference for having the stock screwed
into the action to improve the accuracy. To this day that's one of the problems with
the M1 in a high-power competition field, ... you have to really put a lot of work into bedding the
stock, and after you shoot, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 rounds that's all come loose and has to be redone if
you want to really keep the gun super-accurate. And they also noted the issue of having
this en bloc clip that couldn't be topped up. And there was also some talk of maybe suggesting
that they move to a fixed 10 round internal magazine that was fed by two Springfield stripper clips. It appears at the time the Army preferred the en bloc
clip because it was a lot easier to train soldiers on, and it was simpler to use than stripper
clips which are notoriously kind of finicky. However, all of these problems were considered not
significant enough to ... cause the rifle to not be adopted. ... Everything's going to have some sort of little issues, these
weren't significant enough to hinder the rifle in general. So they put together this report and they say, "We
should adopt this rifle and we should start by spending basically our whole 170,000 dollar development budget
to tool up and make the first batch of these guns." And they sent that report off and it
never got to the Ordnance Department. Because before it was received, or before it was
formally sent I suppose, General MacArthur weighed in. MacArthur was the Chief of Staff of the
Army at the time, so head honcho of the Army, and he sent down a memo through one of
his Adjutant Generals basically saying that this whole .276 idea is not going to go anywhere.
We have a ton of .30-06 already stockpiled, and ... to change to the .276 would
cause a lot of logistical issues. For one thing, it'd be a new cartridge to adopt,
and you'd have to be supplying both it and .30-06, because of course the Army has machine
guns and the BAR all in .30-06 calibre. In an ideal world those guns would have been redesigned to
use the new cartridge, but the Army had nowhere near the kind of financial resources to actually do that. If they
adopted .276 it would be for the new rifles only, and the support weapons like the BAR and the Model
of 1919 machine gun would stay in .30-06 calibre. And for those reasons MacArthur basically said
you guys need to stop messing around with .276, you haven't put enough time into developing a
.30-06 semi-auto rifle, you need to do that instead. That's it. That's what I say,
that's what will happen. End of story. Now the Ordnance Department had been experimenting
with a .30-06 self-loading rifle, and they'd had a lot of trouble getting one that ... could work that was within the
weight limit that they'd set, which was 8.75 pounds. Simply, the .30-06 was a fairly high pressure round and
they had trouble getting rifles that were light enough to meet the requirements that were also strong enough to
survive an endurance test without breaking a lot of parts. They had the foresight, and Garand in particular had some
foresight in this area, he kind of suspected something like this might happen, so the Ordnance Department had been
developing in parallel a .30 calibre version of the M1. And so when this note from MacArthur
came down saying the .276 project is over, this kind of solidified the victory of the M1,
of the Garand, over the Pedersen rifle. Because at this point Pedersen had considered his
... contract kind of in the bag, and that it was a sure thing. And he'd left and gone to England where the Vickers
Company was going to tool up to make his rifles commercially, and he was demonstrating them to the British
government, and also to some other countries. And so he wasn't around to react
to this change in requirements. While at the same time John Garand already had a
prototype version of the ... Garand rifle in .30-06. Now, ... as of 1932, the most recent test they had done,
the rifle had broken a bolt and so they had to fit a new bolt. But when it comes down that MacArthur dictates
.30 calibre, the Garand is almost ready in .30 calibre. And it's not that much trouble for them to go back,
finish it, finalise it. And then because they've been finalising and perfecting the .276 rifle, they
know what they need to do in the .30 calibre rifle. And the .30 calibre M1 is pretty
quickly available and gets adopted. At that point the Ordnance Board knew that they
liked the mechanism, they knew that it worked, the whole system was good, and all they needed to
do was scale it up slightly from .276 to .30 calibre. And that is how we ended up with the .30 calibre M1 Garand. Now there are a number of differences to
this rifle compared to the regular Garand, so I think we should bring the camera in
closer and take a look at those because it's not very often that you get a chance to dig inside the
guts of one of the 20 T3E2 rifles that was ever made. Alright, let's start with just a quick comparison between
the T3E2 and a standard general issue M1 rifle. The weight difference is right at about 0.75
pounds. I actually weighed these two rifles on the same scale and the M1 came out
at 9.8 pounds and the T3E2 at 9.0 pounds. So you get about 12, maybe 13, ounces lighter of a rifle. And over here at the muzzle we have somewhere
between an inch and maybe 1.5 inch shorter for the T3E2. Now that doesn't sound like a whole lot, but the
balance difference in these rifles is pretty substantial. I'll tell you what, the T3 really
doesn't feel like a 9 pound rifle, it feels substantially lighter and
handier in the hands than the full size M1. Now you have a capacity advantage in the T3 rifle as well.
The M1, because it was scaled up and the cartridges were bigger, the M1 of course holds 8 rounds in its standard clip. The T3E2 has a 10 round clip,
so you get 2 extra cartridges along with your 0.75 pound weight reduction
and of course the cartridges are all lighter. So that's the basic set of advantages
you get with the smaller calibre rifle. Now all the mechanics are pretty much the same.
You can see the sights are the same configuration. The bolt handle is the same. The safety looks a little
different on the early rifle but it operates the same way. And the muzzle end. Now the T3 rifle was still a
gas trap and I'll explain what that is in a minute. So the muzzle looks a little bit different than the
standard M1, but other than that very, very similar rifles. So let's go ahead and pull this
apart and take a look at its internals. So, we have our standard rotating bolt, bolt opens, locks open
of course, when you insert a clip you push down on that follower, bolt closes. I'll tell you what, this is an
extremely smooth nicely operating rifle. It disassembles the same way as the standard M1. We
have the trigger guard is connected to the magazine well and the trigger fire control assembly, so
we're going to pull the trigger guard down, that's a little tight, but, there it goes. Now once this is unlocked then I actually
pull the stock down out of the action. So there's our first ... small basic
difference between this and the final M1. In the final M1 the whole trigger assembly
comes out as part of your disassembly, on this the trigger assembly stays in place in the action. It can be removed but it's not
removed for the standard field strip. So we end up with our stock assembly and our
... barrel, action and receiver assembly, so. Fire control group in here is basically the same as the final M1,
so we're going to go ahead and leave that alone for the time being, and let's focus on this. Now like an M1, the first thing I'm going
to do is remove the recoil spring assembly. That recoil spring is housed in the operating rod
itself, just like an M1. So I take this tab, pull it back. This little U-shaped hook pushes on here and so that that allows
the mainspring, the recoil spring, to also act as the feed spring. Have this long floppy mainspring just like an M1. Now that the recoil spring is out we have no tension on our
feed components here, and we can pull the bolt handle back. This is a little bit of a cleaner disassembly than the
standard M1, there's a notch cut right here in the op rod track and we just line that up with the tab on the op rod. Lift it out. So once we've got this out of the track, we bring
it back here and it just lifts cleanly out of the gun. Now that that's out, we can go
ahead and take the bolt out. To do that we're just going to bring it forward
and then lift it up and out of the action. And there we have our field stripped T3E2 Garand. Alright, one thing I want to make a point of. ... Like I said,
there are a number of changes between this rifle and the .30-06. One of them that's somewhat significant, is that
the barrel and the chamber area on the T3 rifle are smaller in diameter because the cartridge
is smaller, and the cartridge is lower pressure, and that allows the operating
rod on the T3 to be totally straight. Where on the M1 Garand there's a bend, a dogleg,
in this op rod because it has a much thicker barrel back here at the chamber, and so the op
rod has to start lower, and then it has to come up to be right underneath at the muzzle end. So that dogleg op rod was one of the trickier parts of tooling up to actually build the M1,
was figuring out how to get tooling to effectively and efficiently and
accurately form that bend in the op rod. It also was permanently kind of a weak point in the
design, because anytime you've got a bend like that, if you have a lot of overpressure ammo, that's
a place where the whole op rod is going to bend. This rifle, having a straight linear op rod, doesn't have that sort
of compromised strength. This is a stronger piece to begin with. As I mentioned earlier, this is a gas trap style of rifle, which
means that there is not a gas port drilled in the muzzle. Instead the barrel actually ends here and
then you have a slightly larger diameter un-rifled section just ahead of the actual crown of the gun. And gas comes out the muzzle and it hits this
expansion chamber, goes through down into here, where it then pushes on the face of the gas piston. The benefit to this at the time was
that you didn't drill a hole in ... the barrel. It was thought that that would adversely affect
the rifling, that it would wear and cause problems. And those concerns were technically
correct, but not really practically applicable. Now that we have a lot more experience with rifles with gas ports,
we know that ... those problems don't cause significant issues. So this gas trap system was retained on the .30 calibre M1s, and that actually this is the system that was used
when the M1 was formally adopted by the US military. And it was only shortly after the rifle
was adopted and put into production that this was changed to a
standard drilled gas port in the barrel. So the downside to this gas trap system,
what they didn't adequately consider at the time, was because it has a larger expansion chamber
what happens is that ... the volume of gas obviously expands. And the laws of thermodynamics
require that when it expands it cools down. And that cooling effect deposited a lot more carbon and fouling in
this area of the gun than it would if you had a small diameter gas port where the gas stayed very hot as it was going
through the gas port. So that tendency to foul too quickly was what led them to replace the gas trap system
with a standard gas port system on all of the Garands. One interesting little quick note here. If you are a
Garand nerd sort of person, you will know that the early M1 op rods had this square connection
between this leg and the base of the op rod. And that was modified fairly quickly with a
radius cut because it was prone to cracking. It's interesting to note that on the T3 we
already have a rounded connection, right there. They don't have a square cut. So I don't know
the exact history of that square cut on the final M1, but it's interesting to note that the experimental models
before it didn't have that potential fault. Interesting. So in general I personally really think that the Army made
the wrong decision in the long term by rejecting the .276. Ultimately, we've kind of come full circle back
to that in some ways with the 6.8 cartridges, actually it's just slightly weaker than the .276. Had
they adopted the .276 and had they been willing to use it in some of the other guns in the US military
at the time, I really think they would have avoided, really, this would have avoided ... the .308
cartridge ever being developed. It then would have avoided probably the .223 cartridge being adopted, or delayed
it for a while because this is a pretty darn good round. And it's more controllable, presumably
would be more controllable in full-auto than the .308, maybe we don't have to
get a new cartridge as small as .223. If you consider what the BAR would have been if you scaled it down
to .276, you could probably get that down to something like 14, 15 pounds and have a much better gun overall. Maybe increase
the magazine capacity from 20 to 25 at the same time. The 1919 could have been left in
.30-06 or it could have been scaled down. You could have ended up with a program much like the
Soviet Bloc had, where they had the 7.62x39 rifle cartridge, and then they had the 7.62x54 machine gun cartridge, and
it didn't seem to cause that much logistical trouble for them. Maybe it wouldn't have been that
big a deal for the United States. Ultimately, of course, we'll never know because it's
history and it's already done and we can't undo it. But I think this is a fascinating what-if scenario that
came, really came that close to actually happening. As I mentioned, there were 20 of these rifles that
were originally made and if you'd like to own this one, a kind of a once in a very long while chance to own a really
cool piece of American military developmental history, well it is coming up for sale here
at Rock Island. If you take a look at the link in the description text below, you'll
find Rock Island's catalogue page on this rifle. You can check out their pictures and their
provenance and their technical description. And if you just decide you really need to have
it, you can either come here to Rock Island and participate in the auction at the end of April,
or place an on-line bid right through the website. Thanks for watching. In a hurry? Camera's on man. It's going. Time is
ticking, I only have a gazillion gigs left. Yeah.
