The New Rifle

An icy crosswind whipped the Army's Aberdeen (Md.) Proving Ground as two riflemen stepped up to the firing line. The marksmen took aim, squeezed off a few single shots, then flipped the rate-of-fire levers on their rifles and sprayed out a rippling burst of full automatic fire at the target. The riflemen were two of the country's top small-arms experts: Major General Julian S. Hatcher, U.S.A., ret., and retired Marine Major General Merritt A. Edson. They were at Aberdeen to try out the Army's secret, new, lightweight .30-cal. automatic rifle.

While newsmen and rifle experts looked on last week, the new weapons hurled rifle grenades 250 yds., sent tracers pinging off a tank at 400 yds. without a miss. In target contests, the new .30-cals. poured out fire twice as fast and just as accurately as the Army's standard 30-cal. M-1 Garand rifle. At 100 yds., their steel-core slugs plowed through half-inch armor plate; at 1,200 yds. they riddled a steel helmet; at 2,000 yds. they ripped through six inches of wooden planking. Fitted with 20-shot clips, the new automatic rifles could rattle off their entire magazines in less than two seconds. When the demonstration was over, even such hard-to-please riflemen as Hatcher and Edson agreed that the U.S. had developed a first-rate new infantry weapon.

Two Directions. A light, hard-hitting automatic rifle is something that many allied infantrymen have been praying for ever since World War II. Combat experience showed that bulky semi-automatic rifles (i.e., one shot for each trigger pull), like the 10-lb. U.S. Garand, were too heavy, and fired too slowly for close-in defense. What the infantry wanted was a light rifle that would shoot accurately at long range, and could also double as a Tommy gun for close-in combat.

After the war, the U.S. and Great Britain went off in different directions in search of such a weapon. U.S. Ordnance men decided that the standard .30-cal. slug was the smallest size with enough stopping power. They got to work on a light-weight cartridge (the T-65) that was half an inch shorter than the standard Garand cartridge and weighed about 16% less, without sacrificing any weight in the bullet itself. The light rifle* that they built around the stubby new shell fires as heavy a slug with the same muzzle velocity (about 2,800 ft. per second) as the Garand, but weighs 1 3/4 Ibs. less.

British gun designers turned to a much smaller weapon: a .276-cal. automatic rifle with a light slug and a relatively low, 2,300-ft.-per-second muzzle velocity. U.S. experts who saw the British .276-cal. perform at Ft. Benning, Ga. (TIME, Aug. 20) call it a "pipsqueak" weapon. They do not like the .276-cal.'s high, telescope-like sight: it could snap off in battle, become useless in foggy or muddy terrain.

Old Faithful. The observers at Aberdeen last week saw a much more rugged weapon in the new U.S. automatic. But it will be a long time before G.I.s get their hands on one. Cocking an eye at the British, who want to make their new piece the standard weapon for NATO armies, the Army announced that it would stick to its faithful old Garand for the time being. The U.S. has shipped huge numbers of Garands overseas, stocked warehouses with billions of rounds of ammunition. Its factories are tooled up and ready for mass production. The hard fact, said the Army, is that there is not enough time or money to retool and start all over again from scratch.

*In two models: the T-44, with the Garand's bolt action and receiver; the T-47, with the BAR'S.

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