The Rifle That Won the War

John Garand was a Canadian-born engineer who spent his working life in a government laboratory on this hill, drawing military pay, driven by a problem he could not let go of. The bolt-action rifles American soldiers carried into the First World War required a man to cycle the action by hand between every shot. A trained soldier could fire perhaps fifteen aimed rounds per minute.

Garand believed he could do better. He began his work in the nineteen twenties. He tested.

He refined. He failed and tried again. By nineteen thirty-two he had a design that worked, and by nineteen thirty-six the Army adopted it officially as the M-one Garand, the first standard-issue semi-automatic military rifle in any nation's history.

A soldier carrying it could fire eight rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger, reload in seconds with a fresh clip, and fire again. Between nineteen thirty-six and the end of the Second World War, Springfield Armory produced more than three and a half million of them, alongside bayonets and spare parts for subcontractors who built millions more. General George Patton, in a letter to the Army Ordnance Department in January of nineteen forty-five, called the M-one rifle the greatest battle implement ever devised.

What makes the story quietly remarkable is what Garand received for it. He offered his design to the government royalty free. He never took a patent fee.

Congress made two attempts to award him one hundred thousand dollars, and both failed. John Garand retired on a government pension, having armed the free world, and died in nineteen seventy-four with no fortune to show for it.