![]() ![]() Lightweight and maneuverable, the gun is all but recoilless and turned out to be adequately reliable under hard use. This is an early version produced by the Rockola Music Company. The M1 carbine was a lightweight maneuverable rifle to be used by second line troops as a sort of Personal Defense Weapon. ![]() Early rear sights consisted of a simple pivoting dual aperture, while later versions were easily adjusted for both windage and elevation. These appendages were added later during the rebuild process. The vast majority of WW2-era carbines lacked a bayonet lug. A later rotating safety lever successfully addressed this deficit. This caused some troops to inadvertently jettison their magazines when attempting to press off the safety. However, they yielded superb service during night operations in the Pacific islands at the very end of the war.Įarly carbines sported a pushbutton safety alongside the pushbutton magazine release. These cumbersome rigs had a short range, around 75 meters. The M3 was the same basic carbine fitted with an early IR night scope and flash hider. The bare steel is uncomfortable, and the stock lacks a positive retention device when either deployed or stowed. While the M1A1 certainly earns some cool points I have found the folding stock to be underwhelming in actual use. The M1A1 was an airborne-specific version that sported a side-folding wire stock. Though there were purportedly very few of these versions to see combat before the end of the war, a friend’s dad found one unattended aboard a transport ship during the invasion of Iwo Jima and brought it home as a souvenir. ![]() In an effort at enhancing the firepower capability of the weapon a selective fire version called the M2 carbine was introduced in October of 1944. At the height of production, we were producing 65,000 carbines per day. Ten different major manufacturers produced around 6.1 million carbines, making this lithe little rifle the most produced American small arm of the war. The design of the M1 carbine evolved substantially over time, and there has arisen an Internet-based religion that orbits around the nuances of collecting. Here it is shown in the hands of a VC irregular. The carbine was popular with both ARVN and Viet Cong troops during the war in Vietnam. Winchester ultimately bodged together the winning prototype in a mere thirteen days. Another was Ed Browning, brother of the famed American gun designer John Moses Browning. One was David Marsh Williams, a convicted murderer who conjured gun designs while in prison. The original design was influenced by any number of interesting characters. The M1911A1 pistol of the day was a superb combat handgun, but it still left its operator at a disadvantage when confronted with enemy riflemen. If your job was running an artillery piece, emplacing a mortar, or stringing commo wire you needed something handier. The rifle we call the M1 Garand was a superb battle tool, but it was too long, heavy, and ungainly for use by specialist troops. This compact weapon ultimately saw widespread issue throughout all combat theaters. This lightweight combat implement represented an effort to combine the portability of a handgun with the innate accuracy and magazine capacity of an autoloading rifle. The M1 carbine that this corpsman carried was designed as a Personal Defense Weapon of sorts. The M1 carbine saw service with Allied forces in all theaters of operation during World War II. A Japanese grenade arced into the trench with the Marines, landing just beyond the point man. While taking cover from an enemy pillbox they spotted eleven Japanese soldiers in a parallel trench and a fierce firefight ensued. On February 19, 1945, Jack Lucas was part of a four-man fire team that was working its way toward a Japanese airstrip via an enemy trench system. Lucas celebrated his 17 th birthday five days before the Iwo Jima invasion. One day before he was to have been declared a deserter Lucas turned himself into Captain Robert Dunlap and was assigned to Dunlap’s rifle company. In response, Jack went AWOL carrying nothing more than his dungarees and field shoes and stowed away aboard an assault transport ship headed for Iwo Jima. When his commander discovered his true age it was resolved to sideline Jack so he could avoid combat and grow old in peace. By all accounts, he was an exemplary Marine. After successfully completing training as a machine gunner he was assigned to the V Amphibious Corps at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. ![]()
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