Wonderful explanation. A fully automatic rifle moves all around. Aiming one is a more difficult task than aiming the semi automatic. All the semi automatic does automatically is reload. Actually the best automatic rifle I ever fired was the BAR. With that weapon, the act of reloading tended to pull forward the weapon so one fired it holding it back to keep it from moving forward. Bursts of 2 were very difficult to achieve but possible. We locked down our machine guns for effective firing patterns. We found that if you place the weapons on a line, but aim not straight ahead but at an angle, and establish the angles to get a pattern that covers a wide area they do the best jobs. Still the range instructors told us stories of the Chinese getting past the heavy fire area set up to defend a mass assault by the Chinese in Korea.
Actually, he just created rifles. In fact, his first design that was adopted for use by the military was the AR-7. This was a takedown rifle, that was adopted for use as an aircrew survival rifle. It was semi-automatic, and used a .22 rimfire cartridge. And the entire thing could be broken down and fit inside of the stock. It is still made today, and is very popular with backpackers. But "Assault Rifle", that is purely a political term. The M1, M1903, and Brown Bess would have been called "Assault Rifles" for their era. THis is easily seen, as nobody can exactly state what such a weapon is without naming a slew of cosmetic things that do not do a thing to make the weapon more dangerous.
That was pretty common for the era. It replaced the M1903, which also used an internal clip. The common rule of the era was that magazines were for Machine Guns and Submachine Guns. Most of the higher ups in that era honestly believed that if they gave people magazines which they could swap quickly and with more rounds, they would just burn through them faster. And this was not just in the US, this was the common belief Internationally. By making the rifles with a smaller number of rounds and more time consuming to reload, it was thought that would ensure that each shot fired was well aimed and not wasted. And in the Marines, there was even some resistance to switching form the M1903 to the M1 because it was believed that a semi-automatic rifle would cause them to waste more rounds than when they used the older bolt action rifle. But after Korea, that thinking finally started to change. Magazines became the norm, and even some older rifles with internal clips were converted to use magazines. Not unlike some of the older muzzle loaders that were converted into primitive cartridge rifles.
Very interesting! Thanks for the answer -- I never knew that. I did read somewhere (maybe I've already said this?) that in Korea, when the ground was frozen solid, the M1-s auto-eject of an empty magazine was a threat, because the enemy could hear the empty magazine hitting the ground, and know that at least one person was reloading. This seems unlikely to me, but maybe it happened.
Wives tale. Your enemy isn’t going to hear the ping of an en bloc being ejected or hitting the ground in a firefight.
Would be true, but not of much value. The M-1 used and 8 round clip that inserted from the top, ejected automatically with the last round and left the bolt open. You would have new clips fast at hand, and you could reload in a half-second or less. The clip was a U-shaped spring device; it would ring a little if it hit something hard.
We had M1s in high school ROTC (although I carried the BAR) but we never got to fire them, except for blanks. The only weapons we got to shoot were .22's. But the M1 has remained imprinted in my mind as the real infantry weapon -- even though I got to shoot a lot of rounds out of the M14, and then, later the M16, they never had the aura of real rifles to me, the way the M1 Garand did. Especially the M16, which, as others have noted, looks like a Mattel toy. However, they're not made to look pretty, and surely every patriot today should own at least two AR15s, a dozen magazines for each one, and a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition. And of course lose them in a boating accident.
The M1 did not use a "magazine" as people think of today. It did not eject, it was fixed inside of the weapon. What it used was the "en-bloc clip", a small piece of metal that was ejected after the last round was fired. And if somebody thinks that another can hear this hitting they ground during a firefight, they are nuts. Might as well stand in one end zone of a football field, and have somebody at the other end drop an aluminum can while a marching band is playing. You are as likely to hear that as you would the clip from an M1 being ejected. And you hear that, big deal? One guy is reloading, but the other half dozen or more in the squad are still ready to fire. One of the things we practiced was timing our shots and spacing them out, so no more than 1 person ever had to reload at the same time.
Yes, it seemed unlikely to be a problem. And my bad ... I do know the difference between a clip and a magazine!
Technically a clip rather than a feed mechanism (magazine) but served the same purpose, allowing you to load 8 rounds at once. Exceptional invention, never failed, and very fast to reload. Fired a lot of rounds that way. Never seen a high-capacity clip, however...