ARMED FORCES: The New Rifle

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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 1¾ 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.