MacArthur sure made a very wise decision by insisting that they stick to the 30-06 rather then going to the .276.
The .276 caliber was a superior caliber and lighter to carry. 6.5MM is the optimal caliber for both distance and terminal velocity.
By 1927 Garand was instructed to develop a rifle to handle the .276" caliber
The 30-06 was chosen because of millions of 30-06 rounds left over from WWI.
cartridge. Five years later, however, Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur
decided in favor of .30 caliber and the project was abandoned.
Also a common round between rifle and machine gun.
“MacArthur sure made a very wise decision by insisting that they stick to the 30-06 rather then going to the .276.”
Douglas MacArthur (then Chief of Staff, US Army) made a decision, but it’s arguable that he made a questionable choice operationally. Sad to say, it was logistically the only course possible in the Depression-wracked starvation-budget days early 1930s, and was politically expedient.
Interested parties should read Julian Hatcher’s _The Book of the Garand_ for the story.
John Cantius Garand designed several small arms (including one operated by primer motion) before turning to gas operation; his initial versions of what became the M1 chambered the 30-06 cartridge. Then he was ordered to rework it to chamber the U S Army Ordnance Corps 7x51mm experimental cartridge know to today’s gun culture as the 276 Pedersen cartridge.
John D Pedersen - the world’s foremost arms designer, after John M Browning’s demise in 1926 - had developed a delayed-blowback rifle proposed for US military issue, but he did not “push” the cartridge on the armed forces. Military leaders were already looking for something better.
In the aftermath of the Great War (it did not receive the numeral “I” until WWII), all combatants recognized that the rifles issued in 1914-18 were so large and heavy that they hampered troops on the battlefield. Also, the cartridges they fired were excessively powerful: though lethal at longer range (above 400m or so, out to max ranges of 2000m) at typical battle-encounter ranges they overdid the job. Most training experts cast doubt on the ability of any nation’s average trainee to see far enough, gauge ranges accurately enough, and hit reliably enough to make use of what we are now pleased to worship as “main battle rifles.” Rifles and ammunition were so large and heavy that commanders despaired of getting their soldiers to hump enough ammunition to get through a fight.
And so the search for smaller, lighter rifles firing smaller, lighter cartridges began.
It was noted that the Italians, Imperial Japan, Nordic nations, and the Greeks all fielded 6.5mm rifle cartridges; Spain and many South American countries used the then-elderly 7x57mm Mauser. All were deemed “good enough”. Each and every one was shorter, lighter, and less violent in recoil than the 30-06 (which was the very longest military cartridge of its time). The 30-06 pushed Garand’s design to its very limit; the military eventually had to redesign the issued round because the 30M1 bullet (172gr boat-tail, designed for max-range performance in machine guns) could not be pushed quick enough to please users. Therefore, the 30M2 bullet (153gr flat base) was adopted before WWII, serving until the 7.62x51mm NATO was adopted in the 1950s.
Th 276 Pedersen was as good as a 30-30, comparable to all the 6.5mm rounds, and only a little behind the 7x57.
An M1 chambering 276 Pedersen could hold ten rounds, double the capacity of most bolt action military rifles (Great Britain’s Lee-Enfield excepted). And a properly proportioned rifle would have been lighter and handier than the actual issued M1, holding as it did only eight rounds of the larger 30-06.
After the Chief of Staff issued his edict, John C. Grand reworked his rifle again, to fire the 30-06. The M1 went into production and was issued, and US troops carried it to victory. Along the way, the industrial workers, government bureaucrats, paper-pushing deskbound officers, and the American people wrought countless miracles of industrial organization, production, transportation, and preparation: victories in their own right. Could the war have been won more handily, or at less cost, shooting Germans and Japanese with 276 Pedersen bullets? Difficult to say for sure. What can be said is that a force armed with 276 Pedersen M1s (or with the Pedersen Rifle, for that matter) would have been toting a rifle that needed less steel, less wood, less brass and nickel and nitrocellulose and copper - all the nameless but vital ingredients that cannot be spared, if the forces are to prevail.
A great deal of fuss has been made by armchair commandos and “military intellectuals” alike, about the wartime benefit of weapons that chamber the same cartridge. Machine gun crews can use riflemen’s spare ammo, and vice versa. In actual service, US forces never did so: 30M1 rounds went into clips, and into boxes, and pallets, and got sent to the troops. 30M1 rounds for M1919 machine guns, and aerial/naval guns, got shoved into cloth belts or steel links, and made their way to combat forces. The twain did not meet.
After the Second World War, all nations renewed the search for newer infantry rifles; the conviction had become almost universal, that cartridges like 30-06, 303 British, 7.92x57 and the like were far too heavy and powerful for most tactical uses. Cartridges much smaller than the 276 Pedersen were designed, tested, chambered in new weapons, and used. The USSR made a close copy of Germany’s 7.92x33 Kurz, and fielded its 7.62x39 until the 1970s in many weapons. The UK tried to get NATO to adopt its 280/30 cartridge, but the US refused to go along, insisting on the 7.62x51, which performs identically with the 30-06 but is half an inch shorter.
In just over a decade, the US undercut NATO and reversed its prior preferences for “main battle” cartridges, by adopting the 5.56x45 with the M16, with downrange performance rather less stellar than the 276 Pedersen, any of the 6.5mm rounds, or the UK’s 280/30. At the behest of the US, NATO finally went with its version of the 5.56x45 in the 1980s; the USSR had in the 1970s already begun to field its 5.45x39mm round, with performance below that of the much-cursed 5.56mm.
Perhaps we should have avoided all the drama and adopted the 7x57mm after the Spanish-American War.
Take a look at earlier editions of WHB Smith’s _Small Arms of the World_: edition 10 or earlier.