Gewehr 43 vs M1 garand

GEWEHR 43! M1 had a ping sound, when the clip was empty. And you weren't able to refill it while it had rounds inside! also here comes the 10 round magazin of Gewehr, and a fact, that it was also used by skilled sniper aces, in which hands the Gewehr, become ultimate weapon. I think Garand, wasn't used for sniping since it had the ping sound. U definitly dont want that, while u are all alone on a top of a barn...

 

The "ping" is greatly overstated, and not that much of a problem during battle. And there were sniper variants, the "D" specifically was for sniping.

There were minor attempts to improve it during the war, but these did not left experimental stages, except for two sniper modifications, M1C and M1D. Both were approved for service in the 1945 and both featured a telescope sight which was off-set to the left due to the top-loading feature of the M1.

See:

Modern Firearms - Rifle M1 Garang

 

Yeah, see:

YouTube - Topping off an M1 Garand

and

YouTube - Loading and Reloading the the M1 Garand

And the ping isn't very audible either. See:

YouTube - Loading and shooting a M1 Garand

 

G43 firing: YouTube - G43 shooting show part 2

 

As a stealth weapon, semi-automatics don't tend to be the prefered sniper weapon. If I am on a battlefield with all the sounds of battle around, the ejected shell isn't as critical. If your sneaking into position all by your lonesome and have an empty shell flying around it becomes a little more important.

 

It's not SHELL. It's a cartridge!!!! Use the proper terminology!

 

The word should be "case", as in the brass of an expended round. In the example of "brass", even if the "case" isn't made of a brass metal alloy, that is a generic term for the empty case.

His point remains valid however, the minor sound of an ejected case or even the en-bloc clip "ping" is of little import in most circumstances. I however would think that at a distance, when trying for silence, the same could be said. By the time that minor "noise" traveled any distance it would be of no import at all. The sound of explosion of the round being fired and the sound of the empty case hitting anything would arrive at the target at so close an interval the little one wouldn't make any difference at all. Sound travels the same speed, loud or minor noise; same speed.

 

The G43 suffered from quality control issues (slave labor is never good!) but is a much superior design than the M1. Although often praised, the M1 is a weird design with a lot of defects: An opening in the receiver which gladly accepts dirt, sand, etc. (nearly all of the M1s that hit the beach at Iwo immediately went out of service when exposed to the volcanic ash (good thing the Japs didn't immediately counter attack!); the G43 has a closed receiver. The M! has a complex long linkage system to activate the clip ejection which is prone to maladjustment since it relies upon a properly functioning gas system. The M1 has an exposed op rod which has to be avoided or malfunction will occur; the G43's is enclosed.And of course, the 8 round do or die clip v. the detachable 10 rd. mag which could be topped off with stripper clips. The G43 was often issued with an easily mounted 4X scope; M1 equipped grunts seldom had scope power. German engineers during WWII studied all the available rifles being used and analyzed their weaknesses, concluding gas systems were inherently unreliable, exposed op rods were a no-no, receivers should be enclosed and removable mags were the best loading systems.They never got to make the "perfect" rifle, but it got done after the War: What we know now as the HK G3/91 family.,

 

...I like the Germans for ''precise'' engineering when they have the time, resources, dedicated work force, etc ....but maybe sometimes being too ''precise'' is not good for the roughness of war ....
...a mediocre weapon in trained, motivated hands is better than a great weapon in ''unskilled'', unmotivated hands....

 

You can top off a Garand clip with your fingers easier than a box magazine with stripper clips. The idea that you can't is one of those myths that get passed around by people who have never used one. The exposed receiver and op rod is another 'six of one, half dozen of another' things. Yes, that makes it exposed to dirt, but it also makes it easier to get at should the rifle foul. You can merely pour a canteen of water through the action while working the bolt and clean it in seconds rather than having to dismantle your rifle in combat to clean it. The Garand was good enough that the army merely upgraded it to the M14 after the war and it continued in service for another fifteen years until an entirely new class of rifles (the M16) replaced it. And the early M16 had far more problems than the Garand ever did. The Garand was the best rifle in WWII.

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Besides wasting all of your drinking water (unless of course you're conveniently located beside a ready source of portable water) trying to get the mud, sand, etc. out of your M1, would only result in driving the watered-down slush deeper into the action-or chamber-since the M! has a solid floor plate. Actually. the water douche would work for the G43 since with the mag removed the pollution can easily escape. Loading single rounds? Hum-m-m, return to the Glory Days of the Trapdoor Springfield when Troopers desperately tried to speed-load by clutching extra rounds between their fingers! Fumbling with loose rounds in the dark in the face of an enemy assault, is a a problem stripper clips and mags solved. And a stripper clip or mag can be loaded quicker than you can say "Stripper clips and mags can be loaded QUICK!" And if you believe the G43 lacks accuracy, check out Hickok45 putting the '43 through its paces.

 

You're assuming you'd have to top off a Garand under fire. If under fire you would keep shooting and then slap a new clip in when you're empty. When you top off a clip or magazine you are pretty much by definition in a pause. You've fired several shots and instead of changing the entire clip (or magazine) you just want to thumb in several rounds to have a full load. You can actually do that easier with a Garand than a G43. With a G43 you'd either have to remove the mag to thumb rounds in, or use a stripper clip. I'm just trying to explode the myth that a Garand clip can't be topped off, when in fact it can, and very easily.
The other point, that cleaning the lugs with any handy water because they are exposed on the Garand is also valid. It doesn't really matter (at the moment) if that water carries the debris into the bottom of the action, because there are no moving parts there. If your bolt body, lugs and op rod are clear, the gun will continue to function. I'm not arguing that an open action is better than an action with a top cover, I agree with you that it is not. But the problem is overstated. An open action like the Garand or Carbine will foul easier, but is also easier to clear. You can SEE the problem, whereas with any closed action you can't. You can only run the clearance drill and if that fails, start field stripping your gun to find the problem.
The other issue, perhaps the main issue with the G43 is that it was created and fielded under wartime emergency conditions. They took a look at the SVT-40 and tried to make their own version. It was rushed. New tooling had to be created and parts were often out of spec, improperly heat treated and so on. If you got a good one, you had a pretty good rifle, but things got cruder and cruder as the war progressed.
A better argument could be made for the FG-42 vs the Garand.

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And those Garand 2.0's are still in service. The Navy, Army, and Marines have had a few on duty ever since they were invented. I think the USCG still uses 'em. The Army has been pulling M14's out of inventory and repurposing them into rifles for designated marksmen at the platoon level. The M14 gets a fresh stock and some optics, but in it's heart it's a Garand.

The big advantage is the excellent .308 cartridge, which was based off the Garand's excellent .30-06. In the modern battlespace, a cartridge with some legs (and punch) is quite desirable.

Agreed, the M1 was an outstanding rifle. The G43/44 may have set the pattern for the assault rifles that followed, but the Garand is still with us for now.

 

You may be confusing the G43 with the STG44.

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Ahhhh....thanks. I did indeed mistake the reference to G43 for the MP43/StG44. The G/K43 was the copy of the Soviet SVT series, ja? I believe some of the K43 models used the 8mm short round that the StG44 used. My bad.

But the M1 was still an excellent rifle.

 

I shouldered an M-1 for two years; if you have a squad blazing away, you're not going to hear the "ping" from the guy right next to you and probably not your own - loud noises do awful things to your hearing, for which I'm paying for now. If the bad guys are 10, 20, 30 yards away and shooting back, they're not going to hear magic ping at all.

Internet mythology at it's best fostered by folk who know not that of which they speak.

 

I am amazed! In four pages of posts no one mentioned the really important difference between the two: their sights! The Garand (and its offspring the M14) had what I consider the best battle sights ever found on a military rifle. The Garand sight was rugged, easily acquired, had a longer sight radius and was adjustable for both windage and elevation. All German arms had 100m elevation adjustments out to 1000ms or so but the soldier couldn't adjust windage. That had to be done by a battalion armorer.

Now I will say that the G/K 43 had much better sights than the K98 with its pyramid in a v configuration. They're not as good as the Garand's but a definite improvement over the 98.

Let's face it, no soldier can shoot better than what his sights allow.

 

For what my non-combat experience is worth, the Garand is a significantly better rifle than the G/K43.

• Garand has much better battle sights
• Garand has a much easier takedown. Bolt removal/disassembly on the K43 is downright painful.
• Garand is more robust and durable
• Garand has a provision for a bayonet while the K43 does not

To be fair, the K43 has the edge on these items.

• K43 has a higher mag capacity (negligble)
• K43 has detachable magazine (negligible)
• K43 is softer shooting than the Garand if you tune down the gas system. The k43 is notorious for over-gassing which can make it unpleasant to fire
• K43 "feels" lighter although both it and the Garand are more or less the same.

Ultimately, the K43 does have the edge on a few technicalities but the Garand is by far the better battle rifle. There's a technical reason why the Garand action/bolt lived on while that used the K43 did not. Don't get me wrong -- the K43 is an excellent rifle and one of my favourites to fire but the M1 Garand is just better. It is a shame that some of the later war and postwar designs which led to the fiasco that was the M14 were not send to production.

As for the infamous ping: this is hogwash. Those who claim that the enemy could hear it in a firefight have never shot rifles (let alone SMGs or MGs) without hearing protection. It's not like what you see in the movies.

 

That's the best point made in this entire thread. There is an optical "trick" to aperture sights, in that the eye will (without any conscious effort) center the top of the front sight in the center of the ring. That creates one sight plane, the front sight. You look THROUGH the rear aperture and only focus on the front sight. You do NOT try to center the top of the front within the aperture because your eye will do that without effort from you. In effect, you have the early 20th century's version of a red dot sight. If your elevation and windage is adjusted correctly, you will hit your target.
If you're not a shooter it's hard to grasp how important that is. With traditional open topped sights you must shift your focus back and forth between the front and rear sights to make sure the top of the front sight is perfectly aligned with the top of the rear sight, and at the same time you must make sure an equal amount of daylight is visible on each side of the sight picture for windage. All of that happens in less then a second, but in the chaos of combat that may be the difference between a hit and a miss.

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