First, note that both rifles are late serial numbers, manufactured in the fall of 1945 during the last production run of M1 rifles before this test was conducted (about another million and a half would be produced during the Korean War), and probably had not seen much use. The next thing that leaps from the page is the results obtained with the M1 Garand control rifles. Given that these tests preceded the InRange trials by 65 years, and given Ian’s propensity for Collector Grade volumes, it’s not entirely out of the question that these trials provided the model for his tests of the M1A, AR-15, and MAS 49/56. The first thing that becomes apparent is, with the exception of the typically stringent standards to which everything – from the mixtures of both sand and mud, to the length of exposure the rifles had to endure – was held, how similar these two tests are to those done by InRange last month. With this in mind, and with the knowledge that the M1 Garand may have some key advantages over the M1A, due to its anti-pre-engagement mechanism and generous underlug (two features deleted from the T44 as design compromises), let’s take a look at the results of the 1950 dust and sand trials, on pages 19 and 20 of The FAL Rifle, reproduced below: Before that, Guns & Ammo performed a similar, though in my opinion less brutal mud test with another Springfield M1A, with an eerily similar outcome to InRange’s trials. Our readers will surely recall the absolutely brutal dust and mud tests to which InRange TV subjected a Springfield Armory (the modern-day company, not the government arsenal) M1A at the end of January and beginning of this month, with disastrous results for that rifle. However, the tests that concern us today are the dust and mud tests. In the rain tests, the M1 beat the EM-2 and was not so far behind the FAL and T25, and in the cold tests the M1 was a clear winner, functioning flawlessly (this would be echoed later when the T44E2 would beat the FAL in trials in Alaska, preventing its cancellation and eventually leading to the adoption of its descendant, the T44E4 as the M14, in 1957). The tests were comprehensive, but not all included the “control” rifle – the M1. Browning’s Belgian protégé – against the Second World War veteran the M1 Garand. In it is contained the transcript of the 1950 Light Rifle trials, which pitted the American T25 design (a rifle that was at once a hybrid of the M1 Garand and BAR, but at the same time much more than that) by Earle Harvey, the Anglo-Polish EM-2 design by Stefan Janson, and the Anglo-Belgian FN FAL design – by none other than Dieudonné Saive, John M. In preparation for an upcoming article about “light rifle” development (i.e., full power automatic infantry rifles), I have been reading the excellent Collector Grade Publication three-part volume on the FN FAL rifle.
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