Any bayonet experts ?

A

adamc

New member
Any bayonet experts ?

My father brought home from Korea, what I thought was an M1 bayonet.
Found it in a box of stuff while cleaning out.
He never talked about any of the guns & stuff to us, only the 'War stories'.
I searched the internet and found an M1 bayonet not even close to what he had.

It looks to be a type of machete
14 1/2 " oal, 10" blade
6" blood channel, 1 1/8 wide blade

I have tried to post pics, but am not able to
 
There is no such thing as a "blood groove" on a knife.It has nothing to do with blood .It's called a "fuller"
 
Blood Groove

Well, the term "blood groove" does have some meaning. The "fuller" is a groove that makes a sword/large blade lighter. The blood groove is designed to reduce section so that as you pull a bayonet/knife out of...something, the suction does not pull...stuff...out with it. However, according to my grandfather who served in the Pacific Theater, it didnt always work.
 
The bayonet could also be Japanese. The Chicoms and Norks had a lot of left overs from WWII that they used in the Korean War.
 
some pictures.. I figured out how to do it, by resaving them "smaller"
 

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Well, lets start by what it doesn't have - any kind of way of mounting it to a gun. It also doesn't have any holes in the tang where the grips were riveted or screwed on. To me it looks like the blank for a bayonet, before the grove for the mount were cut etc.
 
well
I don't know how he would get a blank..

although I did have Uncles who did work for several gun companies
AFTER WW2. Marlin, Mossberg, and Winchester

did any of these make bayonets ?
 
If you look at this drawing of an exploded Garand bayonet, you can see the connection
23-01.jpg
 
Winchester did make bayonets. Don't know if they made them into WWII. The ones I know of date from between the civil war and WWI.
 
After WWII there were surplus up the kazoo that people were trying to figure out a way to make money on it. Using tanks and jeeps to pull plows, one hardware store even used bayonet blanks welded to a frame, hooked up to a long handle to make a weed " hoe". With the millions of tons of military surplus. and left over parts from cancelled contracts, I don't find it surprising that a bayonet blank would be loose in the market, they were probably selling them for 50 cents a piece to make your own "hunting knife". I'm quite sure ther were tons of blanks that wound up in the junk yard as scrape. Remember, they were even pushing crated Jeeps and Trucks overboard because the cost of retuning them to the US was more than their value.Let me amend this, in the 1950's it only cost 10 cents to get in to the movies, so they were probably selling those for 5 cents apiece.:)
 
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There were 4 main M1 garand bayonet types. The first type is the 16in aka long bayonets. I think these were discontinued around 1942 or 1943 in favor of 10 in versions. For the 10in versions, some were made as 10 in bayonets and others were cut down from unissued 16in bayonets. The cut ones will have the blood groove aka fuller go all the way up the blade where as the "m1 bayonet" (I don't know the exact name) will have the blood groove stop, as pictured below and as pictured by the OP. The 4th type is the Korean war m5 type, which had the M4 bayonet (for m1 carbine) blade. That blade type was also shared by the m3 fighting knife, the m6 bayonet for the m14, and of course the m7 bayonet for the M16.

Winchester never made any garand bayonets. I know Winchester made P17 aka 30-06 Enfield bayonets (I had one - these also fit the 1897 Winchester trenchguns) and I think they made bayonets for the Russian contract model 1895 Winchesters. M1 garand bayonet makers included but are not limited to: Pal, AFH (American For and Hoe), Utica, UFH ( Union Fork and Hoe), OL (Oneida Limited), and WT (Wild Drop Forge and Tool)

lg0000015254_A_1295523185.jpg
 
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It is a forging for the M1 bayonet*. Many machining operations would have been needed to complete it. It could have come from any of the factories making the M1 bayonet just before or during WWII, but not from Winchester, which never made the M1.

* The M1 bayonet and M1 rifle are not directly connected except in the coincidence of the nomenclature. The Bayonet Knife, M1, was issued from the late 1930's into the 1960's. It fitted, and was issued with, the M1, the M1903, the M1903A3 and M1903A4 rifles. It was superseded for the M1 rifle by the M5 bayonet.

FWIW, the "blood groove" is a basic training myth; it is properly called a "fuller" and is intended to lighten and stiffen the blade, not to allow the victim's blood to come out.

Jim
 
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That is very interesting. I have never seen a rough forging of a bayonet blank before and how anyone in the service got one, would make an interesting tale.

Things like this would have stayed in the factory or gone into the scrap bin.
 
Well, just because he was in the service doesn't mean he acquired that forging in service, odds are , he didn't. He might have found it in a junkyard, peons like me used to visit junkyards all the time, I didn't even know there were auto parts stores, all our car parts come from junk yards, and these yards used to be places of wonder. This happens frequently, Someones father or grandfather was in the service, after their passing, something is found in their effects, hence it has to be something he was issued in the service. In 99 per-cent of the cases it was something unrelated to military service and just an item that the deceased picked up somewhere in their many years of life. Of course that is JMHO.:)
 
It is possible the forging did come from Korea; at one time, the U.S. Army had something called "offshore procurement" which meant buying a lot of equipment from allied countries, including Germany, Japan and Korea. I don't know if Korea made M1 bayonets, either for the U.S. or for their own use (they did have M1 rifles obtained under military assistance programs), but I do know they later cut the blades of their bayonets to 5"; quite a few of those were sold on the U.S. market.

Jim
 
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