Garand clip 'ping' - cost many soldiers their lives in WWII

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Hearing loss

This is kind of parallel, as "can you hear it?" seems to be part of the question -

As part of my responsibilities as project manager, I administer a hearing conservation program. (Ear plugs and muffs...) We routinely measure equipment, especially new equipment, for sound level. We're looking for a sound level > 85 dBA, which is considered by industrial hygienists as the "threshold of damage".

At our project, we require hearing protection at this 85 dBA level, which is typical of a lawnmower, even though it is really required for a "time-weighted average" of 85 dBA (which is more noise.)

Why? Because, as posted, hearing loss is both cumulative and permanent. What used to be thought of in the old days as "getting accustomed" to loud noises was actually progressive hearing loss. Once you killed of a few hairs in your ears, the loud noise didn't bother you as much.

Until the hearing loss affects frequencies in the speech range, many people don't even know they have a hearing loss. When they can't understand people talking, they figure it out. By then it's too late to prevent it and they are shopping for hearing aids...

In WWII, hearing loss was not nearly as well understood as it is today. Just something to consider when debating who could / could not hear a "ping".
 
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Take this for what it's worth.
A while back I watched a pbs show on the Eskimos of Greenland. They mentioned problems of right ear deafness amongst the hunters since the introduction of modern rifles.
As an aside they said that it was the suddenness of the noise that cause the problem. They said that the human ear can "close" itself to loud noises, but because the noise of the rifle shot was so sudden the ear didn't have time to react.
 
That could well explain why some say such things about getting used to loud noises dmazur. It could also just have been a matter of the Army lying to soldiers to get them to go along with what needed to be done. There are many possible explanations for why I've heard multiple times about this sort of "training". Probably the sad part is that people were talking about training their kids to adapt to gunfire.

I was around a lot of gunfire when I was young. I also attended a lot of loud concerts. And I still do a lot of shooting though I rarely shoot anything loud without protection. I have my hearing checked regularly and according to my doctor I have average hearing for a man my age. I don't know if that just proves we have all lost hearing or that the ability to hear is more resilient to loud noise than is usually suggested. I've also ran jackhammers far too much and worked in factories that were too loud too. I sometimes wonder how I can still hear as well as I do at my age after being exposed to so much loud noise. What seemed to bother my hearing more than anything was listening to headphones too loud. There's no doubt firing a .45 without hearing protection even a few times can give you problems though. When you can't hear well for a week after shooting like that you know something is wrong.

Still I think we're all looking at a relatively new science here. The exact amount of damage from different types of noise is still being studied. It's hard to test because most people aren't going to be willing to listen to loud noise just to see how bad it hurts their hearing. Progress is slow as a result. I'm just not ready to buy all that gets said because the testing of such things is too new. Obviously loud noise will damage your hearing but how much is still something we haven't nailed down yet IMO.
 
I know lots of folks who went to war and came back with no hearing damage to speak of. How did they manage that?
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Probably the same as a couple of fellow coworkers of mine - one was a clerk-typist and the other was a cargo loader for C-24 transports. ;)

I've heard military people swearing that there was a method to make your ear drums adapt to noise. I doubt it's true but I'm not so sure that I know everything or that you do either or that the conventional wisdom is always correct.
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I don't know exactly how true it is, though I have heard it mentioned by vets, that there is a way to reduce the pain in one's ears during a battle and it seems to help with audio recovery time. And that technique is to yell loudly while firing or when explosions are going off. Something about the way sound is carried inside the bone of the skull is supposed to help. Anyone else heard this?

Also when a soldier says something it's part of the historical record. I don't find it so easy to dismiss what they say as some seem to do. History is written based on first hand accounts and that's what the comment I posted was.
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When it comes to certain wars, I start looking at the source of the information -- who said it, who recorded it and in what context.

Unfortunately, too often people now have their own motives for saying things about various wars, battles or actions, that aren't true. This one comes to mind:

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
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Thanks for reading.
 
No argument, but if you look at human anatomy of the ear, there is no mechanism for the ear "closing" for loud noise, sudden or not.

The hairs I referred to are in the inner ear, and, once damaged they do not repair themselves. Thus the "permanent" nature of the damage.

Also, the louder the noise, the more rapid the damage.

The longer the noise exposure, the sooner hearing loss is observed.

The defense is to limit your exposure to loud noise of any kind, and wear hearing protection around noise that can be immediately damaging (such as gunfire.)

I'm surprised at the PBS statement. Usually their content is better researched.

The reason why progressive hearing loss (due to noise exposure) isn't immediately observed by the worker is because it is selective. Different frequencies are lost, not a uniform loss across the range of the human ear. Typically, high frequencies are lost first. If you are a music expert, you might notice certain recordings sound different after a noise exposure, for example. When it becomes apparent is when "holes" are punched in the response spectrum which happen to fall in the range of the frequencies of human speech. You can hear some of what someone is saying, but not all. This is a real challenge for hearing aid designers, who often have to "tune" the aid to the individual patient, to amplify only the "holes" in their hearing. If they provide uniform amplification, the hearing aid is perceived as "too loud", the patient turns it down, and it doesn't work and better than no aid. ( :) ) IMO, this is fairly well understood by industrial hygienists (and perhaps the risk management section in your company), but not by individual workers who often think it is a bunch of nonsense. In retaliation to lack of cooperation, hearing conservation programs often try to scare workers into compliance by exaggerating the dangers. That's not a good plan. The danger of hearing loss is real. "One noise exposure isn't going to make me deaf" is also true. What the workplace needs to do is just recognize that a little bit of protection goes a long way, and the louder the noise, the more you need protection. -- What is unfortunate is that, unless you work somewhere that is concerned about medical costs, this information isn't widely or commonly available.
 
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I've heard military people swearing that there was a method to make your ear drums adapt to noise.
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I think you must be referring to the fact that if a person is exposed to in-close howitzer fire without putting their hands over their ears they'll rupture their eardrums. :confused:
 
Too much information -

Here's an extract on hearing loss -

The mechanism of hearing loss arises from trauma to stereocilia of the cochlea, the principal fluid filled structure of the inner ear.[citation needed] The pinna combined with the middle ear amplifies sound pressure levels by a factor of twenty, so that extremely high sound pressure levels arrive in the cochlea, even from moderate atmospheric sound stimuli. Underlying pathology to the cochlea are reactive oxygen species, which play a significant role in noise-induced necrosis and apoptosis of the stereocilia.[7] Exposure to high levels of noise have differing effects within a given population, and the involvement of reactive oxygen species suggests possible avenues to treat or prevent damage to hearing and related cellular structures.[7]

The elevated sound levels cause trauma to the cochlear structure in the inner ear, which gives rise to irreversible hearing loss.[8] A very loud sound in a particular frequency range can damage the cochlea's hair cells that respond to that range thereby reducing the ear's ability to hear those frequencies in the future.[9] However, loud noise in any frequency range has deleterious effects across the entire range of human hearing.[10] The outer ear (visible portion of the human ear) combined with the middle ear amplifies sound levels by a factor of 20 when sound reaches the inner ear.[11]

Hearing loss is somewhat inevitable with age. Though older males exposed to significant occupational noise demonstrate significantly reduced hearing sensitivity than their non-exposed peers, differences in hearing sensitivity decrease with time and the two groups are indistinguishable by age 79.[2] Women exposed to occupational noise do not differ from their peers in hearing sensitivity, though they do hear better than their non-exposed male counterparts. Due to loud music and a generally noisy environment, young people in the United States have a rate of impaired hearing 2.5 times greater than their parents and grandparents, with an estimated 50 million individuals with impaired hearing estimated in 2050.[3]

In Rosen's work on health effects and hearing loss, one of his findings derived from tracking Maaban tribesmen, who were insignificantly exposed to transportation or industrial noise. This population was systematically compared by cohort group to a typical U.S. population. The findings proved that aging is an almost insignificant cause of hearing loss, which instead is associated with chronic exposure to moderately high levels of environmental noise.[8]

Which came from this article in Wikepedia -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_health_effects
 
Does all of this state when you can no longer hear your wife? I've been ignoring her for years but she's starting to catch on and I'm looking forward to REAL hearing loss.

In all seriousness, I've been exposed to massive amounts of noise and my ears just seem to naturally 'shut down'. Kind of like SCUBA diving when your ears 'pop'. After the 'pop' everything seems to go back to normal.

I'm 57 and can still hear a rattlesnake slither through the leaves at 30 ft. but am having problems in crowds of people.
 
"I'm 57 and can still hear a rattlesnake slither through the leaves at 30 ft. but am having problems in crowds of people."

And that is the nature of selective hearing loss.

I still have very acute hearing in some ranges, but in others? Nothing.
 
Probably the same as a couple of fellow coworkers of mine - one was a clerk-typist and the other was a cargo loader for C-24 transports.
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Yeah that would make sense except those transport engines can be pretty danged loud too. I know you were joking and all but I can't figure out how someone who was a sniper in WWII and a guy who operated either a 30 or 50 caliber machine gun in the door of a Huey (don't know which they used as door guns) could manage to come back hearing anything at all. Those chopper engines are pretty danged loud too. Maybe he used hearing protection, I don't know. I do know that the introduction of noise cancelling headphones certainly made those engines sound like they weren't as loud but the way those things work they are playing sounds just as loud as the engine only on the exact opposite wave form. If the engine sound is on the up side the noise cancelling sound is on the down side. I wonder if those things really help or if they make things twice as bad and we just don't know it.

I know we're making progress in the study of these things but it's still a new science. I just know that people can hear over top of those big engines with noise cancelling tech. I know it's really strange that that technology works at all.

I also know I have some hearing loss even if it is in the normal range for my age. I just figure most of us have had some of the same exposure to loud noises over the years. I wish I did know more about this stuff and I hope my kids don't have the same kinds of exposure I had. I know my dad worked for a railroad and got a big check for compensation for hearing damage. I guess progress is being made because I don't think my hearing is as bad as his was at my age. Then again I never saw dad use hearing protection when he shot his guns but at least he was into shotguns mostly. The sound isn't right by your ear like a .45 is. He shot a 16 ga. most of his life. He used it for trap shooting and for quail hunting.
 
I have a profound hearing loss in both ears caused by tank guns in the army. The isidiousness of hearing loss is that you don't know you have it. I had the ringing in the ears (tinitus) but I didn't know I was hard of hearing. I was middle aged before I found out. After many years of shooting, and flying small planes, a friend asked me why I had my TV turned up so high. I could barely hear it. When I had my ears tested I found out that I had about 50% of normal hearing. I couldn't hear high pitched sounds at all. After I got my hearing aids I heard my own footsteps for the first time in 40 years. I could hear birds singing, and women's voices. I know what caused it because I remember the day I was caught outside my tank and the tanks on both sides of me fired their main guns. It was like getting stabbed in both ears at the same time. But I didn't know I couldn't hear well because if you can't hear it, a noise doesn't exist.

I was trained on the M1 rifle and during training on the firing line you could hear the ping of empty clips, but there were a lot of them, and reloading is very fast. An enemy would not be able to pick out which soldier had emptied his rifle. And he would not be able to move more than 3 feet before the rifle was reloaded. During WWII there were hundreds of thousands of enemy shot with M1s. I have never heard one reliable case of a GI who was shot because of the ping. In the rattle of rifle fire, machine gun bursts, grenades, screaming, yelling, artillery fire, bombs bursting etc. hearing and reacting to the ping would take a superman. IT DIDN'T HAPPEN, its an urban myth.:)
 
OK everyone who has used an M1 in combat conditions (real or training) raise your hands. You tell us about the ping kills. Everyone who has not had that experience sit down and shut up!

As far as stories from the front lines, I know that people don't always remember things accurately. And people sometimes remember things that didn't happen at all. And people sometimes lie. I know one guy who sometimes posts on this forum who claims to have been a gunner on a river Patrol boat in 'Nam. He tells all kinds of stories about his fighting days. I also know his sister and his mother and both of them have told me that the closest he ever got to the military was one semester of high school ROTC. He also says he was a reserve cop, but I know he took a couple of ride alongs and never was a cop.

Historians check their sources very closely, CO's reports, buddies, official documentation, enemy corroboration etc. Any anecdotal tale is discounted without corroboration.

:)
 
So when a historian tells me what you just said isn't true should I believe him or you?

I am a historian BTW. I produce historical documentaries for a living. Currently I'm working on a documentary on one room schools. It's a long process where I've done lots of research and done lots of interviews and I'm still not done. Just getting together the visual material takes a lot of time. So please don't tell me that I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to documenting historical information.

I was a history major and a journalism major in college. I learned what it took to verify information long ago. You're talking about what I do for a living when you talk about how historians and / or journalists verify information. And I'm here to tell you that "anecdotal tales" are not dismissed out of hand when they jibe with known facts.

You guys can argue the point all you want. I know for a fact that the historical record indicates that sometimes the ping did cause people to get shot. A 3 second pause is a long time in certain situations like the fluid battlefields of WWII. If you can't fire back for 3 seconds that gives your enemy a chance to come up from behind his cover and aim at you. Ordinarily the Garrand kept the enemy pinnned down because of the fact it was a semi-automatic facing bolt action rifles. The one time the enemy knew he had a chance was when he heard that ping.

Again my history professor claims he saw this happen. You can call him a liar and dismiss his claims if you like. But you are talking about someone who was there. You're right that in a major battle it wouldn't be an advantage at all. But once again in a small skirmish where a few soldiers were involved it could make a difference. The historical record says that it happened. I know that for a fact. I'll dig out my notes and find exactly what my professor said and post a copy of my notes if you like and I took excellent notes. I essentially wrote down everything that was said.

I didn't want to come on here making claims that are hard to back up but I've said enough times that my history professor was there and he said he saw it happen. If you think I'm lying then so be it. But I know what I was taught. And just to be blunt about it I was the star pupil in that class. That's how I got to be a historian now. I know you have a problem believing what people say and I can't say as I blame you. People do lie. But not all of them and I'm not lying now.

Just to give you an idea what my life is like my wife won the award as the best student in two different disciplines as a college student. My daughter has a totally free ride to Ohio St. because of her academics which is probably a 1 in 50,000 thing, my son is a graduate student at Dayton in laser physics where he does research for the Air Force. He makes a lot of money going to school. Yes he gets paid well to go to college. Actually he gets paid by the Air Force mostly now but he also won a fellowship that was extremely hard to come by. BTW he was qualified to go to Harvard as a graduate student but there weren't enough positions in his field and he wouldn't have gotten paid there anyway. And me, I produce historical documentaries.

I didn't want to go into all this but I'm getting tired of having what I said questioned by people who don't know nearly as much about the subject as I do. Call me a liar if you will but I can describe every battle and every campaign in WWII in great detail. Want to know about Hitler's religion? It wasn't Christianity. he thought he was a reincarnation of Thor. That's what all the Aryan Nation stuff was really all about. He wanted to replace Jesus as the deity of the western world. Want to know about the Japanese and their worship of the Emperor and how he was considered more of a god than a man. Want to know how that lead them to buy into the Samurai culture and why that caused them to try to conquer the world? Want to know what size guns the Arizona had and what size guns the battleship that replaced it had? Want me to recount my discussions with a guy who fought in every single naval battle in the Pacific from Pearl to Okinawa? Do you know what the Turkey Shoot was and what made it be called that? Do you know how many soldiers died on the Death March? Do you know how they were killed? Do you know about the Rape of Nanking? Do you know about the Russo-Japanese War? Do you know about the Burma Road? Do you know who Roger's Rangers were? Do you know what the Maginot Line was and the other name it came to have later in the war? Do you know why the Germans called it the Westwall and the Allies called it the Siegfried line? Do you know what Monte Cassino was about? Anzio? El Alamien? Sicily? Patton? Rommel? Montgomery? Messina? The V1? The V2? The Heavy Water plant at Rjukan? Dr. Yoshio Nishina? Just look up the last one. Here I'll do it for you. Read about him on this web page. If that doesn't scare the pants off you then you just don't know what should scare you. Yes it was a long time ago but it was a race to the finish at the time and most people have no clue why things worked out the way they did. If you read that you will have a clue if you know how to apply it.

I could go on for hours here. Before you start telling people how historians do things you probably ought to find out who you're dealing with. When I say I have evidence that the ping did matter at times I mean what I say.
 
King Ghidora said:
Again my history professor claims he saw this happen. You can call him a liar and dismiss his claims if you like. But you are talking about someone who was there.
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I once knew a guy who was there (and by "there" I mean combat, the particular war is irrelevant) and had the CIB and campaign ribbon and Eleven-series MOS and DD214 to go with it who swore... swore that a near miss from a Ma Deuce could kill you from the overpressure. Most of the time it was a buddy of his that saw it happen. Once or twice, though, he said he saw it happen.

There's a reason that forensic evidence trumps eyewitness testimony every time.

You are a historian, right? How many oral history pieces have you read where GI's describe German Panther tanks and their 88mm guns? Or call anything the Germans had that was hand-held and full-auto a "Schmeisser"?
 
Understand, when most of us say "historians" we mean The History Channel or The Military Channel, and to a lesser degree, the various science channels. They all constantly get things wrong.
 
Technially I am a historian.

I have my degree in history and have more than my fair share of time working in museums devoted to the preservation of American history.

There are most definitely "oddities of history" that people take for gospel truth, and which are even recited as gospel truth by those recognized to be authorities, that just aren't true, or for which there is little to no foundational basis.

First hand "I was there" experiences are not always reliable, either. There are some really compelling studies done of people who have witnessed crimes and how their own prejudices, beliefs, etc., influence their description of events and perpetrators.

How many here have had Navy carrier personnel SWEAR to them that their nuclear carrier routinely operated at 70+ knots, and that wasn't even the top speed, which is turbo ultra secret classified and you'd have to be killed if you knew it? I have, and more than one.

Tamara's example of the "M2 overpressure will kill you" is a perfect example.

Sometimes there's a slight shred of truth that can be gleaned from things like this.

For example, the carrier...

Generally, when launch aircraft, a carrier noses into the prevailing wind and goes to full power.

So, if you have a carrier going 35 knots nosing into a 35 knot wind, there's your 70 knots.

That's wind speed on the flight deck, which is monitored and reported very frequently during flight operations because it affects the catapult and arrestor wire settings.

The ship isn't going 70 knots, but the wind over the flight deck certainly is.
 
Again my history professor claims he saw this happen. You can call him a liar and dismiss his claims if you like. But you are talking about someone who was there.
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That is called a good story, and now it is a story of hearsay, or oft-repeated story.

It isn't about calling your history professor a liar. It is the story you recounted that is in question. They aren't calling you a liar either, just doubting an old story, steeped in a lot of myth baggage.
 
Yes, applying noise opposite in phase does cancel the noise out. There is a commercial product mfg by Bose that uses this technology. The military calls it ANR (Active Noise Reduction.) It does have to sample the outside noise, invert the phase and then apply it in order to cancel the noise. It isn't twice as loud (unless the phase shift circuit fails :) )

Here is an interesting article about the military concern about hearing loss and what they're doing about it. The comments about the degree of hearing loss suffered in military conditions is interesting.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3912/is_200306/ai_n9247108/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

Back to the "can you hear the ping?" question, I think there is plenty of evidence that battlefield hearing loss makes this a "probably not true" in the myth classification department, rather than "current research supports the claim".
 
Such a tiresome discussion.
Those who doubt it could be possible flatly dismiss it.
I know my Father, and he had no agenda when he mentioned the ping in an off-hand comment, one of the few he ever made about his combat experiences. He served prior to WWII in an Ohio National Guard unit that was half horse- half armored car equipped. By the time he reached France, they were fully equipped with M8 armored cars and Stuart tanks.
He was something of a weapons expert in his unit, having qualified with basically every small arm in the Army from 45 1911 to 50 Browning, as well as the 37mm cannon used first as a towed anti-tank gun, then as the main weapon on the tanks and armored cars. He taught the use of the 30 and 50 cal machine guns, and had a personal collection of German automatic weapons which he used to teach other units with. He never went into detail about the war, but would occaisionally make a statement while watching "Combat" with me like "a 30.06 AP would go right through a tree like that, and the german hiding behind it". Or, "Hiding behind a wall like that is useless--an M1 would take that apart brick by brick".
He was a fan of the M1, and liked the M3 grease gun as well. He also mentioned the efficiency of cannister rounds in the 37mm cannon on the M8.
One of the few stories he told about the hedgerows concerned having to drive across a road intersection lined with hedges one by one as a German 88 fired down the road.
You guys can believe or disbelieve the "ping" story, but I know at least one European vet who was aware of it.
 
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