BTW the garand had far too many drawbacks to be the greatest. en blocs being the major one, both the german K43 and Russian SVT40 were superior in that they both had 10 round box mags and could be reloaded with stripper clips or topped off where as the garand required the ejection of all ammo still in the gun if you wanted to make sure it was full.
the only thing that made the garand more successful was that the US army was not afraid to issue the garand in large numbers where as the german and russian armies felt that giving a soldier a semi would cause him to spray and pray, wasting much needed ammo so they kept their several million semi auto on the side lines and in rear echelons for much of the war.
Hi.
The M1 clip can be reloaded while in the magazine. Youtube will show how. While the detachable box magazine better still, the integral mag of the M1 isn't as limiting as one might think. On the one hand, ejecting a partially loaded clip is easy. On the other, a unit of fire was not the huge number of rounds that might be envisaged. A full cartridge belt was plenty in most cases.
I can't argue or defend the want of two rounds in an 8 vs 10 debate as bigger is obviously better, although I will say that the SVT and the K43 weren't available in 1941, while the M1 was. Using the criteria of just the detachable box, the BAR was superior to all three-
double the capacity, with a detachable box
The M1 wasn't as universally issued as may be thought either. The 1903 was widely issued well into WWII by US forces. While the M1 has drawbacks, I feel it's over-simplistic to take the example of the M1 rifle and cast doubt on it being quite a good battle rifle just because it had lots of examples made and it had no detachable magazine. As I posted earlier, given it's era and the state of the art as it existed at the time, it may be the best of that era. Troops cleaning things correctly, etc, while being understandable, certainly do impact a rifle's real world performance, as do the materials used, the inter-changeability of parts, and durability.
Anyway. This thread should be moved