M1 Garand Rifle

The M1 Garand is an American semi-automatic service rifle designed by John Garand and adopted by the United States Army in 1936, becoming the first standard-issue semi-automatic rifle fielded by any major army and giving American infantry a significant rate-of-fire advantage over the bolt-action rifles still standard in most other nations' armies during the Second World War. It fed from an eight-round en-bloc clip inserted from the top of the receiver, and the clip's automatic ejection once empty produced a distinctive metallic ping sound that became closely associated with the rifle in later popular memory, sometimes claimed, with disputed historical accuracy, to have tactically alerted enemy soldiers that a rifle had just been emptied. General George S. Patton is widely quoted as calling the M1 Garand the greatest battle implement ever devised, and the rifle served as the primary American infantry weapon through the Second World War and the Korean War before being replaced by the selective-fire M14 in the early 1960s.