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Practically Shooting

SVD Dragunov


jjjxlr8

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When Melvin Johnson demonstrated the LMG, one of his favorite tricks was to hold it by one hand at arms length and dump a mag into a distant target, usually making a respectable group while doing it. M.M. Johnson was a pretty good size guy and in good shape (being a Marine officer) but that was still an impressive feat with a 13 lb full auto .30-06. It says something for how controllable the design was.

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The simplest reason is that they had plenty of BARs at the time.

The First Special Service Force, a joint US-Canadian unit during WWII used some, and the short-lived USMC Parachute Regiments had some. After the ParaMarines were broken up, they were ordered to destroy their Johnson LMGs (and some semiauto rifles) but it appears some "forgot" in the flurry of activity. A lot of those Marines went to the Raiders (which didn't last long either) and took Johnsons with them as photos show from the Gavatu (Guadalcanal) landing. Some must hung onto them longer, because there are photos of them in use later, and at least one picture of one being fired on one of the later islands attacked (either Iwo Jima or Okinawa, I don't recall which).

A book came out a couple of years ago by Bruce Canfield called Johnson's Rifles and Machineguns. It was written from records and notes belonging to one of Melvin Johnson's sons who is still alive and posts on a Johnson forum. It's a good book, and interesting to any gun person, whether or not they care much about the Johnson rifles specifically.

This book was desperately needed, since most of the info out there on Johnson guns is just plain wrong. I knew only what I had read in magazines like American Rifleman, and found a lot if it was wrong. Some of those articles had been written by the same author before he knew better from the family data. I like to think the book more than makes amends.

One more Johnson LMG bit of curious info:

The magazine was a single stack, and had no feed lips. He felt a double column stack increased the odds of malfunction, and that lips formed from magazine sheet metal were too easy bent. So what he did was machine the feed lips into the steel receiver. The magazine had a spring-loaded hook that retained the ammo when not in the gun. When it was inserted in the magwell, this hook got moved out of the way, allowing the cartridges to feed out.

I got curious after reading that and took a look at my M1941 Johnson semiauto rifle. Sure enough, there is nothing resembling a feed lip on the rotary magazine body. It feeds/presses the ammo up the the bottom of the receiver, and that receiver opening is machined as feed lips.

Being a single stack 25-Rd mag, it is pretty long. A typical mag pouch would be long and clumsy, so Johnson designed a canvas and leather backpack mag carrier. The mags stacked so they fed to the bottom, where the shooter could reach back, pluck one out, and another went in it's place. A magazine magazine.

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