More importantly, the Bloke shows how easy and quickly one could reload following the ‘ping’. Even if a German or Japanese soldier did manage to take advantage of the ‘ping’ window of opportunity, he’s likely to get shot by another GI. Not to mention the obvious fact that soldiers rarely fight alone. Soldiers have only recently begun to wear any kind of hearing protection at all, which would have made such a noise even more difficult to detect. The Bloke shows just how difficult it would be to even hear the ‘ping’, without the various other loud noises associated with battle. Tactical trainer Larry Vickers recreated a scenario for his ‘TAC TV’ series, and more recently YouTuber ‘ Bloke on the Range’ has tackled the myth. However, there’s a bit more to it than that…Ī lot of ink and pixels have been expended arguing the ‘M1 ping’ myth back and forth, and some have even tried to practically demonstrate why it’s a silly idea. The notion of this ‘ping’ being a fatal flaw is a myth, in that there’s no evidence that it endangered infantrymen. These were inserted into the open action from the top and retained inside the weapon until the last round was fired, at which point the clip would eject (along with the final fired cartridge case) with a distinctive ‘ping’ sound (you can clearly hear this in the movie ‘Saving Private Ryan’, for example, and see it in slow motion in this Forgotten Weapons video).

Instead it was loaded with eight round metal en bloc clips. The M1 ‘Garand’ was ahead of its time as a military self-loading rifle, but unlike modern rifles it did not feature detachable box magazines. One of the most persistent firearm myths is that American soldiers fighting in the Second World War (or later, in the Korean War) were at substantial risk of being identified and engaged by the enemy because of the distinctive ‘ping’ sound made by ejection of clips from their issued rifles.

M1 garand reload mid clip