gotta wonder if these would have as short a life as the M14/ T44 had they been adopted instead.

Granted at the time, 1955-1957, it made more sense to adopt the T44, as the FAL save for Canada hadn't really been adopted yet. Hindsight though shows that the FAL became the "Right arm of the Free World" while the M14 was superseded within ten years and is now relegated to a DMR/ sniper platform primarily.

...and if they'd gone ahead with grafting BAR magazine feed capability to the Garand receiver the way they had it worked out by 1945, we wouldn't have even needed the FAL.  Eventually we would have adopted the AR-10 / AR-15, but we would have had a mag-fed 7.62 rifle before Japan surrendered.

I forget which T-series it was, but the BAR magazine was found to be less than ideal for the modified Garand prototypes and was dropped-you'd think a good magazine design would work across the board, but apparently not.  Anyway, the magazine from the German FG42 was copied and scaled down for the T-65 cartridge and this was the design that was eventually employed in the T-44 rifle which was later type-classified as the M14.

There were just too many technical hurdles to overcome in such a short period of time it would seem.

Here is a great documentation on the US FAL.......http://www.falfiles.com/forums/showthread.php?t=254976

 
 

Awesome rifle pics, but seeing that thread again made me sad.

So true.  We lost a great one with his passing.

The L1A1s towards the bottom were my favorite.

If we went with the FAL, we probably would never have adopted the M16.



So sticking with the M14 for alittle longer was probably a godsend.


 

My second gun was a single barrel H&R breech loading .410 shotgun.

The issue, if I remember correctly from another thread, wasn't actually the magazine, but that the receiver of the Garand was too short to allow the bolt to spend enough time in recoil for a BAR magazine to feed fast enough during full-auto fire.  Garand wanted to lengthen the receiver enough to fix it but the Army didn't want to make changes that significant and... the entire idea was abandoned.  Logically.  

That makes sense.  More receiver=more weight, so I can understand the position taken by Ordnance.

Against the backdrop of all this, it is rather surprising to me that the T-48 was even considered at all.  Considerable effort was expended to field domestically-manufactured FALs for testing, which is somewhat surprising considering the effort that had gone into developing the T-44 to that point.  Not sure if it can be chalked up to "lip service" in the name of "objective testing" for a suitable rifle to replace the M1 or not, but in the end the M14 did seem to be the better choice given the circumstances (manufacturing, some interchangeability of some parts, manual of arms, etc.) of the time.

The Israelis found the FAL exhibited flaws in the design when fired in FA, such as firing two rounds and then consistently experiencing a malfunction.  Since the M14 / M15 was supposed to replace the BAR in the squad automatic rifleman role, I have to wonder if Ordnance didn't experience this same problem with the T48.

I remember seeing stock photos of US Army Soldiers doing exercises with the T48. I thought it was neat, but I can't remember where I saw it.

Or a FAL based 5.56



 

Or we might still be using a FAL in the original 280 caliber it was prototyped for