Unpardonable Gun

Fire last week destroyed a new addition to the building where the U. S. Army has its Washington headquarters. Officers looking for the cause guessed at everything from cigaret butts on awnings to saboteurs. Wags had another theory: sparks, set a-flying when somebody mentioned Captain Melvin Maynard Johnson Jr.

Captain (Marine Corps Reserve) Johnson is a tall, gun-happy young Bostonian who invented a semi-automatic rifle, then outraged the Ordnance Department by insisting out loud that his weapon was better than the Army's Garand rifle (TIME, April 8). The Army arsenal at Springfield, Mass., after many bumbles, last week had Garand production up to 2,300 per week. After a year of agonized effort to tool up for the complex Garand, Winchester Repeating Arms Co. at last was almost ready to begin quantity production. But Ordnance officers were still unhappy about Melvin Johnson and all his works, including his latest: a 14-lb. (when loaded; 12-lb. empty), super-simple, one-man machine gun. The Department continued to beg inventors to devise a 22-lb. light machine gun, up to last week had neither offered nor been asked to test the new Johnson. Having been told (unofficially, but unmistakably) that he could never do business with the U. S. Army, Inventor Johnson perforce took his deadly darlings to foreign buyers.

Last week he had two customers: the Netherlands East Indies and China. This information was divulged by the U. S.

State Department, which also indicated its own interest in a deal that would help arm these countries against Japanese invasion.

Happy Mr. Johnson lined up a contractor (Universal Winding Co. in Rhode Island) to manufacture both guns in quantity.

At that point a monkey wrench--apparently flung from the general direction of the Army Ordnance--clunked into the works. The astonished State Department was informed that the War Department disapproved of this deal on two grounds: 1) machine tools needed to make Johnson guns could better be used to make weapons on order for the Army, 2) the Johnson designs, although unwanted by the Army, constituted military secrets which should not be sold even to friendly powers. Military brasswigs had neither forgotten nor forgiven Inventor Johnson's original sin.

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