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John Garand worked on his rifle for about 16 years, 1916-1932, before it was acceptable, then it took another 4 years to rework it after Douglas MacArthur disapproved of the .270 round. Even after it was accepted there were problems-the 7th round stoppage and the change from the gas trap to the gas port. And my understanding is that while working on his rifle Garand also envisioned the production procedures that would be needed. And even with our larger population and industrial base it took a while for us to get production going.One of my M-1s has a serial number in the 600,000 range. It was made in May, 1942. The various Tokarev rifles fielded by the Soviets did work that well. As noted, German tactics gave first place to the machine gunner with the riflemen functioning mainly as support. Also the whole German war machine of WWII was organized and run in a much less illogical and rational manner-downright cockamamie, IMHO, decisions as to what weapons,tanks and planes to produce were all to often made by Hitler himself on the basis of his "intuition" with little thought to the actual needs of the forces or the capacity of industry.
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