M1 Garand, you should always have the top round on the right.. but WHY?

The application of this specific loading routine is credited to Colonel James L. Hatcher, in an attempt to prevent the public discovery of a design flaw during the first public appearance of the Garand at the Camp Perry National Matches. The flaw resulted in a phenomenon known as the 7th round stoppage. If the top round was on the right side of the clip, then the seventh round was also on the right side. The seventh round would often fail to feed, and would instead jump up and jam the point of the bullet on the top of the receiver. To preclude the inevitable public criticism of the Ordnance Department and the foreshortening of his military career, COL Hatcher took pre-emptive actions. He modified a slide follower so that it was impossible to load the rifle with a clip which contained the 7th round on the right side. He immediately had Springfield Armory make 200 more such specially modified followers, and installed them in the rifles just prior to their showing at Camp Perry. He also had Captain Rothwell H. Brown ensure that all of the loaded clips bound for the Camp Perry demonstration had no 7th rounds on the right side. The rifles performed flawlessly at Camp Perry and took their place in our nation’s history, but if they had made a bad impression on several thousand of our nations best marksmen, then things would have been very different.

Subsequent to the highly successful Camp Perry debut, and while trying to conduct what is now termed “failure fault analysis”, it was noticed that the production gun receivers varied from the prototypes and test articles engineered and designed by Mr. John C. Garand. Apparently, some bureaucrat in charge at Springfield Armory had the audacity to change the design specifications without consultation with the design engineer. The top of the two vertical guide ribs on the inside wall of the magazine well, just forward of the follower, had been beveled off during the drilling of the barrel hole in the receiver. Replacing the metal on the ribs was found to eliminate the 7th round stoppage condition. As a result, the original design was reinstated, the tooling changed, and the 7th round stoppage became another historical footnote.

Some of the early production rifles as used for the demonstration at Camp Perry were also in the hands of the Infantry at Fort Benning. Although only a field expedient fix until such time as the corrected production rifles replaced their early-models, the troops continued to use the loading technique to ensure the 7th round was not on the right side of the clip. This is where the inculcation of the practice into the military culture occurred, and has since been propagated as a form of firearms legend.