Articles of the Gazette

Johnson Mle 1941 \"dagger\" bayonet ! (Gazette 20 - Article 4)

"Unknown European Bayo Lot 432” is what the tag read. It was thrown into a lot of miscellaneous bayonets in a March 2009 auction of items from the collection of the late Bruce Stern. Fortunately for me most people who saw it probably did not know what this unusual bayonet was. My good friend and fellow SABC member Stan Tranquillo brought it to my attention.
I don’t know if one would classify this as a prototype, experimental or simply a pre-production bayonet, but it is one of the first bayonets made for the Johnson automatic rifle. What little information I was able to find on this bayonet came from Bruce Canfield’s wonderful book Johnson’s Rifles and Machine Guns.Attorney and firearms enthusiast Melvin Maynard Johnson developed his design for a new automatic rifle in early 1937....