American Rifle - Alexander Rose [116]
During this time repeaters were not even being considered. In the lead-up to the 1870 trial, forty-one rifle models had been submitted by inventors and various companies, but among them was just one repeater (a Spencer). Winchester, knowing the army’s views, did not bother to even enter the heats. The Americans were not alone in their conviction that repeaters were unsuitable for military use: the War Office in London had held a similar competition in 1866, and not one of the 112 entrants had been a repeater.88
For progressives, repeaters had two insurmountable drawbacks. The first was their sorcerous power to hypnotize enlisted men into forgetting to aim. The second concerned storing their cartridges in a tube running under the barrel. As cartridges were fired, the ejection of their spent casings slightly shifted the weapon’s center of gravity. Unless the shooter readjusted his aim each time he pulled the trigger, the muzzle would elevate and send bullets high. The built-in flaw made it impossible to achieve consistently pinpoint shooting.
Diehards, on the other hand, were more open to bringing more repeaters in the fighting services owing to their belief that ammunition magazines (either in a tube running beneath the barrel or hidden inside the butt stock) were a useful addendum to a bayonet. A soldier, before an assault, prepared a bayonet (by fixing it to the muzzle) and used it at close quarters to inspire both fear in the enemy and fortitude in his own men; so too the magazine in a repeater was preloaded and held in reserve. Initially the troops would fire at the command of their officer, but as the fighting grew more heated and the two opposing forces came closer, soldiers would unleash the fifteen or so bullets in their magazine in short order. The enemy, brutally assaulted at close range, would falter, fall back, or just fall, while one’s own men would fight harder, knowing they would never be left exposed while fumbling for a cartridge to load. If surrounded, they could even blast their way out, just as the bayonet, too, was sometimes used as a weapon of last resort.89
Nevertheless, at least during the 1870s, even the diehards weren’t confident that repeaters were up to military-grade performance requirements, and in any case the technology of that decade heavily favored the progressive case. The science of metallurgy was rapidly advancing, and after 1873 newly decarbonized Bessemer steel was adopted for rifle barrels. It permitted the use of larger powder charges and reduced imperfections within the barrel.90 Those attributes, in turn, aided long-range accuracy, much to the delight of progressives and Creedmoor shooters, but they did little to address the repeater’s inability to handle large loads. What was now a doddle for a Remington to shoot was, owing to its delicate firing, lever, and extractor mechanisms, well-nigh impossible for a Winchester.
Ordnance’s decision in 1873 to use the centerfire .45-70-405 cartridge as its standard infantry caliber was another body blow for the diehards. The “forty-five seventy” was way out of the Winchester’s league; the Winchester’s more usual ammunition was the pint-sized .44-28-200 or .44-40-200 rimfires, capable of only short ranges. Put more vividly, the .45-70 was almost 2.75 inches long, about double the length of the .44-40. The company nevertheless produced a special model repeater for the sole purpose of impressing Ordnance, but even then the largest cartridge it could handle was a .44-70-caliber topped by a 360-grain bullet. Firing it so stressed the Winchester during tests that it left a twelve-inch split along the stock.91 It was close, but not close enough, though objective observers predicted that