American Rifle - Alexander Rose [121]
While the Lee certainly had its problems, it was still in the experimental stages. Given proper encouragement, its defects would have been remedied in time, and the U.S. Army might have enjoyed the distinction of possessing the world’s first magazine service rifle once the Springfield, a first-class arm but one showing its age, was gradually phased out. With five-odd years to go until retirement, and with forty years of sterling service behind him, Benét had taken the easier route. Not for him the rigors of introducing a brand-new weapon into the service with all the attendant army infighting and Washington intriguing. He left that to someone else.
Benét’s decision to kill the Lee led to stultification within the Ordnance Department for close to a decade and eroded traditional American superiority in the rifle business. In the meantime the European powers had not stood still. On this side of the Atlantic the Indian wars were sub-siding, but on the other the ravenous hunger for new territorial acquisitions resulted in intense competition to have the best rifle first—or risk losing the struggle for mastery.
In Germany, Peter Paul Mauser and Ferdinand von Mannlicher were competing for supremacy. Mauser, born in 1838, the thirteenth of thirteen children, was the son of a gunsmith and the brother of four more. In the early 1880s, he had successfully converted his bolt-action Infanterie-Gewehr (Infantry Rifle) Model 71 into a magazine weapon for the army. Strikingly, while the American government was requiring firms to standardize their calibers to .45, Mauser insisted on reducing them, first to 11mm (.433) and then, he predicted, to 9mm (.354). Mannlicher produced a bolt-action repeater in 1885, using metal clips to feed its maw that automatically dropped out when empty. The time-saving idea would be integrated into German arms and used until the Second WorldWar.
In Britain, by 1886 the Small Arms Committee was taking a serious look at Lee’s improved magazine rifle. (Lee, miffed, had given up on ever finding success in the United States while Benét reigned.) The following year the committee chose the Lee as the army’s replacement for the Martini-Henry, though its adoption was delayed owing to concern that the Lee’s ammunition might be distinctly cumbersome: the German and the Swiss (who had introduced a .295 for their service rifle) had recently moved toward reduced calibers. So the momentous decision was made to adopt what would become one of the most famous rounds of all time, the .303.111
The French, as always, plowed their own quirky furrow. In 1886–87, the Lebel appeared, named after the colonel who developed its ammunition. It was, again in traditional French fashion, designed by military committee rather than conceived by individual inventors. (The German individualist tendency was replicated in American workshops.) Remark -ably, the Lebel also integrated German and American styles: boasting a Winchester tubular magazine under the barrel, the rifle fired its loads using a Mauser bolt action.
The Lebel left the German, British, and American high commands gasping with astonishment. It was not the rifle itself that shocked them (though the New York Times did dub it “the most vicious small arm in existence”) but the gunpowder that fired it.112 It was the first weapon in the world to use “smokeless powder.” Black powder, that mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, had served for half a millennium as the charge for every pistol and rifle in existence. It had just been rendered instantly obsolete.
The Krag-Jo/rgensen Rifle
Chapter 7
THE SMOKELESS