American Rifle - Alexander Rose [134]
The troops disagreed, and American soldiers fighting in the Philippines (1899–1902) after San Juan Hill illicitly made their own dum-dum bullets out of their army-issue Krag rounds.57 Dum-dums, invented in 1895 and named after a British military outpost near Calcutta in India, were bullets mutilated by grinding off the metal-jacketed tip and notching a cross into the lead with a knife so they would burst, mushroom, or expand upon impact (especially at close range), thereby helping overcome the Krag’s small-caliber “humane” factor. As part of the general shift toward humanizing war, the International Peace Conference at The Hague in 1899 outlawed the “use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body,” but the mass industrialization of slaughter that erupted in 1914 made a mockery of such pretensions.
The Springfield Model 1903 Rifle
Chapter 8
ROOSEVELT’S RIFLE
The final decade of the nineteenth century was among its most tumultuous. Beset by mass immigration, buffeted by violent strikes, amazed by the coming of the electrical age, cramped together by the new urbanization, subjected to new financial and social stresses by the incorporation of America and its transformation from a producer society into a consumer one, jingoed up by international naval geopolitics and the lingering desires of Manifest Destiny, stimulated by a weird interest in Social Darwinism, and rendered unemployed by a terrible depression between 1893 and 1896: people were alarmed and confused by all these developments and feared the future. By the late 1890s there was national support—perhaps not truly bipartisan, but certainly approaching it—for moderately progressive political, economic, and social reform to ready America for the excitement, or horror, of the coming century.
A key strut underpinning any reformer’s platform was the urgent need to modernize the country’s cobwebbed institutions, many of which either hadn’t changed since about the time of the War of 1812 or had been contemptibly rotted from within by incompetence and self-dealing. In Washington the most patently obvious candidate for an astringent burst of spring cleaning was the army, owing not only to its creakingly archaic organization and traditions but also to the War Department’s embarrassing performance at the outbreak of the Spanish-American conflict.
At a time when the European powers were centralizing and modernizing their armed forces by introducing a unified general staff to coordinate, plan, and advise on strategy and operations, American line officers (those commanding combat units) reporting to the army’s commanding general (the most senior rank existing) were bitterly feuding with staff officers (administrators, specialists, and bureaucrats) who fell under the secretary of war’s authority. This internal division dated back at least to the 1830s, when Congress ruled that the civilian secretary would handle all fiscal matters and the uniformed chief of the army, purely military affairs. With one man holding the purse strings and another grasping for them, the system was proving unworkable.
Presidents were all too aware of the system’s built-in conflicts, but they did little to crack skulls. A strong president often preferred to keep his minions squabbling to prevent them from forming potentially rebellious alliances; a weak one tended to fall under the sway of the more powerful of two warring barons. A militarily experienced president naturally sided with his commanding general; an inexperienced one, with his chosen secretary of war. Worse, because they served for indefinite terms, commanding generals became accustomed to regarding themselves as virtually independent deities, not even subject to the commander in chief, the president. After all, presidents came and went every four or eight years, but commanding generals could stay in harness for decades. As for secretaries of war, the minuteness