• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2164 0

were German, and Roosevelt had personally grown wary of the German predilection for race-based nationalism. In the dangerous new world of the twentieth century, he wished to avoid creating a dangerous dependence on Berlin’s continuing amity—particularly when the erratic Kaiser Wilhelm II was at the helm. To Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt confided in March 1901 that “some friends of mine” who had attended German war games the year before “were greatly impressed with the evident intention of the German military classes to take a fall out of us when the opportunity offers.” Not right now, but “in a few years they will be in a position to take some step in the West Indies or South America which will make us either put up or shut up on the Monroe Doctrine.” To that end the German high command was counting on “our inability to assemble an army of thirty thousand men which would be in any way a match for a German army of the same size.” In classic style, Roosevelt concluded that he wished “to see us act upon the old frontier principles ‘Don’t bluster, don’t flourish your revolver and never draw unless you intend to shoot.’ ”27 He and Root were forging ahead with strengthening the army, but still he needed a “revolver” made in America that could be drawn if the Kaiser’s insolence became intolerable.

The Mauser mechanism.

The Krag, of course, was made in America, but it was of foreign design and remained something of an underpowered weapon. Upgrading it would prove difficult. The tempo of technological change had accelerated, and the Krag was already showing its age. Though it was originally constructed to fire smokeless cartridges, its internal design struggled to keep pace with the newer, and more powerful, versions of gunpowder developed since. Its bolt had just one locking lug to secure it against the rearward blast of the exploding powder, and while that was adequate for the Krag’s 2,000-foot-per-second velocity, Mausers were now firing at 2,300 fps. To match that, Springfield would have to make the Krag’s chamber capable of withstanding 40,000 pounds per square inch of pressure.28 At the moment the Krag could handle 30,000 psi. Attaining that extra 300 fps would therefore require an increase of a third in the Krag chamber’s ability to withstand pressure—plus the problematic addition of a second lug to prevent chamber explosions. Even ignoring the pressure issue, adding the lug alone would demand a major overhaul of the firing mechanism; it would also involve a headache-inducing recall of all Krags currently in service.

In the late winter of 1899 Ordnance chief Buffington had tried to refashion the Krag in order to save it. In mid-August 1900 Springfield’s experimental department succeeded in making a newly double-lugged Krag-derivative that could chamber the Mauser bullet and fire it at 2,300 feet per second, only to be told by a new Rifle Board that it must also be able to load, as the Mauser could, a preloaded clip.29

Springfield’s technicians went back to work and eventually succeeded in turning this Krag derivative into a “a clip loading magazine gun . . . which enables the firer to use it as a single loader, with the contents of the magazine in reserve.” The odd hybrid “embodies features of both the Mauser and the United States magazine rifle [the Krag],” noted an internal Ordnance report.30

Crozier’s ascent to the chieftaincy assured the experimental weapon’s redesignation as the .30-caliber, bolt-action Springfield Model 1901. When the Rifle Board examined the transitional M1901, its criteria gave some indication of the predominant attitude. Its primary concern was ensuring that the new Springfield combined “rapidity with accuracy”—a sea change from the nineteenth-century preoccupation with focusing on either one or the other. Having learned from the Indian-fighting experience, the board set up a man-sized target at the abnormally short distance of one hundred feet. Testers fired twenty shots using the five-round magazines; then twenty finger-loaded singly with an empty magazine; then twenty again singly but with