American Rifle - Alexander Rose [142]
The downside of the .30-06 was that, for it to be usable in the rifles, the armories’ workmen had to make exceedingly minor but time-consuming and unutterably tedious alterations to every single one of the roughly 100,000 Springfields then in stock. The new bullet’s neck, for instance, was just 0.1 inch shorter than the regular .30, and thus for various reasons, the barrel of each and every rifle had to be shortened from 24.206 inches to 24.006 inches. As a result, the rear sights on all existing Springfields had to be removed and reattached painstakingly in a slightly different place. Small wonder that the arsenals fell way, way behind in production until the second half of 1907. By April 10, 1908, however, 160,000 of the updated Springfields were stockpiled, and by 1914 some 606,924 had been manufactured.40
So by 1903 Roosevelt’s hope had been fulfilled: Crozier had made an American Mauser. Roosevelt got what he wished for, but in the end he got a great deal less than he desired, because the Springfield superrifle was in fact less all-American than mostly Mauser.
The trouble began in the spring of 1904, when government patent attorneys working for the Ordnance Department noticed that the Springfield’s clips bore an uncanny resemblance to those used in the Mauser. Hoping to prevent a public spat, Crozier immediately sent a letter to Waffenfabrik Mauser in Germany admitting that “an examination would seem to indicate that some of the features of the cartridge clip recently adopted for the United States Army . . . may be covered” by U.S. patents taken out by Mauser. Crozier was referring to patents registered as far back as 1889, when Paul Mauser had logged a “cartridge-package”—his clumsy name for a clip—that allowed the soldier to “increase the rapidity with which the arm may be fired . . . and to inspire [him] with confidence in his weapon by providing means whereby a magazine fire-arm may always be easily kept in readiness for rapid firing.”41 Three years later Mauser made some improvements and repatented it, doing it again in 1895.42 There was thus no lack of a paper trail to follow, but Crozier hoped he could make the problem disappear if he made a preemptive offer. It was he, then, who requested Mauser—and not the other way around—to send a lawyer to determine “what, if any, of its features are covered by your patents and if so, to arrive at an agreement as to the royalties which should be paid therefore.”43
Two months later Mauser attorney Arthur Frazier had a meeting with a distinctly edgy Crozier. Though Frazier knew there was a potential issue about the clips, one that could quite easily be made to go away with a large check, he couldn’t understand why Crozier was so nervous. More mysteriously still, Crozier proposed sending him not only one of the clips to examine but an entire Springfield M1903 rifle as well.
Six weeks after that meeting, Frazier called Crozier to arrange another. On June 16 he told Crozier that the Mauser engineers had determined that the clip violated two of the company’s patents; Mauser, however, would be more than pleased to settle this unpleasant business with a royalty of one dollar per thousand clips made. But there was one more thing: there were five patent infringements on the rifle as well, as Crozier had already gloomily surmised. Another dollar-per-rifle royalty was demanded. Before he left, Frazier added that his client was also convinced