American Rifle - Alexander Rose [143]
Still, better to have no investigation at all, which made it all the more necessary to pay off Waffenfabrik Mauser before the press heard about the scandal. Following secret negotiations between Crozier and Frazier, in early 1905 the United States and Mauser agreed on the terms of settlement. On April 5 the Treasury approved royalty payments of 75 cents per rifle plus 50 cents per thousand clips, up to a ceiling of $200,000. Seven months later, on November 6, Mauser’s accountants were pleased to receive the first (for $11,367.53) in a four-year-long series of checks adding up to the $200,000 maximum.44 Relieved that Crozier’s sterling efforts had averted an embarrassing spectacle—the last thing Roosevelt needed, after apparently sweeping the army clean of dead-wood and ridding it of the old practices, was the revelation that absolutely nothing had changed at Ordnance—the president appointed him to his second term as chief just thirteen days after the initial Mauser payout.
Believing that the whole unpleasant affair with the Germans had been safely buried, Crozier made an energetic start on the new .30-06 bullet, introduced on October 15, 1906. Early the following year he received an ominous visit from a very polite but insistent representative of Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken (DWM), maker of the Spitzer bullets for the Mauser rifle. The .30-06, he said, was a near-copy of DWM’s “projectile for hand-firearms,” which had been submitted to the Patent Office on February 20, 1905—about the same time, suspiciously, that Crozier had been finalizing the financial details of the settlement with Mauser—and approved on January 22, 1907.45
Yet another “complication” was looming very darkly. And this time the alleged infringement had happened entirely on Crozier’s watch. The good news was that DWM had a far weaker case than Mauser’s—it was difficult to demonstrate that the shape and dimensions of such a common item as a bullet were unique—and Crozier’s patent attorneys advised him to fight the case. Crozier, again fearful that the newspapers would find out about this change (even if it was trumped up by an opportunistic DWM), decided to fend off the accusers by stalling. He appointed his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel John Thompson ( inventor-to-be of the famous tommy gun), to take care of the negotiations in the hope that they would go on for years.
In the meantime Crozier was presented with a headache that, this time at least, was wholly American in origin. In fact, it might even have been partly to blame for his German-inspired mishaps. The prolonged campaign to modernize the army that had culminated in the Root reforms had inadvertently left Crozier with an inexperienced, understaffed department. Before Root and Roosevelt had pressured line officers to go on temporary secondments to the staff bureaus in Washington, Ordnance had enjoyed the pick of the litter for its new recruits. It tended to choose second lieutenants in the Artillery who, because the lowest rank at Ordnance was first lieutenant, automatically received a promotion just for joining. As a result, Ordnance’s gentlemanly hours and relatively rapid promotional structure (especially when compared with that of the line) entailed no shortage of highly qualified applicants. After the reforms, however, line officers detailed to Ordnance received no automatic promotion for their voluntary secondments away from their units, and unless they were temperamentally inclined to the scientific, experimental