American Rifle - Alexander Rose [147]
Considering his love for the Springfield 1903 and all its works, it was a good thing that Roosevelt, who died in January 1919, did not live to see the embarrassing finale to the ongoing legal battles over its “American-ness.” As for Crozier, he yet again succeeded in not being left holding the bag, for he retired in the same month as Roosevelt’s death. (His own would come in November 1942.) He thereby escaped censure for the fallout from a reinvigorated lawsuit launched by DWM in 1920. Having given up on obtaining a favorable patent-infringement judgment, DWM’s lawyers focused on whether the alien property custodian’s seizure of the patent had been lawful. Impressed by DWM’s argument that its bullet patent was protected by previous treaty, a tribunal ruled the U.S. government in violation and awarded DWM damages of $300,000. Washington immediately appealed the decision, and the case lurched on interminably, like that of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (“This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means”), for another seven and a half years, until it was finally settled on the last day of 1928, a generation after its beginning. The judgment stood. With interest added on to the original $300,000, the United States owed $412,520.55.56
The M1 Garand
Chapter 9
THE PATHS NOT TAKEN
Though experts counted it as a modern weapon, the Springfield Model 1903, as a bolt-action magazine rifle with a five-round clip, was threatened with obsolescence from the moment it first appeared. Each time a cartridge was fired, the soldier would turn up the weapon’s bolt and pull it back to open the breech and eject the spent casing; then he would shove it forward to insert a fresh cartridge from the magazine (or finger-load one by hand); and finally he would turn it down to lock the breech closed. Considerable muscular effort was required for this process if one wanted to fire rapidly, and a soldier had no evident way to accelerate his movements beyond a certain physical point. But if the process could be mechanized then, theoretically at least, a far greater rate of fire was possible.
To this end, a year before the Springfield was officially authorized for manufacture, chief of Ordnance William Crozier was musing on the possibility of “causing the musket itself to effect its own reloading upon discharge.”1 In the future, he thought, rifles based on just such a “semiautomatic principle” would recycle the energy released by firing a bullet by mechanically ejecting the spent casing and loading a new cartridge. The very act of pulling the trigger would allow the rifleman to pull it again.
Crozier neither expected, nor desired, anything ever to come of the self-loading idea, for two good reasons. In his carefully chosen words, “both tactical and mechanical questions are involved in the consideration of the possible desirability of the substitution of a semiautomatic musket for the hand-operated magazine rifle” (emphasis added).2
By “mechanical,” the general was referring to the fact that the quest to make the semiautomatic principle a reality looked hopeless. Private firms were trying hard but had so far enjoyed little success. As early as June 1902 John Browning, one of the country’s finest designers, patented a recoil mechanism that would form the basis of the Remington Model 8 Autoloader