American Rifle - Alexander Rose [148]
But the Standard weapon jammed so often that the company eventually ceased operations; the Winchesters were clumsy and unbalanced owing to their heavy mechanism; and the Remingtons found few ringing endorsements. They “worked well,” but that was all.3What all three had in common was their underpoweredness, the age-old criticism of repeaters now resurrected for their automated successors.
Just as Winchester’s repeaters in the 1870s and onward had been forced to compete against the army’s regulation cartridge, so too were the Springfield Model 1903’s self-loading rivals. The .30-06 round was among the country’s most formidable loads, but none of its competitors could sustainably handle such a high-power round; the heat buildup alone tended to make casing extraction buggy after just a few shots, and their wooden stocks were often found charred following a rapid-fire burst of a hundred rounds. In a manner reminiscent of the travails experienced by early breech-loader designs, the new semiautomatics were troubled by gas leakage owing to their moving breeches. Inventors tried several ways of solving this problem—including the development of straight-blowback, retarded-blowback, short-recoil, long-recoil, gas-operated, muzzle-cap, and primer-operated mechanisms—but all were forced to conclude that, at least for the foreseeable future, the semiautomatic was destined to use low-or medium-powered bullets.4 The Springfield was safe, at least for the moment.
Crozier had also cited potential “tactical” issues raised by semiautomatics. By this he meant the inevitable resumption of infighting, recently quieted by the arrival of the Model 1903, between the army’s progressive and diehard factions.
The advent of semiautomatics would immensely aid the diehard school in that their very raison d’être was to encourage the profligate use of ammunition at relatively close ranges. At the moment the only thing mitigating that temptation was the Springfield’s miserly five-round clip; a semiautomatic, however, would burn through a magazine of that size in seconds, necessitating ever-larger clips and hastening the decline of marksmanship.
Contributing to progressive alarm over the “semiautomatic principle” was the terrible realization that much of the army had already fallen, or was poised to fall, under diehard control. In 1907 General Arthur MacArthur established the School of Musketry, where the principal focus was on the rapid-firing machine gun, and in 1909 new regulations directed that the diehards’ Germanic favorite, field fire, would appear on the curriculum. In the latter year Captain Henry Eames’s official instruction manual, The Rifle at War, stressed the centrality of officer-supervised field fire and rapid fire to modern warfare.5 Attacks would henceforth be decided, he said, “by a psychically stunning rapid fire,” in which the vast majority of shots missed but that “utterly paralyze[d] the fighting will” of the enemy.6 Convinced, the army’s house organ, Infantry Journal, converted almost entirely to diehard ideology, and virtually every issue of the pre-1914 period carried an article lauding the benefits of field and rapid fire.7
Not all was doom and gloom, however, for the progressive side. Even if they were sidelined within the military, politically speaking they were in fine fettle. Their civilian spokesmen, the National Rifle Association, was at the top of its form, following more than a decade of torpor and sagging popularity. In 1890 it had even suffered the ultimate indignity of having Creedmoor taken from its ownership and deeded to the state of New York.8 In about 1900 the NRA slipped out of dormancy, repaired its chaotic finances and organization, and prepared to go forth into the new century.
Its first order of business was to combat the insidious Eames argument in favor of