American Rifle - Alexander Rose [149]
If anything, the diehard reliance on massive, clumsy assaults resembled nothing less than the outdated, bloody, officer-dominated tactics of old. Marksmanship, progressives had always proudly argued, was the modern, forward, even futuristic way, the thinking man’s method of humanely winning wars. They could even point out that the first bullet fired from an aircraft emanated from a Springfield. On August 20, 1910, less than seven years after the Wright Brothers had achieved sustained flight and just two after the army had tested its first military aircraft, pilot Glenn Curtiss took a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant named Jacob Fickel up in his biplane above Sheepshead Bay racetrack on Long Island, New York.
As Fickel clung with one hand to a wing strut for life and the other to his rifle, Curtiss ascended to three hundred feet and circled around a large target that had been set up in the middle of the racetrack. Four times Fickel steadied himself and fired the Springfield, hitting the bull’s-eye twice and wowing spectators with his riflemanship.10 Reporters began predicting that air fleets would one day transport legions of Springfield-armed skytroopers to the battlefront and evacuate them safely, their missions accomplished with barely a casualty. Given a chance, the progressive dream of clean, antiseptic wars would soon be a reality.
The NRA’s desire to quash Eames and his cohorts was motivated not by self-interest but by its conviction that the diehard importation of authoritarian German concepts in the guise of firearms training undermined patriotically American virtues of liberty and self-improvement. Hence for decades afterward editorial after editorial, article after article, in the association’s stable of magazines would hammer home the lesson that “today’s tactics make the infantryman, more than at any time since the French and Indian Wars, an individualist . . . He must believe in himself, and to believe in himself he must believe in his rifle! He must know that he can deliver deadly individual fire! . . . This kind of individual marksmanship has its roots deeply bedded in the target ranges of America.”11
President Theodore Roosevelt, always concerned with the question of what made an American an American, agreed with the NRA. In his 1906 State of the Union speech he went out of his way to praise the importance of American sharpshooting. To him, a soldier’s “efficiency on the line of battle is almost directly proportionate to excellence in marksmanship.”
When America entered the First World War in 1917, the NRA and its progressive friends could count on the support of the heaviest hitter of them all: General John Pershing, a ferociously competitive marksman (he placed second in the all-army championships) and son-in-law to a future NRA president (U.S. senator Francis Warren, who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Civil War). Immediately before the main American forces arrived in Europe, Pershing had traveled to France to observe French and British maneuvers and to arrange for the training of his troops. Pershing informed Secretary of War Newton Baker that he wanted to “inculcate a strong, offensive, fighting spirit among our forces,” but he was disappointed in the Allies’ reliance on diehard tactics to carry out assaults.
The French and British, Pershing observed, “had all but given up the use of the rifle.” Instead, blunt instruments like “machine guns, grenades, Stokes mortars, and one-pounders had become the main reliance of the average Allied soldier. These were all valuable weapons for specific purposes but they could not replace the combination of an efficient soldier and his rifle.” Pershing added that he had heard “numerous instances