American Rifle - Alexander Rose [153]
The all-too-real, wholly un-Creedmoor like typical experience of U.S. soldiers was well described by William Francis of the Fifth U.S. Marines. During an assault at Château-Thierry in June 1918:
After we made it to the top of the hill the Germans opened up with their machine-guns, hand and rifle grenades and trench mortars. Just then we all seemed to go crazy for we gave a yell like a bunch of wild Indians and started down the hill running and cursing in the face of the machine gun fire. Men were falling on every side, but we kept going, yelling and firing as we went. How any of us got through the murderous machine gun fire the Germans were putting up I will never be able to figure out . . . On this little hill were at least eight hundred dead men and several hundred wounded. [emphasis added]29
Pershing, once he realized that his desired “war of movement” could not happen until the Germans had first been bled white, played down his sunny attitude toward marksmanship and began calling for faster-firing, shorter-range weapons to help break the impasse—which is exactly what his French and British peers had been doing.30 He was too American, however, to leave marksmanship entirely behind, and stood by his conviction that the “infantryman with his rifle” remained the fundamental military unit; all the other forms—aircraft, artillery, tanks—merely “supported” him.31
Accordingly, Pershing’s general orders of April 9, 1918, laid down the new “middle way” of warfare, really a combination of good shooting and ferocious cold-steel diehardism. “The rifle and the bayonet are the principal weapons of the infantry soldier. He will be trained to a high degree of skill as a marksman both on the target range and in field firing. An aggressive spirit must be developed until the soldier feels himself, as a bayonet fighter, invincible in battle.”32 Pershing was searching for men who could shoot farther than any European soldier while outfighting him at close range.
Quite apart from the unlikelihood of doughboys crouching behind parapets within shouting distance of enemy trenches, jumping up and taking the time to target a helmeted German head while risking their own, Pershing had another reason to favor “skirmish firing.” He had been presented with the “Pedersen device,” one of the most secret inventions of the war.
It began in the late summer of 1917 when Mr. John D. Pedersen, a respected, independent designer of sporting rifles and shotguns based in Jackson, Wyoming, but born in Denmark, walked into Ordnance chief Crozier’s office and offered him the chance to see something genuinely amazing. Soon afterward, intrigued, Crozier joined him on the Congress Heights Rifle Range outside Washington.
Producing a Springfield, Pedersen squeezed off a few shots in the regular manner, and then (in the words of Major Hatcher, an ordnance expert) “suddenly jerked the bolt out of the rifle” and quickly replaced it with a “mysterious looking” mechanism. As the observers exchanged wondering glances, “he snapped into place a long black magazine containing 40 small pistol size cartridges.” The next thing they knew “Mr. Pedersen was pulling the trigger of the rifle time after time as fast as he could work his finger and each time he pulled the trigger the rifle fired a shot, threw out the empty cartridge and reloaded itself.” Once he’d emptied the forty-round magazine, Pedersen broke it off, attached another, and continued his murderous firing. “It looked as though he had converted the Springfield rifle,” recalled an astounded Hatcher, “into a one-man machine gun.”
Confronted with this extraordinary demonstration, the Ordnance Department clamored to have a closer look at the strange semiautomatic device. Each cartridge, they found, was of the same caliber as the Springfield’s standard ammunition but one-fifth the size. Whereas the .30-06 was a 150-grainer boosted by 45 grains of