American Rifle - Alexander Rose [154]
For the Western Front, nevertheless, the Pedersen device was thought ideal. Soldiers facing an enemy onslaught could fire their modified Springfields, “and the entire zone in front of the trenches would be covered with such a whirlwind of fire that no attack could survive.” If the troops were to attack the enemy, the Pedersen’s tiny charge produced no noticeable recoil and “it could be fired from the hip while marching or running” across no-man’s-land. Of course, under these circumstances fire would be all over the place, but each man would be producing a storm of bullets so dense that no German would dare to expose himself by returning fire. Moreover, for everyday use, because the device was so effortless to install and remove, a soldier had a choice between using his weapon’s standard firing bolt to shoot his high-power Springfield ammunition and switching over to his low-power Pedersen’s. Owing to the latter’s compactness, Ordnance felt that every soldier should carry an additional ten magazines, each of forty cartridges, in addition to the hundred-odd .30-06s he was already forced to lug around. In that instance, the day of the five-round magazine would soon be over.
Following Pedersen’s initial demonstration, Captain J. C. Beatty of Ordnance was sworn to secrecy and sailed to France with the device safely packed away. His orders were to explain its semiautomatic mechanism to Pershing himself and give another demonstration to a board of senior officers. He did so on December 9, 1917. Just two days later, the board decided to order 100,000 Pedersen devices. If they worked out, they would eventually be issued to every American soldier. The board stipulated that the device was to be kept as secret as possible and distributed only after 50,000 of them had arrived so that a massive surprise assault could be launched. The term “Pedersen device,” however, was sufficiently enigmatic to intrigue the overly curious, which is why it was soon colorlessly renamed the “Automatic Pistol, Caliber 30, Model 1918.”
On January 23 Pedersen’s employer, Remington-UMC, was informed that it would be the chief maker and was authorized to purchase the necessary machinery. By the end of March 1918 production began. Given the mammoth scale of the fighting on the Western Front and the coalescing Allied plan to smash Germany in a gigantic battle of annihilation in the spring of 1919, the order was upped to 633,450 “pistols,” nearly 10 million magazines, and 800 million cartridges.
Then, just as preparations were well in hand with 65,000 devices in stock, the Germans signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918. There would be no Plan 1919, no half-million Pedersen-toting GIs simultaneously going over the top carrying four hundred rounds of ammunition in what would have been one hell of a surprise for the boches.
It was all over, and the first thing stopped was any more production of the devices, magazines, and cartridges. Nevertheless, the device was still classed as top secret, and on June 23, 1919, Ordnance directed Remington-UMC to transfer exclusive ownership and rights to the U.S. government so that the army could decide whether it wanted to declassify the invention and issue it universally to the 130,000 troops left after 128,436 officers had been demobilized and 2,608,218 enlisted men sent home.
Beginning that fall and extending into the following year, three new tests were conducted by boards of combat officers specially convened to make recommendations about the weapons needed in future. The Pedersen device did not make the cut. American soldiers, the boards said, were already overly burdened with equipment, and requiring them to carry an additional 12.125 pounds of Pedersen-related hardware was intolerable. They also cited as a liability the Pedersen bullet’s comparative silence