American Rifle - Alexander Rose [159]
The most comprehensive test, the one intended to settle once and for all the question of what the next service rifle would be, convened on October 9, 1931. Before this combined-service board lay three weapons: the Pedersen .276, the Garand .276, and a Garand .30—“an almost exact duplicate” of its smaller-caliber twin, but one that developed a cracked bolt and had to be sent back to Springfield for refitting.
The board’s summary proved devastating for the Pedersen’s chances. Whereas the Garand .276 was “simple and easy to manufacture” the Pedersen “would be more difficult to produce interchangeably” owing to its relatively complicated mechanism. Revealingly, any defects of the Garand were classed as trivial “basic disadvantages” (i.e., “length of operating rod due to taking gas at muzzle”), while those of the Pedersen were defined as flaws “inherent in the mechanism and which do not appear easy to correct.” It was curtains for the Pedersen. On December 9, 1931, the board recommended the Garand .276 as the United States’ new service rifle.55
Three months later, just as plans to adopt the Garand .276 were speedily progressing, Ordnance received a letter from the adjutant general, John Shuman, writing on behalf of the chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur. Its message, recalled one of the experts, “created a sensation among those who had been connected with the rifle development.” Everyone involved with the various boards “seemed more or less stunned.”56
Directly quoting the chief of staff, the letter stated that he did not consider the commitment to the .276 “wise or desirable,” as it would “introduce an element of chaos, confusion, and uncertainty” into war preparations. Granted, said MacArthur, the board had made its choice based on the “technical perfection of the smaller caliber,” but it had not paid enough attention “to the other important features involved.” He felt that the development of a working .30 Garand semiautomatic had been overhastily curtailed, and he ordered the board to drop the .276 version immediately. The Garand .30’s mechanical defects were to be fixed promptly and eighty models made for testing. “Even if a caliber .30 semiautomatic cannot be developed to the point of perfection desired by the Ordnance Department, it still probably would be advantageous to introduce such a type with its imperfections.”57
This decision, which went against precedent by overruling the technical judgment of the Ordnance specialists, was based on extreme political and economic grounds. At the time MacArthur, aged fifty and the most decorated American soldier of the Great War, had been chief of staff for about a year and a quarter. In November 1930, when President Herbert Hoover appointed him, the nation had been on the verge of a calamitous economic slump, and it had fallen to MacArthur to defend the army as best he could from the inevitable budget cuts. Hoover was intent on balancing the books and wanted to pay for job-creating public works by taking money that had been appropriated for the armed forces. As the Commerce Department‘s index of employment in manufacturing industries plummeted from 100.6 in January 1930 to a catastrophic 61.9 in July 1932, Hoover cut army salaries by 10 percent (President Roosevelt would slash them by another 15 percent in April 1933), thereby lowering a private’s monthly pay almost to the poverty line.
The only good news for MacArthur was that, despite the rotten pay, the army was having no problem filling its ranks, as recently unemployed men rallied to the flag for the free food and accommodation, and it was able even to raise its entry qualifications. Not that there were many slots available: by the spring of 1933, its 60,000 combat troops made the U.S. Army just three times the size of the New York Police Department.58The police were probably better armed, too, since MacArthur’s men were still armed with World War I mortars and protected by obsolete, battered French artillery pieces. The total number of tanks made after 1918 in U.S. service was an unspectacular