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By Root 2083 0

away from Harvey and the T25 project.17 Funding was discreetly pared as Studler reinitiated work on Garand’s canceled T20. Here at least was a rifle whose original version had been proved to work. Studler ordered that surviving prototypes be rebored to accommodate the light T65 round. His instruction was gleefully executed by Springfield‘s production branch. Since 100,000 T20s had been ordered in the waning days of World War II and the machinery already existed to mass-produce them, time was of the essence, owing not merely to Studler’s desire to salve his amour propre in the threatened competition with the British but also to the rather more lethal threat rising in East Asia, where the Korean leader Kim Il-Sung was known to be building a gigantic army with Soviet aid. If war came (as it soon would), outnumbered American troops armed with M1s would be faced with a powerful enemy carrying automatics streaming over the 38th Parallel.

The much-vaunted British weapon, when it did arrive on these shores for trials on February 14, 1950, proved underwhelming. Unfortunately, the Garand T20s weren’t ready in time, so Studler was forced to demonstrate Harvey’s T25 instead—which proved more underwhelming still.18 The one unexpected highlight was a Belgian contender that the British had brought to prove that their .280 ammunition was capable of being fired in a variety of guns. This was a new 8.5-pound, twenty-round weapon manufactured by Fabrique Nationale de Herstal (FN) and named the Fusil Automatique Léger (FAL, or “Light Automatic Rifle”).

The FN-FAL performed as poorly as its British and American competitors, but Ordnance was impressed, primarily because it was hearing through back channels that the Belgians, not entirely in the spirit of European unity but certainly in the tradition of European perfidy, were willing to be “flexible” in the matter of caliber size.19To their minds, the Americans wielded the biggest stick in NATO, and if they refused to reduce their caliber to the British .280, then the odds of winning the subsequent squabble lay in Washington’s favor. The billions of dollars flowing their way thanks to Marshall Plan largesse also helped decide the issue: Belgium would back the .30 as NATO’s standard ammunition. It was never confirmed in writing, but the Belgians were given the distinct impression that the United States would adopt the FN-FAL as their service rifle in gratitude for Brussels’s invaluable aid in this matter.

When they found out, the British were livid. Egged on by its nationalist backbenchers, the Labour government immediately declared that America and Europe could go hang: London was bulldoggedly sticking with the British-made EM-2 and the British-made .280. Nobody had been expecting such a full-throatedly patriotic reaction, though perhaps they should have: at the time Attlee’s Labour Party was struggling for victory in the 1950 general election against Winston Churchill’s Conservatives. On February 23 Labour emerged from the fray with a minuscule five-seat majority in the House of Commons. Attlee’s hold on power was so tenuous that he was forced to call another election, scheduled for October 25, 1951.

Washington cheered when the results of that second election were announced: Churchill had won a workable majority. The new prime minister’s credentials as a friend of America needed no explanation, and Churchill himself had declared that he believed Labour’s posturing on the gun issue was hurting the country. It was more important, he felt, for the West to stick together, and that entailed working with the Americans to standardize NATO weapons.20

At base, the Anglo-American rifle controversy was not about a weapon, let alone about a .280 versus a .30 cartridge. It represented instead a tectonic shift in international relations, the passing of the torch of global supremacy from an empire to a republic. A bankrupt, exhausted Britain had emerged from the war with her possessions virtually intact but precariously so. She no longer had the will, nor the strength, nor the finances to govern a quarter