American Rifle - Alexander Rose [177]
To prepare the way for euthanizing the EM-2, British military officials began discreetly complimenting Garand’s T20. During a demonstration on December 27, 1951, Colonel Kellet, of the British Joint Services Mission, commented that the rifle’s performance was “extremely impressive compared to the M-1.”22The big push was saved for Churchill’s visit to President Eisenhower in early January 1952. At the top of the agenda was Anglo-American unity in the new era, and topping that agenda was the question of caliber. A month later the result of their talks was revealed to all when, challenged by a Labour politician to clarify whether the Americans would be adopting the .280, Churchill tersely answered that he saw “no prospect of carrying out that process of conversion.”23 That October NATO members announced that talks were proceeding on the use of the .30-caliber T65 cartridge as standard—to be rechristened the “7.62mm NATO” round.24
The final decision would be made at an international summit of NATO ministers in Paris scheduled for December 15, 1953.25 In the meantime Studler had urgent business to finish: getting the T20 up to snuff so that he could pull off the double whammy of getting the Europeans to accept both the .30-caliber and an American made rifle to fire it. The first thing he did? He rechristened it the T44, as a form of rebranding. The second thing? He resigned.
Over the past several years the colonel had found himself on the defensive regarding the .30 cartridge. Despite his best attempts, the military was coming reluctantly to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, the Europeans had been right about downshifting to a lighter caliber. Was it possible that, in 1932, Pedersen had been right about the .276 and MacArthur wrong? It was a question that career officers felt they could safely raise now that President Truman had sacked the Great MacArthur in April 1951 for exceeding his military authority in Korea.
Following MacArthur’s involuntary retirement, two internal reports analyzing Korean War performance inflicted further damage on the big-caliber, full-power advocates. The first was written by Donald Hall, a civilian engineer with the Ballistics Research Laboratories (BRL) at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. As the First World War had left behind a vast and miserable pool of human specimens on which to study the effects of bullets on the body, doctors had begun to revise their once-dismissive opinions on the lethality of small-caliber projectiles. Founded in 1938, the BRL had led the way in undermining the still-prevalent assumption that the extent of wounding depended on the mass and velocity of the projectile.26
Since 1945 the scientific examination of war wounds using high-speed film, spark shadowgrams, and microsecond roentgenograms seemed to confirm the importance of velocity, but it found that mass—mostly a function of bullet caliber—played a distinctly secondary role. This revelation rendered more intelligible the unexpected results of the 1928 Pig Board ballistics trials. What had surprised everybody at the time was the success of the Pedersen .276 versus the standard .30 in causing severe trauma. Many observers had not seriously believed that a high-velocity, small-caliber bullet could outperform the reigning champion.27 Dismissed as a weird aberration, the Pig Board’s conclusion that at short-to-intermediate ranges the smaller caliber