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By Root 1923 0

editorialist), “the emphasis has been placed on careers [and] pay and promotion.” The rat race and the greasy pole might be all right for the gray-flanneled Company Man, but it was turning green-uniformed captains into money-hankering businessmen. In keeping with the religious tenor of the time—the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Campus Crusade for Christ were founded in 1950 and 1951, and that decade saw the release of The Robe, The Ten Commandments, and Ben-Hur—Walsh spoke of soldiers having “faith” in their weapons and the “preaching of false doctrines regarding volume of fire and the elimination of marksmanship.”45 (Representative Donald Jackson of California, a Republican, made a still closer association between God and the gun in his NRA convention speech of 1951: While “the Savior of Mankind could probably never have competed at Camp Perry or any other inter-national match . . . the moral rifle of His ideas changed history more than did any series of world conflicts ever concluded.”46 The cult of accuracy, it seems, had transubstantiated into a church.

The furor over aimless fire, the decline of sharpshooting, and civilian alarm over the future of American masculinity prompted the army to reexamine the prematurely terminated T44 project after the humiliating August 1953 Fort Benning tests (when it was bested by the Belgian FN-FAL). Dr. Fred Carten, Studler’s replacement as head of Small Arms Research and Development, convinced the chief of staff, General Matthew Ridgway—himself a fan of the Springfield Model 1903 (he kept one in his jeep during the war)—that the entire basis for the Fort Benning finding had been flawed. Neither the T44 nor the FN-FAL had been tested in extreme arctic temperatures, and it was all too likely that a Soviet attack would occur, not in the prickly summer heat of Georgia, but during the winter.47

The T44 was revived and winterized—each part was lubricated, triggers were enlarged to fit mittened fingers, the wooden stock was reinforced with steel, a pressure-relief valve was added—by Springfield’s mechanics and tested that October 1953 in Alaska. Unsurprisingly, the unwinterized FN-FAL fell behind and showed itself to be less depend-able than the modified T44.48

Within Ordnance, however, it was an open secret that the T44 victory had been fixed. Even one of its firmest proponents in Carten’s office, A. C. Bonkemeyer, confidentially told Colonel Rayle (the new head of Springfield’s R&D division) not to bother making too many refinements to the T44 because it was “so close to being a dead duck, you would be better off to spend the funds and effort on future weapons.”49 He was referring to a rifle that was now being groomed as the next standard weapon of the U.S. Army.

Unattuned to the vagaries of arms procurement politics and unfamiliar with the vigor of the American sharpshooting tradition, the Belgians assumed the Alaska tests were nothing but a minor setback. They still naturally, if naïvely, expected the United States to come across and so took Washington’s side at the NATO conference two months later. On December 15, 1953, NATO announced that the United States, Britain, Canada, France, and Belgium had settled on the T65. 30 cartridge as their standard round.50

Britain, led by an ailing Churchill, had sacrificed herself for the Cause. With the .30 decision finalized, the EM-2 rifle was a dead duck. Churchill, it was reported, even kept a .30-caliber FN-FAL (now called the FN-30) in his office at 10 Downing Street and had been driven to Kimble Range to test it for himself.51 Churchill, like Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, was always very hands-on with weaponry. Back in the war, after the Normandy landings, he, Eisenhower, and General Omar Bradley had once held an impromptu M1-carbine shooting match. Churchill’s target was set up 25 yards away, Ike’s 50, and Bradley’s 75. Sadly for posterity, said the last, “all the targets were tact-fully removed before anyone could inspect them.”52 Back on form, Churchill learned to strip and reassemble the FN-30, swung its butt around