American Rifle - Alexander Rose [183]
On January 19, 1954, Churchill announced to an angry House of Commons that Britain would adopt the FN-30 in the near future. The British “Tommy” would henceforth carry a Belgian rifle that fired American cartridges. Two weeks later the Labour Party submitted a resolution “that this House deplores the decision by Her Majesty’s Government to adopt the Belgian FN rifle in place of the new British
E.M.2 Rifle.”54 A bitter three-hour-long debate ensued. Accused of “weakness” for “not standing up to the Americans,” and interrupted by catcalls from the back-benches, the aged prime minister retorted that the Labourites were “always looking around in every controversy, even this one about rifles, to try to find fault with the Americans.” Ultimately Churchill’s embattled Conservatives and their allies managed to summon the strength to defeat the motion of censure by a vote of 266 to 232—a victory to be sure, but not a resounding one.55
The Belgians now expected Washington to follow through on its unwritten promise to issue the FN-30.56 But it would not if the American backers of the T44 had their way.57 Before any such decision was made, there had to be a final showdown between Springfield’s king of all rifles and the Belgian pretender to the throne.58
In June 1954 Ridgway ordered that five hundred T44s and five hundred FN-30s be manufactured by the industrial division of Ordnance.59 It then took three years—in addition to the decade the T44 had already been in development, and seven years for the FN-30—before one of them was finally chosen as the army’s standard rifle. The T44 emerged as the early front-runner—the result of a massive push by armorers behind the scenes to tweak its mechanisms and improve its performance. The T44 also beat the FN-30 in the usual sand and mud trials and en-countered half as many malfunctions as its rival.60 Still, no firm decision was made, because while technical observers were impressed, the political calculus of the need to standardize NATO weapons and to reward Belgium and Britain for their loyalty was at the fore and only rose in importance the further up the chain of command one went. Army dissenters felt the T44 was too much of a marksman’s weapon and simply out-of-date in an era where firepower mattered. Many knew, as well, that the T44’s backers were disguising its flaws with cosmetic changes that would become horribly apparent only in combat. Nevertheless, at the very top of the chain—the White House—the exigencies of grand strategy and the global existential threat of Communism eventually trumped mere politics, and the T44 was awarded the laurel.
At a different time the T44 might have been subjected to more scrutiny, but alarmed at the titanic sums expended to fight an unpopular war in Korea and at the possible effects on American economic supremacy—the armed forces had ballooned from 1.5 million in 1950 to 3.6 million three years later—President Eisenhower had ordered a reassessment of U.S. Cold War strategy to replace the post-1945 focus on “containing” the Soviets at all points. The result was the “New Look” defense policy of October 1953 that stipulated the construction of an overwhelming nuclear force capable of “inflicting massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power,” to make Moscow think twice before embarking on any military adventures.61
Reflecting Eisenhower’s wish to rely more heavily on this doctrine of Massive Retaliation (known to its detractors as “containment on the cheap”), funding for the army and navy was cut significantly while resources were transferred to the air force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), the new entity designated to deliver the nuclear payloads. By the end of 1953 SAC had completed eleven of the seventeen planned wings in its gigantic, long-range strike force.62On January 12, 1954, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles publicly announced