American Rifle - Alexander Rose [261]
The most extraordinary aspect of the affair is the relatively tiny amounts of powder that contemporaries were fighting over in that innocent era before the industrial age of slaughter. In 1893, for instance, Ordnance had contracted the Leonard Smokeless Powder Company of New York and the California Powder Works (of which Du Pont was a minority stockholder and later owner) to provide lump amounts of 5,000 pounds and 15,000 pounds, respectively, of propellant. In 1906 at Picatinny Arsenal, the army’s brand-new powder plant in New Jersey, it was imagined that 1,000 pounds a day was a major achievement. Two years later Picatinny had upped that figure to an impressive 3,000 pounds daily. Now, skip forward a mere decade, to the Great War. By the time the Armistice with Germany was signed on November 11, 1918, American factories and arsenals were producing 525,000 pounds of smokeless powder per day. Had the war lasted into 1919, the great arsenal near Nashville, Tennessee (built on the site of Andrew Jackson’s house), would alone have been making one million pounds daily. Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder, pp. 129–55;Wolf, Arms and Innovation, p. 265; S. Brown, The Story of Ordnance in the World War (Washington, D.C.: James William Bryan Press, 1920), pp. 97–98.
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25. An extended analysis of the physics of air resistance is given in J. S. Hatcher, Hatcher’s Notebook: A Standard Reference Book for Shooters, Gunsmiths, Ballisticians, Historians, Hunters and Collectors, 2d ed. (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1957), pp. 551–58.
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26. “For an Army Rifle,” New York Times, December 23, 1890, p. 3.
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27. J. Carmichel, “Happy 100th Birthday, .30-06,” Outdoor Life, April 2006, p. 53.
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28. Quoted in Wolf, Arms and Innovation, p. 232.
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29. “Magazine Small Arms,” New York Times, September 5, 1892.
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30. Quoted in S. Brinckerhoff and P. Chamberlin, “The Army’s Search for a Repeating Rifle, 1873–1903,” Military Affairs 32, no. 1 (1968), p. 29.
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31. Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 238–41.
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32. “New Army Rifle,” New York Times, September 4, 1892.
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33. Brinckerhoff and Chamberlin, “Army’s Search,” p. 28.
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34. P. M. Shockley, The Krag-JØrgensen Rifle in the Service (Aledo, Ill.: World-Wide Gun Report, 1960), pp. 6–7; P. B. Sharpe, The Rifle in America, 3d ed. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953), p. 105;Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 264, 278; J. Poyer, The Krag Rifle and Carbine (Tustin, Calif.: North Cape Publications; 2002), p. 155.
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35. The New York Times was very annoyed at these tactics by arms-makers. See “Delaying the New Rifle: Inventors Who Have Succeeded in Postponing the Change,” February 12, 1893, and editorial of February 25, 1893. Brinckerhoff and Chamberlin, “Army’s Search” p. 29n55;Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 254–60.
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36. Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 247–48.
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37. Ibid., p. 262.
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38. On these figures and the accompanying illustration, see V. L. Mason, “New Weapons of the United States Army,” Century 49, no. 4 (February 1895), pp. 571–72.
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39. The conflict between the army and the National Guard on the eve of the war is exhaustively covered in G. A. Cosmas, “From Order to Chaos: The War Department, the National Guard, and Military Policy, 1898,” Military Affairs 29, no. 3 (1965), pp. 105–22.
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40. See Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 270–71. On the Krag’s rate of fire, Shockley, Krag-JØrgensen Rifle, pp. 19, 31; V. S. Mason, “New Weapons of the United States Army,” Century 49, no. 4 (February 1895), p. 572.
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41. T. Roosevelt, The Rough Riders: An Autobiography, ed. L. Auchincloss (New York: Library of America, 2004), p. 15.
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42. H. Irving Hancock, What One Man Saw; Being the Personal Impressions of a War Correspondent in Cuba (New York: Street & Smith, 1898), quoted in Shockley, Krag-JØrgensen Rifle, p. 18.
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43.