American Rifle - Alexander Rose [96]
For this reason the ambiguous lessons raised by an obscure battle fought between Russians and Turks in 1877 at Plevna, a town in northern Bulgaria, exerted a powerful grip on America’s brightest military minds, popular commentators on army affairs, and the highest reaches of command alike.
Galvanized by pan-Slavic feeling, refreshed by the recent abolition of serfdom, angered by Turkish atrocities, and roused by centuries of war between Christianity and Islam in the Balkans, Tsar Alexander II declared war on Turkey on April 24, 1877. Some fifteen thousand Turks under Field Marshal Osman Pasha readied to meet them at Plevna.
Though no Americans were involved in the hostilities, and no American interests were endangered, Plevna would be the first time that American weapons would be put on vivid display before the world. Indeed, Hartley’s UMC factory at Bridgeport had actually supplied both sides with ammunition because Russians and Turks alike had long known that a war was in the offing and had seen to securing the millions of cartridges that they expected to use. Hartley had helpfully separated two workshops, one devoted to Russian cartridges, and the other to Turkish, each overseen by its empire’s official representatives—who, when they met in the corridor, treated each other with a distinctly formal coldness.92
Oliver Winchester, having also seen war in Turkey’s future, dealt only with the Ottomans: he had opened contacts with Constantinople as early as 1870. Following a gift of sixteen specially made Winchesters—including a gold-plated one and five silver-plated—to the Supreme Council of War, the company received an order for 50,000 Model 1866s from the Turkish government. Thirty-nine thousand were sent, and of them between 8,000 and 12,000 would be present at Plevna, where they would play a key role in the fighting.
Winchester was also responsible for brokering the sale of Peabody-Martini rifles to the Turkish government. These firearms had an interesting backstory. In 1862 Mr. Henry Peabody of Boston had brought an elegant, slimline rifle to the (in)attention of General Ripley at Ordnance. Rebuffed, he sold the patent to the Providence Tool Company of Rhode Island.93 At the very end of the Civil War, the authorities toyed with the idea of adopting the Peabody as the standard infantry arm but decided instead to keep the Springfield.94 The Providence Tool Company, still hoping to make a profit, offered its weapon for sale abroad and enjoyed modest success among the lesser powers, such as Switzerland, which purchased fifteen thousand of them.95
In the late 1860s Friedrich von Martini, a Swiss, used one of those fifteen thousand as the basis for his own version incorporating the firing action into the breechblock, patented it under his own name, and licensed it to the British. In turn, the British had one of their own technicians, Alexander Henry (no direct relation to Winchester’s benighted Benjamin Henry), make further adaptations to ensure its suitability for army use. That gun, the .45 Martini-Henry, would be the official weapon of the British Empire for some three decades. It would find immortality at the defense of Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus, an event majestically depicted in the Michael Caine film Zulu. In another Caine (and Sean Connery) movie, The Man Who Would Be King, the British troops carry Martini-Henrys. And Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” which celebrates the doomed, heroic Sudanese warriors who broke a British square at the battle of Abu Klea, concedes that while “our orders was to break you, an’ of course we went an’ did,” we had “Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair.”
Henry Peabody was unamused to hear about Herr Martini’s appropriation of his design and sued the British government for compensation. He lost, the government position being that his issue was rightly with Martini, not with London. Here Oliver Winchester’s patriotic (and commercial) instincts flared up. Using his contacts