The Army Picks a New Gun

There are a couple of dozen versions of this story floating around, most of which have the gist of the story correct.  An economics professor a couple of weeks ago told his class a version and got most of the points correct.  None of the accounts has everything correct, and since I’m going to try and put down my version of the story, I can’t help but wonder just exactly what I’m fornicating skyward.

Here's a simple account of what most of the stories say:

During the Spanish American War, the Army was using this lousy little .38 revolver that just didn’t have enough stopping power.  There were several cases where a soldier shot attacking Filipino natives, hitting them in the chest, and the lousy small bullet just didn’t stop them.  This scared the army so they went to the Chicago stockyards and shot steers with every handgun then commercially available and discovered that the Colt .45 automatic would kill more steers, and kill them faster, than any other gun then available on the market.  And that is why the U.S. Army used the Colt .45 for the next 75 years.

Some of the above is correct.  Most of it is nearly correct.  The real story is actually more interesting.

When the United States entered the Spanish American War in 1898, the standard service revolver was the Colt M1892 chambered in .38LC.  This was the first double revolver with a swing out cylinder adopted by the Army, which meant that the gun could be fired more quickly and reloaded faster than the previous single-action revolver the Army had used.  The downside of the gun was, however, the relatively weak .38 caliber black powder cartridge.

The firearm was used in the Spanish American War, but it was in Cuba, not in the Philippines.  Technically, although our Navy did totally destroy the Spanish fleet anchored in the harbor at Manila, no American troops were landed and no Americans fought on land before the armistice.  The Colt was used in combat during the fighting in Cuba, but the conflict was so brief that there wasn’t enough time to record more than a few reports of the firearm’s suitability.  

Following the war with Spain, the United States fought a second war—the Philippine American War—to stop the resistance by the Filipino forces that had already been fighting against Spain when the U.S. Navy arrived.  Of all the wars in which America has fought, this is perhaps the least remembered.  It was during this conflict that the shortcomings of the M1892 revolver were well documented, particularly against the Moro juramentados, fanatic swordsmen who made suicide charges against the American soldiers.  

Take the case of a Antonio Caspi, who attempted to escape from American soldiers from a POW camp.  When Caspi refused to stop, he was shot four times at close range with the M1892, including three of the bullets striking the escaping prisoner in the chest, perforating both lungs.   Caspi continued his escape, finally being stopped when a trooper struck him in the head with the butt end of a carbine.  I think it is fair to say that this kind of incidents scared the crap out of the Army, who began reissuing the venerable M1873 Single Action Army revolver in .45 Long Colt, a cartridge no one has ever said was too small.

The Army decided to assign the task of finding a better cartridge to two officers, Colonel John T. Thompson and Major Louis LaGarde of the Medical Corps.  In 1904, the two officers tested a variety of ammunition currently available for revolvers.  At this point, they were testing ammunition, not guns, confident that after they had selected the right ammunition, they could solicit bids from a variety of handgun manufacturers.  Among the cartridges tested were the .455 Webley, the .30 Luger, the .45 Colt, and the 9mm.  

The tests were done at a Chicago slaughterhouse where cattle and horses were shot and the results were recorded.  Despite the common myth, very few of the steers died because of the gun shots, as there is a reason people usually go hunting with rifles instead of handguns.  Most of the steers were dispatched with blows to the head with sledgehammers, that being the customary way then for slaughterhouses to kill animals before butchering.  Accounts of these tests rarely include the detail that similar tests were also performed on human cadavers.

The two officers concluded that nothing less than a .45 caliber weapon would give a reasonable chance of incapacitating an enemy with a well-placed shot to the torso.  These tests have been argued over for more than a century now, with well-known experts either confirming or denying the results.  The tests have even been repeated, with cattle, sheep, ballistic gel, and pine logs, resulting in experts both confirming and denying the selection of the .45 caliber bullet.  (I would point out that while the Army has used a 9mm cartridge since 1986, the ongoing arguments about the best handgun cartridge—at least for military purposes—is pointless.  In modern warfare, the usefulness of handguns is about as statistically important as the color of toothbrushes.)

In 1905, the Army sent invitations to several handgun manufacturers to produce working models at a selection trial to be held in two years.  In 1907, the Army began testing automatics by Colt, Luger, Savage, Knoble, Bergman, and White-Merrill, revolvers by Colt and Smith & Wesson, and an automatic revolver by Webley.  The pistols supplied by Luger in .45 caliber are of particular interest.  It is still uncertain whether one, two, or three of the guns were brought to the trials, but the existence of only one such Luger is known today, and it is generally recognized as the most valuable handgun in the world.  If you happen to find one of the missing Lugers at a flea market, it would easily sell for millions at auction.

The pistols were tested extensively by several Army officers, with over a thousand rounds fired.  At the end of the test, the panel of judges had rejected all but the Colt and Savage automatics, ordering 200 of each pistol for field trials from which suggestions for modifications would be forwarded to the manufacturers for a finished model.

In March of 1911, a final trial was held between the two pistols.  In the intervening years, John Browning—perhaps the best gun designer in history—had worked tirelessly to improve the functioning of his design that he had licensed to Colt.  At the final trials, over 6000 rounds were fired through both pistols.  The Savage had 37 misfires while the Colt had none.  Further, the Colt proved to be more accurate and easier to dismantle and clean than the Savage.  The M1911 Colt was the unanimous choice of the board, with the Army placing an initial order for 30,000 pistols.

Over the next 75 years, the U.S. military would purchase another 6 million M1911 pistols.

One more thing.  If the name Colonel Thompson rings a bell, he went on to design his own firearm, the Thompson Submachine Gun, that was beloved by everyone from the Mafia to Winston Churchill.  The gun is chambered for, of course, the .45 Colt.