America's Munitions 1917-1918

by Benedict Crowell; United States. War Department

The American pistol was one of the great successes of the war. For several years before the war came the Ordnance Department had been collaborating with private manufacturers to develop the automatic pistol; but none of our officers realized until the supreme test came what an effective weapon the Colt .45 would be in the hand-to-hand fighting of the trenches. In our isolation we had suspected, perhaps, that the bayonet and such new weapons as the modern hand grenade had encroached upon the field of the pistol and revolver. We were soon to discover our mistake. In the hands of a determined American soldier the pistol proved to be a weapon of great execution, and it was properly feared by the German troops.

We had long been a nation of pistol shooters, we Americans, but not until the year 1911 did we develop a pistol of the accuracy and rapidity of fire demanded by our ordnance experts. The nations of Europe had neglected this valuable arm almost altogether, regarding it principally as a military ornament which only officers should carry. The result of Europe's neglect was that the small-caliber revolvers of the Germans and even of the French and English were toys in comparison with the big Colts that armed the American soldiers.

America owed the Colt .45 to the experiences of our fighters in the Philippines, and to the inventive genius of John Browning of machine-gun fame. In the earlier Philippine campaigns our troops used a .38-caliber pistol. Our soldiers observed that when the tough tribesmen were hit with these bullets and even seriously wounded they frequently kept on fighting for some time. What was needed was a hand weapon that would put the adversary out of fighting the instant he was hit, whether fatally or not. We therefore increased the caliber of the automatic pistol to .45 and slowed down the bullet so that it tore flesh instead of making a clean perforation. These improvements gave the missile the impact of a sledge hammer, and a man hit went down every time.

Moreover, in this development great improvement had been made in the accuracy of the weapon, the 1911 Colt being the straightest-shooting pistol ever produced in this country. Even the best of the older automatics and revolvers were accurate only in the hands of expert marksmen. But any average soldier with average training can hit what he shoots at with a Colt. The improvements in the automatic features brought it to the stage where it could be fired by a practiced man 21 times in 12 seconds. In this operation the recoil of each discharge ejects the empty shell and loads in a fresh one.

Only a few men of each infantry regiment carried pistols when our troops first went into the trenches. But in almost the first skirmish this weapon proved its superior usefulness in trench fighting. Such incidents as that of the single American soldier who dispersed or killed a whole squad of German bayoneteers which had surrounded him struck the enemy with fear of Yankee prowess with the pistol. The "tenderfoot's gun," as the westerners loved to call it, had come to its own.

By midsummer of 1917 the decision had been made to supply to the infantry a much more extensive equipment of automatic pistols than had previously been prescribed by regulations—to build them by hundreds of thousands where we had been turning them out by thousands. In February, with war in sight, realizing the limitations of our capacity then for producing pistols, the Colt automatic being manufactured exclusively by the Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Co. at Hartford, Conn., and for a limited period by the Springfield Armory, we took up with the Colt Co. the proposition of securing drawings and other engineering data which would enable us to extend the production of this weapon to other plants. This work was in progress when in April, 1917, it was interrupted by the military necessity for calling upon every energy we had in the production of rifles.

In order to supplement the pistol supply, although the Colt automatic was the only weapon of this sort approved for the Army, the Secretary of War authorized the Chief of Ordnance to secure other small arms, particularly the double-action .45-caliber revolver as manufactured by both the Colt Co. and the Smith & Wesson Co. These revolvers had been designed to use the standard Army caliber-.45 pistol cartridges. The revolver was not so effective a weapon as the automatic pistol, but it was adopted in the emergency only to make it possible to provide sufficient of these arms for the troops at the outset.

At the start of hostilities the Colt Co. indicated that it could tool up to produce pistols at the rate of 6,000 per month by December, 1917, and could also furnish 600 revolvers a week beginning in April. As soon as funds were available we let a contract to the Colt Co. for 500,000 pistols and 100,000 revolvers, and to the Smith & Wesson Co. one for 100,000 revolvers. Although these contracts were not placed until June 15, in the certainty that funds would eventually be available both concerns had been working on the production of weapons on these expected contracts for many weeks.

When the order came from France to increase the pistol equipment, in addition to efforts to increase production at the plants of the two existing contractors we made studies of numerous other concerns which might undertake this class of manufacture. The proposal to purchase .38-caliber revolvers as a supplementary supply was abandoned for the reason that any expansion of this manufacture and of that for the necessary ammunition would be at the expense of the ultimate output of .45s and ammunition therefor.