Everything Old is New Again. Yeoman's laws of History and Behavior and the U.S. Military Sidearm.

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Yeoman's Second Law of History.  Everything last occurred more recently than you suppose.

Here too, it doesn't matter what the topic is, it happened much more recently than you think it did.  Almost everything and every behavior is really durable, if it had any purpose in the first place.

For example, last bayonet charge?  Are you thinking World War One?  Nope, the British did one in Iraq.  Small unit, but none the less they did it.  And in the Second Gulf War.  Last cavalry charge?  Civil War?  No again, they've happened as recently as the current war in Afghanistan.  Last use of horse mounted troops?  Well. . . we aren't there.  It's still going on.  We're never as far from what we think is the distant past as we imagine.

From Yeoman's Laws of History.

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 Soldiers training with M1911 .45 ACP pistols during World War Two.

This past week, the U.S. Army announced that it is giving up on an effort to replace the M9 pistol it adopted in 1985 (basically because Congress forced it to) with another 9mm pistol.  It wants a pistol that shoots a larger cartridge.  Something in the .40 to .45 range.

The pistol that never really left.  A Greek soldier coaches a Polish soldier in the shooting of the M1911 handgun.  How exactly a scene like this comes about, I don't know, but the M1911 kept on keeping on in the hands of soldiers who really needed an effective handgun.

Instruction on the M9, the Army's current (well, one of the current) handguns, taking place in Afghanistan.

People who follow such things will recall that the U.S. Army had been using the .45 ACP cartridge and the M1911 pistol since 1911.  The Army never saw any reason to replace either, but Congress did and ultimately the Army was forced into adopting the 9mm cartridge, which was the NATO pistol standard.  The Army ended up adopting a Beretta pattern of pistol as the M9, and has been using it ever since, sort of.

Truth be known, just as with the 5.56 cartridge and the M16, there were those in the Army who were never very happy with the change, and ongoing criticism went on for a long time.  There were always efforts to paint a happy picture on the pistol situation, in spite of persistent rumors of the cartridge being inadequate and the M9 having problems, but they were basically officially denied.  Then wars happened.

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Yeoman's Thirteenth Law of Human Behavior:  The measure of the utility of something is how well it accomplishes a task, not how new it is.  Nonetheless, people tend to go with the new, even if less useful.

People tend to believe that they adopt new technology or implements because they are better or more efficient than what came before them.  Very often they are. But they aren't always.  Nonetheless, the new tends to supplant the old, simply because its new.

There are plenty of examples of this.  Some old tools and old methods accomplish any one job better than things that came after them, and some things remain particularly useful within certain condition or niches.  Nonetheless, it takes educating a person to that to keep those older things in use, because they are, well. . . older.

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For reasons that are a bit of a historical oddity, the U.S. Army has always been pistol heavy compared to other armies, and so unlike many other armies, the Army's pistol actually ends up being used in combat.  Given that, the .45 ACP began to creep back into use for special troops in the service, followed by the M1911.  Recently, the Marine Corps simply gave up on the 9mm M9 and readopted a new version of the M1911 for combat troops. The Army now appears set to do so, and in fact has been issuing variants of the M1911 to special troops for some time.  The Navy too has been issuing a .45 ACP pistol, although it's not a M1911, when conditions require it.  This follows the interesting story of the service's 7.62 NATO M14 rifle creeping back into use after decades of denying it was more effective than the 5.56 M16, although there's no indication that the M14 will replace the M4/M16, and I am sure it will not. The M1911 .45 ACP pistol may very well end up replacing the M9 and the 9mm completely. At least some big cartridge pistol will.  This basically proves the critics of the M9 and the 9mm to have been right all along.

 

U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.  All of the firearms that can be seen in this photograph are M16A1 rifles, a rifle that came into service due to being first adopted by the USAF for service (as the M16) in Vietnam.  The rifle supplanted the M14 over the objection of Springfield Armory, which ended up ceasing to exist in the process.  In spite of repeated efforts to fix various problems associated with it, which has resulted in the rifle remaining in service to this day, there have always been grumblings about it.



U.S. soldier of the 1st Infantry Division in Afghanistan, with an updated version of the M14 rifle.  Like the M1911, the M14 never really left the services, as it carried on in the hands of special troops before coming roaring back into service due to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's sort of an interesting story in context of the lessons of history.  The Army has played out this story before.

The U.S. Army went big into sidearms during the frontier era, when effective revolvers first became available.  Revolvers ended up being issued to every single cavalryman by the mid 19th Century, which was not the case for most armies, which relied much more on sabers and perhaps a long arm of some sort.  American cavalrymen, by the post Civil War frontier era, were all provided with a carbine, a saber and a sidearm.  In the field, sabers were often omitted.  Because of this, sidearms were regarded as a serious combat arm by the American military, and in spite of efforts to change that over the years, this remains the case.  American troops carry sidearms to an unusual degree.

In the mid 19th Century, cap and ball service revolvers were generally .36 or .44, with .44s being the more common issue arm in the U.S. Army (and also in the Confederate army).  .36s were used, but they were not used as much as .44s.  The .44 "Dragoon" revolver had come in the prior two decades, and it remained the standard up until 1873, at which point the Army adopted the M1873 Colt revolver in a .45 cartridge.  Why the change from .44 to .45 I don't know, as there was already a big .44 cartridge available, but that brought in the .45.  

Civil War Union Cavalryman with Colt 1860 model revolver.  This cap and ball revolver was the last of the series of successful cap and ball Colts.

The .45 as the service caliber remained in use for decades but in the late 19th Century an effort was made to replace it with a .38 cartridge and a new, double action, revolver was adopted.  It was used, along with old stocks of .45 revolvers, in the Spanish American War, but it was a failure in the Philippine Insurrection and .45 revolvers were reissued and a new one adopted.

 The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry on the San Juan Heights. Theodore Roosevelt carried, and used, a .38 Colt revolver that had been recovered from the USS Maine in the action.

Sound sort of familiar?

Finally, a brand new .45 cartridge and a new automatic pistol were adopted in 1911. That pistol and cartridge carried right on until 1985, and it appears set to come back on it.  History repeating itself.

  

American soldiers in France with captured German 9mm P08s. The 9mm cartridge is actually a little older than the .45 ACP.

This is an interesting story, to followers of things of this type, as it shows the "history repeating itself maxim, and it's a story the US has actually lived through more than one.  The US military had a .45 sidearm and started to replace it with a lighter .38, but that failed, and the US went back to the .45.  Later in the 1980s, the US again replaced the .45 with a lighter cartridge, this time the 9mm. Granted, politics and pressure were involved with it, and an aspect of it was the adjustment of the service to increased numbers of women combined with the erroneous belief that women couldn't handle the bigger handgun.  It's not really a simple story. Yet here again, the 9mm is set to be replaced, apparently, with a .45 again.

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Yeoman's First Law of History.  Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect.

It doesn't matter what the topic is, but the first occurrence of anything is always further back in time than originally thought.  This is why certain distant dates are continually pushed back, and will continue to be. So, take whatever you like, say the first use of the horse, or the first appearance of humans in North America, and you'll find the "first" date gets more and more distant in time.  Things that were thought to happen, say, 5,000 years ago, turn out to have happened 50,000 years ago, or 500,000 years ago, as we gain better data.

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We've done that with rifles too, actually.  At the turn of the century, when smokeless powder weapons were coming in, the .45-70 single shot "Trapdoor" Springfield was replaced by the .30-40 Krag in the Army.  In the Navy and Marine Corps, however, the .45-70 was replaced by the 6mm Navy Lee, which proved too light and was soon thereafter replaced itself.  

U.S. Marines on board the USS Wyoming, equipped with Navy Lees.

Ultimately, the .30 became universal in the US military until the 5.56 came in, but then the .30 started coming back in again, with the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The point?  I suppose there really isn't one, other than that this provides an interesting way to explore the operation of some of the prime Yeoman's Laws of History and Yeoman's Law of Human Behavior.