The U.S. 42nd Division had been in the line in the Luneville Sector, a sector that was otherwise occupied by the French Army, in order to expose it to combat.
While things would soon be changing for U.S. troops, with some irony, their time in the French front concluded on this day in 1918.
While reading the newspapers would have lead you to the opposite
conclusion, and therefore no matter how attuned to the news you may have
been, you wouldn't have known it, on this date in 1918 there were only
four American divisions in France.
The US would end up with a big Army in World War One. A really big Army. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, this was posted to show that, in March of 1918, it wasn't big enough to solve the problems of millions of Germans on the march on the Western front.
Fortunately, as events will show, the fact that millions were on the march, i.e.,literally, solved that problem in and of itself. Not very many were riding, and none were riding as large independent cavalry formation.
But we turn back to the American Army.
You may be thinking, geez man, the US declared war in April 1917. What the heck was taking thing the US so freaking long to get manpower Over There? Only 130,000 combat troops in France in March, 2018?
Well yes, but it was pretty explainable, and indeed, the building of the U.S. Army during World War One is a really remarkable story only really duplicated in our history by the building of the Union Army and Confederate Army during the Civil War.
We're so used to large armies now, and in spite of the big post Cold War draw down, that we tend to think of the US as having a really capable large deployable Army all the time. But we've really only had that since the post World War Two early Cold War build up of the military, which brought in a really exceptional era of our history. At the same time, it's an often repeated story, and frankly a myth, that the United States has traditionally ignored our defense and stiffed the Army so that,. most of the time, its understrength and poorly equipped until a war comes along. That's simply untrue.
What is true is that for most of our history, and until up until about 1948, the United States had a very small standing Army. It was small by design.
Congress came out of the Revolution with a healthy fear of standing armies. The British had been difficult for the United States to defeat because it had a standing army. That didn't argue for an army, however, by any means. That same parliamentary army had been used to enforce British prerogatives in North America over the objection of locals. The lesson was pretty clear. Armies meant power and in that case the parliamentary army that had descended from Cromwell's New Model Army had vested authority in the House of Commons and had overthrown and executed a king. That same army, evolved, had been used to try to keep the authority of the restored Crown in North America. And now matter what you think of the justice of that, it was a powerful lesson.
In contrast the various colonies had always depended for local defense on militias. Armed colonist who were obligated to serve their colonies. That was the defense model that had North American history behind it. Militias weren't dangerous to sitting governments and didn't overthrow them. They could defend them. The lesson was so stout that it was enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which was quite clear in what it meant even if later day politicians claim to be confused by it.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed.
After the Revolution Congress was so repelled by the though of s standing army that there was in fact a period of time during which the United States actually didn't have one. None. We had a Navy, and an early Coast Guard (the Revenue Cutter Service) but no Army. That changed due to the eruption of a Frontier Indian War that has never borne a name soon after Independence and a small, very small, United States Army was created. It was tiny.
But it didn't need to be large either. Our enemies were generally far away and there was going to be time to raise a larger Army in a time of crisis. In the meantime, real defense was based on the U.S. Navy and the various state militias.
This system was far from perfect, as the War of 1812 demonstrated amply, but it did work well enough and it kept a standing Army from overthrowing the government, a real, and realistic, fear. The Army was big enough to work for a Frontier and Port defense force, and to serve as a source of authority, education and standardization for the militias. It was too small to be idle. That worked, most of the time. Indeed, some can asks if that model might, now that the Cold War is over, be one that we wish to more completely return to.
In fact, looking at it, the model was nearly universally successful for a long time, the somewhat contrary example of the War of 1812 notwithstanding. While US ground forces generally preformed quite poorly in the War of 1812, the opposite was true in the Mexican War in which the small US military establishment took on the larger professional Mexican Army with a combined force of Regulars, volunteers and state troops. In that war, indeed, the professional establishment of the U.S. Army proved brilliant both in strategy and in innovation, introducing flying batteries of artillery extremely effectively.
If the Mexican War proved the concept was still viable for the growing continental power in the late early half of the 19th Century, perhaps the Civil War proved that the retained fear of a large standing Army remained correct. Again, the professional elements of the pre war Army preformed very well in the Civil War, for both the United States and the rebel Confederacy, but the fact that the Army had been small and fully deployed during the crisis that lead up to the war may have effectively kept the Army from being used against the government going into it. That's of course highly speculative but it is notable that the Army suffered a partial dissolution of the officer corps going into the war and even some enlisted men defected early on to the Southern cause. A larger Army which otherwise matched the prewar pattern of having a lot of Southern officers may have acted differently than one which was 100% deployed to port and frontier duty, like the U.S. Army was at the time.
It wasn't until the Spanish American War that cracks in this well established system began to show. The war with Spain was the first war against a European power since the War of 1812 and even though it was in the United States' backyard, at first, the US had a difficult time organizing a sufficiently large and well formed Army for the war. The Army was combined from state units and the small Regular Army as usual, but it did not go smoothly and only the fact that Spain proved to be a weak opponent kept things from going badly. The Philippine Insurrection showed new problems as the United States deployed state troops, successfully, to the early stages of its campaigns in the Philippines which resulted in domestic discontent as troops originally raised to fight Spain became bogged down in an endless guerrilla war based on colonial aspirations.
Following the Spanish American War and on into the Philippine Insurrection Congress undertook to address the problems that had developed in part by formalizing the relationships of state militias to the Army, thereby creating the current status of the National Guard as a reserve of the Army. This had always been the case but it became the case legally at the time, thereby making the various state militias part of the Army's official structure and, indeed, part of the Army. That act, the Dick Act, went a long ways towards creating a more professional Army/National Guard relationship that reflected the end of the Army's role as a frontier gendarme and the beginning of the US as a global power. Indeed, the Army soon found itself heavily deployed overseas on a constant basis, which didn't change its nature as a being a very small Army.
In 1914, when the Great War broke out, the United States Army comprised 98,000 Regular soldiers. 45,000 of those troops were stationed overseas in such locations as the Philippines, China, and other locations. The Mexican Revolution which had broken out in 1910 was making manpower demands on the Army on the Mexican border and the Army retained a very serious port defense role which had become highly modern, in context, with advanced coastal artillery batteries being a feature of major American ports. The demands on the Army were huge.
Indeed, staring in 1914 Theodore Roosevelt, out of power, began agitating both for American entry into World War One for a larger American military in light of the risk of war developing with Germany. A major civilian "preparedness" movement, inspired by Republican agitation, developed which saw thousands of men, and some women, undergo military training voluntarily under the tutelage of the U.S. Army and the patronage of some elements of the National Guard and the U.S. Army. In 1915 the risk of war greatly increased when Woodrow Wilson, greatly miscalculating the impact of his actions, allowed Carranza's troops to be transported across southern Texas to be sued against the forces of Pancho Villa, thereby taking a nearly direct role in the Mexican Revolution. This followed the existing American intervention at Vera Cruz which had resulted in American Marines and sailors fighting Mexican troops at that city. Wilson's actions resulted in temporary military success for Carranza and the animosity of Pancho Villa, who in turn sent his much depleted forces across the border on March 9, 1916, a year, more or less, prior to American entry into World War One and two years, more or less, before the massive German offensive of March 1918.
By raiding Columbus New Mexico Pancho Villa oddly aided the United States in regards to World War One as the resulting Punitive Expedition would require Woodrow Wilson to mobilize the National Guard. 1916 was the first time since 1898 that the United States had commenced a complete National Guard call up. 1898, of course, was just eighteen years prior, so it wasn't that many years since that had occurred, and the National Guard had served in the Philippine Insurrection early on, in the form of "state troops", so it had seen active service just seventeen or so years prior. But it was the first time that the National Guard had been called up since the passage of the Dick Act which made it an official reserve of the U.S. Army. Nonetheless, that call up retained features of earlier ones with states recruiting to fill National Guard units even after they'd mustered at the state level. Recall, for example, the saga of the disappearance of Pvt. Dilley, a recently mustered National Guardsmen, prior to the Wyoming National Guard's deployment to the Mexican border.
Because of the Mexican border crisis and looming risk of involvement of war in Europe, in 1916 Congress undertook to expand the size of the standing Regular Army to an anticipated wartime strength of 286,000 men, a huge increase in context although one that did not result in the immediate increase of the Army to that size. The Army did increase in size, however.
The National Guard was released from service as the Punitive Expedition concluded in early 1917. Indeed, those units that were still serving on the border at that time were rather hastily mustered out in early 1917 just as it became increasingly apparent that the US was sliding into war. In retrospect, the fact that National Guard units were mustered out seems a rather poor idea, as by that time it became increasingly obvious that the United States was going to enter the war. That sets aside the fact that, even as the US entered the war in April 1917, it wasn't at first clear that the US would actually form a large Army and send it to Europe. At least some, including the Secretary of the Navy, imagined the US role as being principally a naval one. Soon, however, it became clear that the US would be sending ground troops to Europe and a lot of them at that. The National Guard was called back up and folded into the Regular Army, adding an additional 450,000 men to that establishment. Conscription was enacted and it was anticipated that 1,000,000 men would be drafted in the first act of conscription since the Civil War, with there being two levies of conscripted men in the amount of 500,000 men each.
This meant that right from the onset the U.S. Army went from having less than 100,000 men in 1914 to having over 200,000 men when the U.S. entered the war in April 1917. It also meant that in very short order the Regular Army, augmented by the National Guard, went up to 730,000 men in comparatively short order. And while this was occurring the Army began to take in the first levy of conscripts, to be formed into a separate Army body known as the National Army, in the initial amount of 500,000 men.
Looking at this overall, this means that the U.S. Army roughly had about 650,000 trained men, but in various states of training, when the United States entered the war. But those men were not formed into combat formations that contemplated a war on the scale of the war in Europe. The last time that had occurred, somewhat, had been during the Spanish American War, but even at that time it had not been necessary to form divisions on the order that World War One obviously required. The last time that had occurred was during the Civil War, when it most definitely had, but that was well outside the experience of any serving soldier in the U.S. Army.
And hence, the U.S. was confronted with a massive organizational and training burden it had not seen since 1865.
By the time the war ended, the United States had drafted 4,000,000 men of whom 2,000,000 went overseas. That is, quite frankly, amazing.
But there's no way that could have been achieved by March, 1918.
Something that also could not have been achieved by March 1918 was the equipping and arming of them.
It was Franklin D. Roosevelt, during World War Two who proclaimed that the US would be the "Great Arsenal of Democracy".
Which indeed, we became.
And not only did we become the Arsenal of Democracy, we have remained that since then, allowing for the fact that our being the Arsenal of Democracy then, and now, meant that we armed some pretty undemocratic nations in pursuit of our own goals. During World War Two our production became so vast that every Allied nation came to use articles of that production to include, as is well known, even the Soviet Union which had a large manufacturing capacity itself. The Soviet Red Army rolled along on American Studebaker 6x6 trucks, without which it would have been a foot slogging old fashioned army like the German army largely was.
Not that the Red Army was unique in this in any fashion. The United Kingdom had a much larger manufacturing capacity than its often given credit for in common recollections of the war, but it came to rely on American wheeled transport and American armor, even though it never quit producing either itself. Perhaps, of our Allies, only Canada, which had a vast manufacturing capacity relative to the size of its population, and which became part of the American production system for all practical purposes after 1941, is a bit of an exception, but only a bit. It produced some American weapons, such as the Sherman tank, but it also relied on American vehicles even though it also produced vehicles for the British.
All of this is well known, of course.
And indeed its so well known that there's a common perception that the same story was true of World War One.
But it isn't. Not even close.
I had intended, some time ago, to do a series of threads on various American weapons of the Great War based upon their date of introduction, but it became too problematic and it struck me that a single post will be better. And so we're here. But it is a story that takes place over quite a bit of time. It's very well known to students of the American military in World War One, so I'm breaking no new ground, but it is a significant aspect of our military history, our role in the Great War, and what our role in World War Two would be. It even stretches forward in all sorts of ways to the present day.
And like many such stories as they relate to the U.S. Army, the story has taken on a heavy element of myth. The myth here is that the U.S. has always neglected the material needs of its Army and that it only comes up to speed once a war arrives. You can find this story repeated about nearly every American war, but it simply isn't true.
In fact, while the peacetime Army was always very small prior to 1948, it was also very well equipped. Indeed, equipping an Army the size that the U.S. Army was, was really not terribly difficult. This meant that the government geared equipage and arming of the Army in a very distinct and highly official fashion, and that was a fashion that emphasized production of military equipment by the government itself. The arms and equipment that the government produced was excellent as a rule, with some exceptions. Such production was not sufficient to fully satisfy the requirements of the service, however, so the production was augmented by civilian commercial production. In some instances, but only in some, civilian production actually took completely over certain arms production lines entirely, with handguns being the prime example of that.
Now, those who stop in here, all two or three of you, may recall that I already did a post on the technology of the U.S. Military during the Punitive Expedition and I covered U.S. Arms, somewhat, in that post. Indeed, in a lot of ways, this post simply picks up where that one left off, but in doing that, it entails a major evolution, and indeed change in direction, in the story. In someways, the change in direction would be a small fork in the road in some instances that would lead to one of the roads simply terminating in the 1960s, under the unfortunate Defense Department administration of Robert S. McNamara. Nobody could have seen that coming in 1917, however, when we determined to engage in a land war in Europe for the first time in our history.
Now, in 1910s, the United States was no industrial slacker by any means. But as noted, the military arms industry was actually concentrated within the government itself, which handled the production of most, but not all, military arms. Civilian manufacturers did supply some arms to the Federal government and did compete for foreign sales, but American arms manufacturers depended upon the civilian market for the most part, although handguns again provided an exception to the rule as the military had gone over to civilian manufacturers when revolvers were introduced and had never resumed government production once they took over as the standard.
On the even of American involvement in the Great War, what this mean will be demonstrated below, in so far as issue arms are concerned. As we'll be repeating portions of what we earlier posted in regards to the Punitive Expedition, which remains relevant, we need to add here however the story of how World War One and the foreign market impacted that, and what it meant for the services during the war.
Let's start, however, with the situation in 1916, which was, and we should keep this in mind, a situation that applied to a very small Army and the National Guard.
Weapons
Something that's truly remarkable about the Punitive Expedition, but
rarely completely appreciated, is that it is one of the very few
instances, and indeed perhaps the only instance, when the Army deployed
with all new weaponry. Everything was new at the time and much of what
was used in the Punitive Expedition was used in field for the very first
time. This is all the more remarkable when it is considered that the
Army had introduced a new series of weapons in the late 19th Century,
which it then went on to replace in the early 20th Century.
Rifles were then, as now, the basic individual weapon for most
soldiers. In the Punitive Expedition, the Army was using one that was
new to the Army, the M1903.
U.S. troops armed with M1903 Springfield rifles on Mexican border.
The M1903 was adopted in that year, 1903, and replaced a rifle and a
carbine that had only been adopted nine years prior, the Krag–Jørgensen
series of rifles and carbines. For the U.S. Army to abandon a rifle
system after using it so briefly is fairly extraordinary, although its
not wholly without other examples of the same. More remarkable,
however, is that the Krag rifles and carbines were introduced in order
to bring new high velocity smokeless cartridges into use, which was done
with the accompanying adoption of the .30-40 cartridge. When the Army
(and Marines) adopted the M1903, they were abandoning existing smokeless
cartridges as well, which had only just been adopted themselves.
This all came about due to the Spanish American War.
The Army had appreciated the new smokeless cartridges soon after their
adoption and set about to find a repeating smokeless cartridge rifle for
Army use accordingly, which was to replace the rifles and carbines of
the Allen pattern that had first come into use late in the Civil War.
The problem the Army faced, however, is that with the introduction of
the new, smaller caliber, high velocity, smokeless cartridges a debate
in how these rifles were to be used developed in advanced armies. One
theory, a conservative one, held that the military rifle would continue
to be used basically as the early large caliber, black powder, single
shot military rifles had been. I.e., they'd be used as single shot
rifles, with the magazine containing additional cartridges reserved for
assaults. The more radical theory, advanced by German Peter Paul
Mauser, held that this was unrealistic and that any solder would empty
his magazine in combat invariably, rather than singly load, and so it
placed a premium on the ability to rapidly reload. Various nations went
with one theory or another, with the United States, like the United
Kingdom, taking the conservative approach. Hence the adoption of the
Krag which held four rounds, loaded through a permanently affixed box
system, in reserve. These rounds could be cycled through the rifle very
rapidly, but they could not be rapidly reloaded as they could not be
loaded in a block with a clip, in constant to the Mauser series of
rifles which could be.
Black soldier carrying a Krag rifle. This 1898 photograph was taken in
Tampa, Florida, and therefore probably was of a soldier waiting to go
to Cuba. The soldier's blue uniform was obsolete at the time this
photograph was taken, but many soldiers early in the war were equipped
with the old blue uniform.
The deficiency of the theory was proven in two wars of the late 19th
Century, the Spanish American War and the Boer War. Both wars would pit
armies equipped with Mauser M1893 rifles against armies equipped with
rifles based on the opposing theory, the Krag in the case of the US and
the Lee in the case of the UK. Mausers, equipping the loosing forces,
nonetheless held the day and very quickly the US and the UK reacted. In
the case of the United Kingdom, their existing Lee rifles and carbines
could be retrofitted to take a clip, like the Mauser, partially curing
the defect in their design. The Krag, however, could not be redesigned.
The Army, therefore, set about designing a replacement. And that's how
it was done, the Army itself designed the rifle.
And not just a rifle, but a new cartridge as well. Logically figuring
that it it was to go with a new rifle, which would essentially be a
Mauser rifle, it would also go with a "rimless" Mauser type cartridge
and abandon the rimmed .30-40.
The result was the M1903 rifle firing the .30-03 cartridge. The new
rifle, as noted, as a Mauser type rifle and only a rifle, not a rifle
and a carbine, was adopted. The rifle was a "short" rifle, taking
advantage of the new high velocity cartridges that rendered a longer
infantry rifle unnecessary. By going with a short rifle, the Army could
replace the rifle and carbine with one arm. The Army started the
manufacture of the new rifle immediately in 1903.
However, early in the production of the rifle it came under criticism
from President Theodore Roosevelt, who did not like the retention of the
M1898 Krag's rod bayonet, which he regarded as a bit of a joke. The
rifle was accordingly redesigned to take a conventional sword bayonet.
At the same time perceived deficiencies with the cartridge were
addressed and, in 1906, the redesigned rifle and the the redesigned
.30-06 cartridge were introduced.
Perhaps because Theodore Roosevelt, who was friendly to the military was
President, or perhaps because the Army was producing the rifle itself
(although it had with the Krag as well), or just perhaps because it
appreciated the need, the Army set about immediately to replace the
Krag. That is fairly amazing if the history of the Krag is considered,
as while it was adopted in 1892 insufficient stocks of them existed at
the time of the 1898 Spanish American War such that much of the Army
fought in the first stage of that war with .45-70 "trapdoor"
Springfield's, a clearly obsolete rifle by that time. The history of
the M1903 Springfield would be much different.
Volunteers from Kentucky in the Spanish American War. They are equipped with obsolete .45-70 trapdoor Springfield rifles.
By 1916, just a decade after the redesigned rifle had first been
finished, the entire Army, Marine Corps and National Guard would be
equipped with M1903s. Again, this is in stark contrast to the Krag,
which did not fully equip the Army at the onset of the Spanish American
War and which only probably came to do that at some point during the
Philippine Insurrection.
Wyoming National Guardsmen, July 1916, equipped with M1903 Springfield rifles.
The Punitive Expedition would not be the first time that the M1903 would
be fielded in action. I frankly don't know when that was, but my
suspicion is that it was likely in one of the various small actions in
the Philippines that trailed on well after the technical end of the
Philippine Insurrection. According to one source the first use of the
rifle in combat was against the Moros at Bud Bagsak in June, 1913. The
rifle was definitely used in action by 1914, however, as the Marine
Corps and the Navy used it in the action at Vera Cruz, Mexico. That is
interesting in and of itself as the Department of the Navy had followed
the Army's lead with the M1903, adopting it immediately to replace the
M1895 Navy Lee, a rifle that it had adopted three years after the Army
had adopted the M1892 Krag, and in a different cartridge, that being 6mm
Navy Lee.
Sailors at Vera Cruz. The sailor on the left is equipped with a M1903
rifle. The one in the middle, probably a Petty Officer, is equipped
with the then new M1911 pistol. The one on the right is carrying what
is probably a Model 97 Winchester shotgun. What is remarkable about
this photograph is that it shows how the U.S. Navy, which often was
equipped with somewhat older small arms than the Army, was here equipped
with all new small arms in 1914.
The Army had fought a few minor skirmishes with Villistas prior to the
Columbus Raid (I'll be going back and adding those on the centennials of
their occurrences, so the Columbus Raid and the following expedition
were not even the first time that the Army had fought Mexican forces of
some kind armed with the rifle. But, in any event, the rifle proved to
be just about ideal for the conditions it was used in and it went on to a
long and successful service life. Following the Punitive Expedition
the rifle was manufactured in large numbers as the Army equipped itself
for World War One, although the government arsenals proved to be
incapable of supplying adequate numbers of them for the hugely enlarged
Army. As a result, commercial contracts were given out for the a rifle
based on the British designed Pattern 14 rifle, which itself was in the
design stages when the war broke out and was intended to be a British
high velocity Mauser based rifle. The American variant in .30-06, the
M1917, was a good rifle in its own right and following the war some
consideration was given to standardizing it as a replacement for the
M1903. This was not done, however, and the M1903 kept on as the Army's
standard rifle, with the M1917 relegated to reserve stocks and certain
specific uses.
I should note here that I failed to note in my original text that the Pattern 14 rifle was under production by Remington and Winchester, commercial firms, for the British Army. When the U.S. entered the war it operated to disrupt these contracts and cause the commercial production to be diverted, after the rifle was redesigned, for the United States Army. The M1917 was not U.S. Arsenal produced, like the M1903 was.
Both rifles would go on to see service in World War Two even though the
Army adopted a replacement for the M1903 in 1936. The replacement, the
M1 Garand, was adopted not because the M1903 had proved deficient but
rather because the Army had appreciated that the advancement of self
loading rifles mean that a semi automatic rifle could be introduced for
military service. Nonetheless few M1s were bought prior to 1940 and for
the first years of World War Two the M1903 remained the principal
longarm in US service. Even more M1903s were built during World War
Two, this time commercially by Remington and Smith Corona, and the rifle
soldiered on in some uses until 1945. After that a sniper variant
carried on until the Vietnam War.
Marine in training, May 1942, armed with M1903 rifle.
Completing this story, which we did not have to do in regards to our story that stopped in February 1917, even with non stop production of M1903 rifles and commercial production of M1917 rifles, the needs were so large that the US also took into use Mosin Nagant rifles made for Imperial Russia, but bizarrely rejected by Russian inspectors. These were issued to American troops that deployed to Russia during World War One. This wasn't a large number of rifles, but the curiosity of it being done tells us something about how pressing the needs were.
So does the fact that Krags came back into service as a training rifle and some even went to Europe early on, although they were never used in combat. Likewise, some British SMLE's were used by at least the 82nd Division, and likely others, as elements of that unit rotated through British lines in order to be exposed to combat.
Let's look at the handgun situation.
If the rifle that equipped the American soldier in Mexico in 1916 and
1917 was new, the pistols were even newer. The Army had adopted two new
pistols in less than a decade preceding the Punitive Expedition, one as
a stopgap measure, and the second as a new long term sidearm. That arm
would go on to the the longest serving small arm in American military
history. The sidearms were the M1909 revolver and the M1911 pistol.
M1911 pistol. This photograph was taken during World War Two, but the
pistol had changed very little since 1916. Indeed, it's still in use
today.
Before going on it should be noted that sidearms, while frequently
called minor weapons by military commentators, were not at this time,
and really they aren't today. The U.S. Army is currently in the process
of trying to find a replacement for the Beretta M9 pistol and just as
the adoption of the M9 took a long time to come about, and was
accompanied by a lot of controversy, finding a replacement for it today
is not without its problems.* In some ways this is because the M1911
remains such a successful sidearm everything tends to be judged against
it in some vague ways, even if not intentionally.
In 1916 the sidearm was issued to every cavalryman in the Army and to a
lot of other servicemen as well. Almost every officer in the Army was
required to carry a sidearm and many NCOs were issued sidearms. The
Army used a lot of revolvers and pistols, and it had for a very long
time. This made the U.S. Army somewhat unique. Most armies issued
relatively few sidearms, although there are exceptions. The U.S. Army
issued a lot of them.
The introduction of smokeless powder, which not only eliminated the tell
tale smoke, but which proved to allow for higher velocity cartridges,
came at the same time that the reliability of double action revolvers
had become well established. The Army had adopted a single action
revolver as long ago as the Mexican War when it adopted the massive
Walker Colt. That large single action .44 revolver yielded to a series
of Dragoon revolvers that lasted through the Civil War and indeed a bit
after it. Cartridges for revolvers began to come in late in the Civil
War and the Army converted a number of single action revolvers to fire
.44 cartridges (an original example of which, surprisingly, can be seen
in the film Major Dundee). When the Army went to a designed
cartridge revolver after the Civil War it adopted a tried and true
single action which, quixotically, was adopted in .45 rather than .44.
That revolver, the Colt Single Action Army, M1873, went on to enduring
fame although its best remembered for being the most popular civilian
sidearm of the Frontier period, where it acquired the commercial name
The Peacemaker.
Double action revolvers existed even in the cap and ball era, although
they were clearly not regarded as sufficiently reliable for general
military use. The difference between the two action types is that the
trigger on a double operates to cock the pistol and rotate the
cylinder. On a single action, however, the hammer must be cocked
manually, the operation of which rotates the cylinder. Single actions
are, by their very nature, slower to operate as the operator must
manually cock the revolver for every shot. With a double action a user
may simply keep pulling the trigger until the cylinders are empty.
During the Frontier Era self equipping with sidearms, and even long
arms, wasn't uncommon for officers and even enlisted men, so the double
action began to come in to unofficial Army use irrespective of the
strong love of the M1873. The Army itself experimented with some double
actions during this period, although it never adopted one to replace
the M1873. When smokeless powder came in, however, it did. That pistol
was the M1892.
Sailors drilling with M1892 .38 revolvers. Unlike with the Navy M1895
rifle, the Navy adopted the same sidearm as the Army with Colt's M1892.
In fact, the M1892 revolver carried by Theodore Roosevelt up Kettle
Hill in the Spanish American War was a Navy M1892 recovered from the USS
Maine.
The M1892 reflected the same sort of thinking, in a general way, that
the Navy's M1895 Lee rifle did. That is, nobody was really sure how
small cartridges could now be, and the Army guessed too small. In
adopting the M1892, it also adopted the .38 "Long Colt" cartridge. The
cartridge itself was not a bad design, but it was quite light in
comparison to the black powder .45 Long Colt used by the M1873.
Ironically, perhaps, the .45 LC would survive into the smokeless era.
The M1892 was first used in a significant way in the Spanish American
War where it gave a good account of itself. Things changed, however,
when the Army found itself fighting in the Philippines, as the .38
proved to be simply inadequate for combat. The Army rapidly reissued
stocks of the obsolete M1873, cutting the 7.5 in barrels of the cavalry
model down to the 5" of the artillery model. Having accepted the
superiority of the double action, however, the Army also rapidly looked
for a new revolver. Colt came to the rescue with an existing design,
the Colt New Service, which as adopted as the Model 1909 in a smokeless
variant of the .45 LC.
Even at that time, however, the M1909 was regarded as a temporary
measure. By the late 19th Century semi automatic pistols were coming
into use and proving themselves. Mauser had again pioneered the field
with its ungainly but functional M96 automatic pistol, familiar to
modern movie goers due to its use in the film Star Wars as a laser
pistol. The M96 sold world wide and was adopted privately by quite a
few mounted officers of various armies, including British cavalryman
Winston Churchill.
Hard upon the heels of the M96, and indeed even contemporary with it,
various other manufactures started designing semi automatic pistols.
Georg Luger came out with a famous one by the first decade of the 20th
Century that would bear his name. Significantly for the United States,
phenomenal American firearms designer John Browning turned his attention
to it as well. The Army began testing a Browning design, manufactured
by Colt, and a Luger design, in the first decade of the century.
The Browning design was definitely the better of the two, and with
modifications it was adopted in 1911. The M1911 went on to be the
longest serving American arm of all time, and it is widely regarded as a
contender for the best military sidearm ever made. Adopted in a new
cartridge, .45 Automatic Colt Pistol, it went into immediate production
for both the military and the civilian market.
Unlike the M1903 rifle, the Army did not acquire sufficient stocks of
M1911s with which to equip the entire Regular Army and the National
Guard prior to the expedition into Mexico. It did start issuing them
immediately, but Colt did have a hard time keeping up with the demand,
in part because the private purchase demands from Army and Navy officers
was so high that it interfered with the military production. The
outbreak of World War One in Europe further increased demand as British
officers sought to buy the pistol in .45 ACP and the British government
contracted for some in .455 Webley, which amazingly actually worked in
the pistol if designed for it. Still, the were many of them in service
by the time the Navy and Marines went into action at Vera Cruz in 1914.
Surprisingly, a lot of senior Army officers did not really trust the
M1911, which sets it apart from the M1903. Almost nobody distrusted the
M1903, and indeed when it was slated for replacement in 1936 many older
soldiers opposed the change. The story was different with the M1911,
however. Cavalrymen in particular were highly acclimated to revolvers
and many simply didn't trust an automatic pistol.
The M1911 gave an excellent account of itself during the Punitive
Expedition, but nonetheless at least one officer, the legendary Frank
Tompkins, urged the Army to retain the M1909 for cavalry use, arguing
that the M1911 was so easy to discharge that green solders sometimes
would accidentally shoot their horses in the head in a mounted charge.
That recommendation was ignored but the huge demand for sidearms during
World War One meant that the M1909 went back into production, as the
M1917, along with a Smith & Wesson design by the same name. Those
revolvers were designed to take a clip so that they could take the .45
ACP cartridge in keeping with the Army's real desire to replace all
revolvers with the M1911. By the wars end, however, so many revolvers
had been made that they were kept around and they were still in use by
some old cavalryman when World War Two broke out. They were more often
carried, however, by servicemen who were unlikely to need to use them,
although they soldiered on through the war.
M1917 revolvers being used during World War Two. Note the off side
holsters, which were retained for the revolvers in the old cavalry style
until the very end.
The M1911, however, came out of the First World War with glowing
reviews. A slightly different model of the pistol, the M1911A1 was
adopted after the war, and it would remain the Army's standard pistol up
until Congress force the adoption of a new pistol, the 9mm M9, in
1985. The M1911 never really went fully away however as it was simply
too good of a combat pistol. The US entry into Afghanistan in 2001 saw
the M1911 creep back into use until that could no longer be ignored and
both the Army and the Marine Corps began to acquire new stocks of them
for the first time since 1945, with the Marine Corp even adopting a new
variant of the old M1911.
Our earlier history on the handguns of the Army of the period was so complete that we have nothing to add to it other than that both Colt and Smith & Wesson were already producing the revolver variants noted in .455 for the British, so adapting them to .45 ACP was a very easy thing for them to do.
Lets look at automatic weapons.
If the story of the Army's rifle and sidearm are glowing success
stories, the story of the Army's first real machine guns is much more
mixed.
Model
1904 Maxim .30-06 machine guns in use by U.S. cavalrymen. Note that
these cavalrymen also carry M1911 pistols. The cavalryman pointing is
wearing a holster for the M1911 that was unique to cavalry, as it
swiveled. The machine gun crewmen are wearing the general issue M1911
holster.
The
Army began to experiment with high repeating weapons as early as the
closing days of the Civil War, but those designs did not get as far as
popular tales would have it. The first such weapon to be adopted was the
Gatling Gun, which in US service actually saw next to no service at
all. The first real application of the Gatling Gun came during the
Spanish American War, by which time real machine guns were already
coming into use, and indeed in use against U.S. troops. The best and
most effective use of the Gatling came in British hands in the Boer War,
although they were already experimenting with true machine guns
themselves. The British liberated the Gatling from its wagon wheel
trails, which was foresighted, but by that time the Gatling was already a
bit of an obsolescent freak.
Machine gun troop in Mexico.
The
introduction of modern cartridges made true fully automatic weapons
possible and designers were well aware of that. A variety if early
attempts at automatic weapons of various types were made, including by
such famous designers as John Browning, who later would perfect a couple
of American automatic weapons that went into extremely long use,
including one, the Browning M2HB, which was adopted in the 1920s and
remains in use today. The early field of automatic weapons, whoever,
was pretty confused.
The
first true machine gun used by the U.S. Army was in fact the John
Browning design, which bore the official name of M1895. Manufactured in
a variety of calibers and sold world wide, in U.S. use it started off
in .30-40 and in 6mm Navy Lee. In spite of the fact that the Army never
officially adopted them, they showed up in use more often than a person
might suppose as National Guard units often simply bought them, in a
variety of calibers, and during the Spanish American War two were given
as gifts to the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry by family members of the
unit, although oddly those were in 7x57, the cartridge used by Spain.
The unofficial nature of this use in Army hands (Navy and Marine Corps
use was official) meant that the gun was still in use in various units
as late as 1917 when the United States entered World War one.
Schematic of the Colt-Browning, "Potato Digger"
The
M1895 was not a bad gun, but it was a very early gun, and it was clearly
a pioneering, and therefore not fully satisfactory, weapon. It was
delicate and prone to stoppages. The experience of the Spanish Civil
War showed that another weapon would have to be found as its operational
rate fared poorly in comparison with the obsolete Gatlings.
Fortunately there was a ready alternative to the M1895 available, that being the Maxim gun.
M1904 Maxim in use in Texas in 1911.
The
Maxim gun was a heavy machine gun designed by American born Hiram
Maxim. A visionary weapon, Maxim first introduced the gun in 1886,
shortly after he had relocated tot he United Kingdom. The heavy recoil
operated gun would set the standard for heavy machine guns, a position
which to some degree it still occupied. Maxim's gun came right at the
end of the black powder era and because of the nature of its design it
was suitable for any of the then existing cartridges as well as the
smokeless cartridges that were just being invented. Indeed, the gun was
so adaptable that some of the larger variants of it were really
automatic cannons due to the virtue of their size.
Giant Maxim Gun in the small cannon class in use by the U.S. Navy circa 1901.
The
Army started testing the Maxim relatively early on, but it was slow to
adopt it, perhaps in part as the Army had a hard time figuring out
exactly how to deploy machine guns at first. Indeed, nearly every Army
had difficulty in this department. In 1904, however, the Army adopted
the Maxim as the Army's first machine gun. Production, however, was
slow, with initial production taking place in the UK for weapons
chambered in.30-03 and remaining production undertaken by Colt. Only
287 of the guns were made, but as the picture above shows, they were
deployed along the border and they were very good guns. They were also
extremely heavy, both because of the heavy weight of the action and
because the gun was water cooled. For an introductory weapon, it was
excellent, but as we'll see below, the Army was seeking to replace it
and in fact had already adopted a replacement by the time of the
Punitive Expedition.
Perhaps because production of the M1904 was limited, the Punitive Expedition is much more associated with theM1909 Benét–Mercié, and not happily so.
U.S. Troops firing the M1909Benét–Merciémachine gun, a variant of the Hotchkiss light machine gun. The Benet Mercie has a fairly poor reputation but it was widely used under other names by other armies that liked it.
The entire story
of the M1909 is an odd one, as the gun itself is a legendary weapon,
one of the Hotchkiss machine guns. The Hotchkiss machine guns saw
service around the globe and were generally well liked by most armies.
The U.S. Army, after the Punitive Expedition, and indeed at least
partially because of it, ended up not liking the gun. All in all, the
M1909 acquired a bad reputation in the U.S. Army during the Punitive
Expedition even though reports of its use really don't support that
feeling and it was a better gun than the one that would go on to be used
in the same role during World War One.
One thing that should have been noted here is that production of the M1909 was in very small numbers with only a few hundred being made, that being all the service really required. Both the Federal arsenals and commercial production supplied those numbers.
We carried on.
Indeed,
the entire story of American light machine guns in this era is odd.
There were a variety of light guns available when the Hotchkiss was
adopted and there were options. What was lacking was knowledge on how
the guns would be used and what the best feature for such a gun would
be. Looking back in hindsight, a gun like the early Madsen probably
would have been better but that wasn't obvious at the time. The real
defect of the gun was that it took a very long clip, rather than a
magazine, to feed it, which was awkward in combat and left the rounds
exposed. Guns like the Madsen did not do that.
Neither
did the Lewis Gun, which was an American design and which would play a
small role in the story of the Punitive Expedition, albeit very small.
The Lewis Gun was a new gun at the time, having just been invented
around 1911, but it was already receiving some use early on.
Unfortunately for the Army, it seems that a dislike on the part of the
chief of the Army of the inventor kept it from being adopted by the U.S.
Army for a light machine gun, a decision that would have consequences
during World War One. Given the nature of the times, however, the gun
was picked up privately by at least one small National Guard unit that
was funded heavily by a member, in an era when that sort of thing was
still not uncommon. But Guard units did not cross the border, they only
guarded it, during the Punitive Expedition. The gun wold see heavy use
by the British during World War One and on into World War Two, and by
the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, but not by the Army. Even at that, the
Army took Lewis Guns away from Marine Corp units assigned to the AEF in
Europe during the Great War and issued to them the Chauchat, a French
automatic rifle that the Army adopted for the Great War that was and is
universally regarded as a disaster. Late in World War One the Army
would field the Browning Automatic Rifle which, interestingly enough,
first saw use by cavalrymen in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in September
1918.
Marine training with Lewis Gun
The American solder on the left is equipped with the terrible Chauchat Mle 1918. The Cahuchat has a reputation of being one of the worst weapons every fielded by American soldiers, but it was available in large numbers.
So,
as opposed to the story of rifles and pistols, the story of automatic
weapons in U.S. service in 1916 is really mixed. All the weapons were
relatively new, but none of the automatic weapons then in use would go
on to long use in the Army in spite of all of them being fairly
contemporary weapons. The M1904 Maxim was a really good heavy machine
gun, but it was truly heavy. By 1909 the Army was working on replacing
it with the British Vickers, itself a Maxim variant. During World War
One none of the M1904s would go overseas and the Army would equip itself
with British and French heavy machine guns. Likewise, the M1909 light
machine gun would not see service with the US, which oddly equipped
itself with a bad French weapon. By the end of the war native designs
had been adopted by the US in the form of the M1917 heavy machine gun, a
Browning design, and the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle.
M1917 machine gun, in this case being operated by Val Browning, the son of John Browning, the designer.
That covered the weapons that were used by the U.S. in this time frame. But we really didn't cover, and didn't need to cover, is that the numbers on hand in 1916 were quite limited. Production, moreover, was in the hands of Federal arsenals in part. It proved to be impossible for the arsenals to manufacture significant numbers of weapons for the war and this was evident very early in 1917. That in and of itself was a limiting factor to the growth of the American Army during the war. Substitutes had to be rapidly developed is some areas and in other it simply proved to be easier to take into service weapons that were being made in Europe. Up until very late in the war the US entirely depended upon foreign production for automatic weapons, which was also a limiting factor in the growth of the US Army during the war. Very late in the war new US designs came into use. There was really nothing else in this area that could have been done as a military that required less than 700,000 rifles went to one that required more than 4,000,000. So with that, we now turn to artillery. The U.S. Army has traditionally had very good artillery. And yet in France during World War One it used principally French artillery. How did that occur. Well, again we turn to the situation prior to our entry into the war. And in doing so we must first note that American artillery was all arsenal made.
Artillery? Yes.
We
don't tend to think much about artillery in the Punitive Expedition, but
it as there. Indeed, contrary to what a person might suppose, not only
did the U.S. Army field artillery during the Punitive Expedition, but
the contesting sides in the Mexican Revolution did as well.
The
4th and 6th Artillery went into Mexico in 1916 and other Army artillery
units were stationed on the border. The 4th Artillery took pack
howitzers.
Pack
howitzers are a class of gun that had a long and interesting history.
They're gone now, but pack artillery lasted well into the rocket age,
finally disappearing, in the true mule packed manner, only in the 1950s,
when the last U.S. Army pack artillery unit, an Army Reserve unit,
finally lost theirs. Even at that, airborne artillery, in some ways, is
the immediate heir of pack artillery.
Pack howitzers go way back in U.S. Army usage, but the piece used during the Punitive Expedition, which is nicely discussed on a thread of the Society of the Military Horse's website, was the 2.95" Vicker's Mountain Gun of 1900. As discussed on that site in that thread:
This is the 2.95” Vickers-Maxim Mountain Gun, Model of 1900. Look
through the Runyon photos from the National Archives for the various
shots of it being packed and fired. It was a major improvement over the
1.65" Hotchkiss Mountain Gun, Model of 1875, in that it was capable of
being fired at higher angles.
It was a good little gun and very well
suited for an Army on the move. Quite a few Runyon Photographs of the
Punitive Expedition on line at the University of Texas show it in use.
It was a British designed gun that replaced a French designed gun and
would go on to give service until replaced by the M1 Pack Howitzer that
would be the Army's last pack howitzer and first airborne howitzer.
The Model of 1900 was a 75mmm gun, so in relative terms it was a
relatively large gun. The US also took the M1902 3" field gun into Mexico.
The
M1902 field piece was a 3" (76.2 mm) gun that entered US service in
1902 and served throughout World War One, making it a rare example of a
US gun that served during the Great War in Europe. A good gun, they
went into Mexico and back out, but reportedly never engaged the
Villistas at any point during the campaign. Basically a gun equivalent
to the French 75 (Model 1897), it was phased out quickly after the Great
War, during which the Army had used more 1897s than M1902s.
The
US also sent the 6th Artillery into Mexico. The 6th was equipped with
the 4.7" field gun Model of 1906. As also noted on the Society of the Military Horse webiste:
This was a big gun, shooting 120mm shells. I haven't seen any
indication that they were taken into Mexico, and if the M1902s were
never fired during the expedition, the M1906s were almost surely not.
Nonetheless, they were part of the story as they were stationed along
the border, providing the Army with a very substantial field piece, if
needed.
One thing to keep in mind about artillery of this period is that all of
this came before the big revolution in artillery spotting that defined
artillery missions during World War Two and ever since. The Second
World War, which isn't all that much later than the period we're
discussing in real terms, came during the era of indirect fire. The
Punitive Expedition, and even to an extent World War One, did not. The
guns we're looking at above are all basically direct fire weapons. They
could indirect fire, but they were really designed for direct fire.
And they all came before radios had incorporated themselves into the
scene on a field basis, and while field phones existed, this meant that
you really didn't have Forward Observers up at the front calling in
their missions. No, the Army at this time used the Battery Commander
System. An excellent description of that is provided on the Society of the Military Horse website, so I won't try to repeat it here, but will rather simply refer to it. The system was much different from that which would prevail just a few years later, and the description provided on that thread is excellent.
M1908 6" howitzer. A really big gun, these pieces were not taken into
Mexico, but as can be seen from the caption, they were available along
the border, no doubt more in anticipation of a full scale war with
Mexico.
This is far from a complete list of US artillery at the time. Rather,
it's only a list of those guns that I know, and perhaps inaccurately, to
have been associated with the Punitive Expedition, all of which were
field pieces. The Army had a range of additionally artillery, such as
the M1908 howitzer. The point would be, rather, that the Army went into
Mexico with two fairly modern artillery pieces, one of which at least
never saw action in the expedition, but which did go in. The artillery
in the US inventory was fully modern for the time, rivaling anything
used in Europe or, in some cases, being identical to the guns then in
use in Europe. The two guns that were used were highly mobile pieces,
and their failure to see much action reflected the conditions of the
expedition more than anything else.
Okay, if that's what we had, why did we fight the war with French guns. Simply enough, this is what we had, but we didn't have that much of it.
The pre war Army hadn't required much artillery as it was a small army. The Army being sent to France was gigantic. Shipping the volume of artillery required, let along manufacturing it, was simply impossible. All American artillery pieces were very close in form to European ones, and the French artillery we primarily adopted was excellent. In 1916 we didn't have the volume of artillery pieces and there was no earthly way that production of the complicated weapons was going to be satisfactory for an army of the size the war required. Relying on European guns was required by that factor alone, and that was before the topic of shipping guns from the United States to Europe can even be addressed. Here too, therefore, artillery, a major player in the war, operated slow the growth of the American Army. It had to be acquired.
And artillerymen had to be trained. Among all of the combat arms, the basic weapon of the artilleryman is the most complicated to use and the most dangerous if misused. At the time, artillery was mostly horse drawn as well, which had training concerns all of its own. In order to address this many existing units, both Regular Army and National Guard, were converted into artillery including some cavalry units that had horse experience. Some infantry units, such as the Wyoming National Guard, were likewise converted as their soldiers were experienced (sometime having horse experience) and trainable in the complicated tasks that artillery demanded. Be that as it may, however, training the number of artillerymen required was an enormous undertaking that required the use of trained artillerymen itself.
Indeed, this was a feature of training the Army in general. One of the largest tasks the Army performed during the Great War was training a huge number of untrained men. It's not surprising that some of the trainers, such as Dwight Eisenhower, would go on to be major World War Two figures in spite of having never served in combat and having never left the United States during World War One. Training in some ways was more important that combat leadership at a certain level.
Amongst the the thousand upon thousands of training subjects were thousands of horses and mules, something that the United States had been supplying to European armies in large numbers already. American entry into the war meant that the United States took over this natural market, but even at that the US, in spite of already being a supplier to the European armies, had to rely on French horses for the 2nd Cavalry.** Therefore, even here American resources proved to be limited.
With all of this in mind, the amazing thing wasn't that only 130,000 U.S. combat troops were in France in March, 1918, but that about 2,000,000 would be overseas by the end of the war.
*Since this was written the Army and Marine Corps have adopted the Sig P320 as the M17 pistol and will be replacing their Beretta M9s and various other handguns with it.
**Among the limitations that the US experienced during the war the inability to supply Pershing with independent cavalry regiments, as he had desired to have. Only one such regiment fully deployed to France during the war, although the French divisional square division organization did include organic cavalry at the troop level for each division. Be that as it may, a substantial need for cavalry continued to exist due to the need to patrol the boarder with Mexico, which remained tense, during the war.
M1902 Field Piece at Ft. Mead, South Dakota
